The 'peoples Game' Rip

[EastSaxCol]

Managers have been stripped of their worth in a billionaires' lottery

Thursday, 4 September 2008

Before the euphoria created by the desert eagle that landed in English football laden with gold runs completely off the graph, maybe we should take another look at some of the implications.

There is one, surely, which casts a long shadow over all the glitter of new wealth and the horizons it can bring to a club such as Manchester City.

It is that more than anything else this has been the week when the football manager has been reduced to the status of a bit-part player in a theatre of the grotesque.

Yes, grotesque. Grotesque values, grotesque imbalances of power, grotesque distribution of influence over the course of the game that used to belong, give or take the investment of the odd local potentate businessman, to the people. You remember the football people? They could hire and fire with their noise on the terraces, their demos and the remonstrations and their banners. It wasn't a perfect system but it gave a hint of democracy and if a club was smart enough to hire a top manager, and give him the means and the independence to do the job, the tide of results settled most arguments.

Look at the new situation for a moment and then wonder if we have arrived at a point in English football where the long-term worries do not dwarf the elation of a City fan who, without any achievement on the field, any brilliant insight into how you make a winning football club, finds himself on the easy, cheque-wielding side of the street.

He is there, even the least reflective of his number knows, because Thaksin Shinawatra, a tawdry figure by any standards in and out of football, decided it was time to cash in his chips and with one of the richest families in the Middle East. And who worked the oracle? Some slavish servant of one of the nation's oldest and most revered football clubs? No, an entrepreneurial young lady named Amanda Staveley, a smart gal from the shires who apparently once copped a marriage proposal from the Queen's second son, and had all the right connections in Dubai to work the deal.

The core of the problem in football terms came when the new billionaire figurehead boss of City, Dr Sulaiman al-Fahim, stood before the cameras and trailed his shopping list : Robinho in, Dimitar Berbatov missed, and Cristiano Ronaldo possibly the £100m-plus target in January. Some problem, the average City punter might be forgiven for exhaling, but why have a manager of the quality of Mark Hughes, if he is denied the classic role of all his great predecessors in the game, the one of shaping a team, making the jigsaw in his own image of what will succeed. Hughes, having been starved of competitive funding at Blackburn for so long, might also say, drolly, "Well, if I have to get by with the likes of Robinho and maybe Ronaldo, I'll just have to try to make a fist of it."

But then the ability of football men like Hughes to operate in a new world, with new ruling factors, does not encompass the wider point about the game's loss of the simple dynamic of making teams according to one man's vision and not some bottomless deposit of wealth. Does the potential brilliance of a Berbatov or a Ronaldo – players who have already made an absolute mockery of concepts like club loyalty – compensate for the loss of the greatest beauty any fan will truly behold: the emergence of their team, a winning team, one built out of knowledge and character assessment and belief in its ability?

Sure, the question has the hollow rattle of dead history. You cannot remake the past but then perhaps you might just hope that some of the best of it is preserved. But in the week when Alan Curbishley felt obliged to end his long but faltering love affair with West Ham and Kevin Keegan, once such a paragon of some of the great football virtues as a brilliant, over-achieving player and a young manager filled with idealism – has suffered levels of humiliation arguably unprecedented in football's descent into a sinkhole of financial opportunism and vulgarity, such a wish is surely forlorn.

Grotesque, did we say? What could have been worse than the sight of Keegan's boss Mike Ashley, an overstretched populist if we ever saw one, sourly swilling his pint in the hours before his club made such a bleak travesty of their promise to give Keegan some vital help in strengthening a pathetically inadequate squad.

Whatever Keegan's fate at St James' Park, he has been the football dead man walking for some time, perhaps from the day of his appointment, his chances reduced to nothing by a lack of support at boardroom level and the gut-wrenching need to place a manager's most vital chore, the signing of new players, in the hands of Dennis Wise.

Here, surely, is evidence of a theatre of the grotesque financed at a far lower level than the one that was taking shape in east Manchester this week.

What occurred there with the unveiling of Dr al-Fahim, we were told, was another Abramovich moment. And what, we had to ask, did that mean? It meant the fans of City, like those of Chelsea before them, had something new to celebrate, but something about as organic and meritorious as a winning lottery ticket. There was a time, we will soon have to remind ourselves, when a football supporter had some reason to believe he was part of something. He had an interest in flesh-and-blood, trial and error, win and loss. Now he cheers for a product, one that failing some financial cataclysm, or maybe a new trend in investment, will always belong to someone else.

