Spurs till I die? Credit: Adrian DENNIS/AFP/ Getty
Spurs were founded by Jack Ripsher, the Bible studies teacher at All Hallows Church. Arthur Connell, the rector of St Mark’s Church in Gorton established Manchester City. Liverpool were a cosmic spin off from Everton who were founded in St Domingo’s Methodist Church. Manchester United emerged from the Lancashire and Yorkshire Carriage and Wagon dept in Newton Heath. Arsenal were founded from the Woolwich munitions factory. Among the sullied six, Chelsea were alone in emerging from a pub. Football was a working-class game and its association of clubs were formed by the combination of industrialisation and the Church.
Through it the nameless suburbs found form and attachment, the beautiful game rooted in every working-class community. Much has been made of its religious form; the real physical presence, the holy grail, the communal singing but for the churches in slum areas their interests were more prosaic. It was a form for resisting the demonic temptations of the new order; drink, avarice and sloth, praising instead fitness, teamwork and skill. It was a form of virtue to take on vice.
In Glasgow, Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester and Liverpool, football was also an expression of the sectarian divisions that characterised those cities, expressing, in England at least, an almost forgotten part of our Christian heritage. In Newcastle, Sunderland and Leeds the cities found an expression of civic loyalty and pride through a club that expressed their character. It was a distinctive addition to the civic ecology, an institution rooted in place and carrying its name.
Football allowed all that was denied by the routinisation of life and work. It allowed for love and hate, for a wordless beauty, the longing for glory, the shared witness of a momentary miracle, communal celebration and shared grief. When I was growing up, the contempt for people who left early, when we were losing was striking. And through that, my grasp of the English language expanded. A single shot could slay Goliath. Swindon could beat Arsenal. Don Rodgers, frozen in eternity. Once established, the football club became a permanent part of the urban firmament. Its status was always threatened by competition but supported by association. Love and hate.
In a deindustrialised and desecrated society, football clubs recognised that the bonds of affection and attachment that lurked around in the lives of their supporters could be easily financialised. For those exiled from their homes, with loyalty passed down through families, the sense of attachment became even more intense.
And this is a capitalist story of commodification: the transformation of something that wasn’t produced for sale — human beings, nature, or, it turned out a football club — into something available for sale on the open market. The European Super League was a logical development of that. The clubs who signed up to it are no longer owned by their members but by hedge funds, oligarchs and despots, the relationship with community and place replaced by television rights and branded shirt sales. And the move was logical because the logic of capital is that of both commodification and of oligarchy, towards the elimination of competition and the securing of permanent revenue streams in order to reduce risk. Towards concentration not competition, which explains the oligarchs.
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SubscribeSorry, Baron, I think you are taking it all a bit too seriously. Yes, for many, including me, it is fun to watch, I agree, but it is only kicking a ball about, in the end.
It seems to me to be more important in the lives of people than it was say twenty or thirty years ago.
Is that because people have been robbed of so many other things and they cling to football? It is not on to love your country any more if it is a European one, you cannot admire the great men of the past due to their racism, the communities have been devastated by deindustrialisation or immigration or both, house prices and uncertainty means young people struggle to even form families.
But we still have our football!
I was hoping the billionaires` superleague would take off, just because it might have wakened people up to how thoroughly their noses are being rubbed in the ground.
What many commentators and pundits don’t get is that most supporters are as appalled and revolted by the greed, the stupid haircuts, the endless virtue signalling and cheating which now characterises much of what takes place both on and off the pitch. It is a myth that fans are helpless dopes unaware that they exploited by the owners. They are fully aware of the fact that they are ripped off at every opportunity and contemptuously regarded as an irritating income stream*. I am one of the souls who is currently doing the round of each of the 92 football league grounds and in my experience what binds most supporters to their club is the company of their fellow fans, because as you say they have been robbed of so many things outside the ground, inside it is the one place they can feel they are still have ownership.
*This latter is underlined by the knowledge that a term used by some club officials to describe matchday crowds is ‘scenery’
A very interesting post. I have no doubt that you are correct.
For a Marxist, he seems to be conveniently forgetting how the local based clubs and player loyalty, were enforced by a draconian transfer system, which treated players as the property of their clubs and wage caps, ostensibly in place to foster competition, ment that players worked second jobs, whilst owners creamed off the profits of their labour. How’s that for commodification?
He seems to have missed the point that Pub owned and Workers clubs were owned by the Pubs and the Businesses – not the fans.
Or that the players he eulogises as representing some gentler golden age came in the main from other clubs and we’re bought with TV money… there is a lot of rubbish talked about football, but the best way to get a clearer view of the reality is to have business or commercial dealings with any club.
The ESL was, ultimately, about the increasing power of the Premier League..as in 2019 we could see 4 English clubs in the two finals which illustrates that.
The biggest continental giants fear the massive debts they have to maintain to compete with the increasingly global cash generation of the Premier League.
