Political football promoted to the super league!

In his preview in The Irish Times of the recent Champions’ League final between Chelsea and Manchester City, Barney Ronay, chief sports writer for The Guardian, offered this reflection.

The Premier League may provide the staging and the heritage. But as English footballing triumphs go, this really isn’t that English at all.

Both clubs, he admitted, have a decent regular representation of English players. In this match, Manchester City fielded four, Chelsea three.

Otherwise both of these clubs have reached their current sustainable level only through vast overseas investment. The ownership and governance of both is defined in many ways by its non-Englishness.

Both were intent on severing their basic link to the pyramid only six weeks ago, before simultaneously enjoying a Damascene conversion when it became clear this was going to be quite difficult and unpopular.

The British Government was quick to put the boot in to English clubs’ participation in the quickly still-born European super-league proposal. The Prime Minister went in studs up, saying to fans:

It is your game, and you can rest assured that I’m going to do everything I can to give this ludicrous plan a straight red.

As The Economist pointed out though, he did so via an article in The Sun…

…a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, who did as much as anybody to drive the commercialisation of the game, and once tried to buy Manchester United.

Reflecting more broadly on the matter, The Economist’s Bagehot column concluded that a communitarian streak has always been part of the Tory tradition.

Today’s Tory communitarians are different from their predecessors. They focus on post-industrial towns rather than mist-enveloped villages. They treat the working class rather than the landed aristocracy as the embodiment of community spirit. They are football Tories rather than cricket Tories.

With the super-league dragon well and truly pre-emptively slain, the Government announced a review of football in England to be led by a former sports minister, Tracey Crouch. The review is to be “root and branch”. No self-respecting government would ever admit to a prospective “review” being anything less.

On the Tory supporting website, Conservative Home, Michael Adam, a former Tory councillor, summarised the challenge facing the review:

Here is a test of how well the Government can strike a balance between retaining the market-friendly environment which has created a global leader in the Premier League, protecting historic clubs as the focal point of local communities and listening to the concerns of supporters, many of whom feel disrespected as “legacy fans” from the age of terracing and stale pies.

I suspect that the Government’s purpose in initiating the review is not a desire to be eventually presented with a menu of sweeping changes, root and branch ones even, to the structure of top level English football. Rather, its aim is to kick this football into the amnesia of the long grass.

Reactively scuttling a specific proposed unpopular change is one thing. Taking pro-active ownership and responsibility for reshaping the future direction of domestic football is entirely another. The government might want to dip in from time to time. It will not want to be in charge all the time. It will not want to “nationalise” the structures of English football.

The Cambridge English dictionary defines “club” as “an organisation of people with common purpose or interest, who meet regularly and take part in shared activities”. The same dictionary defines “company” as “an organisation that sells goods or services in order to make money”. The entities participating in the Premier League still call themselves clubs, but only as a fig leaf to distract from the reality that they are companies; commercial enterprises, motivated and fuelled by money. The approval of local fans and even sporting success are means to the end of financial success, not primary objectives.

The owners control the direction not only of their clubs but of the Premier League as an institution. The super-league episode has reminded them that it makes sense to be mildly mindful of the fans, but they are not in the least accountable to them.

When I started following football 55 years ago, the owners, players and managers of teams in the then First Division were mainly English and almost all British. Foreigners were as exotic a rarity as non-white faces on the field. The fans in the stands constituted the sole audience for their games, because there was no live coverage on the then “black and white” television, limited highlights programmes and no coverage beyond the United Kingdom. Live radio commentary was as close as you got to the game from outside the ground. Club revenues were largely confined to match admissions. Teams’ focus was on doing as well as possible in the league, then the FA Cup (which counted for something back then) with the League Cup and European competitions useful but non-essential add-ons.

The train of what the Premier League is all about has long since left that station — and it is not coming back.

The majority of Premier League clubs are now in foreign ownership. The ownership base includes a fair sprinkling of plutocratic individuals and organisations with substantial interests in foreign sporting franchises and general media. They are well practiced in maximising the audiences for their product and extracting maximum revenue from them.

