It is a truth universally acknowledged that Premier League football clubs fleece their paying customers. We, the fans, are prisoners of the rapacious owners who have the laws of supply and demand horribly skewed in their favour. Our only countervailing, and somewhat feeble, power is to envelop them with suspicion and rudeness.
This week Manchester United – for decades the number one club in England – revealed its plans for a new £2 billion pound stadium. This was not greeted with thunderous approval. Within minutes there was an outpouring of dissent. The Norman Foster-designed stadium would be a “circus”, and the sheer scale of the enterprise made no sense – not least because the club had just claimed financial pressure as a reason for getting rid of a bunch of low-paid staff, and removing free lunches for many others.
Angry fans can protest all they want; the truth is, they can never leave. The foundational fact of Football Economics 101 from which all else follows is that once you have picked your team, you’re totally stuck. I don’t know anybody – even if provoked by endless disappointments – who’s switched midstream to the club down the road. And let me make a novel case: instead of grinching and whinging about our teams and the Premier League, we should celebrate them as a sporting joy – and a national asset.
As a child barely able to kick a ball I plumped for Tottenham. They were very good then and I was too young to understand that this was not, very much not, a permanent state of affairs. They are now both super under-performing and apparently super expensive. But no matter – the relationship between a paying supporter and their team is often ludicrously intense, irrational and unavoidable. Bill Shankly, a great and witty Liverpool manager over 50 years ago, famously declared: “Some people think football is life and death. I assure you it’s much more serious than that.” Take it down a notch and this next one gets nearer: “Out of all the unimportant things, football is the most important,” an epigram attributed to various sophisticated foreign football managers as well as – happy thought – to Pope John Paul II (a goalkeeper in his youth).
The charge sheet against the individual clubs and the dolts who run the Premier League is long. Forget all the Sturm und Drang about VAR (the video review system supposed to sort out contentious refereeing decisions). The heart of the matter is their apparently callous behaviour towards us – their captives. For a start, ticket prices are higher in real terms than they were three decades ago – that is, around the time the Premier League replaced the English First Division – about £1,300 for a season ticket for a decent seat at Tottenham, and well over £2,000 for a top of the range affair.
Since the Premier League era began, football, we are ceaselessly told, has lost its romance. The link between clubs shelling out big money and those self-same clubs carting off the silverware is obvious. The fiendishly complicated rules designed to constrain the spending of the big boys are mired in legal technicalities, and it takes forever – longer even than a VAR decision – to get to an outcome, not that any ruling has reversed the concentration of football power. From time to time a club gets punished. But the really big boys (think Manchester City) keep wriggling out of meaningful trouble.
And then there are the moral agonies inflicted on fans with even mildly liberal inclinations. A large proportion of the top Premier League clubs are owned by governments with lamentable human rights records, or by unappealing business titans, or soul-less absentees, all of whom are naturally keen to wash away their various and many sins by chucking billions at a Premier League football team and acquiring serious brand real estate. Doubtless some of these owners and their acolytes know the difference between, say, Harry Kane and Harry Potter – but there’s a lot of reputation management going on. And it’s on a grand scale because English football (and apologies here to the rest of the UK where football is played but with far less money and glamour sploshing around) is a worldwide product.
But there is another side to this – because the Premier League is incomparably superior to the “good old days”. I don’t doubt that some people have been “priced out” from watching their team play – and that is a bad thing – but not many know that the average ticket price for an American NFL game is 300 per cent higher. I watch enough live football to know that it is not a posh, bourgeois pursuit. The food on offer as you approach the ground is short on avocados and long on lethal-looking sausages. The accents are varied – probably more foreign and posher than in the 1980s – but then again England itself is more cosmopolitan and more middle-class.
We should also be careful about what we’re romanticising here. The crowd is still capable of great rudeness – towards the referees, opposing players, its own players, and, in Tottenham’s case, the chairman. But the racism has largely gone (what remains should be stamped on ferociously), the stadiums are safer and I have no nostalgia for the atmosphere of incipient violence that accompanied a walk to and from the ground 40 years ago.
Nowadays, the standard of play is often breath-taking. The games are competitive: and there is no immutable football law that says if you are at the top – you stay at the top. Manchester United glory – which seemed as if it would be inflicted on the rest of us in perpetuity – is long gone. The minnows can, and do, beat the plutocrats. English insularity – and the fact that we had invented the game – led to decades of bogus claims that the top rung of English club football was the finest in the world. That was rubbish – but it isn’t now. The influx of foreign players and managers has elevated the spectacle.
The TV rights provide a great deal of the money that generates the quality – worth about £3 billion a year. A lot of that goes to the players, now hugely rich compared to the era of Bobby Charlton and Bobby Moore. But a lot of it has gone to build stadiums that are safer, larger and infinitely better than the rickety and often dangerous structures of the supposedly halcyon era. And in some areas, it’s led to urban regeneration nearby – East Manchester around City’s Etihad stadium for one.
If the proposed new Manchester United stadium works out, it will be a magnificent piece of infrastructure, generating serious economic activity and creating a lot of jobs. It will add to the lustre of the city – and the Premier League. We have few world-beating industries or companies. The Premier League – moral conundrums and all – amply qualifies, and I love it.
[See also: How darts conquered Britain]
Content from our partners
