Showing posts with label League. Show all posts
Showing posts with label League. Show all posts
Friday, 7 January 2022
Thursday, 14 March 2019
Monday, 6 April 2015
The art of (amateur) cricket captaincy
Charlie Campbell in The Guardian
No cricket captain needs an ECB survey to tell him what he already knows – that playing numbers in England are in decline. The last game of the season is always the most important one for the amateur skipper. By then, up to half of your players will be deciding whether to play next year, whether they’ll put up with the aches, strains and strife that a full summer of cricket brings. But a decent team performance can erase untold painful memories from earlier in the season and a good individual one will banish all winter’s doubts. You just have to coax enough runs or wickets from those players to ensure you have a full team next year.
This is not a problem that the professional captain faces. Those at the pinnacle of the game can choose from the country’s 844,000 active cricketers – though realistically only the last 4,000 are in the running. The remaining 840,000 of us are making up the numbers. And despite these numbers, many amateur captains will struggle to put out a full XI every weekend. Mike Brearley’s The Art of Captaincy brilliantly describes the challenges that he faced on the cricket field when leading England to Ashes glory in 1981. But he never had to play with nine men.
That is just one of the problems the amateur captain faces. It is perfectly normal for players to drop out on the eve or morning of a game. If this happens in Saturday league cricket, the first team takes the seconds’ star all-rounder but will bat him at 10 and won’t bowl him. The seconds will plunder the thirds for their best batsman and probably won’t give him back. The thirds will reluctantly borrow someone from the fourths, hoping he won’t let them down too much. And the fourths will be short, again, and may have to find something else to do that afternoon.
But league cricket is a distant relation to the professional game. And Sunday cricket is something entirely separate again, and requires a different mindset. This version of the game, perfected over centuries in villages all round England, is the beating heart of cricket. It’s where players are born and die: where once-good cricketers are put out to pasture, fathers and sons play together and where the unselectable finally get a game.
As amateur captain you hope to keep all your players happy. Some will be competent cricketers, others won’t and at least one will not have played before. But you have to forge a team out of them. At this lower level of cricket you try to involve everyone in the game one way or another. Ideally you will have a pair of good batsmen, a competent keeper and a couple of decent bowlers. Hopefully they won’t be the same two people. Then it’s like a game of chess, in which you match up your strong pieces against the opposition’s queen and rooks, and let the pawns fight it out.
Not only do you have to husband your resources carefully, but you won’t always be playing to win. Match-fixing – or match management as we prefer to call it – may be the scourge of the professional game, but it is a key aspect of Sunday cricket and perhaps the only thing that amateurs do better than the professionals.
Although not every captain adheres to these principles, usually both sides want a good close game. A one-sided match is enjoyable for the dominant players, but when the outcome is so predictable, the rest lose heart and interest. They all know how the story ends and that they’re not the hero. So sometimes it pays to take the pressure off for an over or two and let the opposition regroup. After all, you don’t want the game to be over by tea.
How I came to own the sweater Wasim Akram wore at the 1992 World Cup final
Read more
There are various ways of doing this but, however you do it, discretion is key – just as it was for Hansie Cronje or Salman Butt. You shouldn’t be asking anyone to underperform, nor be doing so yourself. I’ve never deliberately bowled a full toss, wide or no-ball – there are many better ways to alter the balance of a game. You give a weaker bowler a couple of overs too many, with an attacking field. Your cannier teammates may guess what’s going on, but the rest won’t. They’ll be too busy thinking about their own game.
But this tends to happen after the opposition has lost five quick wickets and is a hundred runs short of a competitive total. What is rare is having to match manage from the outset. It has only happened to me once. I captain a team of writers and we tend to play teams that are a little bit stronger than us. After all, authorship usually comes in the later decades of life, and consequently, our squad is long on experience but short on speed and agility.
