English football: Everything, everyone, has a price

The “roaring” 1920s saw the US economy explode in a manner befitting an octopus encircling an unsuspecting prey. Driven by Europe’s bankruptcy after World War I, the Marshall Plan ensured that apart from propping up capitalist states in the Old World, it allowed American industrialists to conduct business wherever they wanted to without their now enfeebled European competitors interfering.

The US has always claimed that it is different from its European peers because it isn’t a coloniser, a crack addict of nations as it were. In the political sense this is true, since the US government — with the exception of the Philippines I would say — didn’t go around the world planting their flag in someone else’s garden. Instead, they let economics do it for them. You see, they didn’t need guns or diplomacy because economic imperialism was a game that they had rigged. The one side thinks it’s getting a new piece of art. The other side is instead sending a really, really powerful vacuum cleaner, which strips its host bone dry of all the good stuff. You know, the stuff that can get sold. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.

This is where the idea of the American Dream was born. First expressed by James Truslow Adams in 1931, it was an idea that attracted millions of immigrants, all with hopes of becoming something … more. Heck, it inspired The Godfather, The Godfather Part II and Goodfellas. That’s got to count for something surely? America is built on money, power and success, and if you got it, the world is yours. If this force were represented in human form, Gordon Gekko would be that man.

Apart from great films, the American Dream has inspired great works of prose. One of the modern American classics is The Great Gatsby, written by John F Fitzgerald, set in the “roaring” twenties when everyone played the stock market or on society’s need for vice. It tells of the tale of Nick Carraway and how his life changed when he rented a bungalow next to the home of Jay Gatsby. Gatsby threw lavish parties, financed by bootlegging, in the hopes that his former love from the Great War would attend one of his parties. She eventually does with the help of Nick, but in the end Gatsby is killed by the man who knew Gatsby was in part responsible for the death of his wife. It is a tale of grandeur gone sour, a dream deferred.

English football is no stranger to dreams, and nightmares. Banned from European competition following the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, stadiums were renovated and in 1992, the top 22 football clubs broke away from the Football League to take advantage of the lucrative TV rights offered by Rupert Murdoch’s then fledging BSkyB network. The first set of rights, for five years, sold for £304 million (R3.2 billion) with profits divided among the clubs in the league. The latest set of rights were sold for £1.7 billion (R18.33 billion), a 560% increase in value over 18 years. The Premier League became the realm of big money, where dreamers such as Sir Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger and Jose Mourinho went about inadvertently turning their football teams into global brands, using their 17 (out of a possible total of 18) titles as a means of creating that now fabled term “Big Four”. Liverpool, who haven’t won the title since the 1980s, have now fallen out of the reckoning while Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur represent the new kids on the block.

Manchester City especially has shown that if there is a fire hose of wealth backing a particular club, anything is possible. They now lie third on the Premier League table halfway through the season, which is in stark contrast to 11 years ago when they spent the season in the Second Division, the first time ever in the their 120 year history. They, like Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea and seven other Premier League clubs, are in foreign hands. Englishman Mike Ashley owns Newcastle, but that isn’t anything to celebrate for Magpies fans.

The latest syndrome hitting club football in England’s top flight has seen two solid managers, Newcastle’s Chris Hughton and Blackburn’s “Big” Sam Allardyce, get sacked with their owners being the ones holding the smoking gun. Blackburn has recently been bought out by the Rao family who made their fortune via the Indian poultry industry and in October gave “Big” Sam their backing. Five games later, and the guillotine has fallen on one of the Premier League’s more colourful managers.

Newcastle, another club that sacked Allardyce after a short period of time, decided to dismiss the popular Chris Hughton even though they are safely in mid-table, a fine achievement having being promoted from the Championship just a season before. This perhaps isn’t surprising considering how ragged Ashley’s era at Newcastle has been, with the sports merchandise mogul attempting to sell the club a couple of seasons back before changing his mind, or more to the point, nobody was willing to meet his reportedly expensive price. Kevin Keegan and Alan Shearer have since come and gone, with the club now being led by Alan Pardew, another man who caught the bullet at West Ham a while back.

It now seems that performing at mid-table level is no longer becoming acceptable to giddy owners who in the most part know very little if anything about football and most importantly manage the club as a business without due recognition to its chief resources, the players and backroom staff. Without success, there is no brand. They buy clubs dreaming big, treating mediocrity as they would in business: with disdain. The Magpies did manage to beat Liverpool in Pardew’s first game in charge, but the Reds themselves are a club indicative of the perils of foreign ownership considering the mess Tom Hicks and George Gillett have made at Anfield.

What is at stake now is the very soul of the English game. While it has prospered with the bigger clubs getting rich, the gap between rich and poor, success and failure, has grown to such a point where short-sighted decisions are being made in the name of short-term gain, at the cost of long-term stability. Player rights have, it is true, increased, as international and contract law have seeped into global football since it has expanded as a business (something Fifa knows all about). Sadly, every season end and January, the global slave trade re-emerges in the shape of the transfer market, a nascent commoditisation of human football potential.

England isn’t the only nation where the owners have an impact, with Silvio Berlusconi of AC Milan and Real Madrid’s Florentino Pérez doing their own song and dance in Italy and Spain respectively. However, like the American Dream, the English dream of dominating world football through their own brand has turned sour and gone too far, as everyone seeks to get in on the gold rush before it is too late. It still is making vasts amount of money, but more often clubs are servicing debt from being bought out. That is currently Manchester United, Liverpool and now Blackburn’s plight. Portsmouth went bankrupt after a wave of foreign owners installed a revolving door at the chairperson’s office. It was that bad.

Within the next 10 years it won’t be a surprise if every club in the Premier League is owned by corporations, or businessmen and women, where managers chop and change at the behest of impatient Sugar People. We live in an era where the world is shrinking, companies are getting ever larger and the very nature of the capitalist system has seen almost everything in our society commoditised. After Gatsby got shot, Nick went back to the Midwest to get away from it all. For football, it is way too late for that. Everything, and everyone, has their price.