Soaking The Rich

Jonathan Freedland writes about the Premier League's new television deal and how it shows that English football is now a global product that just happens to be in England. This is not really true.

It is certainly true that the new television deal is phenomenal at 5.1 billion pounds over three seasons it makes it the second wealthiest sports competition in the world. Only the NFL generates more cash and soon the 20th richest Premier League club will be able to outspend every club abroad apart from Real Madrid, Barcelona and Bayern Munich.

However the important detail is that the new deal is for the domestic rights, not the global rights. It is the competition for UK pay television rights that is driving the growth, the foreign markets are an important bonus but they are not what is primarily funding English football.

Whether this shows that nothing else can drive subscription television in Britain or that British football supporters are very rich is an open question.

Deep Roots

I am currently reading The Steel Bonnets by George MacDonald Fraser, which is a history of the border reivers- the violent and wild people who lived on the frontier of England & Scotland in the 16th century. The border culture is interesting both in itself and due to the impact it has had on the wider world. Both the Ulster Plantation and the slightly misnamed "Scotch-Irish" settlers of the USA's Appalachian backcountry derive mostly from the borderers.

I have not finished the book yet so will not attempt a review but one thing that did strike me was how many of the clans on the Scottish side of the border bear surnames which now crop up in the Scottish rugby team over the decades- Armstrongs, Beatties, Redpaths, Weirs and Irvines etc- reflecting that the region is the heartland of the Scottish game. Similarly a lot of the English surnames appear over and again among English footballers of North Eastern origins- Charltons, Milburns, Hendersons and Robsons among them.

There really is a very strong continuity of population in this country that goes back hundreds of years, with families often having lived in the same area over the course of many hundreds of years.

The World Game

Football is supposedly the world game, but it's questionable just how global it really is. For all the internationalism of the World Cup it's pretty obvious that based on the quality of the teams Asia and Africa are significantly overrepresented compared to Europe and South America. The game has always had two centres of gravity from which 75% of the best players and 100% of the best coaches come from-  the Western Europe and the cone of South America.

So far eight different teams have won the tournament- all from those core zones- and an additional  four teams have reached finals but never won- all European although in the case of Czechoslovakia and Hungary a little bit outside the core.

Of the top ten most populous nations on the planet, only 5 are at the World Cup, only 6 have been at a World Cup in the last 50 years. Most don't have sustainable professional leagues either, whatever passion they have for the game doesn't seem to extend to playing it.

Football is not yet a genuine world game even if it is closer to being so than any other sport.

The World Cup Is Anti Feminist Apparently

Oh no, what to do now?

In one of the passages explaining the anti-feminist nature of football Sylvia Murray Young writes:

Paul Gascoigne led a generation of males to sport the "Gazza" haircut, yet his popularity was only mildy dented by the sight of his partner Sheryl skulking past the paparazzi with a face swollen and bruised by his fists. Ched Evans was convicted for raping a drunk teenager, but incredulous fans started the #freeched hashtag and outed the victim. Football fans themselves create a demand for the trafficking of women and girls into prostitution.

The stories of a surge in trafficking of prostitutes is a factoid of dubious provenance, but it is true that some prominent footballers have treated women appallingly. However it is surely a bit of a double standard to condemn the whole of football for the actions of a handful of individuals.

When Lord Saatchi grabbed his wife round the throat did it prove that the art world is hostile to women, when the Socialist Workers Party covered up a series of rape allegations against their senior members did it prove that left wing politics is inherently misogynistic?

It seems to me that football is being singled out like this because it is largely played by working class men who are unlikely to be in the target demographic for listening to professional grievance mongers.

Will Hutton- Doesn't Get Rent Seeking

Will Hutton writes about football in the UK. It is pretty much all nonsense but consider this passage in particular:

Britain is a rent-seeker's paradise, as many more football clubs other than Birmingham City can testify. We have created a looters' charter, with football as a playpen, within which the super-rich can do what they want. A recent flash point is the price visiting fans are charged for their tickets. (Manchester City fans protested at the £62 they were asked to pay for today's game at Arsenal.) If the price of admission, along with travel, is prohibitive, then the game is played to only one set of supporters in the stadium with one set of chants. The experience of a game shrivels.

