CONNECT/Eddie Holt: What happened to sport as a community and cultural activity? The possibility of huge money - for players and TV companies - has feudalised football and turned it into a game-show
A decade ago, television was fanatically embraced as professional football's saviour. TV loot would transform the sport by marketing it to widen appeal. A whole new ball game - shiny, seductive and soapy (in the television sense) - emerged from the repackaging. As make-overs go, football's seemed spectacularly successful. However, allowing TV to become chairman, manager and playmaker of the sport has ensured that the spectacle is as superficial as a Sky Sports promo.
England's Football League - the three divisions outside the Premiership - is now a commercial wasteland. It is also, of course, in terms of colour, community and continuity, a cultural treasury. Nonetheless, it is, for the most part, beyond the Pale of profitability. Between 30 and 50 of its 72 clubs could go bankrupt if ITV Digital and its owners, Carlton and Granada, are successful in reducing the £178 million sterling they owe to the league over the next two seasons to £50 million.
An inevitable marketing pattern, always discernible, is now congealing: a few, big, brand names prosper hugely while small, traditional ones die. The process occurred in the retail industry a generation ago when a few chain-store giants consigned hundreds of traditional grocers, butchers and drapers to history. Now, with Roy Keane hauling in wages of £100,000 a week and other players sure to follow, professional footballers of less commitment and ability will join the grocers, butchers and drapers.
In most sports, what's happening as a result of TV's money and influence is that elites of players and clubs are emerging, leaving behind them dozens of once proud but now barely viable clubs. Welsh rugby, for instance, once a premium "brand" rooted in community, is cutting adrift its six leading clubs in an attempt to boost the failing national team.
But it is in soccer, because it's the biggest sport and it is where the mega-money goes, that the community-busting drift is most alarming. In a single decade, more than a century of community-based football has been shredded.
Television has insisted that sport be cast in its own image: part business and part entertainment - showbiz, for short. But sport is only partly showbiz. Sure, it delivers conflict and spectacle, but it's not simply a soap opera or a Hollywood melodrama. Its deepest roots are in communities and identities, not in hype and profits. The game is not a game-show, but TV has turned it into one and, characteristically, even the most successful game-shows are short-lived.
It is telling that the two most successful game-shows of recent years - Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and The Weakest Link - embody the same marketing messages used to sell football. Hearing of the wages paid to top players, millions of young boys start kicking a ball dreaming of becoming football millionaires. Simultaneously, the weakest clubs must be sacrificed to feed the bloated monsters. Allure and ruthlessness are the respective goals of marketing and business. Now they have been made the goals of game-shows and sport too.
In such a pro-profit, anti-community context, it is hardly surprising that the Wembley and Bertie Bowl projects are a mess. Sure, television wants full and throbbing venues to add atmosphere to its coverage - however the recent Juventus v Arsenal Champions League match, played before a "crowd" so small that you could hear a dog barking, was less exciting than a wet weekend in Kinnegad - but TV moguls simply want to bring along their cameras and technology to broadcast the complementary spectacles of play and crowd. They also want to own the game and exploit its infrastructure, rivalries and traditions in order to flog ads to watching millions.
They certainly don't want any of the considerable expense involved in building venues where mere tens of thousands congregate to see live games. Fans are a desirable backdrop, but accommodating them is hugely more expensive than building a plywood and tinsel backdrop to a game-show and paying a presenter - jolly, prattish, manic, avuncular, whatever - to ask the questions and do the links.
A generation ago, professional boxing was still a major sport. Certainly, the heavyweight champion of the world was a major dude in the pantheon of sporting notables. Now, boxing is a sick joke.
Arguments to have it banned on the grounds of barbarity have much merit, but arguments to have it banned because it's a manipulated rip-off have total merit. Distorted to make loot for a few wide boys, it has lost credibility and appeal. It is foolish to imagine that football is immune from being destroyed by its own wide boys.
In effect, television is feudalising football. The top players - the lords of the game - are becoming remarkably wealthy, while the rest - the vassals - are under increasing pressure. Manchester United v Real Madrid or Liverpool v Barcelona will still attract most fans, but as such clashes become increasingly common and thereby mundane, their appeal must inevitably shrink. In fairness, there's still life in the knock-out stages of the Champions League and this year's Premiership run-in, but over-exposure throughout the season is alienating millions.
The irony of this feudalising effect is that organised sport grew with greater democratisation towards the end of the 19th century. Leisure gained meaning and became more ritualised. As a result, it bonded communities and sport generated cultural significance. Inevitably, some people took it all excessively seriously, but at least they weren't treated as mere consumers of mega-scale game-show entertainment. Football was a game all right, but fans, especially in working-class communities, made it a sport and gave it a cultural resonance.
The context of Irish football remains different. Given our small population and the intense competition between Gaelic games, soccer and rugby, the League of Ireland (I know it's not called that any more, but it'll always be the League of Ireland to me!) is in a wildly different financial category from the English Premiership. Yet, even in such a modest league, the effects of demography and marketing are obvious. Its premier division is practically a Dublin-only arrangement because Dublin is, in effect, a primate city, albeit in a European state.
The GAA, however, still a part of "organic" society insofar as it has roots in the soil and the soul, is at the metaphorical crossroads. The association's television advertising for its club championships stresses this organic aspect (you don't choose a club, you "inherit" it), but there's an irony in that too. If club loyalty is simply inherited, then why would anybody need to be told? Such inheritance ought to be automatic, but what the ad does is promote the notion that viewers can choose to inherit or not.
In the end, sport has got to admit that its deals with television are a Faustian pact. The soccer boom, which came about because satellite television needed something popular to fill its schedules, is dependent on brand names to attract advertisers and viewers, but even the most popular brands ultimately have finite appeal before over-exposure relegates them. The immediate future for the big brands appears assured even though the outlook for many smaller clubs is bleak.
Football itself needs community. The big brand names can gobble up the smaller ones to please television and its advertisers. In doing so, however, they reduce diversity and weaken equality within their own community. The business guff for such carry-on is "rationalisation". But it is the crude rationale of the market for supply and demand. Deep roots in communities and identities, which gave sport a cultural significance and vigour, produced a flower more fragile than perhaps we realised. The avaricious game-show sprouts more tinsel by the year.