If Premier League supremo Richard Scudamore had been serious when he announced the £5.1 billion windfall the Premier League is getting from Sky and BT Sport subscribers, he would not have said, “We’re not set up for charitable purposes”. Instead, he’d have said, “We’re not a fucking charity” because would have been more in keeping with what football today has become. And what a success story the Barlcays Premier League has become. To Scudamore and the suits who now control and own ‘The Beautiful Game’, football is an industry, it’s a business, it’s a product. And they could not care less about anyone except the ruling elite. Can you see how football is becoming a microcosm of the society in which we live?
Greed is good, the world of Gordon Gekko and Margaret Thatcher. Where you can have what you want and you can have it now, but only if you can afford it. And who can afford it these days? Well, the comfortable middle classes can afford it, by way of extortionate matchday ticket prices charged by Premier League clubs and by TV subscription prices. And those who don’t want to spend a king’s ransom on Mr Murdoch’s cash cow, can instead go to one of the decreasing number of pubs to watch the game. I mean, who wouldn’t want to go out on a freezing cold night and stand in a pub to get the chance to see Stoke City against Leicester City in ‘the greatest league on earth’? Well, me, because I’m afraid that I can still pay the blood money to Rupe via Beardy Branson’s Virgin package.
Scudamore says the Premier League is “not a fucking charity” and yet it hands over huge sums to ‘grassroots football’. “Grassroots football’ must have let the money slip between its fingers, then, because I spent the best part of a decade with my sons playing children’s football and between them, I think they saw a handful of changing rooms during their entire careers. Arrive in their kit by car, leave by car, wait for the dads to clean the dog shit and refuse from the quagmire of a pitch and pay a fortune to do it. It’s all a load of bollocks.
The average age of the football supporter is climbing dramatically. Already he – and it’s mainly a he – is well into his forties and his kids rarely go, if at all. In the lower leagues, the average age is higher still and there is no new generation coming through. But the way things are going, it doesn’t matter. Who is to say that the next TV deal will provide Scudamore with so much money that they won’t need crowds to pay the bills? Of course, they do need the crowds to ‘create the atmosphere’ for the ‘best league in the world’ but since Sky are so adept with technology, they could perhaps turn the sound up for the benefit of viewers at home? After all, they spend much of their time distorting the swearwords during live games so you’re not offended, as you might be if you were actually at the game.
Football is almost dead, choking on its own greed and arrogance. £5.1 billion might suggest otherwise. But the industry, the business, the product is now a million miles from what it once was when it was only a game. Wayne Rooney earns in a week what the man on the average wage earns in 12 years and soon some players will be trousering half a million quid a week. Meanwhile, the kids whose parents can still afford to let them play will carry on paying larger and larger sums for worse and worse facilities and many kids will never play at all.
Margaret Thatcher, Peter Scudamore – different people, same business model. If the top can succeed, some of the proceeds will trickle down to the bottom of those on the minimum age and those on zero hours contracts.
The Premier League is certainly no charity: it’s a money pit for those at the top and sooner or later, the bubble will burst taking many of its so called success stories with it.
