04.08.2004

Money is the name of the game

The whole transitory saga of Sven Eriksson will be gone in a short while, thinks Patrick Presland. The gigantic cash nexus we call football will remain

First take a handful of power, money, sex and football, cover the dish with a good dollop of hypocrisy and there you go - the perfect recipe for a red-top tabloid journalist’s dream. Front and back pages sorted, and off to the boozer. Only a few weeks ago it was David Beckham who got the treatment, in case anyone remembers. Now it is the turn of Sven-Goran Eriksson, the England manager. Or perhaps we should call him ‘dirty Sven’ (get the allusion to East Enders?) or just Sven the ‘love-rat’? Suddenly ‘Soho Square’ is a brand new soap opera centred on the grey men in grey suits who comprise the Football Association, the pitiful ruling body of a game that arose from the people and is for the people.

Why, I hear you ask, does a communist paper like the Weekly Worker trouble itself to write about such a subject? Simple. Forget the bollocks about “the beautiful game” and all the advertising hype. Whether you love it or loathe it (and I can already hear the collective groans of some dear Welsh comrades who have this strange obsession with the oval ball), football is the people’s game in this country: it is our game. Football belongs to the working class. Many thousands of us play it on a Saturday or Sunday morning in the local park or playing field. Thousands of others likewise follow their ‘own’ clubs (local or adopted) at home and away, spending money hard-earned in the factory or office to get there. Millions watch the game on TV and derive great pleasure from it. There are even people like this writer who think that Stoke City will make it into the premiership this year - sad, perhaps, but we’ll see.So, what has been going on? For those readers who have been on holiday at the North Pole or wherever you cannot get a copy of the News of the World, let us first give a very brief summary. Eriksson and his colleague, the since resigned chief executive of the FA, Mark Palios (£400,000 pa), who had a not bad career with Tranmere Rovers and Crewe Alexander and then turned to accountancy) were “allegedly” “sleeping” (not simultaneously, one gathers) with a certain lady called Faria Alam (£35,000 pa), personal assistant to FA director David Davies. None of the people involved was married. They were consenting adults.

So far so ordinary. Office ‘romances’ are not exactly unknown, even in Fleet Street. But the word was put about and, given the background motivation and the silly season, the usual media circus began. Soho Square first issued a blanket denial, but then had to recant in the case of their doomed chief executive. “Adios Palios”, as one of the rags put it. But worse than this was the fact that Soho Square’s (also now departed) communications guru Colin Gibson had earlier tried with ultimate naivety to do a deal with the News of the World along the lines of ‘spare Palios and we’ll give you all the dirt you need to nail Sven’.

Eriksson’s own case is more complex. Not a man who normally discusses his private life (you know, things like his tabloid-reported liaison with Ulrika Jonsson a couple of years ago), he was “distressed” and issued the following statement: “I wish to state unequivocally that ... I have at no time either categorically confirmed or denied or any relationship with Faria Alam.” Lawyers can make a lot of money out of that. But the key question is not whether he did the ‘dirty deed’ itself (as if anyone cares), but whether he subsequently lied about it. Meanwhile there are reportedly two other uncomfortable senior executives of the FA likely to be named as Ms Alam’s bedmates. Asking price for the whole story? Perhaps £1 million and rising.

By the time this paper goes to bed, England may well be without a manager and the tawdriness of the whole tale will soon be forgotten. But let us take a moment or two to reflect on the real facts about the story, which has nothing to do with ‘bonking’ but everything to do with the politics and economics of football, and with the nature of sport in capitalist society.

In the first place, as one FA insider put it, “If Sven had won us the European Championship, no one would have cared a jot about this.” That is the reality. So you can forget about all the moralistic crap from journalists such as those on the Daily Mail who condemn Eriksson as “ a serial womaniser of the most sordid order” and warn us that “the FA must take drastic action to restore decent values and exemplary leadership to the game that has become the passion of almost every man, woman and, most importantly, child in this country”. If England had lifted the European Cup, none of this would have mattered. But they didn’t, and that is what the politics of Sven’s situation is all about.

