From My Backyard in Hackney – It’s all about the money
By Neil Burgess
On Sunday the 20th of April we sat in the sunshine in our garden drinking tea with a very nice young couple who are buying the house next door. London is just coming out of Covid lockdown and we’re now allowed to meet people in the open air. She’s an architect and immediately bonded with my partner of the same profession. His response that he was a lawyer, didn’t immediately seem promising, but questioned closer, it turns out that he specialises in Sports Law and not only that but he supports Liverpool FC. Well, these are going to be nice neighbours! I remember commenting that it must be great being lawyers working for the top football teams: who is going to argue over £1000 an hour fees when the top players are earning north of £200,000 a week?
Towards the end of the afternoon as they were leaving the lawyer hinted that there was a big football news story about that I might be interested in, he couldn’t tell me what, but it was about to break. Immediately they were gone I looked up on Google and found a short report suggesting a group proposing a new European Super League. Interesting? Well, yes, but it’s been talked about before and there was little detail, so I didn’t think about it again until I heard the news the next morning by which time all hell had broken loose. It was top of the national radio and TV news and headlining the front of all the newspapers and websites.
The four top teams in England and a couple of others had joined with the top teams in Spain and Italy to form a new European Super League that would be best of the best, but everyone was against it, they were going mad. Not just the fans, but the managers and the players knew nothing about it, they hadn’t been consulted. Not just the Chairmen of the other teams who hadn’t been invited. Not only the leaders of the English Football Association and the European Football Association, but the bloody Prime Minister Boris Johnston was wading in. By eleven o’ clock Monday morning Prince William expressed his displeasure, and I was waiting for the announcement from the Vatican that the Pope wasn’t happy, then we’d have the full set.
The sight of this Prime Minister accusing these clubs of greed, was, to use a very English expression gob-smacking.
To say that the kick back against this idea was ferocious is an understatement. What was all the fuss? Apparently this new league would be fixed: win or lose the founding teams would remain in it. Apparently this offended the British sense of fair play, the egalitarian, the meritocracy, the very democratic tradition, that made the Empire great…, er okay, not the last bit. So, in theory, a small team from some backwater can join a local league and by topping that league win promotion the next level of football. If they do that about seven or eight times they might join the English Premiership; election to the Premiership is the biggest cash prize in world sport, it guarantees additional income of over £130 million pounds over the following season. But of course it’s not about the money, no. Naturally, the royals, the politicians, the Chairmen of the Associations and of the lesser clubs and the journalists and the fans and their spokes-people all agreed, it’s about the very nature of sportsmanship, sorry, sportspersonship.
Bollocks. It’s all about the money. The sight of this Prime Minister accusing these clubs of greed, was, to use a very English expression gob-smacking. The previous week he’d been reported claiming that it was greed that motivated the vaccine manufacturers that had saved us from the pandemic. So that greed was good, but football’s greed is bad. Confused? Well, I am for sure. Professional football (yes, I know you guys in America call it soccer, but everywhere else it’s football. I mean, in the American variety they don’t even use a ball, it’s some sort of egg thing, someone should tell them, it’s not a ball.) is worth many billions of pounds and even more dollars. It has attracted Russian Oligarchs, Saudi and other Arab Princes and American sports Mogols, plus other more disreputable types, but all genuine football fans, who now own the entire English league. What, because they love our sense of gamesmanship? Maybe, but also the game is a huge cash cow and so badly regulated that owners can cream off large amounts of money in all sorts of imaginative ways. And what about the people who run the competitions, the World Cup, the Champions League, Series A, the Premiership? Well they’ve all got their snouts in the trough and are gobbling up their share too. This new Super League was about break the status quo and threaten their livelihoods.
Now, the break-away teams have all with-drawn from the Super League and apologised. It was all over in a matter of days. But I remain suspicious about what was really happening. If the Super League was serious, where were the PR consultants and press secretaries briefed to sell the super league idea to the fans? The promise of seeing the world’s top players and teams playing each other on a regular basis and without having to buy a yearly subscription to SKY TV or their UK competitors BT, is an attractive proposition. Why didn’t the Super League group have their considerable media teams behind the idea from the start to counter all the negative stuff? Maybe they are just stupid and hadn’t thought it through? Or maybe there is something else going on and this was just an opening skirmish? Whatever the case I can feel confident that my new neighbour is going to be kept very busy in the coming months.
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