Anyone want to play on the left?

When football was the workers' game, it was the home of charismatic leftwingers like Bill Shankly and Brian Clough. Now, with the Premiership awash with TV money, the socialists seem to have disappeared. Do politics and the beautiful game just not mix any more, asks Barney Ronay

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2064746,00.html

Anyone want to play on the left?

When football was the workers' game, it was the home of charismatic leftwingers like Bill Shankly and Brian Clough. Now, with the Premiership awash with TV money, the socialists seem to have disappeared. Do politics and the beautiful game just not mix any more, asks Barney Ronay

Wednesday April 25, 2007

The Guardian

Later this month Italian footballer Cristiano Lucarelli will be the celebrity guest of honour at a UCL seminar called Money, Politics and Violence. At first glance this seems an unlikely choice of speaker. It is tempting to speculate on Lucarelli's themes ("At the end of the day you're talking about a decay of the post-capitalist economy situation"), his insistence on taking the positives, giving 120% and always remembering that left-leaning political theory is a funny old game.

Tempting, but in this case probably misguided. Lucarelli is an unusual footballer, a self-avowed communist and an oddity both in his own country and in the context of our ideologically neutral Premiership. At the top level at least, footballing socialists are an almost extinct breed. This is hardly surprising. The Premiership player lives a rarefied life. Alienated by celebrity and his own vertiginous wealth, bombarded with the tedious superlatives of a deeply introverted industry, it seems barely conceivable he might still be capable of making the distinctions required to call himself a socialist, a monetarist, a disciple of Chairman Mao, or anything else for that matter. Premiership football has very little political content; it's all on one note. As the former Scotland international Gordon McQueen says: "Football is all about money and greed and everyone's involved in it."

McQueen played for Leeds and Manchester United in the 1970s and 80s. He was also well known as a Labour party supporter who wrote an article explaining his politics in the Daily Mirror. "I came from a family and from an area that was and still is solid Labour, " he says now of his native Ayrshire. "In fact, there were more communists than Tories. I just did what I was asked to do. I went to local meetings. I helped with fundraising." McQueen was hardly a raving Trotskyite; just an everyday Labour man who also happened to be a professional footballer. This is something he believes is pretty much incompatible with the modern game.

"There are plenty of smashing lads involved now, but whether they could be bothered with something like that is a different story. The difference is they don't live in the real world. They're cosseted in a way we never were. I'd say 99% are totally uninterested in politics."

The players might not be interested, but in its own way modern British football is a deeply political affair. Just take a look at the Premiership to find out what 15 years of hot-housed free-market economics looks like. From the first BSkyB broadcast deal in 1992 the revenue from subscription television has utterly transformed the game. The new Sky and Setanta TV contract is worth £1.7bn over three seasons, a significant amount of which will end up in the pockets of the men kicking the ball around. The escalation to a current average Premiership wage of £12,300 a week has been like an unplanned social experiment. The players have come to represent an acme of consumption, a brutally linear expression of a certain way of living. In our footballers we see a funfair mirror reflection of the same forces working on the people watching them from the stands. We don't admire them, so much as aspire to their lifestyle, crave their large American cars and holiday homes in Dubai, bandy their salaries around with a Gollum-like mixture of avarice and disgust. The top tier of British football stands as an extreme expression of a certain kind of politics, rampant capitalism with the volume turned up to 11. A Premiership socialist? It might not even be possible.

This is all relatively new. We're not talking about golf here. Historically, football's politics, such as they are, have tended to loiter on the left wing. The majority of Premiership clubs have their roots in either a local church or a local pub. For 100 years these clubs existed as an extension of their local community, a living riposte - albeit an occasionally violent and shambolically administered one - to the Thatcherite notion that there is no such thing as society.

Bill Shankly is probably still British football's most celebrated socialist. Wisecracking, dapper and a charismatic orator, Shankly was a hugely successful manager of Liverpool through the 60s and early 70s. What seems most remarkable about him now is his insistence on talking politics, even while talking football: "The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It's the way I see football, the way I see life."

