Mission impossible

When did football become so difficult?

It’s ironic that the Premier League, set for so long against an independent regulator for English football, is becoming the strongest advocate for the establishment of one – albeit unintentionally. Chief executive Richard Masters’ appearance in front of the Parliamentary Culture, Media and Sport Committee probably did more to advance the establishment of an IREF than years of campaigning.

It should be acknowledged that Masters has a difficult job, some would say impossible. That’s because the Premier League isn’t the competition governing body it likes to present itself as, but a loose collection of 20 clubs all pursuing their own interests. That may explain the air of almost permanent irritation Masters carries with him. He knows that getting all 20 clubs to agree on something, to see further than their own individual interests, is virtually impossible. That’s why he has to attempt to kick any questions about when agreement might be reached over the current thorny issue of financial distribution with the EFL into the long grass.

Read the transcript of the hearing and you’ll read Masters repeatedly declining to give specific answers about figures or dates. The message he was obliged by his bosses to give was that everyone wanted a settlement, but that going into specifics like numbers and dates wasn’t helpful. And while the Premier League was fully in favour of the independent regulator it had been steadfastly against for so long, it would be better if the regulator didn’t have to step in and the clubs could agree themselves – although using figures and dates to illustrate what that agreement could be wasn’t helpful.

Masters’ mission impossible also extended having to defend the parachute payments system. The problem here was that he had to argue that a system set up specifically to distort competition didn’t distort competition. He was doomed from the start, and doubly doomed by EFL chairman Rick Parry’s direct demolition job on the system. Parry played a blinder, delivering some pithy and effective lines.

He said that in 2020 he’d estimated £285m a year would solve the problem of sustainability for Football League clubs. Since then, Premier League clubs have increased their wage bill by £500m, and the funding gap to the EFL has grown to £5 billion. His basic argument was that “if we got the distribution right we would not need parachute payments”.

Masters, however, cited Luton, Brighton and Brentford as examples of clubs who gained promotion to the Premier league without parachute payments, who “have made a success of their promotion and have managed to stay up and stay competitive”. But in the very next sentence, Masters said: “I believe they would not have been able to do that without parachute payments.” A case, one wag observed to me, of Schrödinger’s parachute payments?

Incidentally, Luton players and staff will no doubt be cheered that Masters thinks they’ve stayed up, but will no doubt focus on getting the results that actually enable them to.

Parry also made a very good point in response to the argument that the Premier League should not ‘share’ the money it makes with the rest of football, and in doing so punctured the conceit of many of those at the top of the game. Since the Premier League was formed in 1992, he said, only six clubs had been ever-present. The average length of time the remaining 14 have spent in the PL is 14 years, and there are 30 teams currently in the EFL that have played in the PL. They too have played their part in the success of the world’s most lucrative football league, a point too often lost on some senior club officials who seem unable to understand the importance of the presence of the opposition.

Parry also neatly demolished the argument that pesky regulation fell short of perfect market mechanism. “The Government say that the market has been unable to regulate football, which we accept, but then they say that the market can sort out redistribution. It patently cannot because it has not. It could have been done any time in the last 30 years if the will was there.” Quite right.

And to round things off, while being questioned on points deductions against Everton and Nottingham Forest, Masters’s attempt to show the PL could act because it had used powers it had held since 2013/14 for the first time rather proved the need for a regulator, and his description of the two clubs as “small” was a PR disaster that has led to questions from MPs, no less. As was his insistence that a hearing had been set to deal with the outstanding charges against Manchester City but that he could not say when that was.

It’s not entirely fanciful to think Masters might be coming to the conclusion an independent regulator would make his life easier.

---

The most meaningless phrase in football is “The fans are the lifeblood of the game”. It’s trotted out routinely, but actions speak louder than words – certainly where matchgoing fans are concerned. The pandemic was supposed to have been a turning point – those empty stadiums showing just how vital a part of the spectacle fans are. Oh how often we were told how vital and respected we were.

And yet the past few years have seen the situation get worse and worse for matchgoing fans, largely due to the way football has chosen to conduct its relationship with TV, something I’ve written about before. There are inevitably going to be some matches that are difficult to travel to and from because TV needs to cover a broad spectrum, there are inevitably going to be some late changes. But kick-off times that inconvenience fans are becoming the norm rather than the exception.

Journeys the length of the country on evenings when there is no public transport option, late changes to matches made just weeks or days before a game, fixtures being moved more than once, the advance notice of TV picks being increasingly subject to qualification … all are familiar obstacles to fans who go to the match. I’ve said before that being a fan increasingly requires a level of planning and almost professional approach most people don’t even bring to their jobs. It is gruelling, it is expensive, it is demoralising.

Football says it cares about the lifeblood of the game. But it doesn’t. Because the lifeblood of the game is money, and TV audiences will always be bigger than those at the game. TV has funded the boom, so why wouldn’t it want to so totally call the shots? The game has given it carte blanche.

So what can be done? Boycotts? Well, there’s always someone else to take your place. Apparently. Peaceful disruption of the kind German fans carried out when they felt the balance had swung too far in TV’s favour? Well, it’s a different culture in England, and there is reticence because of our own history of crowd disorder (on which more in a moment). But anger is building, and more and more people are saying they have had enough.

It’s unlikely even the more progressively-minded types in the TV football firmament will speak out and say that TV has too much power and that, despite the benefits it has brought, the pendulum has swung too far. Not many of us can afford to publicly criticise our employer. But spare us the cant about fans being the lifeblood of the game.

---

The crowd trouble at the FA Cup game between West Bromwich Albion and Wolverhampton Wanderers will have made the heart of anyone who has advocated for fans sink. Here we go again, say the commentators all too ready to reach for ‘return of the bad old days’ rhetoric; here we go again, think those of us who realise football fans are one of the few social groups it’s still OK to generalise about.

I have no insight or expertise on what happened in this instance, but I what I do know is that the episode will be cited sometime soon by someone questioning why fans should be treated fairly. Look what you get up to when you’re left to it, will be the refrain.

But while I will always argue against the mentality that led to people trying to escape a fatal crush being seen as potential pitch invaders, I’m increasingly conscious that, to put it very bluntly, we need to own our own shit. There are too many fans who like to flirt a little with going over the line, too many excuses given for unacceptable behaviour because it’s done under the guise of rivalry. It’s true that fan efforts to counter the worst excesses go more unnoticed than the excesses themselves, but perhaps we could do ourselves a favour by redrawing the lines a bit. And that can mean around the smaller things.

I don’t want to see a game when opposition goalscorers are politely applauded for scoring against us, but maybe, just maybe, an opponent can score a good goal against us and not be a “wanker”. Maybe the referee just made a mistake. Maybe the people on the other side of the seg line are more like you than you think.

I can predict some of the responses to this on social media now (which is why I won’t bother reading them), and I was reticent about writing this section because I don’t like the idea of giving anyone a stick to beat football fans with. But is a conversation about the way we support such a bad idea?

Photo by Max Böhme on Unsplash