Football’s Seven Deadly Sins
With it being the school holidays, I – like many people – used some time off last week to spend with the family and we made the short trip to visit the mother-in-law.
It was just after rush hour, but everything was moving on the roads. On a notoriously busy stretch, I noticed in my rear-view mirror, a white car, zig-zagging in and out of the traffic, indiscriminately pulling out in front of oncoming vehicles and forcing them to swerve. It overtook me – although there was no safe way to do so – then dove back onto the correct side of the road, narrowly avoiding a bus. The car’s driver – and similarly aged passengers – carried on, overtaking at will, until he reached the bottom of the hill and a roundabout where he ignored the red light and sped across, forcing everyone else into emergency stops, before it picked up great speed on the 40mph limit dual-carriageway and hurtled off into the distance.
I don’t know what happened to it next. I presume (as I didn’t see any news reports to the contrary) they reached their destination without major incident. But they could just have easily have ploughed into another car or a pedestrian. On another day, their reckless manoeuvres might have killed everyone onboard, or an entirely innocent person or entire family in another vehicle. What was absolutely certain was that the occupants of that white car didn’t give a flying f**k about the damage they could do to anyone else or themselves. Was this society going – literally – downhill? Or just a few bad apples taking advantage of a situation where the authorities were unable to prevent it? Maybe both.
It stayed with me for the remainder of the journey, partly because I was angry at such scant regard for others, but partly because it made me draw a parallel with football; in its own little bubble, hurtling along at break-neck speed with little thought for others and ignoring all the warnings and red signals – of which there are plenty – as it goes.
You could be forgiven for thinking the narrative, ignoring my rather bleak view, is completely different. There’s an argument that everything is just fine as the new Premier League campaign kicked off in Liverpool on Friday night; record attendances and transfer fees, huge broadcasting deals, some players taking home (or trousering if you read The Sun) up to half a million pounds per week and a successful and growing women’s game.
But the other articles; those beyond the elite hyperbole, suggests a different angle. And I can’t ever recall seeing a season begin with so many bad news stories.
Clubs with financial problems (with some facing expulsion or even extinction), points deductions, crowd disturbances, multiple claims of racism coming from the stands or online, security threats to players, supporter protests and boycotts, players breaking contracts, accusations of clubs exploiting gambling loopholes; even a club getting in trouble for breaking sponsorship rules. You’d expect to see a few of these as the season progresses but not all at once, and before a ball has barely been kicked in anger.
Hopefully, the national game is not heading for a major crash, but I do fear it might be if some of these problems aren’t checked sooner rather than later. Here’s my top seven…
Selfishness
Be it the national associations, leagues, clubs, players, agents or anyone, for that matter, there is too much ‘I’m alright, Jack’ for the long-term good of football. If you’re in the gang, then you’re fine. Whenever the issue of money is raised, the billions that the Premier League has brought into the English game is held up as a sign that ‘we’re alright’. Solidarity payments (money funnelled down to those ‘less fortunate’) are used as an example and the rest of the clubs are supposed to show Oliver Twist style gratitude for the gruel that filters down into their begging bowls. But the Premier League is only the ‘premier’ league because it’s the best twenty out of 92. Without the other 72, it would just be a plain old league. And that’s not what they want, surely? Although at times, you really do wonder.
Inconsistency
Football is littered with inconsistencies just about everywhere you look. Take VAR as just one example, and the way it is being rolled out differently to what we saw at the World Cups in 2018 and 2019. Maybe it’s with good intentions, but doesn’t it also show a shocking arrogance – ‘we can do it better than you’ – and wider disregard for the greater good? FIFA once wanted all players at all levels to adhere to the same rules, but now we have different interpretations when clubs play in the League or Champions League. It’s not just the laws of the game that are all over the place but other areas too; the way clubs and players are punished for breaking rules, FFP interpretations and the closing dates of the transfer window are all further instances where there is not a single way forward that everyone in the game is clear about and fully on board with.
Myopia
I often wonder if football can see any further than the end of each season, or the next broadcast deal. Or sometimes, even the end of the match – #LampardOut was trending on Sunday evening. There is so little evidence of longer-term thinking and planning in the sport. Many clubs have abandoned it for quick-fix, hire-and-fire solutions that barely work when the blindingly obvious fact that the three most successful clubs of recent times; Manchester City, Liverpool and Spurs, have had managers and plans in place since 2016, 2015 and 2014 respectively. But you could argue that football in general doesn’t do long-term planning period. The fixture schedule is another classic way in which it trips itself up, with competitions colliding and clashing in ways that make things harder not easier. It will never happen, but try to imagine a world where there is a World Cup every four years, a continental tournament (AFCON, Euros, Copa America) also every four years creating 24-month cycles with a much-needed rest year in-between. Imagine all leagues and cups across the world becoming aligned so that everyone starts and stops at roughly the same time and that inter-continental competitions compliment them. No, I can’t either.