This particular day we were playing a team of a similar vintage. I walked out with their captain for the toss and we had the standard conversation about the respective strengths of our teams, and agreed a 20-over format. One of cricket’s great joys is that things are not always what they seem. I’ve seen septuagenarians bowl maiden after maiden, morbidly obese batsmen strike quick fifties, and small children throw the stumps down from 30 yards. But as I looked at the opposition, I was pretty sure that appearances didn’t mislead and that we were the stronger side. I called correctly and put them in, thinking that it would be easier to control the game that way. We had a decent team, with enough bowling and batting to cruise to a sporting win.
I was already fretting after just two overs. Their score stood at two for no loss as the openers took a circumspect approach to batting. Chris Gayle often plays out a maiden before unleashing hell in the next over. But these two played more like Chris Tavaré and showed no signs of wanting to accelerate. At this rate we would be lucky to be chasing more than 50.
After four overs, I turned to spin, telling the surprised new bowler that I was keeping myself back for their No3, whom I knew to be their best player. (At our level, few spinners hit the stumps regularly. Each ball comes out of the hand differently. Then there’s the variation the bowler feels it necessary to add, having zealously watched clips of Warne in action. The result is always six very different deliveries, which will include a full toss, a wide and one that bounces twice. It is almost impossible not to score at least five an over off a bowler such as this, particularly if the field includes two slips and a couple of gullies as mine did. Full tosses can be hit to fielders and double bouncers sometimes pass under the bat onto the stumps.) And so the opposition’s score crept up but the wickets fell too. The No3 came and went without living up to the reputation I’d given him. But their No4 made a quick-fire 30 and they finished on a respectable 98 in their 20 overs. Meanwhile, our two occasional spinners recorded their best figures of the season.
Why do we play cricket?
Read more
Half the match had passed and while I hadn’t been actively trying to lose, nor had I been trying to win. I was giving players opportunities they didn’t always get and they were enjoying it. My competitive instinct would typically have returned now, with a total to chase, but I looked around at my team and I saw various players yet to make a decent score this season. This could be the day they did so, if the opposition’s bowling was anything like their batting. And so I put two of our tail-enders at 3 and 4.
Both were clean bowled, making five runs between them, but our spin duo played their best innings of the summer, taking us from 30 for 3 after nine overs to a position where we needed 24 from the last 18 balls. Our youngest batsman, the teenage son of one of our players, hit a few boundaries but couldn’t get the four needed from the last delivery. And so we lost. It felt strange losing like that to a weaker side but I felt we had salvaged something from what could have otherwise been an awful day’s cricket.
Even supposing the captain succeeds in getting 11 players on the field, against that ideal opposition, there still remain infinite ways in which things can go wrong. At least one player will get lost driving to an away game – and home matches are no better, since those who turn up early have to prepare the ground, put out boundary flags and sightscreens. Another player will have forgotten his whites. And pity the skipper who discovered that his first slip had taken ecstasy during the tea interval. Brearley never had to deal with that either.
No cricket captain needs an ECB survey to tell him what he already knows – that playing numbers in England are in decline. The last game of the season is always the most important one for the amateur skipper. By then, up to half of your players will be deciding whether to play next year, whether they’ll put up with the aches, strains and strife that a full summer of cricket brings. But a decent team performance can erase untold painful memories from earlier in the season and a good individual one will banish all winter’s doubts. You just have to coax enough runs or wickets from those players to ensure you have a full team next year.
This is not a problem that the professional captain faces. Those at the pinnacle of the game can choose from the country’s 844,000 active cricketers – though realistically only the last 4,000 are in the running. The remaining 840,000 of us are making up the numbers. And despite these numbers, many amateur captains will struggle to put out a full XI every weekend. Mike Brearley’s The Art of Captaincy brilliantly describes the challenges that he faced on the cricket field when leading England to Ashes glory in 1981. But he never had to play with nine men.
