Pic: http://readtheleague.com/the-big-feature/subbuteo-stadia-12-of-the-best
It would be wrong to over-react to some of the things going on in football in 2019, but it would be a dereliction of duty for those with voices, no matter how small, not to critically analyse recent trends and attempt to chart a course which ensures that when we’re done with it, the game we leave behind can still create the magic it did for us and is as effortless to fall in love with as it ever was. In this piece, I’m going to look at 7 elements of modern football which I believe are fundamentally altering the game I fell in love with back in the 80’s – and remember that was a time when the game’s very existence was being called into question; when people were dying at football matches in Western Europe; and when the on-field spectacle was killing itself too. We’ve come a long way and the vast majority of progress has been positive, but it remains vital that we take some time to check where exactly we are now going. I’m of the view that this check should look at the following themes of modern football:
1. Neoliberalism and Inequality
Bury are not the first club to go under and won’t be the last. Their demise, however, has led to an examination of English football’s greatest open wound – inequality. Outside of the US, the English Premier League is the number 1 sporting expression of neoliberalism at its most voracious, heartless, corporate best. The wealthy clubs rise to the top and their success breeds more capital and cash in a virtuous circle from their point of view, but a vicious one from many others. Some less thoughtful fans turn the other cheek at the reputations of their owners, blinded by the dazzle from the trophy cabinet. In other cases, they are blinded by mere promises. Hicks and Gillett tore Liverpool asunder while promising the world. The fruits of the Glazer takeover – with no planning or direction post-Ferguson – are beginning to be harvested. Even the 2 biggest traditional names in English football are not immune to this.
But it’s not just the wealth, its sources and their intentions that needs questioning. It’s the sheer inequality that really needs to be looked at across the continent. The wealth of the European elite is such that the whole notion of “competition” is being slowly eroded. What was once highly unlikely is now laughably impossible. Leeds, St. Etienne, Borussia Monchengladbach, Brugge, Malmo, Hamburg, Aston Villa – European Cup Finalists all of them from 1975 to 1982 – 6 leagues represented in all in finals during that 7-year period. Steaua Bucharest, Porto, PSV, Benfica, Red Star Belgrade, Marseille, and Sampdoria are in that list from 1986 to 1992 – 5 additional leagues represented in that 6-year period. Then it became the Champions League. It has now been 15 years since any team from outside the top 4 leagues competed in the final. And between 1992 and the Porto-Monaco 2004 final, only Ajax broke the big 4 monopoly.
Nottingham Forest vs Malmo – European Cup Final 1979
This is a fundamental shift which was designed by, planned for and welcomed by UEFA, the big leagues and the big clubs. Moreover, it is one which many wish to build on, elaborate and exacerbate. It is the slow death of continental club football – an assault on the very notion of the European Cup and as the massive Euro-yawn which greeted this seasons group-stage draw demonstrated, it is beginning to take effect. As a Liverpool fan revelling in being champions, I despair that the excitement of being in it is now dimming, as the failure to do what was once celebrated as an achievement – getting to the last 16 – would now be regarded as an epic and catastrophic turn of events.
We have not even mentioned the Europa League, but we will further down. The Champions League and the top leagues of Europe now operate at such a remove from the fans that they have become beacons of a modern cheap celebrity culture where any sign of humanity (giving the ball to a fan, visiting a hospital) is now greeted with astonishment of these player’s “down-to-earthness”. Heaven forbid that these men, many of whom dragged themselves out of poverty to become sporting millionaires may actually be sound. Behind the velvet ropes, the private parties, the vile agents, the publicists, the sponsors, the minders, the SUVs, the headphones, the mansions and the tattoos may lie people who would have been happy, happier even, to earn in a year what some of them earn in a week. Doing the only thing they ever wanted to do. And maybe all the money was pointless. Damaging. A waste. Has it made the game better? Has it made the game something more worthy of handing on to the next generation? Or has the love of money finally extinguished the love of glory?
2. Gambling
This issue has been to the fore in recent years and months, as this industry tightens its grip on the beautiful game. I don’t gamble. I have no interest in the odds and I hate that it infects so many of my conversation about football. I wrote about it here and I think this quote sums up my feelings on the subject as much as I would like to now:
“Football has in recent years thrown its arms around this insidious industry, and has helped, via its slick and incessant marketing, to make it mainstream and perfectly acceptable. Paddy Power’s funny ads with the steward and the bus driver; Ray Winstone’s bloated cockernee face imploring us to “ave a bang on that” 4 times per ad break; in-game odds on the fucking advertising hoardings during a game – what tasteless bastard allowed that to become the norm? All of this serves to make it ok for us (Irish) to throw €5bn into this industry. It makes it ok to whip out your smartphone on your barstool while your mates are looking the other way and spunk €20 on Coutinho to score next goal on B**V*****’s oh-so-easy to use app (the official betting partner of Liverpool FC) .