Postscipt

As a West Ham supporter who has just gone through the darkest days in five decades of a love affair with a club that had been central to my life from boyhood, sadly and very painfully I can no longer continue in my emotional investment. My disgust at what football has become was exasperated by what happened to Alan Curbishley. Not just the he was undermined and disregarded in the transfer market by those who manipulate the purse strings to their financial ends - but that a large and vocal section of our new breed of so called 'fans' who "want it all now" contributed to this. Loyalty and pride in our supporters had often been the thread that bound me to my club through times of baroness on the pitch. Booing our own players and the disgraceful hounding of our manager - a West Ham boy, born and bred - was something of anathema to me which I fought against to the very end , culminating in Curbs walking away from it all - but with his dignity intact.

This general malaise isn't specific to West Ham of course - I smelt the coffee long ago - it's only now become unbearably personal. You can't buy and sell something that's in your blood as just playthings for the obscenely rich. There's no pride in buying success when the grass roots are left to whither and community lost to multi-national corporations. Dignity, loyalty and pride were always the foundations of football clubs. I find that hard to maintain when 'my club' has become a misnomer for 'their PLC'.

So it's with great sadness that I leave my team and out-of-reach football behind - I wish my online friends here happiness. HH

[bkkjames]

Managers have been stripped of their worth in a billionaires' lottery

Thursday, 4 September 2008

Before the euphoria created by the desert eagle that landed in English football laden with gold runs completely off the graph, maybe we should take another look at some of the implications.

There is one, surely, which casts a long shadow over all the glitter of new wealth and the horizons it can bring to a club such as Manchester City.

It is that more than anything else this has been the week when the football manager has been reduced to the status of a bit-part player in a theatre of the grotesque.

Yes, grotesque. Grotesque values, grotesque imbalances of power, grotesque distribution of influence over the course of the game that used to belong, give or take the investment of the odd local potentate businessman, to the people. You remember the football people? They could hire and fire with their noise on the terraces, their demos and the remonstrations and their banners. It wasn't a perfect system but it gave a hint of democracy and if a club was smart enough to hire a top manager, and give him the means and the independence to do the job, the tide of results settled most arguments.

Look at the new situation for a moment and then wonder if we have arrived at a point in English football where the long-term worries do not dwarf the elation of a City fan who, without any achievement on the field, any brilliant insight into how you make a winning football club, finds himself on the easy, cheque-wielding side of the street.

He is there, even the least reflective of his number knows, because Thaksin Shinawatra, a tawdry figure by any standards in and out of football, decided it was time to cash in his chips and with one of the richest families in the Middle East. And who worked the oracle? Some slavish servant of one of the nation's oldest and most revered football clubs? No, an entrepreneurial young lady named Amanda Staveley, a smart gal from the shires who apparently once copped a marriage proposal from the Queen's second son, and had all the right connections in Dubai to work the deal.

The core of the problem in football terms came when the new billionaire figurehead boss of City, Dr Sulaiman al-Fahim, stood before the cameras and trailed his shopping list : Robinho in, Dimitar Berbatov missed, and Cristiano Ronaldo possibly the £100m-plus target in January. Some problem, the average City punter might be forgiven for exhaling, but why have a manager of the quality of Mark Hughes, if he is denied the classic role of all his great predecessors in the game, the one of shaping a team, making the jigsaw in his own image of what will succeed. Hughes, having been starved of competitive funding at Blackburn for so long, might also say, drolly, "Well, if I have to get by with the likes of Robinho and maybe Ronaldo, I'll just have to try to make a fist of it."

But then the ability of football men like Hughes to operate in a new world, with new ruling factors, does not encompass the wider point about the game's loss of the simple dynamic of making teams according to one man's vision and not some bottomless deposit of wealth. Does the potential brilliance of a Berbatov or a Ronaldo – players who have already made an absolute mockery of concepts like club loyalty – compensate for the loss of the greatest beauty any fan will truly behold: the emergence of their team, a winning team, one built out of knowledge and character assessment and belief in its ability?

Sure, the question has the hollow rattle of dead history. You cannot remake the past but then perhaps you might just hope that some of the best of it is preserved. But in the week when Alan Curbishley felt obliged to end his long but faltering love affair with West Ham and Kevin Keegan, once such a paragon of some of the great football virtues as a brilliant, over-achieving player and a young manager filled with idealism – has suffered levels of humiliation arguably unprecedented in football's descent into a sinkhole of financial opportunism and vulgarity, such a wish is surely forlorn.

