Regular readers will be aware that the attractions of football are lost on me. It is usually argued that football clubs are integral to working-class culture, and that they provide a focus for local patriotism. I trust that the ongoing saga surrounding Liverpool Football Club will expose the fact that, thanks to the global capitalism that always destroys any patriotic expression, the second of those is now as gone with the wind as the first has been for at least twenty years.
The worst thing that ever happened to football was the abolition of the maximum wage. Football is now, like any other branch of the fashion industry, an example of what homosexual men think that heterosexual women will like. Each England player’s new strip is bespoke – measured for, and then run up by, a Savile Row tailor. Each new member of the squad now goes through this, as a sort of initiation. What a touching act of solidarity in the current economic climate.
I sometimes wonder why the really big clubs still bother with football. They are so rich that they could name a “squad” of simple beneficiaries of some sort of trust fund. The fashion, the glamour, the gossip, the drugs, the drink, the sex, the lot could then just carry on as before, with no need for training sessions or what have you. Who would be able to tell the difference?
The pricing of the working classes out of football, its legendarily bad treatment of its staff, and its use as a sort of circus of performing chavs as there might be performing seals or the performing monkeys like which they are now even trussed up, cannot be tolerated for ever. Or, indeed, for very much longer at all. Mutualisation, perhaps with a heavy dose of municipal involvement where grounds are concerned, is the last hope. If there is any hope. There may very well be none.
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"Regular readers will be aware that the attractons of football are lost on me"
ReplyDeleteBut yet you still feel it necessary to write frequently about, and make suggestions on this - a topic you freely admit you know nothing about. Which kinda undermines your points.
Still, if you held back commenting on topics you knew nothing about, the blog would be a pretty empty place I guess.
Reading your comment is like meeting my contemporaries who were pretty in their youth. You'll either understand that, or there is no point explaining it to you.
ReplyDeleteThat reply cheered me up like Emetart cannot imagine.
ReplyDeleteA bit off topic, but I think a good example of how a sports franchise ought to be run would be the NFL's Green Bay Packers (hate to say it as a Chicago Bears fan, but it is true).
ReplyDeleteFirst, the Green Bay Packers are a community-owned franchise. The Packers are literally owned by the fans, with a total of 112,015 people holding ownership shares of the franchise. Second, Lambeau Field, where the Packers play, is owned by the City of Green Bay, Wisconsin. Finally, the NFL divides all of the money from national television contracts equally among the various teams, this way huge markets like New York City and Chicago don’t eat up all the revenue from television. These factors have kept the Packers economically viable in the small city of Green Bay (population: 101,025). The Packers have won a record 12 NFL World Championships.
My only complaints with the Green Bay model are that there is, to my knowledge, no system for worker's representation, so I am not sure how well staff is treated. Plus, with 112,015 owners, you run into the nagging principal-agent problem.