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| A happy person - remember them? |
So football goes on. In the midst of a raging zombie attack. With the population hiding in their cellars, surviving on the mould that grows on their walls. With condensation forming on the ceiling, with the air turning stale, with the outside world silent, footballers must face the music and dance, out there in the open. With nothing but a nylon shirt and a sponsor's branding for protection against the horrors.
Why? Apparently, because (in shock news) it's good for the nation's mental health! Football is the new banana bread or Joe Wicks. It's yoga and singing opera from your balcony in Italy in the face of adversity. It's uplifting, entertaining and diverting. It gives a structure to the week, just a little something to look forward to, a topic for discussion, a way to distract ourselves from the existential crisis we're all suffering from discovering 21st century humankind is actually as prone to disease as rabbits or Victorians.
Whilst I don't really know if football should go on, what with being a shit blogger who couldn't be arsed with science and that on the grounds that it's a bit difficult, I do agree that football is pretty good. It's one of the only places you can go in society and shout 'fuck' at the top of your voice for example without being labelled a wrong un', and for that reason alone, it's cathartic and purifying. It's a social space, a rare gathering point for disparate people, one of the few places you can put down your identity and just be part of a crowd. It's a soap opera, a history lesson and a meditation in one. Imagine a whispering voice telling you to 'follow the ball, just follow the ball, let it all go and just follow the ball, lose yourself in the movement, the bounce, feel the ebb, the flow, become at one with the game' and you might wonder why anyone pays money for a guru or a therapist. That all sounds shit and I'm gonna kill myself if I turn into Nick Hornby, but I really do like football.
So, I suppose I agree. It's a good thing for people's mental health. The twinkling delight in Ian Wright's eyes as he surveyed Marine's tiny Rosset Park ground and declared it 'perfect' says so much about the game's capacity to beguile, even in this bizarre season. The 3rd round of the FA cup, breath steaming in the darkening skies, the possibility of history in the air. What else could you possibly want from life but to suspend your disbelief and absorb yourself into the chaos of a game, result unknown and just see what happens next?
For me, as a Blackpool fan, the most recent weekend has been one of elation, West Brom dispatched, a superb game, a superb performance that means can extend our delusion just a little bit longer, this might be our season. We know, deep down it won't but we close our eyes and envisage Wembley just because we can. Because why not?
So, I suppose I agree. It's a good thing for people's mental health. The twinkling delight in Ian Wright's eyes as he surveyed Marine's tiny Rosset Park ground and declared it 'perfect' says so much about the game's capacity to beguile, even in this bizarre season. The 3rd round of the FA cup, breath steaming in the darkening skies, the possibility of history in the air. What else could you possibly want from life but to suspend your disbelief and absorb yourself into the chaos of a game, result unknown and just see what happens next?
For me, as a Blackpool fan, the most recent weekend has been one of elation, West Brom dispatched, a superb game, a superb performance that means can extend our delusion just a little bit longer, this might be our season. We know, deep down it won't but we close our eyes and envisage Wembley just because we can. Because why not?
This has been literally the only good thing that's happened to me this week. Everything else has been at best, humdrum mediocrity and at worst, really not very good at all. I'm not having a particularly bad time of it, in fact, I'm having a fairly good time of it by the standards of plenty, but recent events have tested my patience - being able to do literally nothing and see virtually no one is an endurance test and like everyone else, I mourn simple pleasures denied, I yearn for the chance to explore, to travel and to see people I miss. The one thing I look forward to is 3pm Saturday (or 7pm/7.45pm Tuesday) as at least I'll be sharing that, yes, at a distance, yes from behind a screen, yes, with buffering problems and terrible commentary but none the less, sharing that experience with others is one of the few points of reference that makes me feel anything other than housebound, trapped, isolated and disconnected.
