The reports of a European Super League on Sunday 18th April sent ripples of disgust around the sporting world. The proposal sought to base the qualification of teams based on finance and not necessarily merit. This would therefore result in a hegemony of European Giants in a rigid elite competition. It would ensure the enthralling spontaneity of a football was sacrificed for financial security and continuous and soulless super team match ups. While this was a particularly repugnant move of corporate greed, no sports fan was surprised. The integrity of modern sport has been corrupting since the early 90’s. The growth of apathetic ownerships, absurd wages, new uncompetitive formats, costly subscription fees and accounts of corruption are hallmarks of its death.
Football has been most distorted by money out of all of the sports. While the condition of athletes and sport facilities have been refined for greater entertainment, the success of a team is now solely contingent on the wealth of its owners. For hundreds of years the footballing elite has been mostly decided on a natural trajectory of merit, mostly irrespective of the board. Many teams were reliant on homegrown talent and the British Transfer record had not even broke £1.5 million until late 1981. On the verge of the 2000’s, clubs such as Chelsea and Manchester City (formerly in League Two) were unnaturally propelled, beyond success they had ever achieved, through billionaire take-overs. Sir Matt Busby famously said, “football is nothing without the fans”. This fast-tracking of teams replaced the gratification of hard-fought success spurred on by unwavering fan support with a very different hollow artificiality. The injection of disproportionate transfer fees and lucrative contracts by owners such as Roman Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour has now made the hopes of smaller teams much gloomier. This has undermined the principles of open competition due to the unaffordability of the transfer market. Manchester City now have a squad value higher than the entirety of the Championship; this demonstrates the inequality seen between only one tier of the football pyramid. A failure to create a more affordable market and decrease player wages could be fatal, as it already has been for teams such as Macclesfield Town and Bury FC.
The wages of elite sport are driving up the prices of streaming services as the demand of the biggest clubs increases. The wages of modern athletes are one of the most off-putting aspects of modern sport. In boxing, Wilder, Fury and Joshua all have amassed in excess of $45 million. A proposed fight between Joshua and Fury would reportedly cost £29.95 on Sky Sports according to some suggestions. This demonstrates how the greed of organisations and individuals are rendering sports unaffordable. In the American mainstream sports, such as Basketball, American Football and UFC, astronomical wages have been set. Half of the Top 20 in Forbes’ “Highest Paid Athletes List” (as of 2020) were involved in these American sports. The individualism of global capitalism rife in American culture has particularly influenced this. Most tragically of all, football is universally the highest paid sport. Football’s heritage lies in the escapism for working people. Arsenal FC started as a group of munitions workers, Manchester United was composed of Newton Heath railway workers and West Ham United bloomed from the Thames Ironworks. Yet currently, the affordable background of football has been sabotaged by the wages of the modern player. It is the unconditional wages of the modern player that are most embittering for spectators of the sport. The £95.9 million average annual squad wage for “Big 6” Premier League football players, creates a huge disconnect between the often-greedy players, who are doused in expectation, and the fans. Football has been deeply plagued with inequality across the footballing pyramid. This has led to clubs such as Bury FC folding (during the 2020 COVID Pandemic) while Mesut Özil, was contracted to £350k per week despite not playing even once during the 2020/21 season. Despite the triumph of the collapsed Super League on the 20th of April, the astronomical ticket prices, subscription fees and wages of players remain. It is clear that player wages are also placing an extortionate strain on the lower tiers of elite sport with recruitment especially difficult for the smaller teams.
The disconnect of covetous owners has become glaringly obvious. For example, Joel Glazer’s irreverence of the sport was evident with his use of Manchester United as a business rather than a club. The Glazer regime has decided to register the club in the tax haven of the Cayman Islands, sell stocks and leave a once stable club in debt in excess of an interest-driven £1 billion. The substandard transfer recruitment devoid of a Director of Football (until March 2021) and the leaky stadium roof were a further insult to the fans of the club. The most heinous of the Glazer’s blunders was the collusion of a proposed Super League in April 2021. This proposal sought financial certainty over the miraculous and unpredictable open competition of football. Owners of 14 of Europe’s elite clubs planned to invalidate both relegations and the significance of actual league matches thus removing the dramatic uncertainty of football. The owners of many of Europe’s elite clubs shredded up the history, passion and dedication of fans for the proposal of a £3 billion net profit on losses during a pandemic. This same pandemic involved many clubs such as Arsenal making low-paid staff redundant as footballers wages received only marginal cuts. To entrust the decisions of a club entirely to corporate greed is damnation for football fans. Club ownership changes must be made to team sports to ensure the decision making does not solely reflect the interest of a wealthy select few. In contrast to this deregulated chaos, the solidarity of partially fan-owned football teams, such as Bayern Munich and Dortmund, prevented the plunge into an anti-competitive Super League. The “50+1” fan ownership model ensures that the monetary focus of a club’s decisions is curbed. This is as it allocates fans with shares and thus power in decision making.
Despite the triumph of the cancelled “Super League”, football was already mired in corruption from all sides of this sanctimonious debate between FIFA and UEFA. Both are notoriously corrupt and self-serving organisations. Tragically, around 6,500 migrant workers died (according to The Guardian) in the conditions of sultry heat, low pay and unreliable wage bills in Qatar. This is a horrific example of the devastation that FIFA permitted for the creation of a glib oval of World Cup stadium. Such appalling instances of migrant labour were also prevalent in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 South African and 2014 Brazil World Cup. This lack of transparency in commercialising sport is another hugely off-putting factor. Sport is increasingly falling victim to globalisation. This is allowing such migrant labour to be hidden by the media irrelevancy of nations such as Qatar, Brazil and South Africa to Western consumers. Additionally, the competition of global markets is driving up the prices of sport. The organisations involved such as UEFA and FIFA, the ownerships of clubs and the streaming services such as Sky and BT must be regulated and become more transparent. Otherwise, hundreds of years of visceral sporting drama will be transformed into an unaffordable, uncompetitive and immoral industry.
While the prospects seem dismal, there are solutions. Jeremy Corbyn notably pledged, in his 2019 manifesto, to increase the influence of supporters’ trusts by giving them shares in clubs. Like the German model of “50+1”, this would ensure that decision making would be wrenched from the hands of incapable owners. The ownership of these clubs and organisations should also have a criterion based upon human rights records to ensure a more humane sport. The most difficult solution to implement is that political change needs to occur in many nations to ensure such human rights are guaranteed in sport. To assist individual sports more (such as Boxing and Tennis), athletes wage caps should also be introduced. This may also help to lower the costly drive of subscription fees by reducing the necessity for revenue.