After reading both Jenny Truman’s analyis on sports psychology and John Lerwill’s retrospective of days-goneby, Aston Villa Life has covered both up-to-the-minute present and the past in great detail.
As we all know, the game – and society in general – has changed dramatically compared to the times where the Second World War was a recent memory. Nowadays, many fans have no personal knowledge of the trials faced by the country in the late 1930s and 1940s because anyone younger than their late 60s wouldn’t even have been born when the war finished – speaking as a 34 year old, most of my knowledge of the war comes from my grandparents and history books.
In that sense I, speaking as a member of the comparatively younger generation, feel very fortunate. As a younger generation we have been untouched by war on such a massive scale. Yes, some of us – some of our readers or our friends and family – have been involved in wars since, but nothing in comparison to the two Great Wars of the last century.
In my mind, there is something to be said for how society has changed overall since the mid 1940s. As one would expect, things change as time progresses – sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. To that end, I wanted to look at how the context in which football sits has evolved.
Don’t get me wrong – my suggesting that the game has gone through an evolution doesn’t imply the idea that I think things are better now. In my eyes some things have gotten better but other areas have gotten a lot worse. More specifically, I can’t think of a time where people like you or I are more disconnected from the clubs we love.
Even if we go back to a comparatively recent time, and being fortunate enough to count a number of former players as friends, things were different. I’ve heard stories from those playing around the time when I was born when you’d walk into a local pub and meet a footballer smoking a pack of Park Drive, or you’d simply be catching a bus and they would be mixed in with the rest of society.
Nowadays, we’ve got a major disconnect in terms of players and fans. We see regularly that many modern day players roll up in expensive cars, many with blacked out windows, being paid salaries that dwarf the amounts the average person earns. We see players managed like they themselves are brands, carefully positioned to only say whatever they are directed to, and we can feel disconnected as a result.
However, I can also see the impact of footballers feeling somewhat isolated themselves, sometimes feeling somewhat unable to go or do anything without having that public eye focused on them. Yes, we can feel disconnected, but they also have their own issues to contend with.
After all, for you or I, going down the pub and having a few jars is of little importance to anyone outside our own circle of friends or family. For footballers, especially those at the top end of the Premier League, even going to the shops can be enough to fill column inches in some showbiz magazine.
I know some will have little sympathy for men who are earning £30k, £40k, £50k a week, saying that life isn’t stressful, but money isn’t the solution to all of our problems. Sure, money may well solve pressing issues many of us have, but being paid a lot of money doesn’t mean footballers are any less human, or any less likely to suffer from the same problems we can face as fans.
Anyway, I digress. What I wanted to get back to was this transition from post-war football to today’s game. We have seen money turn the Premier League into the most marketable product in the world. However, therein lies the problem.
My choice of the word product was intentional because it often feels like we are being sold an item, the same way as we might be from a billboard or on a TV commercial. For younger fans who have only seen the Premier League era, things won’t feel the same compared to those who have seen decades more of football, regardless of success or failure – it doesn’t make a difference if we’re talking Aston Villa or Manchester City.
The truth of the matter nowadays, however, is that we are – whether we like it or not – signed up for a product. We will, based on our own choices, go to games or we won’t, but the broken part of the system isn’t, in my opinion, even about the tickets that we buy on the turnstiles. What makes it hard to stomach is that this product is something we used to feel part of, something we have loved all of our lives whether we are nine or ninety.
One major issue is that TV money has vastly outstripped any other income source for the majority of the Premier League’s clubs. For a club like Villa – one likely to post turnover figures at a level of £140-150m, the £80m in TV revenue is massively significant.
In fact, it could be argued that – in modern day football – that TV money is more important than any other deal that occurs, with the major frustration here being that a club can survive by doing the bare minimum and make more money than if they tried harder to please the paying crowd.
Crazy as it sounds, if Villa had every game boycotted by everyone of us who pays to watch them at Villa Park, they’d still be making money. Which is why, in a sense, the current TV system of distributing wealth allows such loopholes to be exploited.
As we know, the TV revenue system was setup to be “fair” by distributing as much money from Sky to the biggest teams as those just coming up for promotion. The logic behind that being that everyone in the Premier League is given an equal amount to spend, though obviously each club will have differing abilities to absorb the associated costs and, as a result, a differing ability to be able to cope should that income disappear via relegation.
Comparatively speaking, parachute payments are only a fraction of the £80m a Premier League club gets. Before the recent upgrades to TV revenue – which took TV figures from roughly £50m per season to £80m per season – parachute payments were a maximun of £48m over four years for clubs that had been relegated, meaning £12m per year, and £12m isn’t a lot when we consider wages.
For those that rebounded back into the Premier League, losing what was then £38m was a potentially bearable, but painful cost Newcastle United, for example, went down and came back up quickly after we relegated them on the last day of the 2008-09 season. Their voyage into the Championship was actually a way to rebuild, but it could have been very different.
Compare and contrast Portsmouth. Here’s a club who won the FA Cup in 2008, but as of 2014, they sit in League Two, a consequence of just how badly money matters can make things.
Perhaps it is this sort of tale – of the significant impact of losing TV revenue – that made Randy Lerner so very desperate to cut costs, happy to get by on a comparatively meagre budget when balanced against his earlier years.
Lerner is right saying that the club should be self-sufficient but the issues arise when we look at how the game overall has progressed, and how we can find ourselves in a situation where Villa Park could have nobody attend in person, yet see more than half of the current turnover covered by pure TV money – for me, that’s a sign of a broken system.
It would be easy to blame it purely on money but, in my eyes, it goes far deeper because money alone means nothing. It goes deeper because we’ve cultivated an instant gratification culture – something that I feel has ramifications inside and outside of football.
What we’ve created standing of the shoulders of giants is a situation where we are, as Westerners, little more than consumers. We can shop for anything we want, whenever we want. We can get access to information all day every day on the internet for free via websites when we used to have to buy books or magazines or go to libraries to read.
These are significant achievements but they have significant consequences – mainly that they’ve also left us increasingly impatient. I wrote a while back that more than half of the Premier League’s teams changed managers in 2013. Such a situation was far from surprising given a wider view – impatience is almost a default stance for society.
If we can’t get success now, we’ve got to change.
If we can’t get what we want, when we want it, how we want it, we demand better.
We’ve got hordes of people with poor self esteem that society has cultivated through marketing that teaches young people that they have to look a certain way.
We’ve got a state that discourages accepting failure as a potential outcome – In short, we’ve got a recipe for disaster that makes football’s transition from past to present look obvious – most of society looks at money as what makes the world go round.
This sort of mentality, in my view, is the societal flip side of money flooding the game – it isn’t just money ruining football, we could argue that money has ruined society.
How? We see the rich get richer and the poor and sick get trodden on. We see people homeless on the streets of our cities, record numbers using food banks and we see millions dying of starvation and preventable diseases around the world because of a lack of clean water or basic medicine. In that sense, money hasn’t fixed society’s issues, so why in the world would it fix football?
The sad reality is that money and capitalism can’t fix anything without a strong moral direction – all capitalism does is give us a free market, something that doesn’t work too well for a species that has survived history based on aspects of selfishness.
Where we are, in footballing and societal terms, is a product of where we’ve come from. George Santayana famously said that “…Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”. As we sit in an era where we’ve been fortunate to avoid another Great War, maybe society should reflect on what it has become.
All this leaves me thinking that maybe if society didn’t try to turn everything into a saleable product, maybe we might think a little deeper than being consumers. Maybe, just maybe, if we do, we can reclaim the game I grew up to love from kicking an old leather caser around in the street as a kid.
Time will tell.
The Author