So, yeah, football is good for my mental health for the reasons outline above and more. It's not just about the winning either. If we'd have lost to the Baggies, there'd still have been everything else, the shared purpose, the conversation, the escapism of the game. We'd have moaned and moaning is good for the soul sometimes. I don't enjoy games where we lose as much but I never wish I hadn't gone. Well, almost never. If we were struggling with relegation, there'd still be the possibility of escape. If we were doomed, the question of how we change things next year. Football is there, even when it's shit.
So, yeah, football is good for my mental health for the reasons outline above and more. It's not just about the winning either. If we'd have lost to the Baggies, there'd still have been everything else, the shared purpose, the conversation, the escapism of the game. We'd have moaned and moaning is good for the soul sometimes. I don't enjoy games where we lose as much but I never wish I hadn't gone. Well, almost never. If we were struggling with relegation, there'd still be the possibility of escape. If we were doomed, the question of how we change things next year. Football is there, even when it's shit.
For the vast majority of the multiple millions of attendances recorded in a normal English football season it isn't about basking in reflected glory. It's just about taking part in something. Most teams, my own included don't offer that much glory on a regular basis. It's important to remember that far more people don't watch Liverpool or Manchester City, Manchester United or Chelsea than do. It's about the same thing sport has always been - the atmosphere, the event, the sense of something live that is in deeply short supply at the moment. The prospect of glory, is of course, part of the thrill but for most fans of most teams, glory is only a fleeting, occasional experience.
But here's the kicker. You probably knew it was coming. If football IS all these things why is it so poorly managed? If it has such innate value to so many, why is it run in an irresponsible way, in what looks like a structure set up to shore up the value and profile of a few clubs at cost of the either the competitiveness or the financial security of so many others. The very week, we've discovered that Burnley have been flogged to people that are leveraging debt to get their hands on them. We've seen the latest takeover attempt at Wigan collapse and talk of Latics moving to Leigh Sports Village, we've heard about Sheffield Wednesday not paying players whilst Derby seem to be hovering on the edge of disaster or takeover by yet another consortium from Mars or somewhere.
These are but a few of the stories we've been subjected too that suggest that the game is not looking after itself too well. These aren't 'little' clubs either. These are, in some cases big clubs, with histories that stretch back centuries, with league titles, European runs, cup wins, international players and crowds of many thousands swaying on packed terraces in their history. There's no lack of demand for football in Sheffield, Burnley, Derby or even to a lesser extent, Wigan. These are historic, important clubs that matter to hundreds of thousands of people just as my club matters to me. These shouldn't be clubs that are under threat. Yes, every club matters and all of that, but you do reach a point where if one man and his dog aren't interested, you won't have a basis to run a team but this isn't the issue for any of the clubs I list.
Yes, Covid hasn't helped but none of the concerns at the clubs above are really especially Covid related. They show clubs who were in trouble before Covid and remain so, or highlight the nature of modern football ownership and how easy it is for a club to slip into the hands of those who may or may not treat them with carelessness, as an ego trip, as a toy, or with a sociopaths disdain.
So, I'd love to ask those who run football - if football is so important, if a nations' mental health is propped up by the game, why is it run so crudely?
The thing is, it's easy for football (plc) to reply that the game is 'just a business' and as with any other business, risk is the yin to the yang of reward. Possibly that's true. Perhaps that's just the way it is. Here's the thing though - Football (plc) can't have it both ways...
On the one hand football wants to be an extension of free market capitalism, with clubs free to trade on the open seas, taking whilst swashbuckling risks and who cares if one or two or ten should founder on the rocks of debt and ambition if another finds the golden treasure.
On the other hand, it also wants to be the keeper of the nations flame, the forces sweetheart, the light in the darkness, the helping hand and friend to the lonely, the tired and the disenchanted, a special case because of its unique spiritual hold on the psyche of millions. A kind of church for everyone, an exemption beyond the description of 'mere business'
Which is it football? You can't have it both ways...
I confess a kind of cognitive dissonance about the continuation of football. I see and engage in the extended community around my own club. The fund raising, the humour, the shared conversation, the support extended to strangers, simply because they follow the same team. All of this is real. All of this is important. All of this is enabled by football's existence. I personally, selfishly perhaps, want something to look forward to. I want to part of the game, even if it football now is like comparing a microwave meal to the gourmet banquet of the real thing.