Shankly traced his political beliefs to his upbringing in the Ayrshire mining village of Glenbuck. A childhood spent in areas dominated by heavy industry and trade union influence has been a common theme among football's senior socialists. Sir Alex Ferguson was a Govan shipyard shop steward before he became a player with Rangers. His backing for the Blair Labour leadership is well documented. At the last general election he posted a message on the government's website praising "two brilliant barnstorming speeches from Tony and Gordon". Ferguson, with his fine wines and his multi-million pound racehorse ownership disputes, has frequently been subjected to the familiar jibe of "champagne socialism". Football is fond of this kind of reasoning, based on the idea that those with socialist beliefs are expected to live exemplary altruistic lives, whereas rightwingers can pretty much do whatever they want. Nottingham Forest legend Brian Clough, a sponsor of the anti-Nazi League and a regular on picket lines during the miners' strike, had his own riposte. "For me, socialism comes from the heart. I don't see why certain sections of the community should have the franchise on champagne and big houses."

Clough was pretty much the standard-bearer for football socialism in the 1980s, a decade that saw the emergence of a new strain of rightwing footballer. Certainly something about Margaret Thatcher touched a chord with the aspirational pre-Premiership player, with his golfing sweaters, his sponsored Rover and his first intimations of the spiralling financial rewards that would reach frantic levels in the decades to come. The famous photo of Kevin Keegan and Emlyn Hughes cosying up to Thatcher on the Downing Street steps remains a pungent image. It wasn't just Keegan. Thatcherism mobilised footballers in unprecedented numbers. Coventry players Keith Houchen and Steve Ogrizovic campaigned for their local Tory candidate at the 1987 election. Footballers even managed to muscle their way in among all the Tarbies and Brucies at the grisly party glad-handings: Arsenal manager Terry Neill and star striker "Champagne" Charlie Nicholas were among those to appear on stage at a Thatcher rally. For reasons that are still unclear, Thatcher herself was installed as honorary vice-president of Blackburn Rovers.

In the 20 years since, the footballing socialist has all but disappeared. Certainly, we've not had a lot to go on: Thierry Henry wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt; Diego Maradona smoking Montecristos with Fidel while detoxing in Cuba; Eric Cantona and his elusively loopy left-of-centre persona. "Perhaps you may find it odd that I think happiness does not come from being able to buy a car that one wants," he challenged in his autobiography, before reminding us that "the woods are full of bows and arrows".

This is a confusing time for any top-level footballer with a twitching of social conscience. The problem is, he often ends up looking a bit silly. Take Rio Ferdinand, for example. Ferdinand is an intelligent man. He lent his name to a campaign against knife crime in London. Peckham-raised, he discreetly offered his support in the aftermath of the Damilola Taylor murder. But somehow it seems that just making a bit of a difference isn't enough. Not when you're this important. "I want to join forces with the Government," he wrote in his autobiography, before going on to describe his plans for a countrywide rehabilitation of the nation's youth via his inspirational chain of Ferdinand-branded leisure centres, a vision of a brighter tomorrow he once tried to share with Gordon Brown after discovering they were staying in the same hotel ("unfortunately he had gone out for something to eat").

The suspicion is that socialism - in the everyday sense practised by the likes of McQueen - is simply incompatible with the life of the Premiership footballer. Leftwing sympathies are still present in isolated gestures. Liverpool player Robbie Fowler celebrated scoring in a European Cup-Winners' Cup game in 1997 by pulling up his shirt to reveal a T-shirt expressing support for striking Liverpool dockers. As a gesture it was widely appreciated. But solidarity only goes so far: Fowler is also English football's fourth-richest man, estimated to own almost 100 houses as part of a £28m buy-to-let portfolio (inspiring the Yellow Submarine-style terrace chant, "We all live in a Robbie Fowler house"). Wigan manager Paul Jewell's dad was a trade union activist in Liverpool. He keeps a pet tortoise called Trotsky.

And then there's Gary Neville, the man most people would pick out as an example of a modern footballing socialist. Neville's "Red Nev" nickname was given to him by the tabloid press after his stewardship of a revolt in the England dressing room over Ferdinand's punishment for missing a drugs test. It's not exactly flogging Marxism Today outside Sainsbury's, but the nickname has stuck.

