David Conn : English Soccer
English football has been transformed so rapidly in the last few years, from a game millions paid cheaply to watch on ramshackle terracing, to an activity which can make 100-million for one man like Martin Edwards, that it is difficult at times to make articulate sense of isolated developments. So it was this week, when BSkyB’s grasping of Manchester United generated an instinctive sense of dismay, but little more.
It is clear that United now lose their independence and become the first English football club to be run as a subsidiary of a conglomerate. Pay-per-view football is a certainty, and relentless expansion of United’s TV market, initially via a breakaway European Super League, very likely. More clubs will follow.
The deeper implications, about the direction of Britain’s national game, whether it has the right any more to claim a heart and soul, rather than simply a television smart card, can be understood only in the broader context of football’s recent commercial carve-up. Shocking as it looks, it is merely the inevitable latest step in the selling of English football by its top clubs and governing body, which followed the Hillsborough disaster of April 1989, and constitutes a betrayal of the Taylor report which followed.
The families of the 96 people who died at Hillsborough were still holding funerals when, four days later, The Sun, Rupert Murdoch’s then prime moneymaker, slurred the Liverpool supporters with notorious lies under the front page headline “The Truth”. Criticised by Lord Justice Taylor as baseless “grave calumnies”, the story was run by The Sun’s editor, Kelvin McKenzie, who is back at NewsCorp now and preaching the benefits for supporters of his boss’s purchase of United.
In his report Taylor, appalled at how football had fallen so low, criticised the Football Association (FA) and Football League for failing to lead. “As for the clubs,” Taylor said, “in some instances it is legitimate to wonder whether the directors are genuinely interested in the welfare of their grassroots supporters.
“Boardroom struggles for power, wheeler- dealing in the buying and selling of shares, and indeed of whole clubs, sometimes suggest that those involved are more interested in the personal financial benefits or social status of being a director than of directing the club in the interests of its supporter customers.” In one respect, this damning indictment was inaccurate. Football clubs were not clubs at all.
Formed originally by members wanting to play football, they became limited companies around 1885, as soon as players were first allowed to be paid. The FA imposed rules on these football companies to protect and preserve their sporting natures against financial exploitation. Directors were unpaid, dividends restricted, the grounds could not be sold off for profit. The rule – the FA’s rule 34 – is still there today.
In the league, football’s communal character was maintained by redistributing money, first gate receipts, then sponsorship and TV money, from the big clubs to the small. Clubs survived as local magnets of belonging, of loyalty, on which the phenomenon of football support is based.
In 1981 the FA allowed full-time directors to be paid, and Martin Edwards almost immediately became chief executive at Old Trafford. Still, though, the rules and redistributive structure prevented financial exploitation of the clubs.
Hillsborough was the end for this way of running football. Taylor recommended that public money be given to clubs to help build all-seat stadiums. But his report went much further, calling for “the fullest reassessment of policy for the game”.
This ought to have included reform of football’s companies to reinforce the concept of the club, but it never happened. Public money came from the Football Trust to the very directors criticised by Taylor . 36-million to the top clubs to build new stands. In October 1990 the Football League made a constructive reform proposal, that the FA and league should combine, to govern football for the good of all. Only a month later, the league’s so-called “big five” clubs obtained TV backing for a breakaway league from Greg Dyke, then of ITV. To their shame, the FA put their name to the venture, “The Premiership” because, caught in a dismal rivalry, the likes of Graham Kelly saw the league’s proposal as a threat to FA pre-eminence.
The Premier League broke away and sold exclusive TV rights to Murdoch’s Sky. Great wealth poured in at the same time as redistribution practically ended.
At the top football became an investment. The old-style directors were sitting on companies which were suddenly very lucrative. The FA simply allowed rule 34 to be bypassed, by the formation of holding companies, like Manchester United plc, officially not football clubs at all, just money-making companies.
The spectacle of public grants – United were given 1,4-million – and huge television money pouring in to only 22 (now 20) companies allowed to exploit it fully, attracted a new breed of businessman.
Eighteen football companies have floated, forming companies still controlled by single chair-shareholders, whose share values are now measured in the tens of millions.
Last year Sky agreed to pay a further 670- million to the Premier League between 1997 and 2001. The Premier League finally agreed last year to put 20-million back into the Football Trust, 20-million to youth development in the Football League, but these are only droplets. Much of football’s wider pyramid is sinking into financial crisis.
United’s sale is surely the first of many. This is a transitional era, provincial potentates becoming football fat cats by voting themselves into money, allowed by the FA to untap a century of loyalty built up in seemlier times.
As a betrayal of Taylor, football’s sell- out is spectacular. In the post-Taylor era there has been more wheeler- dealing of shares than ever before, for undreamt-of personal financial benefits.
The BSkyB deal was not a shock, but it was shocking to see it all laid bare, Martin Edwards getting 80-million – on top of 33-million sold over the years – and Sky moving in with the American patter of chief executive Mark Booth. The corrosion of football’s soul began years ago, but it felt complete last week.
Trevor Hicks, whose two daughters died at Hillsborough, has said many times that nobody responsible lost a day’s pay as a result. In fact, many football people have made fortunes. The families have had nothing from football, no apology from The Sun, and are currently pursuing private prosecutions of the two policemen in charge on the day. They watched this week as Murdoch and McKenzie returned, paying over 600-million to take football to Planet NewsCorp.