Or to do so on your couch, while your kids play on in the same room, oblivious to Daddy’s increasingly serious habit that may one day end up costing them something important. It may be a bit harsh to think of it in that way, but I’m sick to the back teeth of the direction in which my peers, my fellow fans, are bringing the game I love. Every conman needs a rube, and sports gambling has countless millions willing to blow their wages, wages their families may rely on, to feed the industry’s soulless ugly corporate black hearts. The vile takeover is almost complete.”
Gambling is Football’s rash. Governments across Europe need to act now and treat this plague the same way they treated cigarettes. Sponsorship by gambling companies needs to be banned now before it’s too late. Before a bet is seen as much a part of the game as the match-day programme or post-match analysis.
3. Rival Banter Culture
Lads have always been morons. We all had muppets in our groups growing up and we still have a few now. The “mad fella”, the tool who always just avoided an incident with the Gardaí on a night out. His witterings, his semi-drunk, then drunk, argumentative garbage, is now called “banter”. For football matters, we can all look back with shame at how we may have enjoyed Soccer AM in the early days, as I trace this culture to there. (In much the same way, I trace Brexit to 2004-era Top Gear!). On occasion, it makes any sort of thought; any sort of impartiality; any attempt at genuine analysis into an open invitation for claims of bias, lashings of rage-filled invective, and the making of loud, obnoxious, noxious and psychologically questionable statements on what is a game of football. Arsenal Fan TV was (is?) a prime example, whereby the last days of the great Arsene Wenger were turned into some sideshow about a once fine Empire tearing itself to pieces as two rival factions fought out a veritable civil war (jaysus Brexit again! That’s not a coincidence).
Soccer AM and the Birth of Modern Football Banter
The two clowns formerly of Sky Sports (them again, and once again not a coincidence), now of BeIn Sports with their sub-schoolboy sexism a few years back was probably the nadir of this laddish nonsense from a tv perspective, but in the stands, in the pubs and in the workplaces it goes on. Some would even claim that the racism aimed at black players and a particular Irish player from the city of Derry is merely banter. These people need to be shamed into reforming their behaviour and the football authorities need to act. It’s been long enough.
4. Abuse of Officials
It’s a cliche at this stage but without refs and assistants, there is no game. While I don’t always welcome comparisons to other sports, we need to give the refs the status they have in Rugby Union. There used to be a rule that only the captain can talk to the ref. It may seem ridiculous now, but why not bring that back in? Why not empower the ref to book any player that even opens his mouth at him other than to ask him direction on a set-piece etc. The abuse of officials is a cancer on the game, which infects the entire footballing world right down to schoolboys and girls. I honestly have no idea why the authorities do not clamp down. What do they fear would happen?
5. Technology and VAR
It’s daft to say technology in itself is a threat to the game, but in the environment in which we currently find ourselves where unless you have an extreme opinion, you have no opinion, there is a danger that soccer will chew itself to pieces over this.
The answer to the current predicament, and an answer to the abuse of officials lies not in the VAR room, but in the TV studio. Imagine, if you can, turning off the TV at half time and after a match. Imagine Sky, BT et al, only showing action replays from the referee’s perspective. Imagine no faux outrage from former players about the injustice? Imagine no day-long media wankfest over a decision of microscopic proportions? Imagine we could all get on with our lives at the final whistle blissfully ignorant of an event or incident that doesn’t actually really matter that much. Only once in a decade at most will your life be fundamentally adversely affected by a refereeing decision. I’ll give you my examples – Dutch goal offside in Gelsenkirchen 1988 and Thierry Henry in 2009. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any others which had me in a bad mood the next day. Maybe I don’t care enough. Maybe I care the right amount. It’s not the technology on the pitch that’s the problem. It’s the fact that every human decision being made there is under the microscope and then subject to issues 3 and 4 above.
Raheem Sterling’s Offending Armpit
6. Media and Social Media
Remember that tool I referred to earlier under banter culture, Well in the old days his presence once or twice a week in your life was ok because you didn’t hear him in your ear the rest of the week and you didn’t feel the need to respond to his shite every hour. Now it seems you cannot be a football fan and escape totally from the inane ramblings of absolute fools and from the offensive sharts of his fellow neanderthal travellers.
I don’t particularly like blame being always put at the door of social media. I hate when people say things like “twitter has exploded” or “twitter has responded”. Twitter is not a sentient being. It’s the people on twitter doing this and they are responsible for what they write. However it is clear today that there is a feedback loop between the method of communication and the manner of it that may not have been there in the days of newspapers and near broadcasting monopolies. Twitter and other outlets have completely legitimised the tacky and lazy; the bantz and racism; the easy and cheap; the nasty and offensive. Just because you can tweet does not mean you should. Just because twitter themselves don’t think your material is as welcome as raw sewage does not mean the rest of us agree. If these companies don’t get a hold of their output, serious questions will eventually be asked and reasonable people will turn away.
