What's going wrong?

It's bigger and richer than ever, but there are nagging doubts about football that just won't go away.

Football – bloody hell. The game is still a phenomenal success, commanding attention and generating money on a scale the early pioneers cannot have comprehended. The breadth of its influence is reflected by the writer David Goldblatt in his excellent social history of English football, The Game of Our Lives, when he recalls the British governor of Aden, Sir Richard Turnbull , telling then Foreign Secretary Denis Healey in the mid-1960s that association football would be one of only two monuments the fast-dissolving British Empire would leave behind (the other was the phrase ‘Fuck off”). As Goldblatt says: “Cricket, the game of gentlemen, would leave its mark in much of the Empire, but football, the game of the people, would be everywhere.”

And yet. The slow drip drip of concern and doubt does not go away. Football may well be everywhere, all-consuming, an unstoppable force, but the feeling that there is something very wrong is building slowly but surely.

Let’s start with the Premier League. The richest and most high-profile in the world, and arguably the most successful. Of its 32 titles contested, five have been won by Chelsea and eight by Manchester City. That’s just over 40% of the titles contested, and 13 of the previous 21, or about 63%, since Chelsea first won in 2004/05.

Chelsea changed the game when Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich bought the club in 2003. He immediately went on a £100m spending spree, which helped secure a Premier League and League Cup double in 2004/05. While the numbers were bigger, it can be argued there wasn’t much difference between Abramovich ‘buying’ the title and Jack Walker doing the same at Blackburn Rovers 10 years earlier in 1994/95. But the numbers are important. Walker spent £100m over the course of his nine-year tenure at Blackburn, a figure that included redeveloping the club’s Ewood Park stadium. Abramovich matched that figure in his first transfer window just on players.

It was a significant turning point. Walker was arguably the last of the traditional owner benefactors in British football to turbocharge his club’s success – Leicester City under Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha could be argued as a similar case, but it was the new economic reality that Abramovich imposed on the game that had attracted Leicester’s owners, themselves the billionaire bosses of a global retail business. Vichai drew on a fortune estimated to be £1.9 billion, although The Guardian estimated it took just £60m of spending to secure the title in 2015/16.

Abramovich’s success in building a respectable profile out of the chaos of post-Communist Russia was noticed by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family and ruler of the United Arab Emirates. And so in 2008, he acquired a majority stake in Manchester City, helped by a family fortune of around £300 billion. Such is the nature of the economies of the Gulf states, the UAE’s nominal GDP of $569.1 billion cannot be ruled out as a contributary factor. And while discussions about whether or not City are effectively owned by a nation state prompt what we can best call lively discussion, the benefits to it of the country being so closely associated with success in The World’s Most Successful Football Competition are clear.

So the scale of the economics has changed, with even the traditional powerhouses of Liverpool and Manchester United – still the only truly global brands in English football – finding it hard to keep up. As for the other Premier League winners, Arsenal, while the club remains the closest to retaining a traditional ownership model, that owner is US sports tycoon Stan Kroenke (estimated wealth around $22 billion) and oligarch money from Alisher Usmanov has flowed into the club’s coffers.

With a scale of economic change such as this, the stakes become even higher. Which brings us to the very significant current problems facing The World’s Most Successful Football Competition. Because it seems that for Chelsea, a little more had to be done to attain success. It is now clear that, between 2011 and 2018, the club made £47m in secret payments to unregistered agents and third parties, payments that helped secure the services of Samuel Eto’o, Eden Hazard, David Luiz, Nemanja Matic, Ramires, André Schürrle and Willian. Four more players are named in the Premier League’s report, but they have been redacted with no explanation as to why.

These offences weren’t uncovered by the Premier League, which had also failed to ask too many questions about the source of Abramovich’s wealth when he bought the club. Chelsea’s new owners had reported them. There can be no doubt that Chelsea gained a sporting advantage from signing those players. But astonishingly, the Premier League has ruled that no sporting sanction should be applied. Instead, there’s a £10m fine – small change in today’s football finance world – and a suspended transfer ban.

