FOOTBALL MUST WASH AWAY THE DIRTY MONEY
GAME NEEDS TO RECONNECT WITH ITS ROOTS AND WEED OUT WILD SPENDING AND SELF-INTEREST
YOU only had to watch Monday Night Football on Sky this week to see how selective the moral outrage can be in football, a sport which has truly consumed itself.
The quality of dialectic from Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher was brilliant, as always, yet stuffed into the advertising breaks which linked the segments were wall-to-wall adverts for a gambling industry which props up the sport while maintaining a risible pretence that it protects against addiction.
Dubious sources of money prop up football everywhere. The sport is a walking advertisement for gambling companies. It rinses the reputation of despots. And yet the obscene amounts spent seem to be a source of pride.
To the very end, Manchester United’s ed Woodward was boasting about it, reminding in his departing statement late on Tuesday that he had spent more than £1billion on players — when the team in question are no better than when he arrived 12 years ago. So amid the unalloyed celebration about the european Super League being placed into the depository where it always belonged, the sport might find the time for self-scrutiny and ask: how did it get to this?
Perhaps we can now hope that the money-grabbers who came to feed on our sport — people like Joel Glazer, John W henry and Stan Kroenke, who view it as just another trade — will slink away, aware that supporters will not tolerate them feeding off the sport’s history. They have become toxic. They should know that they are reviled.
Somewhere along the road, the distorted view took hold that clubs need these people, though that was only because of the economics of a football industry that will pay a player £300,000 a week without batting an eyelid.
And when the leeches have gone, perhaps we can hope for the entire, vast outlay to be dialled down; for the sport to be restored to the towns and cities which are its emotional core; and for some thought to be given to the collateral damage caused by this brutal machine.
As the sport has accelerated into a perverse parallel universe of unadulterated spending, the quest to find the next ludicrously valued talent sees 10,000 young people, most of them children, herded into British football’s development system at any one time. Most will be rejected, with all the accompanying heartbreak that brings.
Imagine a world in which the TV deal paid considerably less and players earned no more than, say, £100,000 a week. That would still make them monumentally wealthy individuals, yet the groaning wage burden on clubs would be eased, along with the cost to supporters of watching a team or buying a shirt, and the next multi-millionaire owner who swings into town would be less alluring. At £ 100,000 a week maximum, would the standard of football really be any worse?
There was scant evidence, before the crazy last 72 hours, that the pandemic had caused football to reset. Talk of a salary cap for the lower leagues was quickly quashed by the Professional Footballers’ Association, who took to the courts to get it dismissed on a technicality.
But this kind of restraint is the only way to bring order to a sport which is now prey to predators lacking any respect for football’s principles and history.
There was no more wretched example last year than Wigan Athletic, bought by the odious Au Yeung Wai Kay, who dumped the club into administration within a week ‘like litter thrown from a speeding car’ — to quote one excellent analysis piece.
Championship clubs are, more than any others, spending way beyond their means and facing financial Armageddon.
Personal wealth is a part and parcel of sport. It should be and it always has been.
It has brought us owners who are currently major assets to our national football life — Nassef
Sawiris and Wes edens at Aston Villa, Steve Parish at Crystal Palace, Tony Bloom at Brighton. In the lower leagues, Mark Stott and Simon Sadler are quietly reviving Stockport County and Blackpool, their respective local teams.
The challenge is how to keep the vampires at bay and map a route out of the infernal place football has become. There are greed, self-interest, myopia and narcissism at every turn and not enough intellect in places where it really needs to be.
Neville showed himself willing to take a lead last October, when he was one of eight signatories to a manifesto calling for independent regulation and statutory powers to help save football from itself. It provoked minimal attention and sparse publicity at a time when the football roadshow was back in full swing.
Monday’s compelling Sky show told us that he should be at the forefront of working out how football moves ahead.
But no less important is how the wild spending and the money can be consigned to the past.