Review: States of Play by Miguel Delaney

Extensive reach, meticulous research and astute insight make this an essential chronicle of what modern football has become.

“Is football at this point a net good for humanity?” That is the question at the heart of a book that is a vital read for anyone who wants to understand the journey from beautiful game to bountiful game.

Observing that football is now big business is nothing new, but Delaney, the chief football writer for The Independent, clearly and thoroughly sets out an essential modern history of a game that has become so much more than just a sport to reach a point of existential threat. He writes as a genuine football fan who also understands and cares about issues of global economic and political power. It should relegate the phrase ‘stick to the football’ to the dustbin of history.

As Delaney says in his introduction: “The story of modern football is about how it has been transformed and distorted by three main forces”. These are geopolitics, hyper-capitalism, and a “willing facilitation” of both by football authorities unable and unwilling to deal with either. It explores a tension that runs through much of what I write about in The Football Fan, the one that exists between the sport’s need to maintain competition and the business imperative to kill off the competition. And it explains how that tension made football ripe for takeover so that “the game is increasingly used for questionable purposes, and primarily dominated by questionable forces”. 

The book is the successor to David Conn’s The Beautiful Game as the definitive story of the game’s modern development, and a companion to Bradley Hope’s Blood and Oil and Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People as a portrait of the global economy. That may seem like heavy going, but Delaney establishes from the start his love of the game itself and what it should be about. As he says in his introduction to the tale he is about to unfold: “None of this is what football is actually for. It doesn’t actually exist to make a profit. It is still at its heart a mere game that is played to represent communities, not autocratic rulers.”

As you read through the careful setting out of how the game got to the point it has, what strikes you again and again is how those running football and its clubs have so consistently failed to realise its true value, and how that failure has delivered the game into the hands of those who now use it. Where once the local butcher, baker and candlestick-maker owned local clubs to boost their standing in the local community, now the hedge fund manager, the billionaire and the autocrat seek to use the allure of football clubs for their own more complex and far-reaching purposes.

Delaney goes into detail to explain this, showing why the rapacious forces exerting an ever-tighter grasp on the game recognised what those who previously held sway did not. The Barcelona of 2008-2012 are identified as pivotal – a team that captured the imagination and earned adulation. That reach, that popularity, has an obvious appeal to anyone who wants to exercise power and assert influence on a global stage.

Mention state ownership of football clubs and you’ll soon encounter a Manchester City fan with raised hackles. But this is about more than City. There is a direct line from Tottenham Hotspur’s Irving Scholar pushing aside the old FA Rule 34, which prevented club directors from taking dividends and protected the status of clubs as sporting and community assets, through the establishment of the Premier League, to the situation we find ourselves in today. Under chief executive Richard Scudamore the Premier League was, to coin a phrase that resonated with a time in which we were told things can only get better, “intensely comfortable” with lots of money pouring in. Questions about where that money came from, how it would be used and what for, and what effect it would have on the sport itself were dismissed.

As more and more money poured in, more and more money was needed to compete. And that soon meant the £300m spent by local steel magnate Jack Walker to help Blackburn Rovers secure the 1994/95 league title looked positively quaint. Bigger forces were now in play, and Delaney spends some time looking at why and how Roman Abramovitch took control of Chelsea. He references a quote from Putin’s People in which the international investor Sergei Pugachev suggests: “Putin’s Kremlin had accurately calculated that the way to gain acceptance in British society was through the country’s greatest love, its national sport.”

The Abramovitch takeover was a game-changer, but there’s more to come, and Delaney deftly details the complex geopolitical calculations behind Qatar taking control of PSG, the United Arab Emirates’ interest in Manchester City, and the Saudi Arabian factor in the buy-up of Newcastle United. There’s extensive material too on how the World Cup was bought and how Qatar took centre stage even as arguably the greatest player in the history of the game lifted the famous trophy.

The author carefully sets out how the enormous firepower of state-backed clubs – and whatever the arguments about precise legal ownership there can be no doubting the state influence – has affected competitive balance. PSG’s dominance in France has brought the game to crisis point, City’s recent dominance in England threatens to do the same for a variety of reasons. The question of whether the reduction of jeopardy that is so essential for the successful realisation of the ambitions of football’s new owner class poses an existential threat to the game is never far away. Most poignant of all is a mini-portrait of Barcelona as a club sent mad by its own success, reduced to an economic basket case as a result of the beauty it created and a failure of vision.

But there are shafts of light in what is often a dark tale. Delaney looks at other leagues in Europe where success has built on embracing, rather than simply monetising, concepts of community and tradition. Unlike many mainstream football writers, he also acknowledges the influence of supporter activism, spending some time on the subject and quoting extensively from figures such as Ronan Evain, the chief executive of Football Supporters Europe, throughout. He is, too, honest and direct about how too many fans have allowed tribal loyalties to colour their vision.

I’m aware I risk the accusation of confirmation bias, but Delaney’s book makes an irrefutable case for independent regulation of football. Left to its own devices, the game has too often failed to recognise its own value, has tied itself in knots trying to please individuals who see their individual interests as more important than the collective, and brought itself to a point where its ability to retain its appeal in the long term is in question.

This is both an essential guide to what football has become, and a reminder of its true value.