The Cost of Football

The marmite Johnny Nic wrote a good article many years ago about football's excess. At that time I was feeling pretty detached from the sport I grew up loving, as it held a lot of parallels to society itself: massive disparity from the rich and the poor. I wrote in to say I agreed with him, and that I no longer buy shirts, or merch, or pay for a football subscription. I don't spend a dime on football. Not a cent. My relationship with football exists solely as a "free" escape from reality and has done for a while now.

When Bale and Ronaldo were going for 80 odd million, I thought it was insane, but at least they were the best players in the world at the time, so you could make a case (I wouldn't agree) that their fees should be that high. I didn't like it then, I like it less now, as the money is just wasted. I could accept it if it found its way back to grass roots to help kids that can't even afford boots or to go to practice, but it just goes out of the game to agents and groups that take their cut. Clubs do community outreach programs, forgive me for being cynical, but it's solely to keep the masses happy, they could do much more.

Onto the here and now, the Bale and Ronaldo fees have become normalized. I believe the Neymar fee was a watershed moment (on top of many watershed moments)... that sent fees into hyperdrive. Fees seem to get more and more insane every year, as do wages. It was only two years ago that the working class were getting laid-off from the clubs they love working for, by billionaire owners, while they furloughed wages (or tried to) because the pandemic hit their coffers hard. Now we're back to insanity and it's like we didn't learn a thing. At what point do we say enough is enough? What is the percentage of inflation on transfer fees vs the average working wage over the past 10-20 years? I'm curious as going to a match costs an entire week's wages for most people these days. A reminder, without fans, the game is nothing. Ask Liverpool fans if they really got to enjoy their first title in years because they had to stay away...

Finally, it's not just football, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple gets 1150 times the salary of the average Apple employee, does he deserve that, or would 100 times the salary be reasonable? Top executive salaries have skyrocketed since the 1980s while the working wage is barely in line with inflation. So in 3-5 years when the transfer fees are 200 million for a Mudryk, and a CEO gets 2000 times a salary, will we do something then? It's been posited that society accrues its greatest wealth before collapse, I think we're close to a tipping point and no one seems to notice. I'm a capitalist, but a low standard of living for the working class (where everything has gone up in price except peoples wages) isn't capitalism, it's just outrageous greed, and that's what football has become. We aren't making the world better, but much worse, and the same people that are struggling to make ends meet are also just going "huh" when reading reports of ridiculous fees all across the English game (and PSG etc). Why don't we stop arguing over who's articulated the better points and actually do something to focus on the matter in hand? I suggest all fans of all 20 clubs boycott the first game of next season. But I already know the responses I'll get.

So, to me, football is at a crossroads, and I do wonder where we go from here, considering we have more and more billionaires and nation-states owning Premier League clubs. We have the broadcasting rights ever increasing - fueling the Premier League especially, salaries and wages increasing, sponsorship deals (both legal and fake ones) ever increasing and as I alluded to already, gate receipts increasing as we see the next generation largely being priced out of a game. Us fans have a choice to make, as do the governments that allow these clubs to be sold to these groups, this just can not continue, it's not sustainable and it's become, for me at least, harder to justify giving it my time. I think what I'm trying to say is - which should be obvious to most - the fans are the soul of the club, and they are fast becoming the sole, and the sole is largely worn out.