That is just one of the problems the amateur captain faces. It is perfectly normal for players to drop out on the eve or morning of a game. If this happens in Saturday league cricket, the first team takes the seconds’ star all-rounder but will bat him at 10 and won’t bowl him. The seconds will plunder the thirds for their best batsman and probably won’t give him back. The thirds will reluctantly borrow someone from the fourths, hoping he won’t let them down too much. And the fourths will be short, again, and may have to find something else to do that afternoon.
But league cricket is a distant relation to the professional game. And Sunday cricket is something entirely separate again, and requires a different mindset. This version of the game, perfected over centuries in villages all round England, is the beating heart of cricket. It’s where players are born and die: where once-good cricketers are put out to pasture, fathers and sons play together and where the unselectable finally get a game.
As amateur captain you hope to keep all your players happy. Some will be competent cricketers, others won’t and at least one will not have played before. But you have to forge a team out of them. At this lower level of cricket you try to involve everyone in the game one way or another. Ideally you will have a pair of good batsmen, a competent keeper and a couple of decent bowlers. Hopefully they won’t be the same two people. Then it’s like a game of chess, in which you match up your strong pieces against the opposition’s queen and rooks, and let the pawns fight it out.
Not only do you have to husband your resources carefully, but you won’t always be playing to win. Match-fixing – or match management as we prefer to call it – may be the scourge of the professional game, but it is a key aspect of Sunday cricket and perhaps the only thing that amateurs do better than the professionals.
Although not every captain adheres to these principles, usually both sides want a good close game. A one-sided match is enjoyable for the dominant players, but when the outcome is so predictable, the rest lose heart and interest. They all know how the story ends and that they’re not the hero. So sometimes it pays to take the pressure off for an over or two and let the opposition regroup. After all, you don’t want the game to be over by tea.
How I came to own the sweater Wasim Akram wore at the 1992 World Cup final
Read more
There are various ways of doing this but, however you do it, discretion is key – just as it was for Hansie Cronje or Salman Butt. You shouldn’t be asking anyone to underperform, nor be doing so yourself. I’ve never deliberately bowled a full toss, wide or no-ball – there are many better ways to alter the balance of a game. You give a weaker bowler a couple of overs too many, with an attacking field. Your cannier teammates may guess what’s going on, but the rest won’t. They’ll be too busy thinking about their own game.
But this tends to happen after the opposition has lost five quick wickets and is a hundred runs short of a competitive total. What is rare is having to match manage from the outset. It has only happened to me once. I captain a team of writers and we tend to play teams that are a little bit stronger than us. After all, authorship usually comes in the later decades of life, and consequently, our squad is long on experience but short on speed and agility.
This particular day we were playing a team of a similar vintage. I walked out with their captain for the toss and we had the standard conversation about the respective strengths of our teams, and agreed a 20-over format. One of cricket’s great joys is that things are not always what they seem. I’ve seen septuagenarians bowl maiden after maiden, morbidly obese batsmen strike quick fifties, and small children throw the stumps down from 30 yards. But as I looked at the opposition, I was pretty sure that appearances didn’t mislead and that we were the stronger side. I called correctly and put them in, thinking that it would be easier to control the game that way. We had a decent team, with enough bowling and batting to cruise to a sporting win.
I was already fretting after just two overs. Their score stood at two for no loss as the openers took a circumspect approach to batting. Chris Gayle often plays out a maiden before unleashing hell in the next over. But these two played more like Chris Tavaré and showed no signs of wanting to accelerate. At this rate we would be lucky to be chasing more than 50.
After four overs, I turned to spin, telling the surprised new bowler that I was keeping myself back for their No3, whom I knew to be their best player. (At our level, few spinners hit the stumps regularly. Each ball comes out of the hand differently. Then there’s the variation the bowler feels it necessary to add, having zealously watched clips of Warne in action. The result is always six very different deliveries, which will include a full toss, a wide and one that bounces twice. It is almost impossible not to score at least five an over off a bowler such as this, particularly if the field includes two slips and a couple of gullies as mine did. Full tosses can be hit to fielders and double bouncers sometimes pass under the bat onto the stumps.) And so the opposition’s score crept up but the wickets fell too. The No3 came and went without living up to the reputation I’d given him. But their No4 made a quick-fire 30 and they finished on a respectable 98 in their 20 overs. Meanwhile, our two occasional spinners recorded their best figures of the season.
