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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 181 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 181, December 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
With the latest allegations into football corruption focusing on goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar, it was perhaps understandable that the Guardian recently published a cartoon where one MP says to another with a knowing grin: ‘Let’s get up a football team’!
Yet like the odd corrupt businessman who serves a few months in jail – Gerald Ronson and Ernest Saunders far example – the Football Association continually turns a blind eye to football sleaze except when it is forced to do something by such a massive media story. When Grobbelaar allegedly comments on film that, ‘there’s a fucking big risk, and this is what I’m worried about, you know,’ one can’t exactly imagine club directors saying the same when confronted with the continuing problem of ground safety, as recently exposed on television.
In a world of overpaid superstars and cowboy directors, it is still the directors who manage to avoid incrimination. Even after the dreadful Bradford fire, I don’t recall any of them being dragged before the judiciary.
Nonetheless, like MPs and royalty, few football directors can now bask in the genera( adulation of the fans who clearly realise they are being exploited.
I was present at the game which won Tottenham their last championship in 1961. Along with the chants for the players were calls for the appearance of the club directors, who gracefully took their curtain calls. The fact that many of them were Tory councillors, not in the slightest interested in us plebs on the pitch, even then struck me as odd. This realisation was not due to my reading of Marx (I was only 14), but to my experiences in the stadium. With crowds of up to 69,000 jammed in, unconscious youngsters would be passed overhead and allowed to ‘recover’ on the touchline with minimal medical assistance. If the crowd collapsed in a heap, you collapsed with them, and only a green newcomer to football grounds would position themselves in front of a crash barrier for fear of being cut in two. And on the way out, one didn’t have to move – the crowd took you with them ... and often, your broken arm in the other direction!
Football was cheap, but small change adds up, particularly when footballers were still fighting against the maximum wage through court cases and strike threats: Where did the money go? Not to the supporters, and certainly not to the players who had no control over anything. Indeed, the attempts by footballers to have some control over their lives goes back to 1898 when a union was first formed. However, when it affiliated to the Federation of Trade Unions in 1909, the FA withdrew recognition with threats of life suspension. Following a footballers’ strike of 14 weeks, the union had to leave the Federation. Thereafter began the long battle against the maximum wage. Today freedom of contract (up to a point) and the power of agents has undermined the monopoly power of the clubs and directors. But things have moved on.
We are now in an age of the unashamed rip-off. From replica kits – over £50 for my seven-year-old – to an overpriced advertising sheet called a ‘programme’, the club director now stands in all his adulterated glory, and everyone now knows it. As Marx put it in the Communist Manifesto (no doubt after a dismal afternoon on the terraces):
‘The bourgeoisie. has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than [the] callous “cash payment”.’
And if it is not the directors, it is the unelected mandarins who run the game. Witness the 1996 European Championship ticket fiasco – football’s own inimitable example of pyramid selling. To buy two final tickets, you have to buy four £50 semi-final tickets. Indeed, to even obtain these you must also buy tickets for three group matches, and then make sure that you do not buy more tickets for the knockout matches than for the group matches. Got it?
According to Jacqueline Shorey in the Financial Times, her simple requirements for herself and friend would set them back £760, which included £320 for ten tickets not required. So what can be done with them? Surely they can be sold outside the ground at face value? Here, the law finally intervenes. The Criminal Justice Act (well, well!) intends to stop touting by fans, and FA ticket rules deem that you can’t even give them away! As they say ... the referee’s decision is final.
The attitude adopted by the media to the fans is just as dismissive and disinterested as it always was. They are portrayed as either thugs, fascists, ignoramuses, or the reverse, patronised by the likes of David Mellor who on his radio programme continually demonstrates his astonishment at their ‘articulateness’. And then there are the commentators who refuse to acknowledge any connection between football and politics. Hence, during the anti poll tax campaign, chants of ‘no poll tax’ on televised games were studiously ignored. I’m tempted to think that this all began during a famous cup final when some dumb policeman was given the runaround on the pitch by a delighted Liverpool supporter, but it is probably too simplistic. However, fans behaviour, ‘good’ or ‘bad’, tended to be ignored thereafter. Commentator Brian Moore would indignantly inform us that ‘something’ was going on at one end of the pitch and that television would not ‘encourage it’.
Cameras have also tried to avoid showing political protest banners in games shown from abroad; the producers must have not known what to do when the ball went in that area. Even worse were the antics of David Coleman, commentating on the 1978 World Cup in Argentina. There, we were informed, was the smiling Argentine president, General Videla, a man obviously in love with the beautiful game, but not – Coleman avoided mentioning – with the thousands suffering in his torture chambers. I recall Socialist Worker’s headline of ‘Enjoy the goals, but remember the jails’. It was not a subject for the pundits’ discussion at half time.
And to return to the present, the abuse goes on. Venables allegedly illegally bumped up his collateral in order to buy in at Spurs. Enquiry? Not for the England manager old chap! And the apparent ignoring of the Taylor Report into ground safety which led to many stadiums becoming all-seater? All quiet from Lancaster Gate.
All the better then to concentrate upon whether Diego popped a few pills or whether Brucey popped the ball behind him in the net. The point is to take the heat off the real villains – the sharks with one hand on the purse strings, and the other firmly on the supporters’ wallets.
However, like your average Tory MP, they might still rule, but the smokescreen of being a bunch of football loving benefactors has entirely evaporated in this post-Maxwell age.
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