Inequality is killing football
The sport’s governing bodies are presiding over the game's slow death
Incredibly, it wasn’t even the worst footballing idea of the week.
Annoyed at the way that the Super Bowl apparently “feels bigger” than the Champions League final, PSG president Nasser Al-Khelaifi suggested that what European club football’s showpiece needs is… an opening ceremony.
Elsewhere, the Portuguese Football Federation are reportedly intending to trial sixty-minute football matches, with the clock only ticking when the ball is in play. Supposedly this is being done to reduce time-wasting and improve the experience for fans; one suspects that fans were not widely consulted as part of this.
More concerningly, Europe’s elite clubs are lobbying UEFA to change the qualification process for the Champions League, so that clubs failing to qualify through league position might still manage to enter the tournament by other means should their European performance over the past five years be good enough. Essentially this would be a “get out of jail free” card for any top sides who had a bad season, to guarantee that the Champions League riches keep flowing their way.
If it seems as though we are constantly being bombarded with terrible suggestions from the elite clubs and the football authorities at the moment, that’s because we are. Football is restive. Before the pandemic, there were signs that after years of growth revenues were beginning to stagnate; that football was perhaps reaching a saturation point. Then covid hit, costing the big clubs billions in lost earnings as stadiums were closed.
This backdrop of financial turmoil goes a long way towards explaining the abortive European Super League, or the forthcoming Champions League reforms. When economic times are tough, the big clubs will tend to flex their muscles and demand a greater share of the riches on offer. We’ve seen this all before.
It is commonplace to point the finger at the Premier League for all that is wrong in football today. To look at how inequality has grown in the game in recent years, at how trophies are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, at clubs lower down the pyramid struggling to survive whilst the elite few gorge themselves on lucrative television and sponsorship deals, and to assume that all of this began with the breakaway league in 1992.
It is a tempting narrative, but the establishment of the Premier League was more of a step on a journey already well underway in football than a complete break. The shift towards the financialisation of football began with the abolition of the maximum wage in 1961, but most of the significant changes happened in the 1980s.
By the mid-1980s, English football was in a dreadful state. A lack of investment going back decades had left grounds crumbling, dirty, and unsafe. Hooliganism was rife; 81 people were injured in one of the worst domestic incidents, when an FA Cup Quarter-Final between Luton Town and Millwall in March 1985 was marred by rioting. And May of the same year saw awful tragedies at Heysel, Bradford, and Birmingham.
Unsurprisingly, football represented an unappealing prospect, and attendances, which had been declining for decades, crashed to an all-time low. The combination of dwindling crowds, a ban from European competition, and ever higher players’ wages meant the big clubs were desperate to find new sources of income.
The top clubs had already been successful in getting the 95-year-old practice of sharing gate receipts equally between home and away teams scrapped in 1983, but when the broadcasting rights came up for negotiation in 1986, chairmen from the big teams were playing hardball.
They argued that their clubs were the ones people were interested in watching on television, and with the threat of a breakaway league dangling over the talks, they managed to end the long-established norm of sharing broadcast revenues equally between all ninety-two Football League clubs; instead 50% would be shared amongst the teams in the top flight, which would become three-quarters at the next set of negotiations in 1988.
Another target was the match levy; the Football League used to take 4% of all gate receipts and share this amount evenly amongst all league clubs. This became 3% in 1983, and disappeared entirely with the advent of the Premier League. Also in 1983, shirt sponsorship was permitted for the first time; another revenue stream benefitting the top teams most of all. The cumulative effect of all these changes was to make the big clubs richer and the rest poorer.
It was the 1980s which saw the first big moves towards entrenching inequality in the sport. The economic strife led to changes which concentrated money and power at the top of the club game; the big clubs threatened to leave the Football League if they didn’t get what they wanted, the FA and the Football League shamefully kowtowed to their demands, and in 1992 the clubs left anyway.
The launch of the Premier League came near the start of the long boom, and even when global markets took a huge hit in the financial crisis of 2007/08, football weathered the storm relatively well, growing revenue by expanding into new markets. Pressure from the big teams was less intense when everyone was getting richer, but now, in the shadow of the pandemic, with football revenues struggling, the elite clubs are back to pushing for more.
Although the mooted European Super League collapsed, the Champions League is set to change from 2024/25 to a “Swiss Model”, which essentially means more games, and the big teams playing one another more often. On FIFA’s part, Gianni Infantino wants to host World Cups every two years, because this is apparently what the younger generation is clamouring for.
All this shows is that the people at the top of the game - our game - do not understand football. The instinct is to forever tweak with the product: more games, more clashes between the big clubs, more World Cups, more, more. They don’t seem aware that scarcity has a value, that sometimes less is more, that different clubs succeeding makes things more exciting, that World Cups or big Champions League games are special partly because they don’t happen all the time.
But to take Infantino’s point: if the young aren’t getting into football as previous generations did, it’s not because there aren’t enough World Cups, it’s because the game has been taken from them. They have grown up in a time when our national sport has been put behind a paywall. Ticket prices are prohibitively expensive, and Premier League games require at least one subscription to watch on TV; this season, to watch all Premier League matches, you need to sign up to three different providers, an arrangement aimed purely at squeezing every penny out of supporters. It is difficult for football to sustain its place in our shared national culture if it becomes a past-time too costly for the young to ever get involved with, if it is hidden away on pay-to-view channels.
The game’s administrators seem to think they can solve things by modifying the product; by introducing an opening ceremony, or having a different tournament format, or thirty-minute halves. That there are more profits to be had, if only the game could be improved. But football is fine as it is, and all these hare-brained schemes show that the football authorities are either unwilling or unable to address the real problem: money.
The concentration of wealth and power at the top of the sport is slowly killing football. It is making the sport more predictable, less competitive, and less compelling. The unequal distribution of money makes the game more expensive; clubs at the top need to keep growing revenue to compete for signings, while clubs below the elite try to bridge the gap with ticket prices and shirt sales. The young and the poor are pushed out. Clubs further down the pyramid struggle to survive from year to year.
If football is stagnating, it is because of greed, and it is because of cowardice; the game’s authorities have wilted in the face of challenge at every turn. Big clubs will always push for more, but football’s governing bodies are the custodians of our game, and it is their job to push back; a job which for decades they have singularly failed to do. They shouldn’t have allowed such deep inequality to grow in the game. They shouldn’t have allowed billionaires linked to human rights abuses to buy Premier League clubs. They shouldn’t have allowed the game to be available only to those who can afford the subscriptions.
Tinkering around the edges isn’t going to fix the problems football faces. The solution lies in redistributing football’s vast riches in a much more equitable manner, and in the governing bodies remembering that their job is to protect the interests of football as a whole, whatever the richest clubs might demand.
Are there any teams that make an operating profit in the Football League and the National League? It seems to me that all this TV money has not actually increased the number of clubs in good financial health.