Football — stuck in the Dark Ages?

http://www.thefa.com/TheFA/Respect/

Football used to be a simple affair. Eleven fit young men from around the way would go down to the park on weekends and square off against another collective from another locale. The game would be played in high spirits and with goodwill all round, the ref would be a quiet authority on the field and afterwards there’d be plenty handshaking and merriment with epic quantities of refreshing brown ale to aid the conviviality. The fans, delighted after the afternoon’s entertainment, would join the lads down at the pub and all would end well — maybe even a few healthy fisticuffs would be thrown in, as men do. But as I said, that is how it used to be.

Players are treated like demi-gods by their fans, the media and sponsors. Built up to all crazy levels of hyperbole, it is sometimes difficult to blame them for “believing the hype” as US basket-ballers say. It doesn’t help matters that most of them have Intelligence Quotients that would shame the common garden snail, or Highveld tight-forwards. What you have then is a semi-developed intellect being fed — usually from a young age — that Galileo was actually wrong and the sun resides somewhere just up his rear end. You can deduct for yourself how such a person would react to any suggestion that he may be somewhere short of being indisputably correct.

Add then the club managers, the men entrusted with taking these talented if cerebrally precarious beings and moulding them into a unit that makes the most of their individual talent and allied to a team spirit — that not relating to sexual peccadilloes with willing females in hotels and mansions — gives them enough victories to satisfy whatever the aims of the chairmen/directors/owners were for the team. Not the most difficult job at first glance, but consider the stresses and pressures brought on by ambitious chairmen: the ridiculous sums of money involved in the game-relegation from the English Premiership for example, leads to revenue losses of around 30-million sterling from lost TV rights shares the high public profile footballer enjoys, and latterly the masses of commentators/expert pundits -– yes, yours truly is included here — that sit on the sidelines and pontificate and zero-in on every perceived shortcoming on the managerial side, more than a few of whom with a not-so secret wish to take on managerial posts themselves.

Next you have the owners/chairmen etc. The men who put up the money, or at least have to be accountable for how well it has been spent in the quest for glory, respectability or in some cases, mere survival. These men are much derided by the terrace classes for being ‘out of touch’, ‘not true fans’,’ ignorant of the culture of the club’ and all other emotional twaddle that goes out of the way when its transfer window time and you want your team to sign anyone, from anywhere, just to give you hope of some decent football.

They could argue they have the most to lose, having invested nearly obscene amounts just to be in a position to compete — the Abramovichs and al Maktoums of this world being an obvious exception. When you are stumping up hundreds of millions of pounds with minimal chances of a decent return in the near future and the medium-term being as murky as the water in Delmas when the dams are full, it is rather easy to get something of a God complex and assume airs more akin to a Fuhrer than a football investor.

Then there are the fans: the self-proclaimed lifeblood of the game. They, who flock to the grounds, watch from TV all around the world, buy the merchandise, attract the sponsors and advertisers and the source of the mythical 20% boost in performance on home soil. They who make arenas like Anfield legendary fortresses. They who Jorge Valdano proclaimed, to much wise nodding around the world, “would praise a sh*t on a stick as art”, who can end a coach’s career with a disdainful wave of a white ‘kerchief at the Camp Nou and lose their minds in tune with Maradona’s stomping at La Bombonera.

Arguably without them, football would not be the cash cow it is. Football clubs wouldn’t be the iconic emblems of communities and footballing traditions that they are. Of course they too, like those mentioned above, crave success. Everybody has undying love for their team (plastic supporters excluded), but it is easier to get worked up over a glamour Champions League clash than it is a mud fest against Barnsley in the dead of winter — see the rise of the plastic ManUre fan in the mid to late 90s — this is why fans get so hard on players, coaches etc. We want success, we give 100% and we expect the same in return.

In the middle of all this expectation and pressure are the referees. Mere mortals entrusted with an apparently simple task of making sure the game is played within the letter and spirit of its laws. Simple, hey? Well maybe in the days of gentlemen and simpler times. In these win at all cost days, players will do anything to succeed, managers will cry foul over the slightest perceived injustice and turn the blindest of eyes to their own teams’ shortcomings — see Wenger’s famous “I did not see zee incident”. The fans are baying for blood in the stands, the administrators and money men have wield huge sticks in the corridors of power — see England’s demotion system for referees — and you have one man trying to keep up with 90 minutes of frenetic play and make the right split second decision time and time again. When he gets it right, which is becoming ever more subjective as managers/players and pundits get pettier, no one says anything, but should he get even a 50-50 call wrong, all hell rains on him.

So maligned have referees become that England — home to the most watched league in the world — has had to introduce a formal “Respect” campaign for referees. Time will tell if it will succeed, because while everyone talks a good game when it comes to the spirit of football, when the world is watching and three points, a Cup final, money — sometimes even the club’s future as a going concern –- is at stake, everything changes. Its win at all costs and sod tradition. That’s the monster football has become and refs are stuck trying to impose old-school values on a game that’s long moved on from them, yet holds on to pretensions of a far gentler, more honest time.

What to do then? The authorities steadfastly refuse to allow innovation — technological and personnel-wise — for some misguided sense of preserving the game’s traditions, and respecting the ref’s independence and authority. They say this as they overturn carding decisions on video evidence and all other management speak that pays a dishonest nod to football of yore. The time has simply come for football to make a giant leap forward into the 21st century. Look at every other major sport; they’ve embraced innovation and it’s served to empower referees. Mind you, it doesn’t hurt that in those sports — rugby, cricket and gridiron come to mind — any dissent to a match official carries heavy sanction.

So football, are you ready for the 21st century?