Why do we play cricket?
Read more
Half the match had passed and while I hadn’t been actively trying to lose, nor had I been trying to win. I was giving players opportunities they didn’t always get and they were enjoying it. My competitive instinct would typically have returned now, with a total to chase, but I looked around at my team and I saw various players yet to make a decent score this season. This could be the day they did so, if the opposition’s bowling was anything like their batting. And so I put two of our tail-enders at 3 and 4.
Both were clean bowled, making five runs between them, but our spin duo played their best innings of the summer, taking us from 30 for 3 after nine overs to a position where we needed 24 from the last 18 balls. Our youngest batsman, the teenage son of one of our players, hit a few boundaries but couldn’t get the four needed from the last delivery. And so we lost. It felt strange losing like that to a weaker side but I felt we had salvaged something from what could have otherwise been an awful day’s cricket.
Even supposing the captain succeeds in getting 11 players on the field, against that ideal opposition, there still remain infinite ways in which things can go wrong. At least one player will get lost driving to an away game – and home matches are no better, since those who turn up early have to prepare the ground, put out boundary flags and sightscreens. Another player will have forgotten his whites. And pity the skipper who discovered that his first slip had taken ecstasy during the tea interval. Brearley never had to deal with that either.
Monday, 3 December 2012
Borussia Dortmund boss attacks Premier League's oligarch owners
• Chief executive says English game is losing its soul
• Germany's cheap tickets and standing areas show the way
• Germany's cheap tickets and standing areas show the way
Borussia Dortmund's chief executive, Hans-Joachim Watzke, says that links between fans and clubs in Germany are now stronger than they are in England. Photograph: Gary Calton for the Guardian
The chief executive of Borussia Dortmund, who play Manchester City in the Champions League on Tuesday, has launched a passionate defence of German football principles and attacked English clubs' ownership by rich men from overseas.
Hans-Joachim Watzke described German football as "romantic" for retaining its "50% plus one" rule, which requires Bundesliga clubs to be owned by their members. He questioned the ethos and sustainability of Premier League clubs' ownership, including City being owned and funded by Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi.
Of City, a club he visited for last month's 1-1 draw in the first match between the two, Watzke said: "I am a little bit romantic, and that is not romantic. In England people seem not to be interested in this – at Liverpool they are fine for the club to belong to an American. But the German is romantic: when there is a club, he wants to have the feeling it is my club, not the club of Qatar or Abu Dhabi."
Watzke was a prominent supporter of the 50% plus one rule when it was challenged last year by Martin Kind, the president of Hannover. Dortmund are floated on the stock market, but the members elect the president and four members of the club's supervisory board – and also vote to decide major issues of club policy.
"I was the biggest opponent of changing the rule," Watzke said in an interview with the Guardian at Dortmund's Signal Iduna stadium in the build-up to the City match. "Germans want to have that sense of belonging. When you give [the supporters] the feeling that they are your customers, you have lost. In Germany, we want everybody to feel it is their club, and that is really important."
All 36 Bundesliga clubs are owned or controlled by their members, except the historic exceptions of Wolfsburg, owned by Volkswagen, Bayer Leverkeusen, owned by the pharmacy giant Bayer, and Hoffenheim, which is now funded by a single very wealthy entrepreneur, Dietmar Hopp.
Apart from those three and Kind's Hannover, the remaining 32 voted to keep the 50% plus one rule, which was introduced in 2001 when the Bundesliga clubs broke away to run the league competition independently from the German Football Association, the DFB.