This is why the English clubs were so numerous, why they were invited into a primarily Spanish and Italian initiative … and why although they fear missing out the English Clubs can abandon it so quickly..they, unlike the rest can better afford to wait.
And the fans owned German duo with PSG would be in like a shot as well, had it taken off.
Ah, yes, wage caps…. 1960 is still within living memory. Yet there was a wage cap of £20 per week for top division players, when a typical working bloke was on £15 a week.
https://spartacus-educational.com/Fwages.htm#:~:text=It%20decided%20that%20the%20maximum,and%20%C2%A320%20(1958).
The real money was made elsewhere within the club and the factory. A Martian invasion looks less bizarre than the prospect of David Beckham on £20 a week or its 2021 equivalent.
To put that in context, in 1960 a single from Paddington to Bristol cost 33 shillings & 6 pence, or £1, 13/6.
A G&T 5/- a Fillet steak 12/6, a bottle of Medco 13/-.and to finish a 1/4 bottle of ‘Old Monk’ Port 6/-.
Then at Temple Meads to jump into the MG-T and drive like a lunatic the thirteen miles to Arcadia, with Petrol costing about 4/6 a gallon…….Paradise itself.
I think he is left wing rather than Marxist (or do you see them as synonyms?)
I still play*, but I will not pay, having vowed as long ago as 1996 that I would not put any more of my money into English football. The rapacious greed was bad enough then, and it’s immeasurably worse now.
*You should have seen the perfect cross I delivered for the winning goal in the park a few days ago. Delivered right on to Paddy’s head with just the right amount of back spin!
I can’t be bothered to read this but its obviously going to be some rubbish about how football means belonging and heart and stuff. despite, billionaires, millionaire journeymen, corruption at all levels, hatred and exploitation of fans and enforced kneeling to Marxists and that’s before the very convenient and quickly withdrawn super league thing that allows politicians to show they are on the side of the common man.
Look there is an election in a week and a bit (weirdly enough), you want football to truly have a chance of improving then don’t vote for any of the major parties, scare the hell out of them by voting for reform/reclaim.
I also most stopped reading but managed to push on right to the end. It was a very lengthy article that essentially said nothing…
Apparently for everything to stay the same in football everything must change…. but the auther seemed to think it all needed to change so therefore not stay the same… its nonsense.
Imagine the great William Gladstone advocating the reform or reclaim parties.
Identity, attachment, emotional involvement, shared history, rivalry, struggle and glory, symbolism, flags and colours, all being thrown to globalist wolves for money.
If your football team was a country today, media and institutions would be decrying the fans as popularists and reactionaries for not being ‘progressive’ and internationally minded. Local vs Global in microcosm…
Well said – it’s a real struggle for non-fans to understand the reality of your first paragraph, and consequently very difficult for them to empathise.
The top flight is a greed fest we know but at least some sort of marker has been laid down by recent events. Perhaps I am going a bit off piste here but I am foxed by several comments to this, and similar articles, where people have felt the need to comment when they admit to not giving a damn about football, as if we who love the game are somehow intellectually challenged.
I was brought up in a Rugby Union town, that was the game I learnt. It gave me so much when I played and I developed many of the wider life skills during those years. When my grandsons became interested in football I took the opportunity to develop their interest , we became season ticketholders at Cardiff City, it gave them a focus/release outside family and school etc. And boy you learn life lessons as a Bluebird, ups and downs , reward for effort, the good days and the bad, good behaviour and the darker side ( learning to recognise idiots), and probably most important lesson of all – accepting disappointment and defeat but getting back up and going again.
Getting more serious , the amount of learnt knowledge, skills and abilities increases in the course of intellectual development, along with improving interpersonal relationships, which is important in all kinds of activity. Sport is an effective way of developing and improving intelligence. Intelligence has specific functions in sports activity; its development relates to a number of inter related factors such as problem-solving, formation of cognitive skills, interpersonal relationships. Whether you play or watch or do both these are the wider benefits …. But that`s enough analysis and over thinking, – having beer and a good old shout, jumping up from your seat as a goal is scored in the 93 rd minute, hugging your grandson in joy is priceless, and as “rugby man”, I now accept that nothing gives that feeling quite like football does.
Good article – and I’ll never give up on my team because they are more than something the current owner owns.
However, I currently refuse to watch the start of games – as I do not wish to witness the most recent attempted political takeover of football – this time by the BLM movement.
agree, i tune in a few mins after kickoff. indeed i got rid of skysports because of those subliminal messages about blm and commentators apologising in case i was offended by a swear word from the bench, and female ex-footballers trying to analyse a different game to what they played…. gee whizz Sky is so woke you either laugh or cry or ditch the monthly subscription.
