Platini's Aims Laudable but Need Concrete Proposals

In a recent interview with The Guardian newspaper, Michel Platini talked about his concerns, expressed in a letter to all heads of EU government, regarding the “rampant commercialism that assails it” [football]. Interestingly enough, our own ‘gorgeous’ Gordon Brown was the only head not to reply. What a surprise! With all the talk and wringing of hands over recent sporting failings, how interesting that several commentators have identified that the UK government’s lack of interest in football, and sport in general, is reflected by the UK being one of the few leading nations in the world that does not have a sports minister in the main cabinet. Indeed, Australia’s failing at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, where they won only one gold medal, and finished well down the medal table, resulted in a permanent cabinet position being set up. At Athens in 2004 they won 17 gold medals and finished fourth in the medal table.

Despite no comment from Gordon Brown, Richard Scudamore, Premier League Chief Executive, commented in the Financial Times (note, not a paper with a great sporting tradition) that Platini’s ideas, “do not rise much above the view of people in the corner of the pub.” Actually, Richard, your comments reveal exactly what you think of us – your paying “guests” that you so patronisingly referred to us as. We’re all those supporters in the corner of the pub and we pay your exorbitant wages.

Platini replied through the Guardian by saying, “I prefer to speak with the fans in the pubs.” Great. This is a very encouraging sign. He does appear to be saying all the right things and RTG wholeheartedly supports his sentiments. He has, since his election as President of UEFA, originated some interesting and controversial proposals – not all of which RTG has agreed with (see earlier posts re Champions League qualification for FA Cup winners). But, his letter to the heads of government did not appear to make any concrete proposals. And how easy would it be to fight the money men in actually getting through any proposals, anyway, when his organisation, and FIFA, are rife with rumours of financial impropriety?

Let’s stress again, RTG believes (as Platini seems to) that sport has to strike a workable balance between the financial side of matters and its role in civilisation as a cultural and recreational activity. This is not going to be an easy fight for Platini but RTG believes that we, supporters of football, should give him our backing. That’s why this blog exists and why we need you to lend your support by signing the guestbook.

Reclaim the Game – The Week’s Events

• The ambivalence of both Richard Scudamore and the UK government, as mentioned above, is unlikely to help England’s cause in winning the 2018 World Cup bid. It beggars belief how the FA and Premier League continue to walk around with their feet permanently in their mouths.
• Next week sees the launch of the new 24/7 Setanta Sports News Channel. Great. Now we can look forward to Kelly Dalglish (ex of Sky and still of Kenny) delivering yet more WAG stories and over-sensationalised, trite items on an already dangerously over-exposed sport. Now, we’ll have the pleasure of Sky and Setanta being able to bid for the privilege of showing the England plane taking off for the World Cup (if they get there).
• The World Cup 2010 organisers have announced lower priced tickets to matches for residents of South Africa in order to encourage the full cross-section of the South African population to be able to attend. Applaudable if it is being taken up by genuine South African football supporters. What RTG suspects will happen is a rampant black market where the corporates get all the tickets they want and national supporters’ associations get hardly any. Think about the mark-up they will be able to make from tickets purchased at £9.65 each (the proposed price). Sadly, RTG can not really offer any solution at this point.
• When Tom Hicks and George Gillett first took over Liverpool, RTG expressed our dismay at how most Liverpool fans (in the hope that it was a chance to be more competitive) welcomed them in with open arms. The recent spat between the owners and Rafa Benitez is a wake up call to the reality for Liverpool supporters. What a pity that neither Hicks nor Gillett were in the country to see the supporters’ march before their crucial game against Porto last night. RTG supports those who took part.

Santa Or Setanta? TV Money Will Ultimately Decide

Have Manchester United taken a small nip from the hand that feeds it? Setanta wanted to move United’s home fixture against Everton to eight o’clock on Christmas Eve in order to make use of a prime viewing slot. By refusing to ‘play ball’ United have struck a minor blow for the ground-visiting supporter. For all we know Everton may have chosen to refuse also but, by all accounts, Sir Alex gave Setanta such short shrift that it never even came down to them to make a choice. But it is only a minor blow and don’t think for one moment that RTG is suggesting that clubs are going to start fighting back against TV companies in the interests of their fans.

There are, of course, problems for supporters associated with trying to travel on Christmas Eve. There are problems, too, for the police faced with rival Merseyside and Manchester supporters enjoying a spot of pre-Christmas bingeing on what is already a busy night for them. And, credit where credit is due - players come in for a fair amount of stick for the amount they earn these days but shouldn’t they at least have Christmas Eve free in what is a hectic period in the Premiership schedule?

It pains RTG to think that TV companies have so little respect now for supporters that they were even prepared to contemplate this. It has already been discussed here in previous posts how TV revenue is gradually growing in importance over gate receipts as a proportion of a club’s turnover. And, as it continues to take on greater and greater significance, we might even expect to see Christmas Day fixtures let alone Christmas Eve.

The Premiership as a ‘product’ continues to grow in popularity the world over. The need to look after the wishes of the supporters in the stadium, therefore, diminishes. We have already seen Manchester United and Arsenal happily play their recent fixture at the Emirates at 12:45pm on a Saturday while Vietnamese beer commercials flashed up all around the pitch. It was predicted (RTG doesn’t know whether rightly or wrongly) that one billion people would watch that game on TV. Given those kinds of numbers, an attendance of 60,000 inside the stadium starts to seem fairly insignificant.

