WHAT ABAHT the STRIKERS?!

I know precious little of football. I didn’t watch any of the World Cup matches. Had I been caught up in the tournament, I am sure I would have followed the South American teams, who seem to exhibit a flair for and relish in the game always singularly lacking in the English and apparently in some of the other European sides this time too.


Tevez scored for Argentina against Mexico in the World Cup yesterday

Paradoxically, I take a mild academic interest in results, always checking the progress of the teams from the county where I was born and brought up: Northampton Town, Kettering, Rushden and Diamonds. When the last named is referred to on television, it is always mispronounced. It’s not “Rush-ton”, it’s “Ruzh-den”. Northampton are known as The Cobblers, in recognition of the area’s traditional industry, now almost entirely departed. None of these teams troubles the headline writers very often. That George Best scored his double hat-trick in a cup match against Cobblers is more apt to be invoked than the little club’s famous defeat of Arsenal in a different cup year. Cobblers spent one season in the top flight – I remember a report on them for Sportsview in which a young Frank Bough motored up the M1 to interview the legendary manager Dave Bowen. They were relegated with a higher number of points than any previously downgraded team had ever won.

I may not know much about football, but I know a thing or two about capitalism. From what I see and hear, the many commentators now being wise after the event about the “problems” of the England side are obsessed with trivia. “Capello refuses to resign ahead of crisis meeting with FA chairman” declares a headline in The Guardian’s sports section; reporters are so self-important that they expect announcements at press conferences before any of the powers-that-be have been consulted, rather as they expect cabinet ministers to reveal the date of the next general election in media interviews. But the identity of the manager is not the key to raising England’s game or that of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.


Girls playing urban soccer in Peru

What has gone wrong, it seems to me, is that capitalism noticed that football was a killing waiting to be made. Rupert Murdoch saw that a man like himself with bottomless pockets could pretty much corner the market in televising routine as well as big occasion matches. By selling the advertising within and around the broadcasting of live games at a premium rate, he pumped up the price of football. The clubs themselves began to rent out everything visible to the cameras as platforms for advertising. So-called player power, whereby the players took on phalanxes of agents and media consultants and held out for grotesque transfer fees, quickly turned the Premier League into one where most of the players were multimillionaires.

Awash with broadcasting money, the big clubs became easy prey for speculators and asset-strippers who saw them as cash-cows to use as a hedge against debts. Foreign businesses, not constrained by British regulation, bought in heavily and landed all the big clubs with staggering levels of debt.

That this ludicrous situation has been allowed to come about is because the running of the game has been so ham-fisted. The Football Association, the Football League and the Football Conference have allowed the boards of the Premier League clubs and the agents of the international star players to ride roughshod over the best interests of the game as a whole, out of an unregulated desire to make quick and easy profit. The bankrollers of football, like capitalists everywhere, are not concerned about the long-term good of the field in which they operate, only about the short-term benefit of the share-holders.

The result is that the grassroots of the game have been pitifully starved of support. The bringing on of young local players was handled more professionally half a century ago by retired professionals and other sharp-nosed volunteer scouts than it is now. Nobody is suggesting a fantasy return to some Corinthian ideal, just something other than an asylum where the inmates have taken over.

The FA needs to put its foot down or, if necessary, to be given the new powers to put its foot down. There should be a swingeing levy on every transaction (broadcasting rights, advertising deals, transfer fees, wages, golden handshakes), the proceeds of which are invested directly into the game at schoolboy and girl level, developing the skills and attitudes of young players with coaching of the highest quality. The FA should place a cap on the number of players that a club may acquire from overseas, say five at any one time. The current Chelsea squad (as of a fortnight ago) was 52 strong; just ten of them are English-born. It’s 14 years since the club had a fulltime manager who was English and until that time every manager in the club’s history had been English or Scottish, with Danny Blanchflower’s brief tenure in the late 1970s as a single Northern Irish exception.


Metropolitan street football in Brazil

But there is clearly a cultural problem too. In any poor country, you see small boys spending all the hours of daylight kicking a ball about in any open space, however confined. Across the main road that runs past our house, there is a housing estate with plenty of greensward. Though plenty of the households have children and many of the houses were hung with the flag of St George until yesterday evening, it’s pretty rare that you see much football played on the greens. Two or three times a summer, there might a dozen or so boys playing quite hard between two improvised goals. More often, two or three are mucking about with a ball and one goalmouth. But it’s a relatively rare event, certainly not as frequently as once a week. No doubt this generation of kids thinks of games as something you play on a screen, sat on your arse. The football they play is doubtless more likely to be Wii than WW.