A FINE SAVE

Wild claims are swilling around that the four national football teams’ wholly predictable failure to qualify for the next “major” international tournament will cost the United Kingdom anything up to £2 billion in lost revenue. What utter drivel.

In the first place, the drunks who follow these teams to their matches (the so-called “fans”) will be purchasing their liquor at home instead of in some hitherto blameless European town. The amount of alcohol needed to sing as badly as these “fans” do is obviously prodigious, so already the home economy is quids in.

Much of the estimated loss is accounted for by pub sales: apparently thousands of people take themselves off to public houses to watch these football matches. Why they would want to stand for the duration on a carpet that is sticking to their footwear, barely able to see the screen of the pub’s television or hear anything above the hubbub beats me, but then I rarely go to pubs, even for a quiet half. Is this the legendary “atmosphere”? You can so keep it. Anyway, the only “atmosphere” really worth savouring would be at the ground where the match is being played. Even I can understand that.

What is certain is that this combination of drink and football, frequently at a point in the day far from the mid-evening because of the time difference between the venue and the viewer, is responsible for a vast amount of absenteeism, both during the match and thereafter. Assuredly, many (perhaps most) employers and supervisors take a liberal view of such lax practices at work – after all, they will be drunk and shouting along with the rest. It would be instructive to determine how many workers who have no interest in football and who hence stay back and toil diligently during the long hours of euphoria and/or self-pity and subsequent recovery are allowed comparable time off of their own choosing, to attend an opera at Glyndebourne or an exhibition at Tate Modern, for instance, or just to kick back.

But my larger point is that this mass absenteeism must also go into the calculation of lost revenue. It would be fascinating to have an authoritative and persuasive estimate of the revenue that would be lost to the nation if it ever happened again that one of the national football teams got within a match of actually winning one of these oh-so-important trophies. Perhaps, like the 1966 World Cup final, it would take place on a Saturday, thereby considerably diminishing the impact on absenteeism (Sunday for millions is a day of rest, i.e. sleeping it off). This would not be the case, however, if a British team were to reach a final played in, for instance, Israel.

Apart from absenteeism (surely the biggest single cost of national success or near-success at football), there would be many smaller hidden costs: police and bar-staff overtime; the repair of damage caused by drunks; the comparative losses sustained by all manner of enterprises that would have enjoyed a regular day’s business but which will have lost takings because so many customers are detained elsewhere; the immediate pressure on the health service caused by exploding bladders and other binge-drinking damage and the long-term pressure on the health and other public services caused by the hastening of the effects (physical, mental, social) of alcoholism – all these should be factored in.

Finally, there is the unquantifiable cost of the embarrassing behaviour that premature celebration engenders. At the outset of the knockout stage of the last World Cup, Radio Times published a graphic of Beckham and his team-mates holding aloft the Jules Rimet trophy that they were to get nowhere near winning in practice. Such infantile hubris erodes still further the dwindling, vestigial regard in which Radio Times is held by those who remember a time when it had some status (not since the 1970s). Put into the calculation, then, the declining market value of Radio Times.

After the qualifying match wherein Israel’s team (vainly) eased the pressure on England with an unexpected win, the still callow Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, who was in Telaviv, appeared before news cameras to “thank” Israel’s foreign minister on behalf of “all Englishmen”. It was hard to gauge what was most embarrassing, the assumption that “all” Englishmen are as soft-brained as Miliband evidently is, the assumption that only men are interested in football or the assumption that anyone in Israel or anywhere else in the world gives a flying fuck about England’s bloody football team. So Miliband’s stock in the next-leader race declines and the bookies notice a falling off. At any rate, the Israeli foreign minister’s face seemed to suggest so; and who can blame her?