Community Sport

An interviewee on the Today programme rightly bemoaned the cutting of ties between local communities and at least the upper echelons of professional football, but entirely wrongly suggested that in this the Premier League was becoming like the American NFL rather than "a community sport". On the contrary, the NFL still has 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. And not just the NFL. The NBA and MLB 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. Look up the ownership structure of the most recent Super Bowl winners.

As long as you do not actually call it by the S-word, America has always been rather good at it, with her big municipal government, her pioneering of Keynesianism in practice, her strong unions whose every red cent in political donations buys something specific, her very high levels of co-operative membership, her housing co-operatives even for the upper middle classes, and her small farmers who own their own land. Once the universal public healthcare option has come to be, everyone will say that it is as American as apple pie. Which it is.

By contrast, each England football 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. 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 were concerned, is the last hope. If there is any hope. There may very well be none.