As for conventional media – print and TV – Why have the idiots taken over? Why have we ended up in a situation where coverage of the game is so polarised between what is absolutely brilliant coverage by a minority of journalists and utter, utter diarrhoea by so many others. Football 365’s Mediawatch is something I still read, but what I once found funny I now find tragic, because the depths to which the tabloid press in the UK have now plumbed are depressing. These journalists are dirt. Their day-to-day vomits veer from the pointless to the sexist, from the meaningless to the downright racist.
While in relation to TV, I accept that this is a hard job and that to find telegenic ex-players to act as pundits is difficult. So why not stop trying? There are at least a dozen journalists – actual real-life journalists who write compellingly about the game on a daily basis and who are guests on podcasts that truly analyse every facet of the game. Get them on! And I don’t mean in a Jimmy Hill Sunday Supplement kind of way. I mean get one of them onto panels on Sky or BT. Or one on MoTD. Surely it’s not just the well-educated fans who despair at the garbage spouted by some ex-players? You don’t need a PhD to realise that the vast majority of what they say is a waste of oxygen!
7. Status and Inequality of Competitions
Related to the first point about more general inequality, this is more about the cheapening of certain competitions, most notably the FA Cup. It’s very sad what has happened to this old trophy. It doesn’t take much work to realise this. All you have to do is think of how much it means to win the FAI Cup in Ireland compared to it. I’m a Shamrock Rovers fan and I know our fanbase would explode if we won it. I was there when Pat’s finally broke their hoodoo and saw what it meant to them. Did City fans even celebrate it last year? When was the last year that you could guarantee that nearly every football fan in the UK and Ireland would have sat down to watch at least some of the Cup Final? A lot has contributed to this – saturation coverage of football on tv; crowded fixture list; United pulling out of it; and a generally more atomised culture in which the collective experience of “the match” is dying. In Ireland, the only Monday mornings in the workplace where everyone would know what you mean by “the match” are those that follow the All-Ireland finals, and even that is starting to fade.
But this matters because a game in which a trophyless season finishing 30 points off the pace in 4th place is deemed even a partial success, is not one worth following. There has to be a dream of glory somewhere. Lifting a trophy has to be the endgame for all players and yes some trophies have always been less valuable than others, but I don’t remember the 2001 UEFA Cup as a stopgap as a Liverpool fan, and I don’t remember meaningless League Cup victories in 1995 and 2003. For absolute certain, the 2001 and 2006 FA Cups were not meaningless in the way City’s seems to have been last year. They won the fucking double! It should be massive, jaysus. It was when Fergie and Arsene were at it. As was the now defunct European Cup Winners Cup when both clubs won it in the 90’s. How did we let this happen?
The European Cup Winners Cup 1991 – The Spark that Ignited an Empire (or was it the 1990 FA Cup?)
Final Thoughts
Are we pissing into the wind, trying to hold back the tide. Should we just let the elite football ship sail off into the distance into a European Super League with games played in China and the US? Should we go back to our grassroots completely, back to the days when continental competitions consisted of invitational tours and challenge matches. Whither international football in this dystopian sporting megafactory? I really don’t know the answer to this and perhaps in Ireland we are too conscious of the shadow cast by the Premier League behemoth. Are Dutch and Austrian fans similarly concerned, for example. I would assume the thoughts of a European Super League makes almost all football fans slightly queasy. Would even greater renewed interest in our domestic game or local games ultimately benefit us all in any case? The problem is that fan power is slowly being eroded at the upper echelons. Boycotts may or may not make a difference as the global reach of the footballing megabrands make the local fans less and less relevant.
There are massive and fundamental structural problems within football as we define the game in 2019. There are some solutions I would put forward under the topics below and I think they should be discussed:
- Real financial fair play
- A wage cap
- Champions League places for the domestic cups
- Ban on gambling sponsorship
- Empowerment of Referees
- More female officials
- Reform of TV Coverage
- Points deductions for racist or discriminatory chanting
As we have seen with Donald Trump’s ascent and the tragic scenes as the UK’s democracy rents itself asunder, you need to be very careful to nip these types of issues in the bud as soon as they rear their ugly heads. We’re past that stage now, well past, and no-one seems willing to take it on. Plenty is being written and many will agree with a lot of this article, but as long as the powers that be continue to pump the drug directly into our veins almost every night of the week, we seem incapable of kicking back. Just spare a thought for the poor Bury fans who must now go cold turkey.
A Yard of Grass 