Forget soccer’s foul side, I’m like an over-excited kid waiting for Saturday
AMAN of my age probably should not be admitting this but I’m like a child looking forward to the return of the Premier League soccer season in England this weekend.
There are many more like me, preparing to indulge one of our favourite forms of escapism: that’s why so many fly from Ireland to England each weekend to attend matches in person, so many others subscribe to expensive television channels that broadcast matches live, and every one of those football fans reads the sports pages of this newspaper and others, and now the online content, so avidly, both before and after games.
Some of the best players in the world compete in the English Premier League, to provide compelling entertainment and drama, outcome uncertain. It is multi-cultural and multi-national in a way that does England credit and makes its Brexit isolationism somewhat confusing.
It provides those so-called water-cooler moments at work or in the pub, an opportunity to talk with friends about games or go to the matches with them, even if some people are best avoided because they clearly haven’t a clue what they’re talking about.
Over the last 30 years – since the Premier League was introduced to replace the former First Division – the ‘product’ has improved dramatically.
The grounds are safer places than they were in the hooligan-dominated days, if very expensive to access, and efforts to stamp out racism, homophobia and other bad behaviours have been impressive.
And yet there is a nagging doubt about the very suitability of it all.
Not just whether it makes sense for a supposedly mature adult to care so much about the games involving Leeds United (a city to which I have no connection other than a first cousin who emigrated to there from Cork) or to watch games involving other teams with such interest.
This, after all, is a sports league that, among other things, endorses and promotes so-called sports-washing.
This is the laundering of reputations by disreputable regimes and odious oligarchs, who buy the loyalty and adulation of fans and get to receive genuflection as they mix in the elite circles, by dint of throwing money at the purchase of players and paying those players’ huge salaries.
I used to have soft spots for Newcastle United and Manchester City – before I plumped as a child for Leeds – but thankfully didn’t align myself to either, with the former now Saudi Arabian-owned and the latter a financial plaything for owners in Abu Dhabi. Both are countries with allegations of the most grievous human rights abuses hanging over them. It seemingly matters nothing to the fans of these clubs though, if the owners deliver successful teams.
Thankfully I haven’t been put in a difficult position like that, but I staggered a little in 2018 during Leeds’s pre-season tour to Myanmar, of all places.
These days, if teams are not purchased by wealthy owners as ego-boosting playthings they are regarded as potentially lucrative investment opportunities and run that way.
Clubs like Manchester United, Liverpool and now Chelsea (after the exit of sanctioned Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich) are owned by American billionaires who run the businesses to make money, either from rich annual dividends or in the expectation of being able to sell for great profit to the next enthusiast at a later date.
Players who are fan favourites get sold because the money on offer from richer teams is too much for smaller clubs to ignore. Good players who would adorn mid-table or relegation threatened teams take the money and are content to sit on the bench as replacements with big teams.
Only the very biggest can realistically expect to contend to win the big prizes; this is a league in which success is largely dependent on who has the most money.
THERE may be rare cases when a team with far less money – Leicester City memorably in 2016 – can break through and win the title but that is a classic example of where the exception proves the rule.
The competition is being dulled by inevitability of dominance by the biggest budgets.
This is a league that, ironically, needs US-style sports socialism to be imposed, salary caps for clubs and limits on the amount that can be spent on transfers.
Fitness-to-purchase rules need to be implemented, as do rules on how much money clubs can be allowed to lose; the rules that are there are too often loosely observed.
Knowing all of this I’ll still be glued to it. Roll on the weekend.