 The idea that football attracts rent seekers is preposterous. Three days ago Chelsea FC reported their first profit since Roman Abramovich took over, but in reality it was just an accounting quirk. Overall the Russian oligarch has spent around a billion pounds on Chelsea football club. Manchester City's owners have also spent an amount they will never claw back. Promotion and relegation ensure that clubs continually have to spend almost all their surplus cash on higher wages just to keep up with their rivals.

Owning a football club is not an opportunity to seek rent but rather a rich man's hobby which he may enjoy but won't profit from.

It is different in league systems with no promotion and relegation such as the major American leagues, because there the pay roll can be capped and the scarcity value of a place in the league can be leveraged to encourage extravagant subsidies from tax payers.

Cluelessness Or Comic Genius

The England rugby team's defence coach, Mike Ford, has quit. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph we get this:

Comments critical of Ford, given anonymously by some England ­players, were published, saying “his analysis was like a white wall of jargon”, “defensive and line-out drills were two to three years behind” and “he was full of pointless stats.”

Ford maintains these comments only represented “11 per cent” of the feedback and a number of players have been in contact to say as much. He is disappointed mostly because those who held critical views did not feel they could approach him.

{observation nicked from someone in the comments to the article}

Poor Phrasing

Just heard a radio bulletin describe sacked Sunderland FC boss Steve Bruce as "the first managerial casualty of the season".

I'm not saying anything.

Basil D'Olivera

The cricketer Basil D'Oliveira, whose inclusion in the England team ultimately led to the sporting boycott of Apartheid South Africa, has died aged 80.

I don't follow cricket but the behaviour of the South Africans at the time does demonstrate why that country was boycotted when other regimes that were even nastier have not been.


When D'Oliveira was added to the England team due to tour South Africa the host nation cancelled the tour. In other words they would only participate in sporting contests if their opponents agreed to implement apartheid on themselves. Unlike the USSR, Nazi Germany & China in the Olympic Games (or Zimbabwe and Pakistan in cricket) for example, they forced opposing teams to collaborate with their ideology.

Why Is Pakistani Cricket Corrupt?

There is an idea that international sports stars get paid vast amounts for very little work. In the case of the Pakistani cricket team it really is not true- the basic salary for international cricketers is £22000. While that is a considerable sum in Pakistan, it probably goes fast if you are travelling the world almost non stop in countries where the cost of living is much more that in Pakistan.

With millions of pounds being made through betting on cricket and so little being paid to the players it is not difficult to see why so many of their players were corrupt.

So the next question is why are they paid so little and the answer to that seems to be that their is no competitive market for cricket players- the money is largely in international cricket (the IPL is a positive step in the other direction.and players cannot simply offer their services to the highest bidder.

Despite football having teams from nations even more corrupt than Pakistan there are few credible reports of match fixing in international football because the clubs will pay players from poor countries what they are worth.

Think Of The Children

 Child cage fight organisers will not face police action- 

I suspect that calls for prosecution are because mixed martial arts is a relatively new discipline rather than because of the inherent dangers posed given that the same publications that condemn it are happy to give space to promote youth boxing, which also has the potential to cause real damage.

Super Injunctions

Ryan G**** is suing Twitter over revealing his affair with Imogen Thomas. I don't get this, if Twitter hadn't been served with an injunction then how could they be breaching it by claiming that R*** Giggs cheating on his wife.

The problem with these kind of injunctions is that by protecting his privacy it impinges on the right of the other party to freely talk about what they have done. Doing that requires an exceptional reason and protecting someone cheating on their wife is not worth it.

The arrest of Dominique Strauss Kahn also highlight why preventing the press reporting on the affairs of rich and powerful men is a bad idea. Without assuming that he is guilty of the crime he is being charged with- it is clear that his "private life" which the French press could not report, involved serially predatory behaviour against women- which is surely a very public matter.

Super Injunctions.

The former Big Brother "star" Imogen Thomas has been named as the woman who had an affair with a married footballer. It seems terribly unfair that he can, in getting an injunction, simultaneously portray her as a slapper whilst protecting him from being outed as a tabloid love rat.

Still she is apparently moving on with life and pursuing a music career- she's been doing gigs in the North West for some time already apparently.