"In former times in England I think the relationship between the club and supporters was very strong," Watzke argued. "Our people come to the stadium like they are going to their family. Here, the supporters say: it's ours, it's my club."
Watzke, himself a lifelong supporter of Dortmund, who drew 1-1 with runaway Bundesliga leaders Bayern Munich on Saturday, linked the system of member-ownership and control to the maintenance of affordable tickets and standing areas at top flight German football.
At Dortmund, the 25,000 fans who form the famous "Yellow Wall" standing area in the Signal Iduna stadium's south stand pay just €190 (£154) for a season ticket for the 17 home Bundesliga matches. Season tickets that also include entry to the first three Champions League group games cost slightly more at €220, working out at exactly €11 for each match.
"Here, it is our way to have cheap tickets, so young people can come," Watzke said. "We would make €5m more a season if we had seats, but there was no question to do it, because it is our culture. In England it is a lot more expensive. Football is more than a business."
Watzke argued that Dortmund, who top the group of City, Real Madrid and Ajax while the English champions cannot qualify for the knockout stages, have been able to compete with such clubs thanks to sensible management, coaching and player recruitment, despite not having the resources of a rich individual such as Sheikh Mansour backing the club.
"Everybody told me you cannot play in the Champions League against clubs like Manchester, they have more money. But we are trying to do it ourselves, in our way.
"There are a lot of ways to Rome," he said. "Chelsea have won the Champions League. But Chelsea's question is: what happens after [Roman] Abramovich?"
Hans-Joachim Watzke described German football as "romantic" for retaining its "50% plus one" rule, which requires Bundesliga clubs to be owned by their members. He questioned the ethos and sustainability of Premier League clubs' ownership, including City being owned and funded by Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi.
Of City, a club he visited for last month's 1-1 draw in the first match between the two, Watzke said: "I am a little bit romantic, and that is not romantic. In England people seem not to be interested in this – at Liverpool they are fine for the club to belong to an American. But the German is romantic: when there is a club, he wants to have the feeling it is my club, not the club of Qatar or Abu Dhabi."
Watzke was a prominent supporter of the 50% plus one rule when it was challenged last year by Martin Kind, the president of Hannover. Dortmund are floated on the stock market, but the members elect the president and four members of the club's supervisory board – and also vote to decide major issues of club policy.
"I was the biggest opponent of changing the rule," Watzke said in an interview with the Guardian at Dortmund's Signal Iduna stadium in the build-up to the City match. "Germans want to have that sense of belonging. When you give [the supporters] the feeling that they are your customers, you have lost. In Germany, we want everybody to feel it is their club, and that is really important."
All 36 Bundesliga clubs are owned or controlled by their members, except the historic exceptions of Wolfsburg, owned by Volkswagen, Bayer Leverkeusen, owned by the pharmacy giant Bayer, and Hoffenheim, which is now funded by a single very wealthy entrepreneur, Dietmar Hopp.
Apart from those three and Kind's Hannover, the remaining 32 voted to keep the 50% plus one rule, which was introduced in 2001 when the Bundesliga clubs broke away to run the league competition independently from the German Football Association, the DFB.
"In former times in England I think the relationship between the club and supporters was very strong," Watzke argued. "Our people come to the stadium like they are going to their family. Here, the supporters say: it's ours, it's my club."
Watzke, himself a lifelong supporter of Dortmund, who drew 1-1 with runaway Bundesliga leaders Bayern Munich on Saturday, linked the system of member-ownership and control to the maintenance of affordable tickets and standing areas at top flight German football.
At Dortmund, the 25,000 fans who form the famous "Yellow Wall" standing area in the Signal Iduna stadium's south stand pay just €190 (£154) for a season ticket for the 17 home Bundesliga matches. Season tickets that also include entry to the first three Champions League group games cost slightly more at €220, working out at exactly €11 for each match.
"Here, it is our way to have cheap tickets, so young people can come," Watzke said. "We would make €5m more a season if we had seats, but there was no question to do it, because it is our culture. In England it is a lot more expensive. Football is more than a business."
