Monday, November 08, 2010
RAYMOND WILLIAMS, the Marxist scholar, had an interesting take, not on sport per se, but on people’s attitudes – one that could easily be applied to the non-stop erotic cabaret on offer across the water in the Premier League.
Williams said once that the great achievement of the bourgeoisie was a confidence trick: that its concerns and interests were the concerns and interests that should naturally occupy the minds of right-thinking people everywhere, and that this was a state of affairs beyond question.
Does that sound familiar?
WHENEVER this column hears about the financial rewards on offer to the stars of the Premier League, Williams’ notion comes to mind. That the latest pantomime, the hilarious Wayne Rooney contract imbroglio, should narrow in with laser-like focus on Rooney’s remuneration only proves the case.
Not only does every observer know what Rooney is to earn, it is the golden fact, the clinching evidence for both the prosecution and the defence – and nobody sees anything unusual in that.
Raymond Williams clearly wasted his time as a theorist on economics; he should have blogged as a soccer know-all.
ECONOMICS would be a fair help to understanding the predicament of another club in the Premier League as well.
What does it tell you about the current state of the sports world when Liverpool supporters hail one group of American corporate raiders simply because they’re different to the last group of American corporate raiders?
The New England Sports Ventures group is notorious in Boston for hiking prices but Boston Red Sox fans were desperate for success after almost a century in the wilderness. When John Henry and co hike prices at Anfield, you’ll know how desperate Liverpool fans are.
ECONOMICS also dictated there cent sale of Nobby Stiles’ medal collection, which was acquired by Manchester United for its museum. That Stiles should cash in his chips is no surprise; he’s the eighth member of England’s 1966 World Cup-winning squad to do so.
THE fact that we had to endure hand-wringing commentary about the indignities visited on Stiles by the sale. Why? Because he lined out in the 60s, an era when players were known by the number of caps rather than the zeroes in their pay packet.
OF course, Stiles didn’t earn one million pounds sterling a month, which we are told with much breathless emphasis is soon to be Wayne Rooney’s take-home pay, didn’t make him a better person than his modern-day counterparts.
Then again, Stiles didn’t set himself up as a modern day arbiter of morals like Rio Ferdinand, lampooned mercilessly in The Observer some time ago for speaking out against knife crime among English kids in the same week as he described a super-violent video game as his favourite pastime.
YET in a way we feel sorry for the likes of Ferdinand, witless yobs whose every step outside the confines of the dressing room is subject to scrutiny and investigation. That level of examination wasn’t a problem for Stiles and his contemporaries, and many of them escaped scot-free from scrapes, big and small.
Is that progress – the 21st scouring of the private lives of youngsters versus the discretion, or hypocrisy, of the silence of the 60s?
ALONG with Raymond Williams, another quote from academia which enjoys favoured-nation status here is evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s warning to expect athletic excellence and nothing else from your sporting heroes.
But consider a moral environment in which Manchester United’s near neighbours City were involved with Thaksin Shinawatra of Thailand, whose government faced allegations of electoral fraud, corruption, authoritarianism, treason, conflicts of interest, acting non-diplomatically, and muzzling the press.
BAD enough, you might say, until you consider the comments of City chief executive Garry Cook: "Is he (Shinawatra) a nice guy? Yes. Is he a great guy to play golf with? Yes. Has he got the finances to run a club? Yes... whether he’s guilty of something over there, I can’t worry too much about... Morally, I feel comfortable in this environment."
FULL DISCLOSURE: Cook later recanted his comments and expressed his regrets. So that’s fair enough.
GOULD, the scientist mentioned above, was a baseball fanatic and we feel it’s telling that American sports investors, or speculators, are showing such interest in the Premiership.
The point has often been made that contrary to general belief, the major sports leagues in the States, for all the free-market ultra-capitalist lip service, resemble nothing so much as socialism in sport, with collective bargaining, salary caps, rigid broadcasting agreements and so on.
Little wonder, then, that the Yanks see the dog-eat-dog soccer divisions of England – which feature relegation, an alien concept in the States – as ripe for the plucking: forgive the mixed metaphors, but it’s a buffalo carcass waiting for the vultures.
FINALLY, and neatly, Nobby Stiles’ medals were bought by Manchester United for the club museum.
The cost was almost the same as a week’s wages for Wayne Rooney, but for the purposes of making sweeping generalisations about morals and economics, not close enough.
Soccer players. Can’t they ever get it right?
* with apologies to Francois Girard and his Glenn Gould movie.
* Contact: michael.moynihan@examiner.ie Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx
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