Tommy Martin: Transformation of football from dream factory to actual factory complete
Khaldoon Al Mubarak, Chairman of Manchester City, and Pep Guardiola with the Premier League trophy
In the latest instalment of the ongoing tale about how the game is officially gone comes the intrusion of another nefarious profession into the ranks of professional football.
Beset by avaricious agents, absurdly spectacled marketing men and laptop wielding data nerds, the old game had already long lost its magical sheen. But it has become apparent this summer that it is now subsumed entirely, lost in a fog of spreadsheets and calculations, provisions and revisions, profitability and sustainability, all leading to the question of when, exactly, did football become a branch of accountancy?
This one crept up on us. As Danny Blanchflower had it, we thought the game was about glory. Jumpers for goalposts, theatres of dreams, giant killings and last-minute winners. But now, as the deals are being done and the transfer window slams shut, it has become clear that it is really about things like book value, amortisation and, that great tautology, pure profit.
Proof that the accountants have taken over football has been accruing (accountancy word) over the last year or so since one of them spotted that the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules made it better for clubs to sell homegrown academy players than to actually have them play football. Because they had not spent any money buying them, any money received would be recorded by the giddy bean counters as, you’ve guessed it, pure profit.
And so, the transformation of professional football from dream factory to actual factory was complete. Transfers like Cole Palmer’s move from Manchester City to Chelsea last summer, Conor Gallagher’s from Chelsea to Atletico Madrid and Scott McTominay’s looming move from Manchester United to Napoli are all examples of the new game of accountancyball.
Getting rid of a young player who has been at a club since he was practically wearing nappies now carries the same emotional weight as an investment bank bundling up some financial securities or a multi-national conglomerate divesting itself of its Slovakian concrete manufacturing arm. Clubs treating players like assets on balance sheets is nothing new, but only now is it the actual object of the exercise. This chunk of pure profit, it’s one of our own.
The influence of the spreadsheet merchants is everywhere. Why are Manchester City in hot water, facing 115 charges for various breaches of Premier League financial rules? Because crack teams of accountants high up in Abu Dhabi skyscrapers told their dastardly bosses they could get around financial fair play by all manner of crafty means, like makey-uppy sponsorship deals and treating Roberto Mancini’s charisma as tax deductible. Allegedly.
The multi-club model, that other modern scourge, is all the accountants’ fault as well. It was they who saw through the age-old trope that football clubs were community institutions where ordinary people shuffled along every week to feel a part of something bigger than themselves.
What they actually were, it turns out, were franchise opportunities. The abacus wielders spotted the potential for scale at Big Club Inc by having lots of branches in various places where you could shift your product around as you saw fit. So, the good people of Salzburg, Troyes, Girona, Strasbourg and elsewhere now get to go along to their local outpost of whatever multi-club conglomerate has deigned to loom over their town like a giant Hollywood movie UFO and wonder if they still should scatter Dad’s ashes over the place.
It's important to note here that not all accountants are bad people. On the contrary, there are lots of good ones out there, helping coffee shop owners to not spend too much on Colombian arabica or turning around struggling childcare facilities by pointing out they could rent out their building for Zumba in the evenings.
And they have been around since the earliest days of human civilisation. Clay tablets dug up in modern Iraq tell us that the first form of writing was ancient Sumerian peoples keeping records of selling each other bushels of barley and suchlike, meaning accountancy is basically the second oldest profession.
But I’m betting that top Mesopotamian bookkeepers weren’t advising their clients to sell their cow, the one they had raised up from when she was a little calf for the purpose of providing milk for the family, and buying in its place another, inferior cow – who, for the purposes of this exercise, we’ll call Cow Felix – that had been around lots of other villages and produced very little in the way of milk, or assists for milk for that matter.
The relationship between football and accountancy reminds me of that old line about the shortcomings of rock journalists – that writing about music was like dancing about architecture. I’m guessing that football was always subject to the strictures of debits and credits to some degree but was largely able to ignore the nebbish auditors through sheer force of reckless charisma.
I preferred the days when football clubs were great hot messes, carrying on like drunken sailors on shore leave, bitterly regretting an ill-advised splurge the next morning but only till the next South American striker with a colourful private life came along. Sometimes they would go bust, but they would never really go bust, just sort of stagger back into the saloon the next day wearing a new moustache and missing several teeth.
These were the days when newspapers would write about a manager having a transfer warchest, and it used to be satisfying to think of that as an actual chest, full of doubloons and jewel-encrusted goblets, which he would present to the manager of another team in exchange for the services of their star player, like a dowry for a princess.
But then I found out that there were no warchests and there were barely even transfers. Instead newspapers started to write about this thing called amortisation, where a player was moved from one club to another and his value was written down over the course of his contract, like he was a tractor or a refrigeration unit.
And so, it turns out that the game is not truly gone, it is only amortising.