Neville is one of the Premiership's more thoughtful players. He has called on his colleagues not to use agents, although having always been represented by his father makes this an easy position to adopt. He signed up to the recent initiative for footballers to donate a day's wages to a nurses' hardship fund. He might even, you never know, see himself as a socialist. Still, you come up against the insurmountable stumbling block of his profession. In Neville we can see an intelligent man placed in an unintelligent situation. Earning £80,00-a-week for playing football places him on one side of a very real divide, whatever his potential leftwing leanings. The old distinction of champagne socialism doesn't really do it justice, unless perhaps we're talking about taking an Olympic swimming pool-sized Jacuzzi in the stuff every morning. Which is possibly something Neville might be planning to do in the £3m home with golf course, gym, pools, stables and a cinema he is having built in Lancashire. Clough is right. Socialism doesn't necessary exclude you from living in a big house; but there are limits to everything.

Does any of this matter? Certainly, football's central relationship, that between fans and players, seems to have suffered some collateral damage. The working man's ballet is now very much the middle-class man's ballet, too. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but the speed with which the demographic of football's target market has shifted is unprecedented. Not least in the idea of actually having a target market in the first place. Andy Lyons is editor of When Saturday Comes, the UK's only independent national football magazine. WSC began as a fanzine in 1986, at a time when following football was a relatively marginalised activity. "There used to be a sense of a shared experience of being a football supporter," Lyons says. "This has splintered now, due in part to the sheer weight of numbers of the Sky generation of new supporters."

Various forces have been working on this relationship between supporters and players: the repackaging of the game as televised entertainment and the dilution of the idea of a geographical fanbase; the hyper-inflationary hikes in ticket prices and the emphasis on football as a corporate hospitality product. Going to watch a game at Arsenal's new Emirates ground feels more like attending a stadium rock concert or visiting the Ideal Home exhibition. Your relationship to everyone else inside the stadium has changed. You're united by consumer choice. The people performing in front of you are skilled entertainers.

This is not necessarily what football's traditional consumers (formerly "fans") actually want. A feature of some recent Liverpool home games has been a habit among home fans of a concerted holding up of scarves en masse and singing of their traditional anthems in a self-consciously "Liverpool Kop" manner. Always a club tradition at bigger games, at every home game it is a relatively new thing, fetishising the club's own past, perhaps out of a sense of nostalgia for a still-present but undeniably fragile sense of footballing community. This feeling of a collective identity is what sustained football through its lean years. Will it still be there when they come again?

British football is ahead of the rest of the world here. Lyons believes that in other countries players are not only more openly political, but possibly also have a greater bond with their supporters. "You find in countries where the working classes tend to be more political, such as Argentina, where there is still a strong trade union movement, there tends to be more of a sense of communal identity," he says. "Society is perhaps based around older social patterns that no longer exist here, such as heavy industry. In among these, football is one of the forces that bind people together."

There are plenty of examples of political South American footballers. The World Cup-winning Brazilian striker Romario is a high-profile supporter of the progressive President Lula and has also assisted with projects to relieve poverty in the favelas. Italian club Internazionale were persuaded by their Argentinian captain Xavier Zanetti to donate €5,000 (£3,400) to help Zapatista rebels in Mexico. "We believe in a better, unglobalised world enriched by the cultural differences and customs of all the people," Zanetti said, possibly surprising some of his team-mates in the process.

Where all this leaves us is hard to say. Is it really impossible to be a socialist and a top-level footballer? Probably, in the hard line "property is theft" sense of the word; the bar has simply been raised too high. But then, all of this is very new. There is no precedent for the Premiership, outside of the transcontinental sporting conferences of the US - never exactly a hot bed of leftwing politics and, what with the market-led sports "franchise" system, certainly not an environment where the social bond between supporters and club is valued.

