Despite its faults, football remains the beautiful game
Sometime in the mid-1950s an Italian club – Palermo, as I recall – made an offer to Tom Finney, at that time arguably the finest footballer in England. He was being offered what was then a princely sum, a signing-on fee worth four or five times his year’s wages. The chairman of Preston North End called him into his office, and told him: “You’re not going anywhere, Tom. You’re a Preston man.” End of story. Finney was indeed a Preston man, spending all his career there and supplementing his income by working in the family plumbing business.
Players were chained to their clubs. Even so it wasn’t long before a few were taking the road which had been forbidden to Tom Finney. John Charles, the great Welsh player, equally effective at centre-half and centre-forward, was transferred by Leeds United to Juventus where he quickly became a hero and later an enduring legend. He was given a standing ovation by tens of thousands who had never seen him play when, as an old man, he returned to Turin. Others followed to Italy, Denis Law (briefly) and Joe Baker, for instance, and then others travelled to Spain to join Barcelona or Real Madrid.
Now of course the departure lounge is almost empty, the arrivals thronged. The English Premier League is stuffed to the gills with imported players. You won’t hear many London accents in the Chelsea dressing-room or Lancashire ones in Manchester City’s. England did well to reach the semi-finals of the World Cup this summer, but the interest of English fans extended beyond the national team. The other semi-finalists – France, Belgium and Croatia – all fielded star players from Premier League clubs. I saw one report which said there were sixteen Premier League players in these three teams. It would be no surprise if this was the case.
It’s not only the richest clubs that look to recruit foreign players. Even in the lower divisions there are team-lists in which old English or British names are outnumbered by foreign ones. Scottish football is in the doldrums – there are very few Scots in the English Premier League now, a contrast to the days when English clubs regularly looked to recruit in Scotland and when for instance there were four Scots in the Tottenham side that won the League and Cup double in the early sixties; yet even in Scotland where Black players were once as rare as a Roman Catholic in the Rangers team, you find players with names that the older fans at least have no idea how to pronounce.
English football is awash with money, in the upper echelons of the game anyway. It was refreshing when Leicester City won the Premier League a couple of years ago, but everyone knew it was a once-in-a-blue-moon event. Success goes to the big battalions, that’s to say, to the richest clubs. Last season Manchester City strolled away in the League. Scottish football is not, financially or indeed in any other way, in the same league as English football, but even there too, everyone knew last September that Celtic would be champions yet again.
Nothing shows the sad state of Scottish football more clearly than the inability of clubs to hold on to their better or more promising players. Every club in Scotland is a selling club. Not even Celtic can keep hold of a player if an English Premiership club comes calling. Apart from anything, the player’s agent would see to that. Agents who take a hefty cut from transfer fees, signing-on fees, salaries and image rights play a huge part in the People’s Beautiful Game now. Many see them as a blight on the game. A veteran Scottish football journalist told me recently: “Agents? Jock Stein would have had them out of the windie.”
At the top level, football is very big business, and corrupted by money. Everyone knows this but almost everyone prefers to pretend it isn’t so. When a player signs for a new club and kisses the jersey and proclaims his love for the club he has just joined, fans, who really do love that club, love it unquestioningly and beyond reason, are happy to go alone with the pretence. It’s astonishing how often the word “beloved” is attached to the name of a football club, astonishing partly because it’s no longer a word in general use.
The remarkable thing about football is that it has not only retained its popularity even as, at the top level, it has moved so far away from its roots; it has even enhanced it. It has become the one truly global sport, and the top English clubs have fans in the furthermost parts of the earth. Nobody would have predicted this even fifty years ago.
It is dominated by money and valuations of players may often seem absurd. Fans however clamour for the owners of their clubs to spend more buying new players – often ones about whom the fans know nothing – at inflated prices – and they will berate the owners of their clubs if they haven’t spent millions in the weeks when the transfer window is open.
Money swilling about as it does may encourage corruption – corruption of the spirit if not the sort of corruption that leads to appearances in court. But even evidence of the most blatant corruption does nothing to damage football’s popularity. Who really gives a damn about the evidence of such corruption among FIFA officials? Corruption may have got Russia this year’s World Cup – who cares? It was a great tournament, a roaring success. So indeed it was: some lovely play and a tournament in which the England side regained the affection of the nation and general respect.
That’s one of the good things about football; it brings people together, it’s a unifying force. You can conduct a football conversation anywhere in the world, nowadays – even, I’m told, in the USA. One consequence of the game’s popularity here is that it has probably done more than any Government legislation to dilute racism and promote good race relations. It‘s more difficult to be a racist if half the team you so fervently support are black or of mixed-race.
Nowadays it’s not only the players who are stars; it’s the managers too. All the top Premiership clubs have a manager whose first language isn’t English. How far back do you have to go to find an English manager lifting the Premiership trophy? Has there indeed ever been one? One wonders sometimes just what a manager does. Not speaking fluent English doesn’t disqualify – but then many of the manager’s players don’t speak English very well either. Be that as it may, the star managers attract every bit as much attention now as star players, though fifty years ago a lot of fans couldn’t have named their club’s manager; he was a man in a suit who sat in his office and didn’t give interviews even to the local evening paper. In those distant days he might not even be allowed by the club’s directors to pick the team. Hence the famous blank page in the autobiography of the talented but difficult Inside-forward Len Shackleton – blank but for the heading: “the average director’s knowledge of football.”
Already this season the hottest question is not ‘who will win the title?’ but ‘how long before Manchester United give Jose Mourinho the sack?’ Mourinho, in the days when he called himself ‘The Special One’, was a Media favourite. Now he is almost everybody’s kicking boy – and seemingly feeling disgruntled and sorry for himself. The general view is he has lost it. The truth may well be that he is overburdened by expectation. Managers who have enjoyed great and prolonged success cast a dark shadow over their successors, one that often may not be lifted for years. Matt Busby had that effect at Old Trafford, and United went through years of failure and a long list of managers before Alex Ferguson‘s teams started winning trophies again. Two successors, David Moyes and Louis van Gaal, have already been discarded. It will be no surprise if Mourinho is soon shown the door and, handsomely compensated, told to clear his desk. Likewise one may expect it will be years before any Arsenal manager can emerge from the shadow cast by Arsene Wenger’s long reign.
Football is a game which is at once ruthless and sentimental. Its attraction rests, partly at least, in this contradictory combination. It is Darwinian: survival or success goes to the fittest who, in football, are also the richest. The weak are discarded; the football landscape is one of young men’s broken dreams. At the same time. it inspires the warmest and most generous emotions, and if dreams are broken, new dreams are permitted. People watching football are granted the freedom of escaping from the perplexities of their everyday life, and fans have a subject of conversation with almost anybody.