The money sloshing around the sport is part of what makes it so compelling. ‘Financial fair play’? Nonsense
It was almost 11 o’clock on Saturday night, well past his bedtime, and my middle son, my nine-year-old, was still up. Worse, he was running round the lounge, jumping up and down and shouting at the top of his voice.
This is not behaviour I would normally condone. But I would have felt a hypocrite telling him off, given that at the time I was running faster, jumping higher and shouting louder. It’s not every night that Chelsea win the Champions League.
I can’t really explain to you where my liking of football comes from. I don’t come from a footballing family. My father’s hobby – I am not making this up – was studying the history of the Rabbinical School of Warsaw. While this need not logically have excluded cogitation on whether the 160-goal midfielder Matt Le Tissier was right to have spent his entire career at Southampton, in practice it did.
My elder brother preferred offbeat sports – coxless rowing, triathlons and that Japanese, or is it Thai, thing they do in parks. So while he was an inspiration for much else, he was only able to be indulgent of my football obsession. I must therefore, I suppose, have picked it up from my schoolfriends. I have always slightly feared that being a fan is an indication that I succumb too easily to peer pressure.
In any case, I imagined that as I got older the whole fan thing would fade. Not a bit of it. Oddly, as the years have gone by, it has got stronger. You may have picked up the paper on Monday and wondered why on earth an adult would want a twenty-page special Chelsea edition of The Game. My only problem with it was, why not twenty-eight pages?
The big question, I suppose, is: ‘Why?’ It can’t be about identity. True, I wouldn’t dream of being a fan of anyone other than Chelsea. When I was seven, I was taken to a game at Stamford Bridge by a friend whose dad had a shop nearby. I have supported them ever since and so I suppose it is part of who I am. But as a North West London Jew, Tory and think-tank wonk, I am hardly in need of extra pieces of identity. On the identity front I am only outbid by Sammy Davis Jr (African-American, Jew, one eye, member of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack).
Nor do I invest football with some great intellectual or cultural properties that it doesn’t possess in the hope of persuading you that its place in national life, or even my own, might somehow justify the investment of all that time and energy. I am very interested in analysing the game rigorously because it enhances my enjoyment, but my attachment to it is so unintellectual as to be almost witless.
Over the weekend there was a fuss because John Terry, the Chelsea captain, had collected the cup wearing full kit, including shin-pads, despite the fact that he had arrived wearing a suit, having been banned from the match. I have been explaining to friends that not only do I not care about this, but as he was the captain of my team, having just won the Champions League, I would have been perfectly content for Terry to have collected the cup wearing only shin-pads.
If you are wondering if I realise how ridiculous this sounds, then let me reassure you. Of course I do. But I provide the same explanation as the Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy when asked how he could bear to put his hand over a naked flame until his flesh burned: ‘The trick is not caring.’
I don’t care where Chelsea’s money comes from as long as there is plenty of it. I don’t care if Didier Drogba rolls around on the floor without really being injured as long as (eventually and please take your time, Didier) he gets up and scores. I don’t care that Chelsea footballers are paid a lot of money. Pay them more is what I say. Especially Frank Lampard. I don’t feel embarrassed to use ‘we’ when talking about winning the cup, even though my own contribution, particularly away to Barcelona, was modest. I happily, and without unduly feeling it absurd, accept congratulations from my friends on Chelsea’s latest trophy acquisition.
In other words, it is precisely the ridiculous, sweep-everything-away, argue-for-an-hour-about-nothingness of football that makes me love it.
I don’t read much fiction. Who needs it when you have soccer? A football match is for me a great work of fiction, one in which the ending is impossible to predict. On the stage or in a book, you can usually work out where it’s going even if the author has been very careful. Football never ceases to surprise. If Drogba had equalised in the last minute of Swann’s Way I might have gone on to read the rest of Proust.
The idiosyncrasies, the unfairness, the rabbit out of the hat, they are football. What else is it? A Russian billionaire comes along in the middle of the night and buys a club for a pound. A sheikh turns up and takes over a club that used to belong to the exiled Prime Minister of Thailand and a couple of years later they win the title. What tremendous fun. What’s not to love about that? Who wants logic? Or rigour?
So I can’t be doing with people who want to iron it all out. UEFA, the European government of football (and everything that description would lead you to expect), is introducing some new rules to ensure what it calls ‘financial fair play’. The idea is that you wouldn’t be able to waltz in and put your millions into a club; all the money that a team spends has to come from its income from football. This removes some unfairness but, like all such well-meant schemes, won’t really work. It will make the game more unequal (as the big clubs grow their income and the little guys can’t catch up) and more predictable. And what’s the point of that?
In any case, the big money hasn’t spoilt football; it has improved it. Better players have come from abroad, improving standards all round. And there is always the chance that your club could be next in the money. In the years before big-money football, Liverpool won the title seven years in a row and there wasn’t a sheikh in sight to save us from them.
More important still, the rules might impede Chelsea, which I am against, whatever the other arguments. People ask me if I didn’t prefer the purity of the old days. Well, I have sat in the stands before Roman Abramovich came along and we were in Division Two and the manager was sitting all by himself in an empty bit of the stand as we lost again.
Saturday was better.