Greed
Surely the most problematic of these sins and a genie that almost certainly won’t go back in the bottle. The game is awash with money, and even if we put it down to ‘market forces, to pay these huge transfers, wages and fees takes huge amounts of money. Football has always operated under a rich get richer mentality but now that rich has become incredibly rich, the have / have-not gap is widening at an alarming rate. The more money that flows in, the more goes to the top and the greater the desire to be at that top. But, and it’s true, there are only six to possibly eight clubs who are immune from relegation from the Premier League and one bad season can see a club hit serious financial skids in no time. If they can’t recover quickly, those monetary pressures grow, as does the temptation to spend more. Sustainability at clubs is often replaced by a fingers-crossed attitude that, in some cases, can only end badly. It’s also true that only three clubs can ever be promoted into the Premier League each year, but come May, how many in the Championship will have gambled it all on them being one of the three?
Wrath
Football has always been tribal, never more so than in the seventies and eighties when I grew up (allegedly). I remember one of the first books I owned being The Soccer Tribe by Desmond Morris that, for a curious eleven-year old boy, contained some explicit lyrics from supporters’ chants that laid bare the fact that fans are a mixture of religious-like worship for their team and hatred for others that don’t. The first major tournament I watched on TV (Euro 1980) was better-remembered for tear gas than goals if you were an English fan. But that was also a time when some football fans went out with the intention to kick someone’s head in. 2019 is a very different time. We might see crime levels and anti-social behaviour growing on the streets again, but there is still a yawning dichotomy between the feudal nature that exists in football stadiums and the game attracting a new, younger, gender neutral fanbase and it’s a gap that football needs to find a way to bridge. The growing number of complaints of racist behaviour and the re-emergence of crowd problems in stadiums is an afront to the family-friendly atmospheres and experiences that clubs want and need to project. I’m not saying you can’t have core fans and families that both enjoy the same game of football in their own way, but you sure as hell can’t have some fans throwing obscene insults and coins in the same place as young impressionable kids – aka the fans of tomorrow.
Hypocrisy
Gambling is an obvious manifestation of this ‘sin’. Football and betting are inextricably linked, yet they act like they are having some kind of illicit affair. On match days, gambling firms and slogans are all over television, online ads, stadium names, perimeter boards and shirts, yet they are hidden away like some grubby secret whenever anyone under the age of 16 walks in. Where there are rules, the clubs and firms find ‘crafty’ ways around them (and gain even more by way publicity in the process). If football and gambling can’t – as it appears – exist without each other, then at least be honest about it and say so because the current mixed messages and looking for loopholes isn’t helping anyone.
Indifference
Football has an astonishing ability to look in the other direction when things aren’t going the way it wants. We can now pinpoint the exact part of Raheem Sterling’s shoulder that is offside, so why can’t we spot some of the glaring problems on the road ahead?
Football has to get it’s shit together at all levels, not just concentrate all its firepower at the top of the game. We shouldn’t be able to pick and choose which things are important.
When you cross-fertilise the sins, like greed and wrath, it gets even more worrying. For instance, The Mirror reports that Manchester United fans are furious that the club has ‘only spent £150m’ this summer. As it’s The Mirror, we can presume this means that a small number of fans on Twitter are furious, but the point is social media magnifies so much that is wrong with the game’s values when you consider that players and staff at nearby Bury and Bolton are still waiting to be paid.
Football has that speeding car feeling about it right now, hurtling down the hill amidst a hurricane of big money deals and platitudes that make it get bigger, faster and more unstoppable every day. Is it any wonder it doesn’t even slow down to make sure everyone is still safely on board?
I truly fear for football in the long term; I have said so for a while. It’ll be okay in the now, and in the near future, but 15-20 years from now, I’m not so sure. These tell-tale signs feel significant – an as yet unheeded cry for help – but if 40,000 people are in the stadium and overseas viewing figures are up, then most will shrug and turn a blind eye because it’s not directly impacting on them. The have-nots will hope that some of the riches fall their way, through a decent cup draw or the emergence of a wealthy benefactor.
Who has their eyes on the road, who’s looking out for potholes or pedestrians or red lights? Who even cares? Probably not many at the moment. Until it’s too late, of course.
So, what does football – and it is football; not just the leagues or the clubs or the players but everyone involved – do? Does it try to deal with it now or leave it for the next poor sap unlucky enough to be in the firing line when the shit really hits the fan?
These sins are hurting football, but they aren’t necessarily deadly now. But keep driving the way it is and they might be eventually.
words Darren Young, D3D4 columnist