Anyone who follows football is familiar with the agenda of Fifa president Sepp Blatter. He, like Michel Platini, resents the success of English clubs in the Champions League (even though both of them may deny it). He also does not like the involvement of big business in football. It is therefore no surprise that he should welcome the global financial crisis as an opportunity to return football to what he sees as its roots, although some of us are sceptical about whether the era of rule by local small businessmen who invested nothing in the team or the stadium was such a golden age.
Anyone who follows football is familiar with the agenda of Fifa president Sepp Blatter. He, like Michel Platini, resents the success of English clubs in the Champions League (even though both of them may deny it). He also does not like the involvement of big business in football. It is therefore no surprise that he should welcome the global financial crisis as an opportunity to return football to what he sees as its roots, although some of us are sceptical about whether the era of rule by local small businessmen who invested nothing in the team or the stadium was such a golden age. However, Blatter’s position is somewhat contradictory, as should the economic downturn really hit football, Fifa’s revenues would suffer as well.
Fifa relies on the World Cup for 90 per cent of its revenue and expects to earn $3.2 billion in television and marketing revenue from the 2010 tournament in South Africa. Blatter’s view is that the organisation will remain in a ‘comfortable situation’ until 2010, but is braced for a bleaker financial outlook after that when deals for future tournaments must be renegotiated. Blatter argued, ‘Football has yet not so much been touched by the first wave of an economic tsunami. But the second wave will touch football, especially with the sponsorship of club football and sport in general. Look at Formula One and motor sport – they have already lost sponsors.’ I do not think the analogy with Formula One is a very good one. It is an incredibly expensive sport to run and although it has its devoted followers, it is not a game with global appeal like football (the United States aside). As has been argued in earlier articles, football will take a hit from the recession, particularly in terms of corporate spending. But as long as television revenue holds up, the Premiership model is not going to collapse.
Blatter then went on to reveal the contradictions in his position again when he claimed that football was ‘the biggest business in the world’ and hoped that despite a tough economic environment it would remain so. ‘There is no company in the world that makes a bigger turnover than the international football family,’ he said. ‘It’s worth about $300 billion dollars … and we do hope that it can remain the biggest in the world.’ Leaving aside the fact that one cannot really compare a company with an industry, it does seem that Blatter wants to have his cake and eat it as far as football as a business is concerned.
Blatter then got going on his favourite hobby horse, expressing concern that fans were losing their local identities, especially in England’s Premier League. Given that he was speaking in Manchester, he might have realised that this process has been going on for a long time, well before the arrival of the Glazers (about whom he made some ambivalent remarks given that he was visiting their club). I was in Melbourne last Saturday and at a tram stop I got into conversation with a young woman wearing a United shirt about trams. ‘Of course, you have them in Manchester,’ I said. ‘I don’t come from Manchester,’ she replied. Silly me!
Blatter argues that ‘In England, the clubs don’t belong to fans they belong to investors’. He favours the German model in which there was majority local ownership. I have been watching football for fifty years and I can never remember clubs being owned by ordinary fans. Shares may have been more dispersed in the past but Charlton, for example, was owned by a wealthy familuy of timber importers who had the reputation of taking money out of the club rather than putting it in. Let’s not escape into sepia tinted myths of a golden age.