Black and White

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 today’s goings on around Newcastle United will have exposed 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 20 years.

The fate of football is one of many, many, many examples of how, since the 1980s, Britain has taken capitalism to excesses that would be inconceivable in the United States. The National Football League maintains the equal sharing out of ticket and television revenue, and there is still the hard salary cap for players, as well as the very extensive welfare provision. The present Super Bowl champions, the Green Bay Packers, have a not-for-profit model of community ownership which has had to be banned from spreading for fear that it would otherwise prove so popular. The Packers have never moved out of a Midwestern city of only 102,313 people as of the 2000 census. The National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball more than do their bit, too. In all three cases, displaying the name or logo of a commercial sponsor on the kit would be considered the very height, or depth, of sacrilege.

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. The last hope is mutualisation, perhaps with a heavy dose of municipal involvement where grounds were concerned; in better days, Saint James’ Park was owned by the City Council. That idiosyncratic spelling is itself an integral part of the heritage of the city and of the wider area. Or is that part of Newcastle, together with its Metro station, to be renamed “Sports Direct”?

If there is any hope. There may very well be none.