In an e-mail to me a short time ago, a friend of mine from England (we met as undergraduates forty-eight years ago!) made a few comments about the state of soccer in Britain, and he set me thinking and reading about it in a way I hadn’t, despite my devotion to this game for more than 55 years. As I wrote a short time ago (May 28, 2007 in the archive, it’s a simple game no more.

Billions of dollars from TV and sponsorships cascade into the Premiership, gorgeous new stadia have appeared in city after city, players can earn more than $250K per week, and foreign stars wishing to play in one of the best, if not the best, leagues in the world have agents busy touting their qualities, with hefty “bungs” (incentives) changing hands during some, but not all, negotiations with clubs. It’s more a business—a profitable, and sometimes unsavoury one—than a sport these days, whetting the appetites of foreign investors from the U.S., Russia, Thailand and elsewhere for a meal of British soccer-money.

So why would anyone in an irredeemably capitalist society want things to change? Do we want to return to the days (which I remember very well) of impoverished clubs saved by the charity of occasional benefactors, to dilapidated stadia, to exploited players unable to find prosperity? Is that the alternative to the excesses of the modern game?

Inevitably, I suppose, the situation is more complicated, because as in any society, human emotions take over and determine—perhaps more than reason—whatever progress is made. In the case of England and the Premiership: envy, fear, nationalism, disgust and class-struggle all play a part in the discussion.

The envy is obvious, for who wouldn’t want to earn more than $200,000 a week? It become sickeningly so when just twelve days ago a government minister Gerry Sutcliffe, (for sport, no less) declared about John Terry that “..it is obscene to be on £150,000 a week. People in the street cannot understand salaries like that.”
John Terry is captain of England and Chelsea, and is their starting center-back, was selected for the World Cup all-star team, and his weekly salary is actually £130,000. Be that as it may, but like Terry, Gerry himself is a working-class bloke, left school at sixteen, worked as a salesman and in the printing trade where he became a representative for his union, and thence into politics. As a government minister he doesn’t make the kind of money that Terry takes home, and that seems to p**s him off.

Maybe Sutcliffe covets the footballers life, which he should know is very much shorter than the life of the average politician. Sutcliffe’s comment smacks of pure envy, and to call the salary obscene, when he was a member of the British government that joined with the U.S. in the war in Iraq that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, is hypocrisy of the crudest kind. And does he complain about super-rich entertainers, or about J.K. Rowling making billions from pottering about writing fairy tales?

Add fear to the mix, when people suggest that the system in the Premiership is economically unsustainable, and small wonder that there is talk of (among other things) setting salary-caps to keep the fans’ costs down. But the business model that drives foreign acquisition of big clubs is similar to the model for a lot of business take-overs: borrow money to make the acquisition of a thriving business, then use profits to pay down the debt.

You may not like the model, but it is not out of line with normal capitalist maneuvering. It only becomes unsustainable when people refuse to pay to go to games, and even then, the biggest source of income for the Premiership is worldwide television, not tickets. Is it likely that fans won’t pay to go to games? Manchester United increased their ticket-prices, but Old Trafford is still full.

[On Monday I’ll look at the argument about how the Premiership affects the English national team, and whether something should be done about it.]