Don’t look up! As the families of Westeros squabble, the undead gather beyond the Wall. As senior monks jockey to be the new abbot, viking longboats mass on the horizon. As the left bicker interminably over infinitesimal doctrinal differences, right-leaning billionaire tech-bros fund the march of quasi-fascistic populism.
The problem with existential threats, from the climate crisis to Conquistadors to Covid, is that they always seem distant, somehow unreal. People are always predicting the end of the world, which makes it easy to dismiss the doom-mongers. When we’ve had so many warnings of the apocalypse, why should anybody listen now? But some day one of those prophets is going to be right. Nothing is eternal.
Football has never been so popular. Crowds in England are at the highest they have been for half a century and, if you include non-league football, probably ever. The global television audience is vast. It is an all-consuming universal. And yet that is its very problem; football is so magnetic that it has drawn the interest of too many who see it not as a sport, not as cultural expression, but as an entity from which they may profit.
Other sports, while never having quite football’s global appeal, have been unassailably popular in the past, only to decline: no one goes to the arena to watch gladiatorial combat any more, chariot-racing is defunct, cockfighting has had its day, even cricket – once England’s national sport – feels locked in a perpetual battle to survive, the rash of cash-boosting short-form tournaments reducing the schedule to unfathomable irrelevance. Football’s structure is different, but as new competitions are invented and existing ones expanded, its calendar does increasingly feel packed with content for content’s sake.
Football has proved extraordinarily resilient for 150 years but the existential threat is there. As fans and pundits and media have quarrelled over the past week about just who “won” the Premier League v Manchester City legal battle over associated party transactions (APT), taking up their pre-assigned positions behind the barricades, it’s all a bit Fuji and Kodak fighting a sales war 20 years ago: er, have you heard of digital?
The sport is now in the hands of states, oligarchs and private equity funds, none of whom, it’s fair to say, are likely to care much for the long-term good of the game. They are all rich enough to pursue hugely expensive litigation that could cripple football’s administrators, a point made explicitly in the email published by Der Spiegel purportedly from City’s general counsel, Simon Cliff, that quoted the club’s chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, threatening “the destruction of [Uefa’s] rules and organisation” by suing them “for the next 10 years”.
For a long time it’s been problematic that those who govern the game also run and derive profit from competitions, creating a nexus of interrelated incentives that has led to clientelism – but this is worse. What future does any organisation have if a member has the power effectively to decide that it doesn’t have to obey regulations voted for by the others, the “tyranny of the majority”, to use another phrase used by City?
What the case seems to have established is that financial regulation is necessary to prevent successful clubs becoming a self-perpetuating elite, and that loans from shareholders to their clubs should incur interest at market rates so as not to count as a subsidy for the purposes of profitability and sustainability calculations. All of that seems entirely reasonable – and was already part of Uefa financial fair play regulations.
City, it could be argued, have done the game a favour by closing a loophole that ensures tighter financial controls. However, if that were their aim, it seems odd that they would describe the Premier League’s plan to update the regulations accordingly as “an unwise course”, which “would likely to lead to further legal proceedings with further legal costs”.
The broader issue now is whether they have isolated a procedural flaw that could undermine the Premier League’s 130 charges against them (they, of course, deny them all). There are those, often cloaked in free-market dogma, who argue there should be no restrictions on what clubs can spend. But then the rich win, generate more revenue, buy the best players and win even more.
That’s why, until 1983, home teams in the English league paid the away team a levy and why a maximum wage was implemented in 1901. The maximum wage soon proved exploitative but the significant point was the rationale behind it: there has to be regulation to prevent the richest clubs developing what would in effect become monopoly positions – a principle that would be accepted by all but the most libertarian free-marketeers.
No one ever seems to consider how the game should look. In an ideal world, how many points would the average Premier League champions get? What is a club? What happens when the investment funds of authoritarian states with command economies start dabbling in a free market?
The issues are complex, global and would require an enormous, perhaps impossible, amount of consultation and collaboration to resolve – but these are questions that are not even asked. Everyone is wrapped up in their own self-interest, driven by their own greed. And that brings danger. Already at certain clubs there is a clear preference for high-spending occasional fans over regulars.
Tournaments are bloating. The Champions League is a footstep from being a Super League. There is more and more content and less and less of it means anything. Financial bullies, celebrated by fans and partisan cheerleaders, seek the right to bully financially. Football is being dragged away from the communities that fostered it.
What if the global appetite dwindles? What if this new audience moves on, to MMA or esports, or something else? If English football has ostracised its base, it might find there isn’t much left, and the self-absorbed mega-rich aren’t going to hang around to bail out the decades-old institutions they own; the medium-to-long term isn’t in their thinking. What if an infinitely rich owner bankrupts the Premier League?
How might football end? Through the greed and monstrous self-interest of those who never really cared for that game, and the complacency of those who allowed it to happen. Winter may already be here.
