03.05.2006
Winners need not apply
The fans' alienation is reflected in the call for the new English coach, says Lawrence Parker
Luiz Felipe Scolari, coach of Portugal's national football team, has had the temerity to turn down the Football Association's offer of managing the England team, claiming the British media's intrusion into his private life put him off. Alternatively, Scolari could have been playing hardball with the Portuguese to win a vastly improved contract when his present one expires in July.
Whatever the truth may be as to Scolari's intentions, the reaction to the FA's initial choice for England coach reveals some of the deep sickness that blights our 'national' game. Scolari won the World Cup in 2002 with his native Brazil. Keep that little fact in your mind as you read a battalion of glasshouse-bound English commentators, managers and players throwing stones.
Gary Lineker, who never won anything with England, said Scolari would be a "strange" appointment because of the "obvious footballing differences between Brazil and England". The most obvious difference being that Brazil win more games than England. David Gold, chairman of Birmingham City, a small-time club recently relegated from the Premiership, said: "No matter how brilliant a coach someone from abroad may be, it is a betrayal of Englishmen and England fans." So, no brilliance here, thank you very much. Harry 'Houdini' Redknapp, manager of Portsmouth, a man who specialises in narrowly escaping relegation (essentially an exciting brand of mediocrity), said: "I would like to have seen one of the England lads get it. There are some great young managers in this country who could do the job, no problem." But not that many who have won the World Cup, Harry. A significant number of England supporters have repeated these mantras on various phone-ins and websites.
The main English contenders, Steve McLaren (Middlesbrough manager and assistant to current 'passionless' England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson), Stan Allardyce (Bolton manager) and Alan Curbishley (currently coming to the end of his tenure as Charlton boss) have all presided over middling Premiership clubs. McLaren now appears to be the favourite and his stock has risen as Middlesbrough have progressed to the final of the Uefa Cup. However, his team's Premiership form has been patchy down the years (they currently lie in 15th place) and it was only in February this year that Boro fans were ready to drown McLaren in boiling oil following a 4-0 home defeat by Aston Villa.
None of the top six teams in the premiership are managed by an Englishman. The FA have apparently already approached Arsenal's French manager, Arsène Wenger (an excellent choice), who turned them down; and if they have not seriously considered Chelsea's Portuguese manager, José Mourinho, then they are very short-sighted indeed (not that they would be likely to get him either). Commodities shift around the globe in the international economy. Unsurprising then that commodities such as football coaches and players move across boundaries too and that chairmen and FA executives, with an eye on glory as a means to a healthy balance sheet, scout high and low for the best.
Reading the meaning of this is a bit more sophisticated than merely branding elements of the football establishment (in this case, not the FA) and a significant section of England supporters as little Englanders. As I have stated previously in relation to the passing of George Best, football is saturated with a sense of loss after undergoing a process of extreme commodification over the last 15 years ('The Best of times', December 1 2005). Money talks louder than ever. This is reflected in the current dominance of Chelsea under Russian billionaire chairman Roman Abramovich and the tiering of the Premiership into a mirror of a financial league table (which means a certain amount of uncompetitive football).
The packaging of this product for television and the gentrified classes has meant the eradication of football's traditional working class terrace culture in the name of getting rid of racism and hooliganism. Physically and culturally, today's commodified premiership football ground can feel like an alien place to supporters schooled in the proletarian playgrounds of the 1970s and 1980s. In the context of talking about having to fight against the National Front in the 1980s, a Leeds United fan says: "Oh, I don't go any more. I can't afford it and I stopped enjoying it as much anyway. When we were going we were in the middle of division two with 14,000 there and it was great - despite everything. It was a working class game and it's not any more" (N Varley Parklife: a search for the heart of football London, 2000, p151).
It is important not to sentimentalise this issue, in that British football was never a working class game in any purist sense (for example, consider how football grounds have always been a place for the state to flex its muscles), but it is certainly true to say that in the past it was a more genuinely contested social space. This loss affects everyone associated with the game, not least the owners and officials currently concerned with falling attendances, uncompetitive football and an over-priced, over-hyped product.
This is why the demand for an English manager for the England football team strikes such a deep chord. We need 'one of us', someone with whom we have an affinity and share a culture, unlike a contemporary game with which it is increasingly hard to have any meaningful relationship (except in the alienated sense of being a 'customer', 'consumer' or 'viewer'). David Gold expressed this desire well: "We want an English manager that we can relate to. We all support the England team and part of that is an English manager."
Nothing expresses the ideological sickness of our current society better than this expression of a positive desire in the guise of such stupid narrowness, which only makes the 'England for the English' demand more seductive. If Sven-Goran Eriksson's team actually win the World Cup (increasingly unlikely with the injury worries around Wayne Rooney and Michael Owen) then everyone will undoubtedly be calling for extra helpings of Swede. After all, it's a funny old game.