Thanks to satellite and internet, television and smart phone, games of football are now watchable live or at one’s convenience in full or in more digestible bite sized highlights almost anywhere around the world. And football is still the only game played and watched worldwide, even if it hasn’t really “cracked” some major “markets”, especially the US, also India. Revenue streams derive from viewing rights to the games themselves, multiple forms of advertising and from the merchandising and other opportunities that flow from cultivating brand loyalty and fandom for individual clubs. In the revenue optimisation stakes, football is some way behind the NFL (American football), basketball and baseball in the US, despite having a larger worldwide potential market. So revenue yet to be tapped is huge.

26 of the 29 titles won since the Premier League was established in 1992 have been divided among only four clubs, Manchester United alone winning 13 though the last was 8 years ago. All four of these clubs committed to the super-league project before beating a hasty retreat.

Nonetheless, by comparison with other major European leagues, there is real competition — for the title itself, for the lesser placings which earn admission to the lucrative Champions’ League and, at the other end of the table, to avoid relegation. This competitiveness, the “staging and heritage” mentioned by Mr. Ronay and English being the closest to a global language underpin the Premier League’s status as the global leader among domestic national leagues. Along with its financial firepower. To those that already hath, a lot more shall be given.

Clubs have to be competitive not only within the Premier League but with foreign teams in other European leagues. Clubs compete on the field and in identifying and recruiting players, coaching and corporate management “talent” for which they need worldwide “reach” as well as plenty of money. Top level football operates in a global marketplace for the supply of its “raw material” as well as for the products it sells.

The clubs’ “roots” in their local “communities” are therefore merely the point of take off for their aspirations rather than the desired landing zone. Sales of tickets and other things to local supporters are still relevant but comparatively finite, while there is no meaningful ceiling to potential overseas earnings. The presence of fans, the long history, that “staging and heritage” again, are all props in selling the products; marketing collateral, essential but not central. It is more accurate to speak of clubs perching or roosting where they are located in England than being rooted there, convenience rather than commitment.

Along with the owners, few of the players and backroom people have any genuine emotional connection to their club and its geographic hinterland. They are hired guns, bound only by transactional, mercenary loyalty. Players, managers and coaches are further differentiated from the local fan base by being paid more in a season than many worshipping supporters might earn in a lifetime, their modes of living stratospherically different.

Most if not all of the clubs have various forms of “outreach” schemes to their “communities” but, like “corporate social responsibility” programmes generally, these are cosmetic decoys to dilute if not divert focus from where the real action is. The success of the Premier League has created a financial trickle down to the Football League. But this is only modest compensation for the degree to which the concentration of wealth and focus within the top tier has drained vitality and visibility from those lower divisions.

Paradoxically, because of Brexit and its 80 seat majority in the House of Commons, this UK government is better placed than any for decades to tinker with the top tier of English football. There are constraints arising from EUFA membership. And the government can’t discriminate too much between treatment of the Premier League and equivalent structures for other elite sports like rugby or cricket. But, no other sport has the social or cultural importance of football.

The government could perhaps introduce requirements for teams to field a substantial minimum number of English born players or, more radical, players born within, say, 50 miles of the stadium. Rugby offers a precedent for caps on squad pay, even if these are sometimes honoured more in the breach than the observance.

Of course, we must wait for Ms. Crouch’s pronouncements. But I expect the Government’s disposition will be to use the publication of her report only to award itself another self-congratulatory lap of honour for protecting English football from the predations of the super-league and otherwise place it on a high shelf to gather dust.

The super-league’s “crime” wasn’t to try to degrade the true and trusty social capital of the Premier League by luring some teams away from it. Rather, it was to hold in plain sight the uncomfortable truth that the Premier League is not about accruing social capital at all, but about making money for itself. The Premier League sows only as little as is needed to harvest more. The offence to the local fans was to remind them breezily how little they really matter. Their primary purpose is to be milked. In the Premier League season just finished, betting firms of one kind or another were the principal shirt sponsors for no less than eight of its twenty teams. Ms. Crouch would do well to reflect on that modern day heritage.

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