It would be nice to see someone trying, however. In the future, perhaps a few of our footballers might be willing to challenge their environment, rather than simply accepting its rewards. Former England goalkeeper David James made the relatively radical suggestion last week that players might be paid only on a performance-related basis. This might not exactly be up there with Paul Breitner, a West German World Cup winner in 1974, who combined a mastery of attacking full-back play with growing a bushy beard, espousing Marxism. But James' notion of footballers-as-estate-agents at least goes pleasingly against the tide. It's an acknowledgment that there might be another way. And, like Lucarelli who cuts a slightly cartoonish figure with his Che Guevara T-shirts and clenched-fist salutes, it's also appealingly silly; a counter to the po-faced sense of entitlement that has too often been the Premiership player's defining trait. This is only football, after all. It doesn't have to mean anything. But it's usually much more fun when it tries.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2075171,00.html

English football takes a pasting - again

Barney Ronay

Wednesday May 9, 2007

The Guardian

'Put a shit hanging from a stick, and there are people who will tell you it's a work of art." So said Argentinian football pundit Jorge Valdano this week in the Spanish newspaper Marca. Oddly enough, Valdano was describing the recent Champions League tie between Chelsea and Liverpool, a game hitherto held out with a quiet satisfaction as a showcase of the best that English football has to offer.

Valdano is an unusual figure. He occupies a unique role as football's philosopher-critic. He played in Argentina's 1986 World Cup-winning team. He published a book of epigrams called Apuntes del Balon ("Notes of the Ball"). He once compared criticism of his tactical approach to "the time they dared ask Borges what poetry was for".

So, he's a footballer, a philosopher, a name-dropper. But is he right? The answer is that in some contexts - such as trendy east London - "a shit on a stick" can indeed be art. Like art, football arranges itself in different genres. When Valdano was sporting director at Real Madrid, his team was a travelling sideshow of back-flicks and nutmegs, in contrast to the pragmatic styles of Liverpool and Chelsea. This is clearly a case of the baroque versus the brutalist.

There may be politics here, too. Rafa Benitez and Jose Mourinho, managers of Liverpool and Chelsea, are both candidates to take over at Madrid. Valdano is speaking not to us, but to Madrid's board and fans, while offering a reminder of his own legacy.

Which is all very well, but it's still rude. The obvious riposte is that our football may be a shit on a stick, but it's a successful shit on a stick. Three Champions League semifinalists: count 'em, Jorge. More likely, it comes down to different notions of beauty. We don't produce extravagantly skilled Maradonas. We produce tough John Terrys and tall Peter Crouches. We run around a lot and, occasionally, we forget to take the ball with us. Which, in the right light, can be just as lovely.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Hoy me siento de humor Chacotero para comenzar el día. Mmm. Hagamos un rápido ejercicio. Izquierdosos versus fachos en el Pambol:

Izquierdosos:

Gabo (García Márquez), Cruyff, Valdano (según él, mmm), El Chava Barragán (¡Ah, no!, ese táchenlo), Camilo José Cela, el DIEGO (MARADONA, but of course), Eduardo Galeano, Nabokov, El “Vasco” Aguirre, todo el INTER de Milano, el EZ (Fut REBELDE, YEAH!), Los Fab Four, Villoro, “El Flaco” Menoti … M@rco (¡Je!),

Fachos:

Mourinho, Franco, Leaño, ¡Ah! Ahora que anda de moda … Ahumada, ¿le acoplamos a la Chayiyo Robles?, KISSINGER (Calla boca, esas ya son palabras mayores, remember el Palacio de la Moneda), Musolini ¡Utas!, Slim, Azcárraga, Fox, Vergara, Berlusconi, Abramovich, Salinas-Pliego, … “El Chaparrito-Peloncito”.

En esto Pelé ni fu ni fa. No pinta el BATO.

Al rato si me acuerdo les traigo más, tengo que terminar la TESIS, para imprimir YA.

P.D.PAYASA. "...through SPACE and time, always another SHOW/we all need the CLOWNS to make us SMILE..." - FAITHFULLY (Journey).

P.D.HUMILDE. "... and Harry doesn't mind if he doesn't make the SCENE/he's got a day-time JOB, he's doing alright..." - Sultans of Swing (Dire Straits).

Pilona “Bronceada”.

No reparéis en que soy MORENA,

Porque el SOL me miró …

Cantar de los Cantares 1:6 (Casiodoro de Reina, 1569)

… la OLA MEXICANA.