Grotesque, did we say? What could have been worse than the sight of Keegan's boss Mike Ashley, an overstretched populist if we ever saw one, sourly swilling his pint in the hours before his club made such a bleak travesty of their promise to give Keegan some vital help in strengthening a pathetically inadequate squad.

Whatever Keegan's fate at St James' Park, he has been the football dead man walking for some time, perhaps from the day of his appointment, his chances reduced to nothing by a lack of support at boardroom level and the gut-wrenching need to place a manager's most vital chore, the signing of new players, in the hands of Dennis Wise.

Here, surely, is evidence of a theatre of the grotesque financed at a far lower level than the one that was taking shape in east Manchester this week.

What occurred there with the unveiling of Dr al-Fahim, we were told, was another Abramovich moment. And what, we had to ask, did that mean? It meant the fans of City, like those of Chelsea before them, had something new to celebrate, but something about as organic and meritorious as a winning lottery ticket. There was a time, we will soon have to remind ourselves, when a football supporter had some reason to believe he was part of something. He had an interest in flesh-and-blood, trial and error, win and loss. Now he cheers for a product, one that failing some financial cataclysm, or maybe a new trend in investment, will always belong to someone else.

Postscipt

As a West Ham supporter who has just gone through the darkest days in five decades of a love affair with a club that had been central to my life from boyhood, sadly and very painfully I can no longer continue in my emotional investment. My disgust at what football has become was exasperated by what happened to Alan Curbishley. Not just the he was undermined and disregarded in the transfer market by those who manipulate the purse strings to their financial ends - but that a large and vocal section of our new breed of so called 'fans' who "want it all now" contributed to this. Loyalty and pride in our supporters had often been the thread that bound me to my club through times of baroness on the pitch. Booing our own players and the disgraceful hounding of our manager - a West Ham boy, born and bred - was something of anathema to me which I fought against to the very end , culminating in Curbs walking away from it all - but with his dignity intact.

This general malaise isn't specific to West Ham of course - I smelt the coffee long ago - it's only now become unbearably personal. You can't buy and sell something that's in your blood as just playthings for the obscenely rich. There's no pride in buying success when the grass roots are left to whither and community lost to multi-national corporations. Dignity, loyalty and pride were always the foundations of football clubs. I find that hard to maintain when 'my club' has become a misnomer for 'their PLC'.

So it's with great sadness that I leave my team and out-of-reach football behind - I wish my online friends here happiness. HH

Well written.

[taxexile]

Dignity, loyalty and pride were always the foundations of football clubs. I find that hard to maintain when 'my club' has become a misnomer for 'their PLC'.

excellent article , but until the wide boy agents , middlemen , and trough slurping parasites are prevented by law and the FA from taking over the game , things will only get worse.

as a leeds fan , i have watched my team plummet from the heights , and have to say that life in the lower divisions where the teams seem more evenly matched is more exciting and has more meaning to this (armchair) supporter than before.

less glamour , but much more footballing grit.

[keddy]

Dignity, loyalty and pride were always the foundations of football clubs. I find that hard to maintain when 'my club' has become a misnomer for 'their PLC'.

excellent article , but until the wide boy agents , middlemen , and trough slurping parasites are prevented by law and the FA from taking over the game , things will only get worse.

as a leeds fan , i have watched my team plummet from the heights , and have to say that life in the lower divisions where the teams seem more evenly matched is more exciting and has more meaning to this (armchair) supporter than before.

less glamour , but much more footballing grit.