Watzke argued that Dortmund, who top the group of City, Real Madrid and Ajax while the English champions cannot qualify for the knockout stages, have been able to compete with such clubs thanks to sensible management, coaching and player recruitment, despite not having the resources of a rich individual such as Sheikh Mansour backing the club.
"Everybody told me you cannot play in the Champions League against clubs like Manchester, they have more money. But we are trying to do it ourselves, in our way.
"There are a lot of ways to Rome," he said. "Chelsea have won the Champions League. But Chelsea's question is: what happens after [Roman] Abramovich?"
Wednesday, 19 October 2011
In the Premier League the endgame of rampant capitalism is being played out
An unsustainable system where the rich win and the poor go to the wall. We see it in English football – and beyond
Illustration by Belle Mellor
It's a newspaper convention that the front and back pages are a
world apart, as if news and sport inhabit two different spheres with
little to say to each other. Indeed, it used to be an article of faith
that "sport and politics don't mix", with the former no more than a form
of escapism from the latter. And yet the Occupy Wall Street and London Stock Exchange
protests that led the weekend news bulletins might not be entirely
unrelated to the Premier League results that closed them. For the
current state of our football sheds a rather revealing light on the
current state of both our politics and our economy. Or, as one sage of
the sport puts it: "As ever, the national game reflects the nation's
times."
What that reflection says is that Britain, or England, has become the home of a turbo-capitalism that leaves even the land of the let-it-rip free market – the United States – for dust. If capitalism is often described metaphorically as a race in which the richest always win, football has turned that metaphor into an all too literal reality.
Let's take as our text a series of reports written by the sage just quoted, namely the Guardian's David Conn, who has carved a unique niche investigating the politics and commercialisation of football. Conn elicited a candid admission from the new American owners of Liverpool Football Club, who confessed that part of the lure of buying a stake in what they called the "EPL" – the English Premier League – was that they get to keep all the money they make, rather than having to share it as they would have to under the – their phrase – "very socialistic" rules that operate in US sport. In other words, England has become a magnet for those drawn to behave in a way they couldn't get away with at home.
Start with first principles. Of course, inequality is built into sport: some people are simply stronger or faster than others. What makes sport compelling is watching closely matched individuals or teams compete to come out on top.
But a different kind of inequality matters too: money. A rich club can buy up all the best players and win every time. That's the story of today's Premier League, as super-flush Manchester United sweep all before them, challenged only by local rivals Manchester City – now endowed by an oil billionaire – and Chelsea, funded to the hilt by a Russian oligarch. This, then, becomes a different kind of competition, a battle not of skill, pace and temperament but of pounds, shillings and pence. The clearest manifestation of that came at the close of the transfer window, when the biggest teams splashed out millions to buy the top talent. It means the half-dozen top sides, already at a different level from the rest, soared even higher towards the stratosphere and out of reach – in just the same way that the super-rich float ever further away from everyone else, the 1% in a different league from the 99%, as the Occupy protesters would put it.
Nothing you can do about that, says dogmatic capitalism. You can no more stop the richest teams dominating football than you can prevent the fastest sprinter winning gold. That's the force of the market, all but a law of nature.
Except along comes American sport to show us another way. First, there are those rules on revenue-sharing that so frustrated Liverpool's new owners. All the money that, say, a baseball team makes – from tickets, TV rights and merchandise – is taxed by the major league that runs the sport and spread around the other clubs, so that the richest cannot dwarf the rest. That isn't because the titans of Major League Baseball have read too much Marx. It's because they understand that their sport is worth nothing if it stops being a real competition, if only a handful of the wealthiest teams ever have a chance of winning. Redistributing the wealth around the league ensures their sport doesn't become boring. It does not level the playing field, but it comes very close.