Someone down the pub told me that.

Great Moments In Sportsmanship

Here:

After Pakistan’s defeat at the hands of India on Wednesday, Pakistan’s captain, Shahid Afridi, garnered praise from the Indian media for his graciousness in defeat.

That bolstered an aura of camaraderie created by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s decision to invite his Pakistani counterpart, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, to watch the game.

By Monday, that atmosphere had evaporated after Mr. Afridi returned home and made comments of a much different tenor.

Asked by a chat show host on Pakistan’s Samaa TV station about what it was like playing in India and the feeling he got from the Indian public, Mr. Afridi had this to say:

“If I speak truthfully, they just can’t have the kind of heart a Muslim has or a Pakistani has. I think they don’t have the sort of big hearts, pure hearts, Allah has given us.”

The comments elicited applause from a studio audience.

Makes our athletes look like Socrates in comparison.

Shades Of Gray.

As a committed anti-sexist I applaud Sky Sports for the decisiveness in sacking Andy Gray over sexist comment he made about the female assistant referee Sian Massey.

The embarrassment suffered by Massey should not be tolerated, however she wouldn't have had to endure that had she been in kitchen.

Food for thought.

Can I Claim Royalties Or Something?

There are plans to start broadcasting NFL games with a musical soundtrack. This is an idea that I had for football games years ago, except I was thinking more along the lines of giving each player their own individual tunes.

Title

I'm sceptical about the benefits of hosting big sporting events like the World Cup, so I'm not too upset that England did not win. However the brazenness of FIFAs corruption is startling. The fact the the two winners of the contests to host the 2018 & 2022 events (Russia and Qatar) were also the two countries whose shortcomings were highlighted by FIFA's own technical committee demonstrates that they could not possibly have believed that they were the best bids. Qatar isn't much more than a city state and absolutely tiny compared to any cup host since Uruguay in 1930. Russia has the opposite problem- utter vastness with poor transport links. The one thing the two countries do have in common is a willingness to bribe FIFA officials.


It also shows what a waste of time England's kowtowing to FIFA's crooks was, appeasing the likes of this guy by sending the England team halfway across the world is not only undignified but also a waste of time. They were always going to be outbid by even more overtly corrupt.

I suspect that by diminishing their prestige event so badly they have ensured that the future of the game lies with the clubs.

RIP Paul The Octopus

We should have seen it coming, well Paul should have given that he's psychic, but the eight legged soothsayer has passed away.

If a football pundit had to die why couldn't it have been Alan Shearer, at least that would have spared him from dying each week on Match of the Day.

Interesting Defence

Wouldn't it be less embarrassing just to admit the doping offence, even in the unlikely even that he is telling the truth?:

AMERICAN 400m Olympic champion LaShawn Merritt received a 21-month ban for an anabolic steroid which his lawyer claimed was contained in an over-the-counter penis enlargement product.

It's like trying to get yourself off a speeding fine by arguing that you were having sex with a sheep at the time.

It's That Bad!

How terrible must the athlete's village in Delhi be that the Scottish team were considering not going? I mean if a country that contains Dundee thinks it might be verging on the unlivable then we should take their word for it.

At The End Of The Day, Obviously, We're Over The Moon....

I don't know why anyone is surprised that professional athletes are more interesting in their Tweets than in post match interviews. The reason why post match interviews are so notoriously dull isn't because the interviewees are dull but because the questions that are asked give little room for anything but obvious answers, like "You must be pleased with your win today?"

The only way to provide interesting answers to questions like that is to do what Gordon Strachan does and answer sarcastically so as to highlight the ridiculous nature of the questions:

Reporter: Bang, there goes your unbeaten run. Can you take it?
Strachan: No, I'm just going to crumble like a wreck. I'll go home, become an alcoholic and maybe jump off a bridge. Umm, I think I can take it, yeah.

Reporter: Gordon, you must be delighted with that result?
Strachan: You're spot on! You can read me like a book.

Reporter: Welcome to Southampton Football Club. Do you think you are the right man to turn things around?
Strachan: No. I was asked if I thought I was the right man for the job and I said, "No, I think they should have got George Graham because I'm useless."