1992 was something
of a turning point for English Football.
Three years on from Hillsborough and two years on from Italia ’90, World In Motion and all that, there was
the publication of Nick Hornby’s semi-autobiographical “Fever Pitch” and the
spring saw the wholesale resignation of the First Division of the Football
League, who were in the process of setting up the Premier League. There was also the second season of the
league format of the European “Champions” Cup (which came into play at the
quarter final phase). From the 1992/3
season though this was branded “The Champions League” – for many people their
first experience of “Zadok the Priest”
would have been as Rangers and Olimpique Marseilles walked on to the pitch on a
wild November night at Ibrox.
Not everyone though
thinks that the founding of the English Premier League and the re-marketing of
the old European Cup was something to shout about. Rob Smyth and Georgina Turner have penned a paean
to the days when Football was a sport not tainted by money, and men were real
men and not the faux gymnasts they seem to be today. “Jumpers for Goalposts” sets out to find out
why football is now a money juggernaught.
Oh and also has a not so sneaky go at football’s current sacred cow –
the current Barcelona
team.
The first target
for the book is the super-annuated footballers themselves. In among all of the anecdotes about
footballers either wasting their money or enjoying nights out while pulling the
“don’t you know who I am” trick, there is a loose point being made that the
vast amounts of money somehow erodes the competitive edge that these
“sportsmen” have. However, if the vast
amount of money doesn’t kill your “competitive edge”, the ensuing “celebrity
lifestyle” will. Interestingly though
the few that have were the so called pioneers, David Beckham being the most
famous (and coincidentally the best). Rather tellingly, the Manchester United
sides that continued their trophy kleptomania from the 1990’s on to the 00’s
were – Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo apart – absent from the gossip sheets,
while all manner of stories appeared about other players – with even Chelsea
players appearing at some stages.
With a book which
is essentially a love letter to a by gone age of football, sooner or later the
conduct of those players on the pitch comes up. Diving gets blasted (and it’s
rightly pointed out that it has been part of the game here for years –
Manchester City’s Francis Lee “was having
problems staying upright back in the late Sixties”, while the former
Rangers forward John McDonald’s nickname in the terraces was “Polaris”). What is also heavily criticised in the book
though is the petulant behaviour of players that has contaminated the
game. Or as it’s put in the book “It’s amusing that football is still
regularly described as a man’s game when every other week the biggest talking
points revolve around grown men behaving in a manner that would shame the most
petulant of bairns”.
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| Brian Deane scores the first ever goal in the FA Premier League V Manchester United, 15 August 1992 |
It’s not just the
players though at the receiving end. The Portuguese coaches Carlos Queiroz and
Jose Mourinio receive criticism for their negative styles. Alex Ferguson’s slight defensiveness (nay, “Sextonian” phase) in the early 00’s are
credited to Queiroz, while Mourinio is castigated because his sides have a
needless negative streak – though little mention was made of the cynicism of
his Porto side that lifted the UEFA Cup the season before “England” discovered
him. Rafa Benitez also gets stick for
the overly defensive nature of his sides, stretching back to his trophy laden
times at Valencia.
Scottish footballing journalists of a certain vintage would at this point be
lamenting the reach of the “Largs Mafia” – Largs being the home of the Scottish
Football Association’s highly regarded coaching school that has seen one of it’s
founding members become Technical Director of UEFA and seen several “students”
become high profile managers & coaches around the rest of Britain and
Europe (including several coaches already mentioned in this piece). The “beef” these journalists had with the
“Largs Mafia” was that they were taught to produce defensive and highly
organised sides dependent on structure and not independent skill ie not the
“Scottish” way. Sound familiar.
Most of the ire
though is reserved for non footballing people, the governing bodies and the
competing commercial interest groups.
Governing bodies are castigated for not listening to the fans and for
listening too much to commercial interest groups. Commercial interest groups are castigated
depending on which group they belong.
Broadcasters (principally BSkyB) are criticised for how Football is
handled – the constant deviation from the “traditional” Saturday 3pm kick off,
the constant dumbing down of how football is broadcast and the level of
punditry and the hyping of the most ordinary football stories over other larger
Sports stories (which leads the authors to claim that the yellow “Sky Sports
News” ticker used for breaking sports stories is “Possibly the most evil thing on this planet”).
The most scandalous
story though relates to the part where the sports sponsors are under the
microphone. In 2008, UEFA requested that a branch of the Swedish burger chain
MAX close or heavily disguise its outlet at the Boras Arena – a proposed venue
for the 2009 European U21 Championships.
They offered a compromise, UEFA refused that. MAX then put it to their customers vote, who
voted overwhelmingly in favour of the branch staying open. UEFA then de-listed Boras as a proposed venue, the decision obviously
nothing to do with the sponsorship money UEFA receives from a certain large
American burger chain. To rub salt in
the wound, the Swedish FA blamed MAX for having “cheated Boras residents out of this football
festival”. The antcs of the organising committee
of the South Africa 2010 World Cup pale beside that (and they pulled some
corporate bullying moves themselves).
The government also
receives some criticism, for setting up the Football Task Force (which was
fronted by the former Tory MP David Mellor).
