16.05.2013

Alex Ferguson: Icon of football’s big money

The departure of Alex Ferguson from football management has generated more column inches than a royal wedding. Harley Filben asks why

The unthinkable has happened. Referees will sleep easier in their beds. Rival teams will dare to relax after the clock strikes 88 minutes. Stress levels on newspaper sports desks will plummet.

Alex Ferguson has announced his retirement, and we are all the poorer for it - Manchester United fans, supporters of rival clubs whose torture of Glaswegian voodoo dolls has come to naught over the last quarter-century, and the very small proportion of those who follow English football with no interest either way. Doubters as to the significance of this event should simply consult last Thursday’s papers (May 9), accompanied by a shower of pull-out supplements that makes press coverage of a royal wedding look positively restrained.

Football, like most things worth paying attention to in human culture, has an importance wildly disproportionate to the actual stakes of the game itself. Fundamentally, it is a contest between two teams of a seemingly arbitrary size to see which of them can most competently hoik an ersatz pig’s bladder between two goalposts without the use of their hands. It has its roots in pre-modern peasant sports, though the modern game is unrecognisable by comparison.

Its power, like the power of all mass culture, comes from its ability to take a pre-modern set of rituals with its attendant structure of feeling and industrialise it - kicking a ball has become a religion and an outpost of finance capital, a heroic epic and a bureaucratic farce; the feats of its protagonists inspire in the audience ecstasy and abjection alike, with the alternation between the two set to the schizophrenic pace of the mass media.

It was never separable from the broader history in which it is imbricated, but football is probably now more heteronomous than ever. The significance of Alex Ferguson lies in his part in bringing this state of affairs about.

Ferguson began his managerial career in 1974, at the relatively young age of 32. He ends it at the exceptionally old age (in a profession not noted for being especially relaxing) of 71. That period, just shy of four decades, spans the prehistory, gestation and birth of the current epoch of English football - what you might call its financialisation. His relation to this transition is two-sided: Ferguson was carried along by events that, in his quarter-century tenure at Manchester United, he helped to shape.

Born to a Glasgow dockworkers’ family, his humble origins are well-known, as are his socialist convictions - while barely visible in recent decades, except by adding additional vituperation to already existing grudges (the spat with Real Madrid over Cristiano Ronaldo being a case in point), Ferguson’s left views at one point in his youth brought him into the orbit of the International Socialists, forerunners of today’s Socialist Workers Party, along with several others among the Glasgow dockers.

This flirtation does not seem to have survived far into his playing career, as an accomplished striker at the top tier of Scottish football with Dunfermline and Rangers, among others. After making the switch to management, success came quickly - he led his second club, St Mirren (the only club ever to sack him), from third-tier doldrums to the Scottish First Division title in four years. He then took control at Aberdeen, and in his second season steered them to the League title, a feat he was to repeat twice, with a European Cup into the bargain, during his time there.

His move to Manchester United saw little success in initial years, resulting in fans calling for him to be dismissed; winning the FA Cup in 1990 eased the pressure somewhat. It would be three more years before he brought his team to a league title.

Moneyball

By then, however, it was a different league. The Football Association made the decision to spin off the top-flight division into its own, semi-autonomous institution: the Premiership. This was no superficial name-change; the Premier League was a limited company in its own right, and represented a compromise between the top English clubs (10 of which had previously threatened to break away and form a ‘super league’) and the FA.

The reason was painfully simple: money. It was flowing into the game far faster than in the 1980s, particularly due to rising revenues from television. The Premiership turned this flow into a torrent. A year before, Rupert Murdoch had added a sports channel to his Sky satellite TV service; he pounced on the fledgling league with a £302 million bid for exclusive broadcasting rights (Sky and others have recently paid an astonishing £6 billion for rights over the next three years, which tells you everything about where football is going).

Ferguson’s United, by accident or design, ended up in lock-step with football history. Ever since, Man U has unquestionably been the dominant team in England. Serious challengers to that dominance have arisen, one after the other, but all have faded away (we will see if over-moneyed local rivals Manchester City have any staying power).