But... I'm also a little bit cynical about football's sudden status as an important pillar of the nation's mental health regime and suspect that, as John Nicholson writes persuasively in this piece, that the true reason we're continuing is because the data and gambling industries need football to continue as much as football needs football to continue, because television contracts need football to continue, because the bloated and often boring football media needs football to continue because without football all the boring people who talk and write boring things about football wouldn't have anything to do.
This is also a boring piece by a boring and often bloated writer, so I'll try and move it towards a pithy conclusion. If football really is awakening to it's role in the lives of the supporters. If it really has had an epiphany about its function as a kind of public service, a conduit for communication, for expressing a sense of place, for venting frustrations, for cathartic releases of emotion, for joy and for connecting with others, then it also should be aware of its duty to sort its own house out, to safeguard its structure and its clubs. It should make some decisions that move it from endlessly trying to colonise the world's TV markets towards ensuring that the broad game not only survives but prospers. Yes, the 'big match' is shown live in 95 countries across 5 continents, but Wigan or Sheffield Wednesday fans are still staring down a barrel. It's great that people in Ghana support Arsenal and all very lucrative but is that as important as whether people in Wigan or Bolton or Oldham or most poignantly Bury have a team to watch at all?
Nothing has been put in such stark relief in recent times (in the world of football) as the fact that games need fans to really be a spectacle. The game limps on, powered by largely by the memories of the past. It's diminished and dulled and yet, having lived through an undeniable demonstration of the way that the supporter is really part of the spectacle, not a mere spectator observing it, you don't really get any sense that anyone in the game is serious about listening to the concerns of the supporters or that troubled by the storm of crisis clubs as long as the big 6 keep up the good work on TV.
Millions are still spent, wages continue to be the stuff of eye watering obscenity, kick off times will still be all over the place when 'normal' shuffles back in to place, the same clubs will still shout loudest when the rules are laid out and still demand more even when handing themselves riches beyond belief. The game will still function as a way to create millionaires of its stars (perhaps justifiable at a push) and the hangers on (definitely less so)
The CEO of Manchester United earns £3.2 million a year. That's an astonishing amount. I'll steal a point from Kieran Maguire (of 'Price of Football' fame) here - if Manchester United are serious about mental health, then they could start by paying their lowest paid staff a living wage. I'll expand with a few stats of my own. Ed Woodward earns abut the average wage for a Premier League player. If you think 'fuck, me, Ed Woodward earns a lot' - then every single player on match of the day earns about the same. I've written reams about how that impacts on football as a whole and how that destabilises the game's finances at lower levels so I won't repeat that here, but at least the players provide some entertainment from time to time. What the fuck has Ed Woodward ever done that's been of any use to football at all? For one Ed Woodward, you could employ 2 entire League 2 playing staffs and have money left over for a few extra squad members. Again, why? What has Ed Woodward done for anyone that has entertained in the slightest or improved anyone's life in any meaningful way?
How do we square the moral and philosophical status football has decreed upon itself with the wasteful and self destructive burning of piles of money in pursuit of 'global market leadership?' It's like saying BP are good for the nation's spirit or declaring Barclays a church. Football has bled dry its followers for decades. Shifting itself behind a paywall, rising ticket prices, effectively socially cleansing many of those whose Victorian equivalents those who gave birth to the professional arm of the game. Relentlessly drowning out the domestic games of less prosperous nations with transfer raids and wall to wall TV coverage and hype. There a good people in the game and the game does good, but it's hard not to feel that those good people are drowned out and the good the game does is sometimes a minimum if deliberate and an accident if not.