While the description of the Task Force was accurate, any investigation
(in particular, the reading of Tom Bower’s excellent “Broken Dreams”) will have
put a different spin on the crippling ineffectualness of the Football Task
Force. In particular, the part played by
two Downing Street staffers, Andy Burnham and James Purnell (both subsequently
elected as MP’s in the 2001 Westminster Elections) in nobbling the
effectiveness of the Football Task Force.
The tale of how Tony Bank’s idea of a Football Taskforce was completely
nobbled by the vested interests of the FA and the Premier League would have
been worthy of bringing up in this book.
The problem with
the book though is that it does seem overly romantic in places, and kind of
misses the point in a couple of other places.
Where it missed the point was with choosing Cesar Luis Menotti as the
coach of a “Soul of Football XI” in the introduction. He seemed to be picked partly because he
looked cool (not a phrase you can use with his successor as Argentina coach and ideological opposite, Dr
Carlos Bilardo) and partly because of the “thrilling, futuristic, high speed
football” Argentina
played while winning the World Cup in 1978.
The thing about Menotti though was that his sides were not futuristic but
were revivalists – reviving the Argentinian style of passing attacking football
(which according to “Inverting The Pyramid” was originally called La Nuestra) which
existed before the brutal, cynical styles espoused by Racing and Estudiantes in
the mid to late 1960’s.
The other part
where you felt that the book missed the point was in it’s criticisms of sports
journalists “indulging” in churnalism.
Churnalism I think was first coined in the book “Flat Earth News” by
Nick Davies and referred to a malaise affecting print journalism as a whole,
and in particular the trend of “Showbiz” journalists to fill their columns with
re-cycled PR Pieces. In this respect
Piers Morgan, Andy Coulson and Domonic Mohan are not the trailblazers that the
English based press needed. Yet this
knack of fashioning stories from not very much has become a key skill for
Sports writers, to the detriment of actually finding stories. Too late for this book, but the way
“Churnalism” has replaced actual journalism can be seen in the reporting of the
crisis surrounding Rangers, with the Scottish press corps still prepared to
print the thoughts of David Murray as gospel.
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| France, playing 4-2-3-1, V Spain (currently the best proponent of 4-2-3-1) in the Euro 2000 Quarter Final |
Where it seems
romantic for romantic’s sake is it’s criticism of the 4-2-3-1 formation. If you were going to criticise a formation
for not really having a place for flair players, then the one to pick on would
be 3-5-2 – the one with 3 at the back and wing-backs instead of wingers and
wide players (yet both England & Scotland enjoyed relative international
success by adopting this formation – England reached semi-finals in Italia 90
and Euro 96, while Scotland got to Euro 96 and France 98 while using this
formation). Yet this book derides
4-2-3-1 as “insidious and deceitful… devious, a sneak and a phoney – not to be
trusted”. According to the book, it’s
problem is that it is essentially a defensive formation, with four defenders
and two defensive midfielders – making six defensive players in the team. While it is true that it first emerged at the
turn of the century, it could be argued that both the Manchester United teams
from 1993-1997 and the early Wenger Arsenal sides morphed into this formation
(Wenger’s double winning side of 98’ had a midfield of Petit and Viera with
pushed on wingers Parlour and Overmars and Bergkamp dropping off behind his
striking partner). Its breakthrough tournament
was Euro 2000, where it was employed by the French, Portuguese and Romanian
national teams – all of which were not exactly defensive sides. Euro 2000, in case you have forgotten, was
the best football tournament since the 1970 World Cup.
The other jibe is
that 4-2-3-1 was used by the Netherland’s, Spain and Germany – the first two
sides reaching the last World cup final, a game described as “Anti Football” by
Cruyff. Yet these three sides are late
adopters to this system. Spain switched
to it in the semi final of the last European Championships thanks to an injury
to David Villa. Both Germany and the Netherlands
also switched to this system four years ago – Germany
started Euro 2008 as a 4-4-2 team but switched in the knock out stages while
the Netherlands
started Euro 2008 with 4-2-3-1.
Interestingly both Germany
and Spain have shown signs
of evolving this system, with Germany
switching to 4-2-1-3 when attacking during the last World Cup. 4-4-2 might be the “bloke next door who will
look you in the eye and drink you under the table” – but already looks like a
relic from a past age. This is not to say
that 4-4-2 might not come again – after all Italian sides have started playing
3-4-1-2 again this season. Its place as
the formation of choice has gone though, usurped by a formation that has room
for wingers and playmakers. Ironic given
“Jumpers…” criticism of the collective over the individual.
While it is easy to
be irritated by these criticisms, the book does make some valuable points about
the future of the game. Most of the best
points come at the books conclusion, where the point is made that nothing would
scare the football authorities more than an empty piggy bank. While this is
true, getting the authorities to do something before we are all too skint to go
to the game will be a hard trick to pull off.
In spite of being an open love letter to a more innocent past, “Jumpers
For Goalposts” does chronicle the crossroads that football is fast approaching,
and the choices that it faces if it is to avoid the fate of other sports that
have become less relivant, like for example Boxing.