The old socialist found himself the public figurehead of what became, inevitably, a global business empire. Barely a decade after the Hillsborough disaster exposed dilapidated stadia and widespread contempt for ‘oikish’ football fans, Premiership football had became a star-studded spectacle, with teams competing to throw ever more stupid amounts of money at transfers, bigger and better grounds to play on, and a larger layer of ‘casual’ support. In the mid-1980s, it was customary for Tory grandees to bristle with snobbish contempt at the unwashed hooligans who played - and watched - football. By the end of the next decade, Tony Blair was desperately attempting to convince people he supported Newcastle United; and now, having a favourite team (preferably local to your constituency) is on every bourgeois politician’s ‘how to convince people you share their concerns’ checklist.

Sky TV gave this glamorous new product a media platform. Manchester United was the deluxe item in the shop window. United’s runaway success is so bound up with this whole transformation that BSkyB - Sky’s successor - attempted a takeover at the turn of the millennium (quashed by the competition commission). It has instead ended up, like all elite clubs in England, under the tutelage of big capital, in the form of food-processing magnate Malcolm Glazer.

If Ferguson is the iconic individual of English football’s big-money era, however, he and his team have also always been a bit askew from a pattern which is only now fully taking shape. While the transfer market became absurdly inflated in the mid-1990s, United has never been as reliant on the immediate vicissitudes of cash flow as the teams that have snapped at their heels and overtaken them at times. Many, perhaps most, of the iconic names of the Ferguson era - Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Roy Keane - either began their careers as United youngsters, or were brought in early for relatively low fees.

And, while United was at the vanguard of the gentrification of the game, bringing a new middle class and corporate audience into uneasy coexistence with traditional working class support on the stands, it was a United player - Keane - who crystallised that unease in a typically furious outburst about that audience’s fondness for “prawn sandwiches”.

Nostalgia

Linked to this is a certain concern about what Ferguson’s retirement actually means - not just for United, but for English football as a whole. It is clear what the general assessment of those special colour supplements is - there will never be another one like him. It is not his talent that is unique, however (undeniable though that talent is). It is his longevity.

It is barely conceivable that anyone else will be allowed, in the contemporary game, to become so established. The new big-money owners, so goes the pundit’s moan, are impatient. They throw hundreds of millions of pounds into the transfer kitty, and expect the manager to turn that into very rapid success; they also feel more entitled than ever to interfere with events on the pitch.

Ferguson built success by maintaining total dictatorial control over every aspect of the club’s life that could at all plausibly fall into his remit - transfers, youth training and everything else. Even top-level managers are now frequently expected to work under a director of football, or some other interfering representative of the owners.

It is this sense in which Ferguson and Manchester United were a mechanism of transition from an older, rawer English football to the present era of filthy lucre - perhaps the first global footballing brand, they advertised the Premier League to the world’s plutocrats, but did not quite become the plaything of a Roman Abramovich themselves. Ferguson’s departure thus troubles football culture, because it is indicative of the increasingly rigid, money-fuelled stratification of the game.

The nostalgic response is inevitable, and complex. People mourn the death of football’s more populist past, when the gulf between club owners and ‘ordinary’ fans - the bridging of which falls uneasily to the team and manager - at least seemed smaller. Yet this becomes identified with other nostalgic images which may crudely be called reactionary: a disdain for ‘effete’ (and usually foreign) players who dive too easily, as against the more rough-and-ready physicality of an earlier era; a veneration of the strong-man manager, who rallies his players with encouragement and terror alike. The latter, certainly, is the abiding image of ‘Furious Fergie’.

There are those on the left - idiots, mostly - whose image of a liberated society is one in which football does not exist; or, worse, one where all competitive sport is supplanted by an arid regime of mass callisthenics. The truth is that we do not know what culture will be thrown up by broader society, should the revolutionary project succeed.

We can guarantee that football itself will be liberated from its current status as a particularly absurd form of conspicuous consumption for people with too much money and nowhere else to blow it, from the incompetent bureaucracies like Fifa and the FA that do little other than interpose themselves between the game and the masses who keep it alive.

Whether that will mean, equally, the final demise of the Alex Fergusons of this world - dictatorial management, the half-time hair-dryer treatment - or their full re-emergence, is open to dispute. In the degraded current state of football, the dressing-room strongman will neither survive nor be replaced by anything better. Behind the glitz, English football is in a bubble, culturally and financially. The old is dying, and the new cannot yet be born.