39th
While the whole thing has been roundly condemned in most quarters, and arguments against it expressed in a far more succinct and elegant style than I could ever manage, I still want to go on the record here and use my first football (soccer) related post to add my own voice to the cacophony of outrage that has greeted the latest brainwave from the game’s money-men.
I have grown up with the Premier League; I was eight years old when it was founded, so I have had no personal frame of reference when others have complained about the way in which it has distorted English football, and have typically had little sympathy for that position either. The league, in it’s primary role as a money-making organisation, has undoubtedly had many positive effects on the game. The top-level of football in England is now of an indisputably better standard than it was fifteen years ago, and the influx of foreign players has meant it currently resides as, if not the best league in the world, then certainly one of the top three.
On a personal level, having spent a good portion of the last ten years overseas, the increased broadcasting presence of the Premiership has meant that I have been able to keep in touch with a league that I may otherwise have missed out on. As a fan of a team that has been playing some of the best football in the world in the last few years, I also recognise that the men who made that possible, namely our French manager, Arsene Wenger and his numerous foreign signings, would, in all likelihood, not have touched Arsenal with a barge pole were it not for the progress that the club, and the league as a whole, had made in the early nineties.
I recognise that much of this progress has come at a substantial cost, in terms of increasing prices for fans, an unbalanced competitive ability amongst teams, and the inadvertent devaluing of other, less financially rewarding, competitions. Nevertheless, I have largely been willing to accept the balance of that trade-off.
The proposals this past week for a 39th game to be played overseas in future seasons has just tipped that balance as far as I am concerned. As already mentioned, the arguments against it are fairly self-evident for most football fans, and don’t need to be reiterated by me (but for a nice summation, which also tries to be even-handed by presenting the potential arguments in favour, click here). Suffice it to say that if this comes to pass it may prove to be as momentous a decision in the history of the English game as the forming of the Premier League itself, and one which, if at all successful, there will be no way back from.
What is most concerning, however, is that despite the near unanimous opposition from the fans, we will have little to no impact on whether the scheme goes ahead or not. British fans are almost entirely impotent within the game, especially when compared to our European equivalents. There have been murmurings about potential boycotts of league sponsors, but the lack of a strong, central fan association limits the effectiveness of this proposal. The even more drastic suggestion of a fixture “stay-away” weekend will never get off of the ground either; season ticket holders have already handed over their cash to the clubs, so their absence will not have a strong financial impact, while for every other ticket that is not sold, there will be ten other fans willing to take advantage of the situation and buy it (in the case of most clubs anyway).
However, the opposition of other, more powerful interests, is a comforting development. Already the regional football bodies of Asia and the US, the two prime candidates for fixture re-locations, have come out against the concept, quite reasonably stating that it has the potential to do great damage to their own, still fledgling, leagues. Even Michel Platini of Uefa, and, perhaps even more surprisingly, Sepp Blatter of Fifa have pledged to block all such moves by the Premier League, with Blatter going so far as to say the scheme, if it got off the ground, would undoubtedly scupper England’s chances of hosting the World Cup in 2018. This last point means that Gordon Brown is unlikely to support the league’s proposals, given that he hopes to use the World Cup bid as a key success story for his government, in the same way that Tony Blair did with the Olympic bid.
Regardless of whether the plans come to fruition or not, the whole debacle is indicative of the drastic changes ahead for the game in Britain and around the world. Football, and football fans in particular, have long been accused of being reluctant to accept change in the past, but there have more often than not been numerous good reasons behind that stance. It might not happen in the next five, ten or even twenty years, but it is hard to imagine that the age of US-style “franchise” sports will not come to the English game at some point, and that it will not forever alter the footballing landscape on a devastating level. Unfortunately, for the money-men it seems, that day cannot come quickly enough.
