Football customers

If you, like me, are gradually beginning to fall out of love with football, Arsene Wenger’s comments about the distribution of the new Premier League TV deal will probably not make you fall back in love with it again. This is what he said:

“We are a company who, on one side [the fans], want you to buy more players. What will happen is the prices of the players will go up and you will need this supplement of money coming in to buy new players. I believe that the pressure on spending the money will become bigger and you cannot necessarily distribute the money to other people.”

Wenger is one of the most intelligent men in football and someone who is worth listening to. And when he says something like this, I would despair, if I cared enough to. It’s wrong on so many levels, starting from the initial reference to a “company” and ending with the reality that all the money being paid by Rupert Murdoch (but Sky subscribers really) will end up in transfer fees and in players wallets and not for cheaper tickets. And do you know what’s incredible? Arsenal’s games will still sell out.

Arsenal introduced the first £100 non corporate bog standard matchday ticket; their season tickets for 2015/16 cost from £1035 to £2039, again bog standard admission only tickets and they have no trouble selling them. No wonder Wenger refers to the “company” rather than the football club because Arsenal, like many other ‘clubs’ these days are not clubs at all, not in the way that we know them.

I am not picking on just the Arsenal because Liverpool are in the news today, having announced they are going to charge £77 for some tickets and announced on the Fenway Sports Group (FSG), which owns the ‘club’, that their intention was to turn “fans into customers”. Whoops! Despite taking down the “fans into customers” comment form their website, enough people saw it including, happily, journalists who happily reported on it. Perhaps FSG was just being honest: they see football purely as a business, a method of making money and lots of it. Why else would they have bought Liverpool? Why did the Glazers buy Manchester United? Because they suddenly, overnight, became fans and benefactors? Oh, come on!

The truth is that the Premier League clubs will get away with changing whatever they like for as long as football customers are willing to continue to support the soccer brand (!) and there is not the slightest indication that they’re walking away anytime soon.

I keep thinking that football we one day eat itself. I’m no longer so sure about that, but it’s getting a long way from the people’s game, that’s for sure.