Hello HH, yes the Curbishley resignation has left a bad taste in my mouth, as well but you can't get away that easily supporting The irons is a life sentence you might be out on parole now but come the WBA game you'll be back inside like the rest of us. While I agree that football has become a grotesque, over inflated and the business side of it seems to have overshadowed the actual game. I can't be sure if there was ever an era where peoples hands were clean. I think football has always attracted dubious characters The Don Revies, going further back to the match fixing in 1964 and 1915. Can you even say that this regime is any worse than the Cearns/Brown era who seemed to milk the fans but failed constantly to invest in the team. More to the point the sacking of John Lyall left more than a few people disgruntled especially in light of the failure of the board to sanction proper investment in the squad after 1986. As for booing I'm afraid there has always been boo boys at the Boleyn. I remember Billy Bonds sticking two fingers at the west side in 1980 after he was booed coming onto the pitch. There have always been scapegoats who got it in the ear.for various reasons Clyde Best, Alan Taylor, Geoff Pike and of course dear old Paul Ince, among many others. However I think the negativity has increased along with the ticket prices and there's the rub. The cost of going has increased ridiculously and some of the people going are expressing a general disgust at the state of modern football and are no longer willing to put up with rubbish football, stuck in a plastic seat, told not to stand up shephearded around by zealous stewards in a dead atmosphere. It seems less teenagers and young people are going now priced out of the game I suppose. Anyway the way football is going is unsustainable and I'm expecting an implosion at some point with attendences slipping, people not paying suscriptions to sky and other channels due to the cost and the quality of what's on offer (did you see any of Liverpools recent games i fell asleep during both games, luckily).. Anyway there are fewer camel haired ciger smoking chairmen and more billionaires but it will always attract business types on the make as it always has done, as well as its fair share of corruption but the game is still worth watching and maybe a new club will eventually emerge which will be an improvement on the current shambles.

[Sunderland]

Football is far from dying in its popularity. As an armchair fan in Thailand it's great that I can watch my team week in, week out, albeit with mixed performances.

As for the atmosphere in the ground, that changed a long time ago when all seating was brought in. The atmosphere has never been the same since and it will never be as it was before. Shame ... it used to be a good afternoon out. I'll get my slippers ...

[toasted]

The best post I've read in this forum HH. You're one of an increasing number who won't continue to follow a club that's sold its soul. My team's fortunes plummetted while I was in Thailand, but when I take my son to a match it's real football with real fans who have stayed loyal. It's how it should be. People refuse to sit and there's more singing in ten minutes than at some top flight matches I've been to.

The sooner the 'top' clubs break away and join some super-euro-champions-league with their foreign players, managers and owners, the better. Get rid of them. They have little place in our national game any more. They're the latest Britney Spears of the football world - children all over the world are saying, "I love Man. City 'cos they've got Robhino" or "I love Man Utd 'cos of Ronaldo" or "I support Liverpool 'cos of Gerrard and Torres." Get rid of these clubs into their super league where TV revenue will support their players' wages. In the meantime the rest of us can get back to a decent competitve league where teams are not merely aiming for a mid-table spot, but actually have a chance of winning something on a fairly level playing field.

The sad thing is that some clubs will sell their souls and still won't find success. And this will cost them dear - both in financial terms (short term) and in supporters through the gate (long term).

[redrus]

Great post.

I went to see FCUM last Monday at Bradford Park Avenue, it pissed down, we lost 0-2. We sang for more than 90 minutes, we laughed and we loved every minute of it.

I still go to quite a few MUFC games and I still sing I still have a laugh but, it is not the same. I love my club with all my heart, it just doesn't feel the same and, until the unlikly event that United is returned to its fans or to someone who even knows what Football is, it won't....!

redrus

[billybonker]

There's no pride in buying success when the grass roots are left to whither and community lost to multi-national corporations. Dignity, loyalty and pride were always the foundations of football clubs. I find that hard to maintain when 'my club' has become a misnomer for 'their PLC'.

Perfectly put.

Not just the he was undermined and disregarded in the transfer market by those who manipulate the purse strings to their financial ends - but that a large and vocal section of our new breed of so called 'fans' who "want it all now" contributed to this.

Just saw some young West Ham about 12yo being interviewed on Sky about this he said the exact same thing and was gutted he'd been sacked, put a smile on my face to know some young fans still know about football.

I wish we could package this Premier League up and give it to the countries around the world that will be financing it over the coming years through TV deals and start again with a new league.

[samuibeachcomber]

Very good post HH.My team is Wolves and i was wondering is there anywhere on true sports that show championship league games?

[mrbojangles]

As a city fan, you can appreciate i have had a roller coaster life supporting them. But that's football, that's why we love the game. There have been times when i have wanted to stop watching it and going to watch womens hockey instead (but that's a story for another day)

HH if you stop watching West Ham cos the manager has gone, i have to question if you was on the brink anyway and this just tipped you over. Yes it was <deleted> how it was done (same as Erikson) but to me, there is not one single person at City, who if left, meant i would stop supporting them. If that was the case, i'd have stopped years ago when Colin Bell, Franny Lee and Mike Summerbee stopped playing. We never know what goes on behind closed doors at clubs, all we can do is either support the team or not. It really is that simple, no one forces any of us to go. Well United do, forcing season ticket holders to pay up for all cup ties.