2 books examine where money is taking football
Football holds a mirror to ourselves, Michael Calvin asserts in State of Play. Modern football is angrier, more brutal, more unequal and simply more relentless than ever before. The sense of a football club being rooted to its locality has been shattered. Global is at ion, and hyper commercial is at ion, means that local owners have been replaced by “speculators and savants” from abroad. Locally reared players, victims of football’s global free market in talent, have become rare. To receive the TV bounty that teams in the Premier League enjoy, “You have to create the most competitive team, which doesn’t necessarily include young Johnny from the academy,” explains Scott Duxbury, the chairman and chief executive of Watford — a club once renowned for developing academy graduates. Yet Calvin’s rounded portrayal of the modern game — raw vignettes garnered from the rarefied elite of the sport to non- league matches which, like the game itself, are by turns surprising, uplifting and dispiriting — shows that yesterday was not always better. The standard of play at the top of English club football has never been better. Women’s football, though it has never completely recovered from the Football Association’s 50- year ban from 1921 to 1971, is buoyant. Though huge obstacles remain, progress is being made to combat homophobia and racism. And England’s World Cup campaign offered a glimpse of football as something more. “Sometimes it’s easier to be negative than positive, or to divide than to unite, but England: let’s keep this unity alive,” said England’s defender Kyle Walker.
Look closely enough and, Calvin asserts, the game still retains a beating heart which separates it from the corporate entertainment that many administrators seem to mistake it for. There are tales of Common Goal, the campaign for footballers to donate 1 per cent of their salary to charity; how Sunderland’s players bonded with Bradley Lowery, who died of cancer aged six last year; and Fans Against Foodbanks, groups of fans who help feed vulnerable people. “Football brings you together. That’s why it really is the beautiful game,” says one of the co- founders. But the contrast between the apex of the sport, which has never been so wealthy, and the state of grass roots football is damning. The current broadcasting deal for the Premier League is worth £ 2.8 billion a year worldwide; agents earned £ 211 million from Premier League clubs in the year to 31 January. Yet, as Calvin notes, football participation in England has fallen by 19 per cent in the past decade, and 150,000 grass roots matches last season were called off due to poor facilities, a damning indictment of the Football Association. Ultimately, is it is precisely the same deep emotional bonds between supporters and their clubs which leave football so ripe for exploitation. “Most fans are liars,” observes Bob Beech, a Portsmouth fan who, through the club’s supporters” trust, helped prevent the club’s liquidation. “What they really want is to win on a Saturday. If that happens they don’t really care whether a Colombian drug cartel is running the place.”
Red Card, an account of the downfall of Fifa, reads like an FBI thriller — because that is exactly what it is. The levels of greed Ken Bissinger details are absurd.