Hugh, I admire your sacrifice in giving up Skysports. Alas I am a hypocrite – I continue with the Sky football channels but despise the PL players and commentators/pundits. That these multi-millionaire players ‘take the knee’ before every kick-off is a profound insult to the country, and when I see black players like Arsenal’s Aubamayang adding further insult by raising his clenched fist, my loathing and contempt increase. And the oleaginous commentator Martin Tyler rabbits on about ‘social equality and justice’! When Fulham recently fielded 9 black players, I wonder why the creep didn’t bang on about ‘equality’.
And yes, the utter absurdity of the obligatory woman on the pundits’ panel is indeed risible when we know that women’s international football teams have been beaten by schoolboy teams. Ah, but we must have our ‘diversity’, eh?
I laughed out loud when, in the fiasco aka the European Super League, one pundit said that the Premier League ‘wasn’t about money’! Of course not – when, say, Rashford is raking in 200,000 pounds a week (it would take a worker on 25,000 a year 8 years to make that amount – what obscenity! – and I omit from the calculation his 200,000 a week from sponsorship deals) even when he wasn’t playing during earlier lockdowns – you have to wonder if the players have any scruples or morals (you don’t have to wonder too long).And didn’t some of the PL clubs have the sheer effrontery to seek financial support (furlough) for their pleb workers while the ponces continued their rake-ins?
The FA has, in politicising the game by blind obeisance to the vile and racist BLM, has polluted the game further and made it a cesspool with a stench a mile high.
There were relatively minor earlier concessions to the Great God Tel Lee. In black and white days, you had to make sure the opposing teams had outfits which clearly contrasted in monochrome. So the much larger audience at home would not be confused.
But the more media money poured in, the less local supporters mattered. This reached its insane peak this month (April 2021) when a guy from the Manchester United Dubai Supporters was interviewed and declared that he was all in favour of this monster League.
It is less frowned upon to change your wife than your football team so it occurs to me that it is the clubs that own the supporters.
None of the teams have the same players or managers from one season to another. At Spurs it is Levy and Lewis who have committed their time and resources to maintaining a club in the top half of the Prem which despite fan’s yearning for glory constitutes success.
This round of Hoo Ha is like Kerry Packer and you can be sure that football’s IPL is on it way.
I feel for grass roots football but that has the same role as youth centres, parks and swimming pools. Professional tennis doesn’t fund local tennis clubs.
It is interesting to note the similarity of background between Glassman and Lewis although a generation apart. Lewis left school at 15 though, whilst Glassman went to Cambridge.
”It is less frowned upon to change your wife than your football team”
So true, and only those who realise this can grasp the deep roots that football has laid down in the community psychie.
Like it or not, it is the nearest thing to patriotism at a local level
Oh, I don’t know. I’m an Australian who loves our own football but I think Aguerooooo is the most exciting moment I have ever seen in sport.
Nice one! City fan for 70 years and the best moments have usually involved Sergio…
I was there. I’ve the club video of that season. Putting it on from the 1-0 defeat of Utd (also there), to that moment, is better than Prozac.
Dickov’s equaliser against Gillingham in the league 1 play off final at Wembley, in 99, was a similarly sublime moment. I have a Rosario Centrales shirt that I drunkenly swapped with a Brazilian tourist in trafalgar square about midnight.
As a lifelong disliker of City’s opponents that day, that moment is way up there.
It was exciting but nothing comes close to Michael Thomas in 1989.
As an American, whose family members have played and spectated at both types of “football”, I can sympathize with a great deal of this. There is much to be enjoyed in team sports, the communal aspects being most notable. But, they are no longer what they appear to be, and used to be: proxies for real physical and moral conflicts.
What finally turned me off completely to professional sports was when they morphed from good-natured “Us Against Them” contests between talented athletes to pure idolatry. Perhaps this is more evident in American culture, with the ugliness of the pagan orgies at Super Bowl halftimes. But all through modern professional ( and even collegiate ) sports is now this core of idolatry. “Hey, it’s just a game folks!”, say I. “NO! It’s temple worship! On your knees, slave!”, say the acolytes.
The rank capitalistic attributes of professional sports don’t really bother me that much. After all, if you’re stupid enough to spend $400 to take your family to a mind-numbingly boring Los Angeles Dodgers baseball game, I figure it’s your money and your family. And if you think professional athletes should be paid ten times what a neurosurgeon is paid, well, there are worse examples of people being rewarded all out of proportion to their talent or contributions to human well-being. Let’s talk rock stars. Or rappers.
“despite Marx’s teaching that under capitalism “all that is solid melts into air and everything holy is profaned”,”
!
He mentions Jon Cruddas whom I seem to remember disliking when he wrote for the Guardian. (Not a very promising first half of his surname.)
I found out an interesting fact about him on wiki just now.
He has one son called Emmett.
If anyone does not know who that is referring to, you are clearly not looking at establishment American media enough!
And would that be a problem for you.
yet another commie journalist bashing capitalism, which has taken more people out of poverty than any other system, whereas the evil socialist dogma has destroyed itself and the country’s it infects every single time