Money wasn’t killing football, it’s what made it so much fun

MACCLESFIELD have gone. There are boarded-up shops and empty pubs on the way to Moss Rose, and now the football club will pass the same way.

Southend have 42 days to find the £493,000 needed to survive. Rick Parry reckons his Football League clubs require £250million to stay afloat. Can we now admit: the boom was better.

All those reckonings that were wished for are with us now. And those crimes laid at football’s door — the rising wages, the enormous transfer fees, the vaunting ambition — it turns out they were signs of health, signs of life. What we have now, is our alternate reality.

Everyone’s skint, everyone’s frightened, yet the desperation is such that even as swathes of the country are placed in lockdown amid fear of a pandemic resurgence, it is still being argued that fans must return to stadiums or our entire sporting edifice will fall. So the next time someone begins lecturing on the obscenity of Chelsea’s spending, or PierreEmerick Aubameyang’s new contract, or loudly explains how many nurses can be employed with Gareth Bale’s salary, save your sanity and just tell them to shut up. The money spent by football was not evil. It was fun.

It brightened the day, kept the nation amused. What Manchester City paid for Kevin De Bruyne did not stop hospitals being built; it helped rejuvenate a dead part of town. The money Real Madrid lavished on Gareth Bale passed via trickle down economics to upwards of 500 football clubs across at least four continents, and counting.

All of those clubs employ people, serve communities. That money worked hard. Take one player who Tottenham bought, Paulinho from Corinthians in Brazil.

Corinthians then bought players from Cerro Porteno, Coimbra, Botafogo, Penapolense and Ponte

Preta. And Cerro Porteno, from Paraguay, appear to have then recruited players from 14 different clubs. Those 14 clubs would subsequently do transfer business, too.

Get the idea? That is preferable to austerity. Money wasn’t killing football. It was making football, all across the world, in its own sweet way. Not a perfect system, far from it. But better than this, which must only bring joy to those hair shirts who resented the thought of young, working class men earning like bankers.

Turns out, it wasn’t so bad. Turns out Wayne Rooney signing for Derby wasn’t the coming of the Apocalypse.

Before coronavirus, very rich folk still fancied an ego trip on the coat-tails of a football club. They wanted to invest, to build, to buy their way in, to have a bang for their buck. And that’s good; or certainly it’s better than this. Better than redundancies, closures, the tightening of belts, the grim fight for survival. And this is not the payback for football’s economic incontinence either. Restaurants haven’t been recruiting £100m chefs, airlines weren’t paying pilots £200,000 a week, but they all as good as went skint overnight the moment customers were banned.

Football has done rather well to get this far actually, propped up by another despised entity, that it now transpires was a positive: the Premier League’s inflated television deal. Everything it was said was ruining football was actually doing the opposite: television money, big transfers, the wages that attracted global talent.

These were signs of vibrancy, not decay. Those who looked forward to the day the bubble burst, well now you’ve got it. Not much fun, is it? Turns out depression, recession, misery and fear doesn’t build hospitals, doesn’t increase the gaiety of nations, doesn’t deliver more nurses to the ward.

Turns out if those very rich folk are cutting back on their football clubs, they are cutting back on everything else, too: jobs, investment, ideas, ambition.

So if the day ever arrives when Manchester United do want to spend £100m on Jadon Sancho, it may be an idea to put out bunting.

For it will mean this is ending and people are ready to be daft, to be frivolous, to be ambitious, to be bold again. And, from here, perhaps be careful what you wish for. For we have seen both sides of the economic argument now: and austerity sucks.