The uncomfortable truth for the Premier League is that the integrity of Chelsea’s three title wins in 2009/10, 2014/15 and 2016/17 is in question. There is no easy solution, because it cannot simply be argued that the title should be awarded to the runners up. Who knows how each game would have gone had all teams been competing on a level playing field? But the campaigns are tainted.

Manchester City, as I’m sure I don’t need to remind you, currently face 115 charges for an alleged range of offences including disguising payments from ownership as sponsorship, and providing undeclared salary or bonuses to players and managers. The case has run on interminably, and what little faith observers had in the Premier League dealing with it properly was further eroded by the Chelsea verdict. Even if City are found guilty, will the Premier League conclude that no sporting advantage was gained? Again?

City have won six of the last eight titles. It’s a great story, the club that worked its way up through the leagues and back to the top after years in the wilderness, who challenged the big guns and upset the established order, who proved that anything was still possible. But that picture is blurred by the possibility that City also skewed the playing field. We’re not really here, you might say.

What is indisputable is that there are question marks over the sporting integrity of a competition when two of its most successful teams may have achieved that success by gaining an unfair advantage. For sport to work properly, for it to capture the imagination and inspire devotion and loyalty, people have to believe that what they are seeing is real. Chelsea and City cast a long shadow of doubt.

Belief in what we see has also been put to the test by the introduction of VAR - a move packaged as one that would eliminate mistakes but which was really introduced to give the TV companies that put so much money into the game even more content and even more power. I’ve made it clear that I’d love to see the back of it, and I’m not alone.

In a survey of 8,000 fans, the FSA found that 75% wanted rid of VAR, and 86% had concerns about expanding its remit. Uppermost among the complaints was the fact that VAR was reducing those spontaneous moments of joy, as fans increasingly waited – or were forced to wait – to see if what they thought they’d seen was actually what they had seen. The very experience of being at the match was being damaged and fans were concerned.

The Premier League’s response? Well, it called into question the veracity of the survey as respondents were self selecting – an attack line subsequently recycled by at least one journalist who should have known better – and then claimed its own survey work showed “fans are largely in favour of keeping VAR.” Not for the first time, the Premier League didn’t share details of how its research was gathered.

Given the growing disquiet about the state of the product, few companies would choose to contemptuously dismiss criticism of a measure by customers who’d had that measure imposed on them, but this is the Premier League we are talking about.

Add in unrest about ever-rising ticket prices, fans being moved from long-held seats to make way for corporate areas, the erosion of concessionary pricing, late kick-off changes, anti-social kick-off times. And sprinkle with a general feeling that the fans the game is happy to use as marketing fodder when selling passion and loyalty to commercial partners are seen as an inconvenience at best. It’s a picture that should trouble anyone who cares about the long-term good of football.

But there’s more. So many conversations about the state of the game feel the need to start with the caveat that it is a great economic success. But a recent BBC examination of the finances of clubs in the second-tier Championship showed clubs in the division had lost a total of £3 billion in the last 10 years. In the supposed economic miracle of the Premier League, three clubs – Chelsea, West Ham and Spurs, all from the capital city – have posted combined losses of just under half a billion pounds for the year. Clubs at this elite level are selling themselves their own stadiums, hotels, and women’s teams to balance the books, and Brighton and Hove Albion, a club that has benefitted from over £400 million in interest-free loans from its owner, is regularly held up as an example of a sustainably run club.

The riches on offer in the Premier League incentivise clubs outside the competition to gamble everything on getting there. But once there, as we’ve seen from the examples above, the financial challenges do not end.

What worries me is not the football bubble bursting – to use a phrase often toyed with – any time soon, but decline over the longer-term. Many of those running clubs or the game more widely are not in it for the long-term. Their approach is a relatively new addition to a game that existed for generations before they came along, and I suspect not too many of them care too much what happens for generations to come.

You’d be unduly alarmist to predict disaster, but you’d be a fool not to worry.

Photo by Mwandwe Chileshe on Unsplash