White Hart Lane stadium: the gap on match days between the affluence inside the ground and the surrounding area is one of the biggest in the UK.
The problem with British football can be best understood by making a match day journey to White Hart Lane stadium, home of Tottenham Hotspurs Football Club.
For most visitors, this will entail travelling by underground from one of London’s railway stations to Seven Sisters Road on the Victoria Line and catching a crowded bus heading north along Tottenham High Road.
They will enter one of London’s most deprived areas. It’s been hit hard by the Covid crisis.
After about two miles, and in striking contrast to the surrounding area, Tottenham’s stadium comes into view.
It’s a monumental structure of polished glass and grey cladding opened in 2017 which can accommodate more than 60,000 spectators and cost around £1bn. It’s the most expensive privately-owned building in the whole of Haringey, the London borough of which Tottenham is part.
The main east entrance looks like the reception of a business class lounge at Heathrow airport. Bars and restaurants that would not be out of place in a luxury hotel are conveniently placed behind banks of seating overlooking the pitch.
Season tickets start at just over £800, though there are concessions for seniors, young adults and juniors. Spurs’ famously dispassionate fan base includes many well-paid professionals and business people. From 80 corporate boxes comes the sound of food being served and eaten during games. Often, their occupants don’t even watch. Few live in the area.
And there are the team. They are paid up to £200,000 a week. But the highest earner at Spurs until 19 April was its coach Jose Mourinho who got £15m a year and is said to be in line for compensation of the same amount for being sacked.
White Hart Lane is a magnificent place that expresses an impressive commitment by the club to the future. But the difference on match days between the affluence inside the ground and the surrounding area is one of the sharpest in the UK.
Tottenham was one of the six English clubs that supported plans for the European Super League announced on 18 April.
Designed to increase its members’ share of broadcasting income generated by European club competitions, the Super League was condemned by fans and sports pundits. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was determined to stop it..
“… a small handful of owners want to create a closed shop of elite clubs at the top of the game – a league based on wealth and brand recognition rather than upon merit,” Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden told the House of Commons on 19 April. “We will not stand by and watch football be cravenly stripped of the things that make millions across the country love it.”
The Super League was effectively killed when its backers pulled out. The ball is in the court of UEFA, Europe’s football club association, which has its own more limited reform which will nevertheless probably involve more money for top clubs.
But will this permanently contain pressure from the backers of the Super League for a radical reordering of European football in their favour?
Probably not.
It’s up to the Super League’s critics to come up with a new approach to the national game to preserve the competitive and community-based spirit that originally inspired it and, simultaneously, address the challenges of today.
Association Football as it was originally known is wrongly described as the most lasting legacy of the lost culture of tangible good manufacturing that made the UK in the mid-19th century the workshop of the world.
Its rules, approved in 1863, were in fact shaped by English public schools and Britain’s upper classes, but manual and skilled workers provided most players and practically all the spectators after professional football was allowed in 1885. By the end of the century and the coming of half-day working on Saturdays, a pattern was established which involved professional games kicking off at 3pm. It created a uniquely proletarian culture.
Despite huge crowds and the rapid spread of football to Europe and Latin American, the game was always poor compared with the gentlemen’s sports of horseracing, hunting, cricket and tennis. Until the end of the 1950s, many footballers were often originally factory workers and miners. Their pay was modest.
By the end of the 1960s, with crowds diminishing, there was talk of professional football’s terminal decline. Television saved it from the fate of Britain’s coal mines, ship yards and textile mills, but it was a disaster that made the biggest difference.
Deaths caused by a crowd stampede before the 1985 European Cup Final involving Liverpool at the Heysel Stadium led to a ban on English clubs from the competition. During an FA Cup semi-final at Sheffield’s Hillsborough Stadium four years later, 96 were killed and almost 800 injured in another disaster. The British government ordered every professional club to upgrade the safety of their grounds. All-seater stadiums became compulsory. Ticket prices went up.
With costs rising, professional clubs sought new sources of revenue. In 1992, the biggest English clubs created the Premier League. Its members were allowed to negotiate commercial deals directly and broadcasting rights were sold to a satellite television company that was subsequently taken over by Sky.
The premiership was created two months after the collapse of the Soviet Union. History had ended and the only compelling political idea was the market economy where price ruled, including in the conservative world of professional football.
Broadcast rights for Premiership games now generate more than $5bn a season.
It is now forgotten that the creation of the Premiership was initially as widely criticised as the Super League is now.
Only a handful of Britain’s biggest clubs make a profit. One of the main reasons the Super League has been launched is because clubs behind it aren’t generating a competitive investment return.
Outside the premiership, turnover is usually under £10m a year and often much less. Most struggle just to pay their player’s weekly wages.
Fans of small clubs dream of a good cup run and promotion to a higher league. But their hopes are often invested in a rich investor buying their club.
The premiership meanwhile boosted the earnings of top players and coaches. Some of its income has trickled down to the lower leagues. It worked wonders on the pay of television football pundits.
But it’s drastically widened the gap between football’s haves and have nots. Clubs with deep community roots and proud histories have been marginalised. Most will struggle to survive.
In this respect, professional football has mirrored the experiences of the wider British community since the 1980s. It seemed to be the inevitable way of the world. But that consensus was rocked by the 2008 financial crisis and now, possibly decisively, by Covid.
There’s an appetite for new approaches to reflect a radically-transformed political and economic consensus.
For football, it starts with recognising that the bulk of the value it creates is non-monetary and exists in the minds of players dreaming of playing at Wembley and followers for whom their favourite team defines an important part of their personal identity. For smaller towns, the football club is close to the heart of the community it’s named after. It contributes to its capacity to function constructively and helps build links among disparate groups and identities.
Football clubs play a role analogous to schools, hospitals and community centres. We may not use them all the time, but we’re glad they are there.
This suggests the cornerstone of any alternative to the failing status quo and the new vision defined by the backers of the Super League is recognising that football clubs are part of the physical and social infrastructure; like roads, railways, schools and hospitals.
So the first imperative is that all professional football grounds should be publicly-owned and repurposed to maximize their use by local communities.
How much would that cost? The government could probably buy every premiership ground for less than £10bn. This could be done by offering owners an equivalent value in the form of a new type of government debt: perhaps an infrastructure bond like Labour suggested in its 2017 and 2019 manifestos.
Publicly-owned football grounds should reflect the desires of the local community, including fans, in the way they operate and are maintained. That will mean fewer underused corporate boxes and, perhaps, a bit of social housing instead.
The second step is restructuring football clubs themselves.
They should never be controlled by profit-seeking corporations, and particularly not by tax-haven entities. And they should not be owned by rich individuals.
The football club should be a non-profit and non-asset partnership owned by the players. They are the ones who create the value, not the owners. The clubs will lease the ground and derive income from gate receipts. They will also enjoy their share of television and online advertising income.
There’s no reason to believe the players will suffer on average any loss of income. And there is no in principle objection to talented people that create value from enjoying the full fruits of their efforts and achievements, not least if they are properly covered – as some are not – by the national income tax system. Co-ownership of clubs will increase their commitment and loyalty.
But is that the cure for football’s ailments?
The answer is no so long as companies are allowed by legislation and accounting codes to book as balance sheet items assets that have no physical characteristics.
The Super League has been made possible not by greed – something that has shaped football for decades – or by tax exiles. It’s because its founders have been able to translate the expected future stream of broadcast rights into a balance sheet item that’s been used to collateralise a $4bn loan from JP Morgan.
If that wasn’t there, no one would lend the Super League a penny.
It would be dead in the water, which it isn’t and won’t be until that final step is taken.