It’s an argument that has kept football fans busy since 1992’s Premier League rebirth – has football lost its soul? It seems it may have…
It’s important to note that this article isn’t about money, even though the numbers being bandied around are staggering in their insanity. Paris Saint-Germain just paid (if reports are to be believed, in one hit) £200m for Neymar on the business end of £800,000 a week. Spurs are spending £800m on their new stadium, Chelsea £500m on theirs. Sunderland who finished bottom of the 2016-17 Premier League got paid a few quid shy of £100m for a season of abject failure.
OK, it’s a little bit about money.
The man on the Clapham omnibus will claim with absolute justification that he’s being priced out of the game in favour of what Roy Keane famously called ‘the prawn sandwich brigade’ and that without him, and thousands like him, the game we love is destined to die a slow, agonising, unsustainable death.
Football is a multi-billion-pound industry run by international plutocrats (owners, agents <em>and</em> bureaucrats) who are focused on the bottom line and how much they can suck out of the game. They don’t appear to be interested in the passion of the fans or the history or traditions of the club they’ve bought. There is now a single-minded focus to forego principles and do whatever it takes to stay in the Premier League because the rewards are unbelievable and the consequences of relegation are severe.
Of course, that is a general statement and there are notable exceptions but they are getting thinner on the ground…
The development of young local talent has been eschewed for the high-risk instant gratification of a foreign import because the pot of gold keeps getting refilled. Manager not working out? Sack him with a huge pay-off and get the guy from Germany or Spain or France who has a decent record in April relegation scraps and take a view over the summer. We hear it every season.
When West Ham Vice-chairman Karren Brady was speaking about the controversial move to the Olympic Stadium, she was quoted as saying <em>‘If you’re always driven by money, you lose your traditional values and what you’re there for. The stadium and the league are not what makes a club. It’s the people who support it. Protecting their traditions and their values and their integrity in their own brand is very important.’</em> The very fans she referred to as ‘our customers’.
On second thoughts, this article is more than just a little bit about money. It’s a lot about money.
Remember when clubs used to have ‘just’ a shirt sponsor? Now clubs have sponsors for training gear, sponsors for European kits, official lager suppliers, official moisturiser suppliers and dozens of other commercial deals to maximise revenue and make the clubs (and their owners) vastly wealthy but these deals are of no real value to the fans. These are the men and women forking out a thousand pounds and more on a season ticket, eighty-odd quid apiece for replica kit for the kids, five quid programmes and venison carpaccio baguettes at six pounds a pop when they really only want a bag of chips with vinegar dripping down their coat sleeves or a burger of questionable meat content filled with ketchup and carbonised onions.
The Shelf at Spurs has gone. As has Arsenal’s Clock End, Chelsea’s Shed and West Ham’s Chicken Run. Now we have clinical, state-of-the-art corporate stadiums sponsored by global brands complete with Michelin-quality dining, heated seats, executive lounges and adjoining hotels.
Is this the price of progress? Are we slaves to the corporatisation of our beautiful game by a handful of billionaires? To a certain extent we are but we also know we can’t have our cake and eat it.
In order to attract and pay the world’s best players, our clubs have to cough up huge amounts of money – money generated by selling stuff – season tickets, shirts, stadium naming rights, five-pound pints and sometimes, just sometimes, their souls – and there’s always a buyer.
The experiences we all grew up with in the 70s and 80s are still there. You can still stand with your mates in rickety old stadiums telling the twenty blokes who’ve made the 400-mile round-trip from god-knows-where what you think of their maternal parentage, you can still hear every word uttered on the pitch by players convinced they can play at a much higher level, you can still drink steaming hot tea in Styrofoam cups and eat pies with fillings hotter than the sun. But, you have to drop down into Leagues One and Two, even into the National League. You can’t find it in the Premier League or Championship any more. The stakes are simply too high.
Referring to the TV deals and schedules that can see Newcastle play Bournemouth on a Sunday at midday and the big clubs playing twice in four days for broadcast in the Far East, Alex Ferguson said, ‘when you shake hands with the devil, you have to pay the price’.
But ultimately, what is the price? World-class sporting arenas? The biggest names in the game gracing our pitches and the most competitive, most watched and most marketable league in the world? Or are we heading for Red Bull Arsenal vs Bank of India Liverpool at 4am in Shanghai to suit the lucrative Chinese betting markets?
Yeah, it’s all about money.
Thoughts, as always, on a postcard to the usual address….