There is, without question, enough money in the game to support the existence of a broad pyramid and to advance the place of football as a participatory sport for all who wish to engage. We can see from the money that does 'trickle down' in terms of community funding, the power football has to shape lives. We can see in education programmes, anti knife initiatives, health drives and more, that people who can be hard to reach can respond to football (for more on this, read the excellent Adrian Tempany.) The frustration is, that whilst yes, some money does make it to some incredibly worthy causes, at the same time, some of the clubs that have the power to make a difference in communities are being endangered. What good is a community trust without a club? How much does supporting a side whose financial structure is built on sand or whose ownership have allowed debt to get out of control or whose owners are downright set on asset stripping the club and locked into a self destructive spiral of spiteful, petty, deliberate mismanagement and delusional statements (remember, I'm a Blackpool fan, we've not always had the nice Mr Sadler...) really support anyone's mental health?
Having written this incoherent spleen venting polemic, I'm not sure if 'football plc' is good for the mental health of people or not. The conversation, the community initiatives, the collective spirit and community of a football club isn't generated by the business of football. It's generated by the fans themselves and it would exist whether or not Ed Woodward, or the top flight players got paid £3.2 million a year. If you're lucky enough to support a club like mine, you might have an owner who seems understand the value of that but many don't (and lets be honest, ours didn't come easy!) With or without the owner, the fans remain resolutely the same people. For the Premier League in particular with all its cynically accrued and ill used wealth, it's naked greed and self serving hyperbole to be trading off the idea of performing some virtuous act of kindness to the nation leaves me cold.
Then, for all of that, it's Hull away tomorrow and I can't wait. It's all we've got. That's the rub. We need it. But what we've learned since March, is they need us too. It's a mutual affair and the state of play whereby we get ripped off and they get ever richer whilst more and more teams look shakier and shakier is, for all the world, ours to change.
But here's the kicker. You probably knew it was coming. If football IS all these things why is it so poorly managed? If it has such innate value to so many, why is it run in an irresponsible way, in what looks like a structure set up to shore up the value and profile of a few clubs at cost of the either the competitiveness or the financial security of so many others. The very week, we've discovered that Burnley have been flogged to people that are leveraging debt to get their hands on them. We've seen the latest takeover attempt at Wigan collapse and talk of Latics moving to Leigh Sports Village, we've heard about Sheffield Wednesday not paying players whilst Derby seem to be hovering on the edge of disaster or takeover by yet another consortium from Mars or somewhere.
These are but a few of the stories we've been subjected too that suggest that the game is not looking after itself too well. These aren't 'little' clubs either. These are, in some cases big clubs, with histories that stretch back centuries, with league titles, European runs, cup wins, international players and crowds of many thousands swaying on packed terraces in their history. There's no lack of demand for football in Sheffield, Burnley, Derby or even to a lesser extent, Wigan. These are historic, important clubs that matter to hundreds of thousands of people just as my club matters to me. These shouldn't be clubs that are under threat. Yes, every club matters and all of that, but you do reach a point where if one man and his dog aren't interested, you won't have a basis to run a team but this isn't the issue for any of the clubs I list.
Yes, Covid hasn't helped but none of the concerns at the clubs above are really especially Covid related. They show clubs who were in trouble before Covid and remain so, or highlight the nature of modern football ownership and how easy it is for a club to slip into the hands of those who may or may not treat them with carelessness, as an ego trip, as a toy, or with a sociopaths disdain.
So, I'd love to ask those who run football - if football is so important, if a nations' mental health is propped up by the game, why is it run so crudely?
The thing is, it's easy for football (plc) to reply that the game is 'just a business' and as with any other business, risk is the yin to the yang of reward. Possibly that's true. Perhaps that's just the way it is. Here's the thing though - Football (plc) can't have it both ways...
On the one hand football wants to be an extension of free market capitalism, with clubs free to trade on the open seas, taking whilst swashbuckling risks and who cares if one or two or ten should founder on the rocks of debt and ambition if another finds the golden treasure.
On the other hand, it also wants to be the keeper of the nations flame, the forces sweetheart, the light in the darkness, the helping hand and friend to the lonely, the tired and the disenchanted, a special case because of its unique spiritual hold on the psyche of millions. A kind of church for everyone, an exemption beyond the description of 'mere business'
Which is it football? You can't have it both ways...