The proof is in the stats so beloved of sporting obsessives. Over the past 19 seasons, 12 different teams have won baseball's biggest prize. In the 19 seasons since the Premier League was created, only four teams have won; Manchester United alone have won the title 12 of those 19 times.
It's not just revenue-sharing that ensures true competition. In American football and basketball a salary cap applies, limiting how much each club can pay in wages and thereby preventing the richest teams making their domination permanent by snapping up all the best players. (A "luxury tax" performs a similar function in baseball.) In the same spirit, teams in all major US sports submit to a "draft", in which they take turns picking from a pool of newly eligible players, so that the equivalent of Chelsea or Manchester City can't gobble up all the fresh talent, but instead have to let the Blackburns or Wigans have a go.
Put like that, it seems fantastical. Who can imagine Old Trafford voluntarily snaffling less of the pie, so that clubs in smaller cities with smaller grounds, and therefore weaker gate receipts, get a look in? And yet English football used to work just like that. When the founders of the Football League gathered in a Manchester hotel in 1888, they fretted over how they might ensure that a fixture between, say, Derby County and Everton remained a real contest. They agreed the home side should give a proportion of its takings to the visitors, a system that held firm till 1983.
Clubs shared the TV money when it came too, spreading it around all 92 league clubs. But the big teams always resented subsidising the minnows; indeed, the Premier League was formed out of the biggest 20 clubs' express desire to keep Rupert Murdoch's millions for themselves. That TV money is at least partly spread throughout the Premier League, but now there are noises about ending even that small nod towards wealth-sharing, so that the biggest half-dozen teams can keep every penny for themselves.
Not for the first time, it's fallen to Europe to act. Upcoming Uefa "financial fair play" rules will require teams to live within their earnings, which should put an end to the sugar daddy handouts of Man City and Chelsea. But that 2014 change will push clubs to maximise their revenue, which is bound, in turn, to mean even less sharing. Football will still be a game determined by who has most money.
There are three consequences of this strange gulf between our rules and those across the Atlantic. First, football's most storied clubs have become attractive to foreign tycoons who sniff a licence to print money, unrestricted. Second, we've established a model that is inherently unsustainable, involving colossal debts that cripple all those without a billionaire to bail them out. Since 1992, league clubs and one Premier League team – Portsmouth – have fallen insolvent 55 times. Third, we risk killing the golden goose, turning an activity that should be thrilling into a non-contest whose outcome is all but preordained.
Hmm, a system that sees our biggest names falling to leveraged takeovers – think Kraft's buy-up of Cadbury – thereby selling off the crown jewels of our collective culture in the name of a rampant capitalism that is both unsustainable and ultimately joyless. That doesn't just sound like the state of the national game, that sounds like the state of the nation.
What that reflection says is that Britain, or England, has become the home of a turbo-capitalism that leaves even the land of the let-it-rip free market – the United States – for dust. If capitalism is often described metaphorically as a race in which the richest always win, football has turned that metaphor into an all too literal reality.
Let's take as our text a series of reports written by the sage just quoted, namely the Guardian's David Conn, who has carved a unique niche investigating the politics and commercialisation of football. Conn elicited a candid admission from the new American owners of Liverpool Football Club, who confessed that part of the lure of buying a stake in what they called the "EPL" – the English Premier League – was that they get to keep all the money they make, rather than having to share it as they would have to under the – their phrase – "very socialistic" rules that operate in US sport. In other words, England has become a magnet for those drawn to behave in a way they couldn't get away with at home.
Start with first principles. Of course, inequality is built into sport: some people are simply stronger or faster than others. What makes sport compelling is watching closely matched individuals or teams compete to come out on top.
