Football is a ray of sunlight - it’s not meant to pay the bills

PrEMIEr LEAGuE clubs spent £2billion in the transfer window. And there is a word for that. Success. Not obscene, not outrageous, not scandalous. Success. It makes our game more interesting. So if you like football, it makes your life more interesting, too. That is why everyone watches it, across the world.

English football is better for Antony, Erling Haaland, Darwin Nunez, Brenden Aaronson, Alexander Isak, all of the players that have come to our game. They make the competition tighter, fiercer, harder. Football is about community, civic pride and belonging, yes.

But it is also about very rich people investing in an industry that amuses the working classes.

In the days when the establishment resisted supposedly revolutionary ideas that seem mundane now — names on shirts, an additional substitute — Arsenal director David Dein regularly clashed with Bill Fox, chairman of Blackburn and the Football League.

‘ If football was a public company, what sector would we be in?’ Dein asked one day.

‘We’d be in the entertainment sector,’ he said, answering his own question. ‘You go there to be entertained.’

And nothing has changed. Except now there is a movement to turn football into a branch of accountancy, to wrap it in red tape and government regulation, as if a tidy balance sheet is the goal, not glory, not fun.

So how did politicians react to football’s spending this summer? ‘Football needs to be brought down to earth,’ said Ian Mearns, chairman of the All- Party Parliamentary Group of Football Supporters, and Labour MP for Gateshead.

Clive Efford, MP for Eltham and a member of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee, went further. ‘It is pretty obscene at a time like this,’ he said. ‘Clubs should take a hard look at themselves. They should feel ashamed. Football as a whole should come together and provide some sort of fund to assist people at this time.

‘When this happens during a cost-of-living crisis, when there is inflation for food and energy, costs are so high, it underlines the madness.’ He stopped short of screaming ‘nurses’ but give it time.

Some might blame the economic crisis in this country on the Government, and on an opposition — of which Mearns and Efford are members — so utterly useless that they have not laid a glove on them in four elections. But apparently it is football’s job to sort out your utility bills. That is why the game needs a government regulator, so it can be properly policed as happens in the fields of energy and water by OFGEM and OFWAT.

Let’s see if Mearns, for instance, wishes to campaign in Gateshead for Newcastle to stop buying players. To speak out on the purchase of Isak, when the club could have waited for Callum Wilson to return from his latest hamstring injury while sticking with the goal-averse Chris Wood. It is a grim winter ahead.

It does not pay the bills, but the one ray of sunshine for some in the North East right now is that they finally have a football team

going places. And while that may seem trite, it is true.

Documentaries have been made about how important the success of Liverpool and Everton was to a depressed Merseyside region in the 1970s and 1980s. Alan Hudson called his autobiography The Working Class Ballet.

If you are a Manchester United fan struggling with the cost of living, United not spending £82million on Antony does not solve that for you.

That you now support a coherent football club, however, might bring some much-needed cheer into your life. If defeat can cause a rise in domestic abuse — and studies show it can — is it so far-fetched that having a good team, a winning team or merely an exciting team might actually make people happy?

So why is this a cause for shame? Why is it obscene? We are scolded for failing to talk up this country even while we bathe in sewage and contemplate living in darkness, yet one industry that is genuinely successful is placed under constant attack.

Government regulation has solved no part of this cost of living crisis and yet it is argued as the way forward for football.

Meanwhile, a competition that will actually bring fun and entertainment to millions this winter, that is a genuine world leader, not some politician’s crummy soundbite, is under siege.

Do not let Westminster anywhere near our game. They would not know what real success looked like, most of them.