I’m here because I have things to say about the state of the beautiful game. I’ve been a football fan since the age of nine, an ardent, passionate supporter of an unfashionable Championship side on whom I’ve wasted more tears than all the women I have had to do with. I have a naive longing for a return to old-fashioned football values and the loosening of the corporate ties that bind the game to the City of London, the marketers and the brand managers. I subscribe – in full – to Bill Hicks’ view of those who work in marketing and advertising.
My own club has recently been refused permission to continue with its terraced standing area for the coming season, a decision which, whilst widely expected, is nevertheless symptomatic of the football world we inhabit. The Government, hand in glove with the corporate chancers invading the game, decree that Standing Is Not Safe and thus we must have seats because Whatever Happens There Must Not Be Another Hillsborough. This opinion, constructed on the flimsiest of premises has been repeated so often it has now become received wisdom: one only has to listen again to Richard Caborn’s performances in interview to understand that. Like all ministers, he is merely a performing monkey, reading lines officials write for him, incapable of engaging in debate at all. But then, having worked in government, I have a generally low opinion of ministers.
I digress. The point is, of course, that the necessity to provide seating has been used in the Premiership as a convenient excuse for skyrocketing prices for an inferior product, coupled of course with the need to maintain the illusion that we are witnessing The Best League In The World. This is of course poppycock, as Alexis Lalas pointed out in the Guardian (and was rapidly rounded on by the tabloid scribes whose livelihoods depend on the Premiership cash-cow). It works thus. TV pays an exorbitant amount of money for the rights, which it then has to justify. The games are, by and large, cripplingly dull, contested as they are by teams too frightened of losing to take a chance on winning, so they must perforce be hyped and presented as “titanic clashes”, “typical blood-and-guts encounter” and so forth. Meantime, as the wage demands rise in response to the need for glitzier and glitzier stars, so the prices for the ordinary fan go up and the more of its soul football has to hand over to Sky in terms of kick-off times, rearranged fixtures, delayed starts for the commercial breaks and so on. Where will it end?
That’s a foretaste. No doubt as the new season approaches I will become less grumpy, and more swept up in the optimism a new seasn always brings – I always do. But the older I get, the more I wonder about how much emotional energy, not to mention money, I can continue to expend on a game mortgaged to the hilt to a bunch of Australian venture capitalists and run by politicians, accountable to no-one, whose primary concern is the wellbeing of the TV deal. Its about time the FSF stormed Lancaster Gate and took the FA in a bloody coup. Come to think of it, isn’t July a traditional month for revolutions?