I confess a kind of cognitive dissonance about the continuation of football. I see and engage in the extended community around my own club. The fund raising, the humour, the shared conversation, the support extended to strangers, simply because they follow the same team. All of this is real. All of this is important. All of this is enabled by football's existence. I personally, selfishly perhaps, want something to look forward to. I want to part of the game, even if it football now is like comparing a microwave meal to the gourmet banquet of the real thing.
But... I'm also a little bit cynical about football's sudden status as an important pillar of the nation's mental health regime and suspect that, as John Nicholson writes persuasively in this piece, that the true reason we're continuing is because the data and gambling industries need football to continue as much as football needs football to continue, because television contracts need football to continue, because the bloated and often boring football media needs football to continue because without football all the boring people who talk and write boring things about football wouldn't have anything to do.
This is also a boring piece by a boring and often bloated writer, so I'll try and move it towards a pithy conclusion. If football really is awakening to it's role in the lives of the supporters. If it really has had an epiphany about its function as a kind of public service, a conduit for communication, for expressing a sense of place, for venting frustrations, for cathartic releases of emotion, for joy and for connecting with others, then it also should be aware of its duty to sort its own house out, to safeguard its structure and its clubs. It should make some decisions that move it from endlessly trying to colonise the world's TV markets towards ensuring that the broad game not only survives but prospers. Yes, the 'big match' is shown live in 95 countries across 5 continents, but Wigan or Sheffield Wednesday fans are still staring down a barrel. It's great that people in Ghana support Arsenal and all very lucrative but is that as important as whether people in Wigan or Bolton or Oldham or most poignantly Bury have a team to watch at all?
Nothing has been put in such stark relief in recent times (in the world of football) as the fact that games need fans to really be a spectacle. The game limps on, powered by largely by the memories of the past. It's diminished and dulled and yet, having lived through an undeniable demonstration of the way that the supporter is really part of the spectacle, not a mere spectator observing it, you don't really get any sense that anyone in the game is serious about listening to the concerns of the supporters or that troubled by the storm of crisis clubs as long as the big 6 keep up the good work on TV.
Millions are still spent, wages continue to be the stuff of eye watering obscenity, kick off times will still be all over the place when 'normal' shuffles back in to place, the same clubs will still shout loudest when the rules are laid out and still demand more even when handing themselves riches beyond belief. The game will still function as a way to create millionaires of its stars (perhaps justifiable at a push) and the hangers on (definitely less so)
The CEO of Manchester United earns £3.2 million a year. That's an astonishing amount. I'll steal a point from Kieran Maguire (of 'Price of Football' fame) here - if Manchester United are serious about mental health, then they could start by paying their lowest paid staff a living wage. I'll expand with a few stats of my own. Ed Woodward earns abut the average wage for a Premier League player. If you think 'fuck, me, Ed Woodward earns a lot' - then every single player on match of the day earns about the same. I've written reams about how that impacts on football as a whole and how that destabilises the game's finances at lower levels so I won't repeat that here, but at least the players provide some entertainment from time to time. What the fuck has Ed Woodward ever done that's been of any use to football at all? For one Ed Woodward, you could employ 2 entire League 2 playing staffs and have money left over for a few extra squad members. Again, why? What has Ed Woodward done for anyone that has entertained in the slightest or improved anyone's life in any meaningful way?
How do we square the moral and philosophical status football has decreed upon itself with the wasteful and self destructive burning of piles of money in pursuit of 'global market leadership?' It's like saying BP are good for the nation's spirit or declaring Barclays a church. Football has bled dry its followers for decades. Shifting itself behind a paywall, rising ticket prices, effectively socially cleansing many of those whose Victorian equivalents those who gave birth to the professional arm of the game. Relentlessly drowning out the domestic games of less prosperous nations with transfer raids and wall to wall TV coverage and hype. There a good people in the game and the game does good, but it's hard not to feel that those good people are drowned out and the good the game does is sometimes a minimum if deliberate and an accident if not.
