Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Football Used to be Simple
Football used to be a simple game. Headlines would be about players and their antics on the pitch though once in a while we would be treated to kiss and tell shockers that player so and so, who missed a sitter the previous Saturday that would have earned his side three points, had actually scored the previous evening and in fact the gangling centre forward we saw week in week out who couldn’t control a beach ball was nothing more than a sensuous lover who knew how to take Shaz from the club to unknown peaks of pleasure.
No one knew a thing about who ran the club. Fans would turn up rain or shine, take their favourite spot on the terraces, moan like hell during an abysmal game played on an abysmal pitch then take the train home vowing never to return again as knuckle dragging hooligans beat the living daylights out of each other.
With the media glare elsewhere, usually the late Princess Diana or Boy George, people were involved in football because they wanted to be. There was certainly no ‘status’ to be gained by owning a club and the stereotypical football fan so beloved by England’s low brow media was a shaven headed thug with boots designed for kicking.
The people who ran the clubs were usually local people. Butchers, bankers, farmers, they were a hybrid bunch who probably couldn’t find Russia or Abu Dhabi on a map let alone contemplate some deep pocketed foreigner being interested in the English game.
Things have changed. And how! Seriously, I never thought I would have explained how the credit crunch in the US would affect a football club’s activity in the transfer market. I now need a PhD in advanced mathematics to understand ticket pricing policy at most clubs.
Headlines, once dominated by players, are now hogged by a menagerie of weird and wonderful characters that have no links with English football beyond perhaps having once bought a replica shirt for their children.
We have Russian oligarchs, Emirate sheikhs, Icelandic cookie kings, Geordie barrow boys, Irish horse racers, Americans who don’t talk to each other now falling over themselves for a piece of our game. And while they throw money into the bottomless pits football clubs have become they also bring with them odd ideas about how football should be run.
Some clubs need to be run as a business, some are just the plaything of some fabulously wealthy individual excited to have a brand new toy.
Football in England is no longer a sport. It is even no longer a business. It is now nothing more than an extension of playground taunts. Taunts that were once limited to chants like Brady is better than Hoddle now boast about how much the owner is worth and how much was spent pre season.
Football in England is slowly strangling itself in the grasp of foreign owners who seek personal gratification at any cost. The national team has long since died, at a youth level the last rites are not far off but all is well while the suits in the FA who run the game drool over the sums being invested at the very top. Sums that are soon being redirected into the pockets of agents and clubs overseas on players of mediocre ability.
The stadiums maybe full, fans maybe snapping up the replica shirts and the lust for the English game round the world shows no sign of being sated. But all is not well on the good ship English football and the fall when it comes will be very painful. Not for the owners, the players and the agents who can afford to ride out such hiccups and will move to pastures new.
Football clubs will be left high and dry committed to expensive players on expensive contracts and committed to unworkable business models. Who then will replace the billionaires in the boardroom and the corporates in the executive boxes?
No one knew a thing about who ran the club. Fans would turn up rain or shine, take their favourite spot on the terraces, moan like hell during an abysmal game played on an abysmal pitch then take the train home vowing never to return again as knuckle dragging hooligans beat the living daylights out of each other.
With the media glare elsewhere, usually the late Princess Diana or Boy George, people were involved in football because they wanted to be. There was certainly no ‘status’ to be gained by owning a club and the stereotypical football fan so beloved by England’s low brow media was a shaven headed thug with boots designed for kicking.
The people who ran the clubs were usually local people. Butchers, bankers, farmers, they were a hybrid bunch who probably couldn’t find Russia or Abu Dhabi on a map let alone contemplate some deep pocketed foreigner being interested in the English game.
Things have changed. And how! Seriously, I never thought I would have explained how the credit crunch in the US would affect a football club’s activity in the transfer market. I now need a PhD in advanced mathematics to understand ticket pricing policy at most clubs.
Headlines, once dominated by players, are now hogged by a menagerie of weird and wonderful characters that have no links with English football beyond perhaps having once bought a replica shirt for their children.
We have Russian oligarchs, Emirate sheikhs, Icelandic cookie kings, Geordie barrow boys, Irish horse racers, Americans who don’t talk to each other now falling over themselves for a piece of our game. And while they throw money into the bottomless pits football clubs have become they also bring with them odd ideas about how football should be run.
Some clubs need to be run as a business, some are just the plaything of some fabulously wealthy individual excited to have a brand new toy.
Football in England is no longer a sport. It is even no longer a business. It is now nothing more than an extension of playground taunts. Taunts that were once limited to chants like Brady is better than Hoddle now boast about how much the owner is worth and how much was spent pre season.
Football in England is slowly strangling itself in the grasp of foreign owners who seek personal gratification at any cost. The national team has long since died, at a youth level the last rites are not far off but all is well while the suits in the FA who run the game drool over the sums being invested at the very top. Sums that are soon being redirected into the pockets of agents and clubs overseas on players of mediocre ability.
The stadiums maybe full, fans maybe snapping up the replica shirts and the lust for the English game round the world shows no sign of being sated. But all is not well on the good ship English football and the fall when it comes will be very painful. Not for the owners, the players and the agents who can afford to ride out such hiccups and will move to pastures new.
Football clubs will be left high and dry committed to expensive players on expensive contracts and committed to unworkable business models. Who then will replace the billionaires in the boardroom and the corporates in the executive boxes?
# posted by Me @ 5:53 PM 
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