AHOY HOY AND WELCOME ABOARD again! Another Premiership dawns and I greet it with the skittish delight of a winter-born colt getting its first faceful of spring sun. I adore it all — the smell of the new-mown pitches and the whiff of ink drying on improved contracts, the well oiled turnstiles and the well oiled assistant managers. Nothing compares to the genesis of a new football season.
Except. In recent years, something has nagged. Something rotten that threatens to sour the apparently limitless love we seem to reserve for the national game. It’s not the ludicrous cost of attending big games; football is now more expensive than opera, but nobody is expected to go see Die Fledermaus 20 times a year. The punters will eventually vote with their feet, moving all the faster away from our grounds because they’re unencumbered by heavy wallets.
It’s not even the cheating, although this, too, will eventually drive sane people away from the spectacle. No, the thing that really menaces the public’s affection for the sport is that it’s all too predictable. At the top of the sport, at least, we pretty much know what’s going to happen.
The top four will be some combination of Chelsea, Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal. That, I’m afraid, is that. “Oh no, Danny,” people say, knowing my allegiances. “I think Spurs will break into the top four this year.” OK, I reply patiently, so above whom will they finish? Chelsea? United? The Gunners? Steven Gerrard’s lot? Eyes are cast towards shoes.
Silence falls. Tottenham will, in all probability, finish fifth. We know what’s going to happen in the league. There was a time when teams could come out of the second tier of English football and immediately go on and win the title. Spurs did it in 1951, Ipswich in 1962 and Nottingham Forest in 1978. Imagine that happening today. Even the FA Cup, once a haven of haphazard happenings, is now the exclusive preserve of the Big Four.
Sport works only if we don’t know the result in advance. Without uncertainty, without genuine competition, it becomes a mere pageant. And much as I admire the circus of Mr Cottle and the works of Gustave Courbet, I don’t want to shell out the thick end of 50 quid every fortnight to see an exhibition.
But all is not lost. During the close season, something important happened, something that might — just might — result in the curse of uncompetitiveness being lifted. I refer, rather startlingly, to Mr Randy Lerner’s soon-to-be-finalised purchase of one of that most comatose of giants, Aston Villa. Incidentally, didn’t Robin Asquith once star in a 1970s driving instructor romp called “Confessions Of A Randy Lerner”? In any event, the arrival of Mr L and his fistful of dollars means that the takeover of Manchester United by the Glazer family was no fluke, no one-off. The enormous magnet attracting the Yanks to our shores is not enthusiasm for the game itself, but rather for the huge wad of Sky cash with which it’s soon to be festooned.
Football in Britain has not yet reached its economic zenith. The hobbity Glazers know this, Randy L knows this and, presumably, more of their ilk know this and will follow in their wake. We are undergoing a seismic change in club ownership. At the turn of the millennium, no Premiership clubs were owned by foreigners. Now, 20 per cent of them (United, Villa, Chelsea and Portsmouth) are. The trend will continue.
And if the Yanks take over, they will not tolerate a league in which the outcome is known in advance. This isn’t because they’re such great sportsmen but because, in the end, the TV moguls will cough up more for a sport that’s truly competitive. Much, much more. The next Sky deal in Britain is huge, sure, but it is a spit in the Atlantic compared with the money being poured into the NFL, from where Glazer and Lerner have emerged.
And the reason the telly people are so keen is that, at the start of every year, most of the NFL’s 34 teams genuinely believe that have a chance to win the Super Bowl. That hope is not idle. In the 40 years since the Super Bowl was inaugurated, 18 clubs have won it, including the Glazers’ Tampa Bay Buccaneers three years ago.
Much has been written about the beneficial effect of the American football draft (in which each year the worst team gets the choice of the best young talent), but the real reason for all this equality is that all the vast wealth the sport generates is shared out equally among the clubs. The TV moolah, the sponsorship dough, even the cabbage from the sales of shirts — all evenly distributed. It makes it much more difficult for any team to dominate the league, but in the end it ensures that the sport is ever more popular and, let’s be frank, ever more filthily rich.
Of course, no one in the Barclays Premiership is going to countenance such bolshevism. Equal shares? People buying Liverpool shirts actually putting money into the coffers of Everton? The remotest possibility of a change in the established order? Nay, nay and thrice nay will be the agonised cry of the barrow boys and bean-counters who own and run our clubs at the moment.
But soon they may be in a small minority, overwhelmed by more Americans keen not on short-term success but on long-term riches. Then the opening week of the new season will be something for all fans to welcome.
THE WANING PRESENCE OF ROONEY
WAYNE ROONEY IS THE recently gentrified game’s worst nightmare. Bullish, impulsive and apparently untouched by the national curriculum, he is the public bar bruiser wiping his busted nose on his sleeve at the country house garden party.
But I can’t help myself. I have come to love young Wayne. That said, I fear I may see very little of him in the coming season. Nothing to do with ability, of course; just a matter of mathematics.
Abacuses out: in his past two proper games, Rooney has been sent off. Against Portugal in the World Cup, his attempt to stunt the growth of the Carvalho family tree left him with a two-match ban. In Amsterdam, a misplaced elbow and a preening ref mean that he will miss three Premiership games.
Two matches played, five matches suspended; two appearances for every seven scheduled. Using a simple extrapolation, at that rate (and assuming Manchester United do well enough in assorted cups to play, say, 56 matches), this season we’ll see England’s best player on all of 16 occasions.
SPURS LACK BROWNIE POINTS
THERE ARE SOME THINGS football clubs should never do. Foremost among these is this: they should not have an all-brown kit.
It looks just too much like something Fido might leave and it encourages even the most progressive of newby footie fans to join in the ancient chant of “you’re s*** and you know you are”.
The last club to risk this kind of ridicule was Coventry City in the 1970s. That particular strip has just been voted worst of all time. So nobody in their right mind nowadays would adopt an earthen hue for their uniform, would they? Would they? Come on down, Tottenham! It’s “chocolate”, they tell us, which displays pluck in the face of the evidence. Spurs, they remind us, wore a brown kit in the 1890s, which shows an admirable sense of history. And given the post-lasagne Riverdance on the final day of last season, the whole thing reveals a sense of humour not normally associated with North London’s finest.