How do you assess his record? Correct me if I’m wrong, but in their last 23 fixtures, England have lost only three times. After his recruitment by Adam Crozier (now busy ‘rationalising’ the Royal Mail), who brought in tons of fresh revenue to the FA but also presided over a spiralling of costs, Eriksson appeared vindicated by England’s smashing of Germany 5-1 in Munich. But what about the 2002 World Cup in Japan, where England could not manage to beat a 10-man Brazilian side in the quarter finals? They have managed to reach the quarter-finals of the World Cup and the European Championships. Most recently, they dropped out after a penalty shoot-out against Portugal in Euro 2004. On one level, you can’t blame the manager for the fact that some of his players cannot put penalties away. But on the other hand, how did England get into such a position? By tactical ineptitude, excessive cautiousness; defending far too deeply in a forlorn effort to hold on to advantage, a generally negative and passive attitude - all strategic errors that are finally the manager’s responsibility. Yet if you listen to the team, players like Beckham himself and Frank Lampard, to name only a couple, they know better than us about the value of Sven’s leadership and his ability, contrary to the ice-man image, to galvanise the squad. A very complex equation.

At Thursday’s emergency meeting of the FA’s ruling committee all this will be secondary, if indeed mentioned at all. What these pin-striped apparatchiks of the people’s game are concerned with is money, especially the money derived from Sky TV. Money will be the unspoken but ever present item at the top of the agenda. For remember that Eriksson’s dalliance with Chelsea (cosy chats with Abramovich and Peter Kenyon) led the FA to dissuade Sven from defecting to club management by renewing his contract on improved terms until 2008. The man ‘earns’ something like £4 million a year and the bill he could extract for constructive dismissal could therefore amount to somewhere around £14 million, maybe bankrupting the FA in the process.

According to the celebs’ favourite publicist, Max Clifford, Ms Alam stands to make around £1 million by telling us just who she ‘slept’ with and when. Sexist headline writers are already calling her the ‘real FA trophy’. Pathetic. The latest issue of Now magazine finds it timely to produce a double-page spread about the “style gaffes” of Sven’s reportedly ex-partner Nancy Dell’Olio. If only she had worn something different.

Such are the decadent, sickening times we live in. Times when in the darkness of the night you ask yourself: why do I go on struggling for socialism in a world that appears to be drowning itself in a self-made mire of mindless trivia? But that is exactly the point. Where does alienation come from? From the internal recognition - leave aside all ideology to begin with - that we are divorced from what we make, that our labour-power is exercised not in our own interest but in that of the boss. This makes our free time even more precious, a time when we can not only relax from the labours of the working day but begin to express and define ourselves as individual human beings.

And sport, whether you play it yourself or just derive pleasure from watching it (live or on the box), is an important part of our experience as human beings - as a collectivity. It need hardly be said that under capitalism sport in general and football especially amounts to no more than a great generator of profit. Think of Manchester United (though I try not to): the income derived from season ticket sales (it takes longer to get one than the current 15-year waiting list for MCC membership) runs into millions. Then there’s the huge take from merchandise, such as club replica kit, which changes surprisingly often and the kids, naturally enough, want the latest. Parents can tell me exactly how much that costs, but I am sure it is a good deal of money.

The fact is that we, the working class, actually pay through the nose for our big sports to continue. Without us paying punters there would be no premiership, no Sky near-monopoly. So am I proposing, like a good old anarchist, that we vote with our feet on this question? No. The whole transitory saga of Sven, for example, will be gone in a short while, whatever the outcome. The gigantic cash nexus we call football will remain. Forget the idea that a recession will bring things back to the Halcyon days when cloth-capped workers stood and watched Stan Matthews take on all opposition for a few bob and a packet of fags. Those days will obviously never come back. Football, like every other aspect of our lives, has been devoured by that Moloch we call the market and changed for ever.

Until, that is, we decide that enough is enough. Until we struggle for a society where people say that work - yes, work - creative labour is humankind’s greatest need, work as a means of self-expression and self-fulfilment. And afterwards recreation of all kinds, and among it sport - football, of course, included and probably near the top of the list; whether as a player or spectator you derive joy from a game that is played not for £50,000 a week, as happens in the current market, but from the simple joy of the sport itself. It may seem a long way off. It is. But that is our socialist vision and we live for it.