But a different kind of inequality matters too: money. A rich club can buy up all the best players and win every time. That's the story of today's Premier League, as super-flush Manchester United sweep all before them, challenged only by local rivals Manchester City – now endowed by an oil billionaire – and Chelsea, funded to the hilt by a Russian oligarch. This, then, becomes a different kind of competition, a battle not of skill, pace and temperament but of pounds, shillings and pence. The clearest manifestation of that came at the close of the transfer window, when the biggest teams splashed out millions to buy the top talent. It means the half-dozen top sides, already at a different level from the rest, soared even higher towards the stratosphere and out of reach – in just the same way that the super-rich float ever further away from everyone else, the 1% in a different league from the 99%, as the Occupy protesters would put it.
Nothing you can do about that, says dogmatic capitalism. You can no more stop the richest teams dominating football than you can prevent the fastest sprinter winning gold. That's the force of the market, all but a law of nature.
Except along comes American sport to show us another way. First, there are those rules on revenue-sharing that so frustrated Liverpool's new owners. All the money that, say, a baseball team makes – from tickets, TV rights and merchandise – is taxed by the major league that runs the sport and spread around the other clubs, so that the richest cannot dwarf the rest. That isn't because the titans of Major League Baseball have read too much Marx. It's because they understand that their sport is worth nothing if it stops being a real competition, if only a handful of the wealthiest teams ever have a chance of winning. Redistributing the wealth around the league ensures their sport doesn't become boring. It does not level the playing field, but it comes very close.
The proof is in the stats so beloved of sporting obsessives. Over the past 19 seasons, 12 different teams have won baseball's biggest prize. In the 19 seasons since the Premier League was created, only four teams have won; Manchester United alone have won the title 12 of those 19 times.
It's not just revenue-sharing that ensures true competition. In American football and basketball a salary cap applies, limiting how much each club can pay in wages and thereby preventing the richest teams making their domination permanent by snapping up all the best players. (A "luxury tax" performs a similar function in baseball.) In the same spirit, teams in all major US sports submit to a "draft", in which they take turns picking from a pool of newly eligible players, so that the equivalent of Chelsea or Manchester City can't gobble up all the fresh talent, but instead have to let the Blackburns or Wigans have a go.
Put like that, it seems fantastical. Who can imagine Old Trafford voluntarily snaffling less of the pie, so that clubs in smaller cities with smaller grounds, and therefore weaker gate receipts, get a look in? And yet English football used to work just like that. When the founders of the Football League gathered in a Manchester hotel in 1888, they fretted over how they might ensure that a fixture between, say, Derby County and Everton remained a real contest. They agreed the home side should give a proportion of its takings to the visitors, a system that held firm till 1983.
Clubs shared the TV money when it came too, spreading it around all 92 league clubs. But the big teams always resented subsidising the minnows; indeed, the Premier League was formed out of the biggest 20 clubs' express desire to keep Rupert Murdoch's millions for themselves. That TV money is at least partly spread throughout the Premier League, but now there are noises about ending even that small nod towards wealth-sharing, so that the biggest half-dozen teams can keep every penny for themselves.
Not for the first time, it's fallen to Europe to act. Upcoming Uefa "financial fair play" rules will require teams to live within their earnings, which should put an end to the sugar daddy handouts of Man City and Chelsea. But that 2014 change will push clubs to maximise their revenue, which is bound, in turn, to mean even less sharing. Football will still be a game determined by who has most money.
There are three consequences of this strange gulf between our rules and those across the Atlantic. First, football's most storied clubs have become attractive to foreign tycoons who sniff a licence to print money, unrestricted. Second, we've established a model that is inherently unsustainable, involving colossal debts that cripple all those without a billionaire to bail them out. Since 1992, league clubs and one Premier League team – Portsmouth – have fallen insolvent 55 times. Third, we risk killing the golden goose, turning an activity that should be thrilling into a non-contest whose outcome is all but preordained.
Hmm, a system that sees our biggest names falling to leveraged takeovers – think Kraft's buy-up of Cadbury – thereby selling off the crown jewels of our collective culture in the name of a rampant capitalism that is both unsustainable and ultimately joyless. That doesn't just sound like the state of the national game, that sounds like the state of the nation.
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