Portsmouth entitled to feel alarmed

When a football club play their chairman £300,000 while the players do not get their wages on time, then it is clear the game has undergone a radical metamorphosis since the days when John and Patrick Cobbold regarded their stewardship of Ipswich Town as merely a chance to entertain their friends on a regular basis.Not that this latest twist to the interesting and varied career of Terry Venables should be regarded as representing the face of the modern game as a whole. After al, few Premier of Football League chairmen have held office while coaching Australia amid speculation that they were about to be hired by Nigeria. It now appears the latter want Bora Milutinovic. Had Venables been the choice, the Nigerian government might have needed to check its credit with the International Monetary Fund first.Venables insists that the sum Portsmouth paid to his company, Vencorp, was simply money owed. The Vencorp invoice said the payment was "in respect of one off performance bonus". Maybe Tel, who once thought of becoming a pop singer, treated his fellow directors to a rendition of Moon River. Portsmouth are in a parlous state and their supporters are entitled to be alarmed. The example of Brighton and Hove Albion, less than an hour's drive along the coast, shows how quickly a club can decline and how little history and tradition can mean once the rot has set in.Yet the amounts involving Venables are peanuts compared to the millions that certain other club owners, chairmen, chief executives, majority shareholders and managers are making from the present football boo. Almost all share prices fall once the initial enthusiasm for a club going public has worn off, but some very rich men have become even richer through share options and the ability to play the markets.This may be normal business practice and for the moment at least football is a highly marketable product. But, when millionaires see the game as an opportunity to become billionaires, then those running clubs are in danger of becoming remote to the point of invisibility so are as the supporters are concerned.English professional football for most of its history has been ruled by the merchant class and played and watched by the working class. Tony Mason, in Association Football & English Society (1863-1915), published a table summarising the occupations of club directors before the first World War. The bulk of them were brewers, builders and retailers; 4.3 per cent came under the category of "gentlemen".The social mix of the game may have changed and the players are no longer slaves to the maximum wages and the retain-and-transfer system. But is football really any happier than it was when John Cobbold could throw a visiting chairman out of the Ipswich boardroom for being rude to a waitress?After Manchester United had beaten Blackburn Rovers 4-0 at Old Trafford a fortnight ago, a smartly dressed young man of Middle Eastern appearance approached the press box to inquire how he could gain access to the directors. He was, he explained, a nephew of the King of Saudi Arabia and he wanted to buy United.Spurning the sports headline of the year, the reporters advised him to ask one of the stewards and as yet nothing has happened to suggest Manchester United are about to strike oil as a change from gold.But the idea is surely no more far-fetched than the notion of the biggest club in the country being sold to a bouncing Czech con-man. Cap'n Bob was every fan's image of a merchant banker. The corporations getting involved in football now are less visible and less risible. For them happiness is share-shaped rather than pear-shaped.