Premier League deserves red card but the GAA is the only game in town
Badly behaved players who get paid obscene amounts of money to regularly cheat, on and off the pitch, are not my idea of sporting heroes.
Yet the hype is relentless and we here in Ireland buy into it too, cheering players as heroes who are given frankly ridiculous pay packets of anything between £30,000 per week (that’s about £1.5 million each year) to sometimes as much as £200,000 each week (coming to about £10m), to dive, feign injury, and try deliberately to injure opponents.
I couldn’t really care too much about how they behave off the pitch, although I would prefer if my money wasn’t ending up in their pockets (as it does if you have a Sky Sports subscription or buy your kids replica club jerseys), but what we watch on the pitch is no longer joyful.
I am by no-means anti-soccer. Far from it. I grew up loving the game and the big matches and still do, in the right circumstances. When it is played properly football is a beautiful game to watch. I was lucky enough to have been in Wembley in May to see Barcelona play wonderful football to beat Manchester United in the European Champions League final. And even though Manchester United were outclassed that evening, manager Alex Ferguson deserved great credit for remaining true to a philosophy of attacking football, of always trying to win instead of trying to defend their way to success.
But English football is being ruined by an influx of excessive money, mainly through foreign owners who buy English clubs for vain or political reasons and who do not apply the normal rules of business to their expenditure. They have spent recklessly in attempts to buy instant success and in doing so have distorted the efforts of others who have tried to manage their finances prudently and build their teams over the medium term. It is happening throughout the top two divisions, but there are two outstanding culprits.
Chelsea was bad enough since Roman Abramovich took it over in 2003 but now there is Manchester City, funded by a favourite of the Saudi royal family. Chelsea bought some English success but fortunately all of the money spent on buying new players and paying them astronomical salaries has not bought their Russian owner the Champions League title he desires.
But it is also outrageous to think that anybody who is part of a football squad should be paid between £80,000 and £200,000 per week as is the case for most of the Manchester City players. People who work in far more important jobs are regarded as rich if they earn that in a full year and you can be sure that they don’t avail of the “incentives” and tricks that are available to make sure that the tax paid is minimised.
I know that there are many football pundits who justify such obscene amounts on the basis of the market rate, or the historical exploitation of players by unscrupulous employers. But that is facile. It is a distorted rate of pay that cannot be covered by the income a club earns from ticket sales, merchandising and sponsorship. The big clubs — and many smaller ones — are being subsidised by men with big egos and wallets on a basis that is unsustainable.
It forces other clubs to follow suit but I suspect that eventually, and this is long overdue, that English football is heading for the type of financial “correction” that is happening in the real world. The sums simply do not add up. Fans are ripped off all of the time in the attempt to cover as much cost as possible before restoring to the sugar daddies.
Match ticket prices are often outrageously high, as is the cost of merchandise. Sponsorship income has to be under threat as corporations reassess spending as fears of a double-dip recession grow. The one constant is TV income, because of long-term deals with Rupert Murdoch’s Sky.
There must also be the fear that football will alienate its fan base. Fans might like to see their clubs spending big on new players but if these same young men are too arrogant to sign an autograph or pose for a photograph, as many are, then discretion may be applied to whatever money is spent on supporting the chosen team.
It may be true that English football is preferable in some respects to the game as it was 25 years ago, blighted by hooliganism and racism. You took your life in your hands going to a game. But things are not as sanitised now as you are led to believe often. There is a hateful undercurrent to be found at many English games, a threat of violence often hanging in the air, despite the heavy police presence. It wasn’t the unavailability of scarce police resources that led to the cancellation of some matches, but the genuine fear that the gatherings at football matches could act as a catalyst for further violence.
A couple of weekends ago sports fans in Ireland had a choice of major live events they could attend in Dublin. On one side of the River Liffey, at the Lansdowne Road Aviva Stadium, some of the world’s most highly paid professional footballers — multi-millionaires most of them — took part in a non-competitive tournament, one that got the usual marketing hype. On the other side of the river players from eight Irish counties took part in Gaelic football games in the All-Ireland senior football championship. On the south side most of the players involved went through the motions and barely stretched themselves as they warmed up for real competitive football to be played from this month onwards. But the allure of the highly-paid stars of Manchester City, Inter Milan and Glasgow Celtic, and a collection of players from League of Ireland clubs attracted many to pay higher ticket prices than the GAA was charging for really competitive games.
PEOPLE who went to Croke Park got great value for money from players who are not even paid to represent their counties. The early play in the Kildare versus Donegal quarter final on the Saturday evening may have been far from memorable but the game as it went on into extra time was engrossing and the ending dramatic.
What was particularly noticeable was the extraordinary fitness of the amateur players. With extra time included they did 90 minutes as soccer players do regularly but if you add in the greater physical intensity of the challenges then the effort was even more remarkable. The next Kerry captain Darren O’Sullivan scored the sort of goal that would be replayed endlessly by Sky Sports had a soccer player managed it and Mayo overcame all-Ireland champions Cork with the type of underdog performance we once used to see in big English soccer games before the weight of money ruined it all.
Fortunately, Irish kids are tuned into all of this. A market research company did extensive research of Irish teenagers early last year and found that they found Irish rugby stars and GAA players far preferable to the surly overpaid English based soccer stars. I hope that the Irish soccer team qualifies for the 2012 Euro championships, because it could give the country a lift, but I suspect that it may fall to the rugby players in next month’s World Cup to do that. Whoever would once have thought that?
The Last Word with Matt Cooper is broadcast on 100-102 Today FM, Monday to Friday, 4.30pm to 7pm.
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