There is, without question, enough money in the game to support the existence of a broad pyramid and to advance the place of football as a participatory sport for all who wish to engage. We can see from the money that does 'trickle down' in terms of community funding, the power football has to shape lives. We can see in education programmes, anti knife initiatives, health drives and more, that people who can be hard to reach can respond to football (for more on this, read the excellent Adrian Tempany.) The frustration is, that whilst yes, some money does make it to some incredibly worthy causes, at the same time, some of the clubs that have the power to make a difference in communities are being endangered. What good is a community trust without a club? How much does supporting a side whose financial structure is built on sand or whose ownership have allowed debt to get out of control or whose owners are downright set on asset stripping the club and locked into a self destructive spiral of spiteful, petty, deliberate mismanagement and delusional statements (remember, I'm a Blackpool fan, we've not always had the nice Mr Sadler...) really support anyone's mental health?
Having written this incoherent spleen venting polemic, I'm not sure if 'football plc' is good for the mental health of people or not. The conversation, the community initiatives, the collective spirit and community of a football club isn't generated by the business of football. It's generated by the fans themselves and it would exist whether or not Ed Woodward, or the top flight players got paid £3.2 million a year. If you're lucky enough to support a club like mine, you might have an owner who seems understand the value of that but many don't (and lets be honest, ours didn't come easy!) With or without the owner, the fans remain resolutely the same people. For the Premier League in particular with all its cynically accrued and ill used wealth, it's naked greed and self serving hyperbole to be trading off the idea of performing some virtuous act of kindness to the nation leaves me cold.
Then, for all of that, it's Hull away tomorrow and I can't wait. It's all we've got. That's the rub. We need it. But what we've learned since March, is they need us too. It's a mutual affair and the state of play whereby we get ripped off and they get ever richer whilst more and more teams look shakier and shakier is, for all the world, ours to change.
When they open the doors, we need to remember how much the game needs us. All of us. Whatever the shirt, whatever the team. We need to realise our collective power. It's them that told us how much it matters in order to keep it going. Lets show them exactly how much it matters to us. To all of us. They need us, we don't need Ed Woodward or any other over priced, over paid, over rated, self appointed guardian of the game.
We are the game. We understand what we want. We don't need a stupid financial structure that is set up to cripple the ambition of small town teams and keep the riff raff away from trophies. We don't need to give a fuck about the marketability of the British game in developing nations. We don't need tunnel clubs and £90 seats or any of that. We don't need Monday night soccer or VAR that renders the experience baffling for the match goer. We don't need 80% of the stadium sold out to hugely expensive season tickets or block bought seats for tourist fans on package weekends. We don't need these or many other things they want to keep giving us. All we need is football. It's football that is good for us. Nothing else. They don't think we matter really.
But they need us. That's what we have learned. They need us.
Head up lads and lasses. Keep going, it's shite all of this but we'll get through it.
We are the game. We understand what we want. We don't need a stupid financial structure that is set up to cripple the ambition of small town teams and keep the riff raff away from trophies. We don't need to give a fuck about the marketability of the British game in developing nations. We don't need tunnel clubs and £90 seats or any of that. We don't need Monday night soccer or VAR that renders the experience baffling for the match goer. We don't need 80% of the stadium sold out to hugely expensive season tickets or block bought seats for tourist fans on package weekends. We don't need these or many other things they want to keep giving us. All we need is football. It's football that is good for us. Nothing else. They don't think we matter really.
But they need us. That's what we have learned. They need us.
Head up lads and lasses. Keep going, it's shite all of this but we'll get through it.
If you make it to the end - thanks for reading. Keep safe.
Postscript:
Whilst 'researching' this blog (i.e. looking for a picture) I discovered a computer game called 'Death Penalty Zombie Football' it seems apt to share it. Zeitgeist or something.
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