Furthermore, as the needs of worldwide TV viewing figures begin to take centre stage, so competitive sport will begin to be compromised. How long will it be before a team winning fairly comfortably brings on a Chinese, Indian or Korean player, for the last 10 minutes, purely to boost TV revenues? Player decisions will increasingly be made for commercial reasons. Impossible? Well, just look at the case of Brazilian player, Giovanni, who, was not only a surprise pick for the 1998 World Cup squad, but he also played in the first game against Scotland to satisfy a commercial commitment with Nike. He was substituted at half-time and was never seen again for the rest of the tournament. Ronaldo was evidently not fit to play in the final that year, for whatever reason, and yet the idea of him not taking the field was unacceptable to the sponsors. And, you might question why England took an unfit David Beckham to Japan in 2002. Shirt sales, perhaps, ahead of the construction of the New Wembley? Trust RTG on this one. You ain’t seen nothing yet!

If fixture times can be moved to accommodate TV, is it not also feasible that we may soon see, for example, Liverpool versus Manchester United played in Beijing or New York? That may seem ridiculous to football supporters now but so did the idea of changing kick off times to Saturday mornings, Sunday afternoons and Friday nights once upon a time. In fact, the idea of only one match in the top division being played at 3pm on a Saturday would have seemed like nonsense.

In its recent study of the globalisation of sport, The Observer pointed to research that showed that the armchair TV fan is more open to the idea of switching allegiances from team to team. Anyone who has watched a game in a bar in the Far East can clearly see this process in action. The truth is it suits the franchising model for exactly that to happen. Supporters who get uppity at clubs who threaten the tradition and makeup of the team they have followed since they were a kid are not what the modern club owner wants to see going forward. Fickle TV viewers who are prepared to come on board when their favourite star player moves to their club. Now that makes far more financial sense!

Reclaim the Game - The Weekend's Events

• An interesting development taking place at Arsenal where three of the club's season ticket holders are suing their own club for racist chanting at the Emirates stadium. Arsenal fans have long held out that the word 'Yid' is just a nickname for Spurs fans who use the term themselves. The supporters - a Jew, a Muslim and a Christian, beg to differ. A far cry indeed from the days when nicking over the fence was the only way you could get back at your club financially! Supporters these days are clearly too educated and too well-heeled to stop at that.
• A football fan was shot by a policeman in Italy at the weekend during a fight between Lazio and Juve fans. The match was subsequently postponed. Other games in Serie A kicked off ten minutes late as a mark of respect while games between Roma and Catania and Atalanta and Milan were abandoned due to rioting. Far be it from English fans to start getting sniffy about this. Anyone who goes to watch football here knows that hooliganism still goes on but tends not to get reported. But, Italy has ignored or chosen not to confront this problem for too long. Three Middlesbrough fans were stabbed during a UEFA Cup quarter final and dozens of Manchester United fans were injured during their Champions League match with Roma while the police chose to look on or baton charge those fans actually being attacked. Instead of condemning this, the Italian authorities chose to get really defensive about it instead. Italy has contributed too much to the game to allow this to go on and someone in authority needs to start taking action rather than burying their heads in the sand any longer. Playing games behind closed doors and over zealous rules and regulations rules are not what we want to see in European matches. Supporters should be able to enjoy the experience of travelling abroad to games without being in fear of their lives.
• Are the pressures of anchoring mid-week games starting to show on Jeff Stelling? Not only does he not excel at this role (being only marginally better than the infuriatingly bad Richard Keys) but his performance on Gillette Soccer Saturday was less than exemplorary this weekend. Apparently Ware is now in Herefordshire not Hertfordshire and Dagenham and Richmond....sorry....Hampton and Redbridge....sorry...what? Well you get the point. Come on Jeff, you are the guiding light in the tawdry world of Sky Sports. Don't get complacent now!

Hat's Off - Take a Bow (or not)!

Player of the Week - Gabriel Agbonlahor. Who says one player can't change a match? Cleared off the line in the 'Second City' (as it now seems to be called) derby while the score was 1-1. Went almost immediately up the other end and scored the winner for Villa. And as the media love to remind us, "he's English you know".

Hero of the Week - Torquay United. The only non-league team to defeat a league team (and one two divisons above them to boot). Not only that, they did it in style with a 4-1 thrashing. Oh the magic of the FA Cup!

Villain of the Week - Joey Barton. Fairly obvious why when you look at his high tackle on Sunderland's Dickson Etuhu and perhaps, worringly, the fact that were stories of racism banded around when he left City. Our Joey just doesn't seem to want to put his chequered past behind him and move on. He has as much trouble shaking off controversy as his brother does his ball and chain.

Shock of the Week - Liverpool 8 Besiktas 0. Time was when all English teams used to get a bit 'brown underpants' about the idea of playing Turkish teams in Europe. Now it seems a below par Liverpool can see them off at a canter.

Cliche of the Week - 'Israel Do Have A Lot To Play For' and other similar statements of mindless optimism churned out by the press who are struggling to come to terms with the idea that they may have to spend summer with their families rather than on the lash in Austria and Switzerland.

Force Fed TV Diet Leaves Supporters Hungry

So, three o'clock Saturday comes, switch on Sky Soccer Saturday and what do we find? One Premiership fixture only. What with European commitments and TV scheduling the vast majority of Premiership matches were moved to Sunday kick offs varying from 12:00pm to 4:10pm. Perhaps the most cruel of all, Sunderland fans being asked to travel early on Sunday to get to London for a midday start. Anyone who uses trains on a Sunday in this country will know that is not a pleasant prospect. If you are attending matches, home, away or neutral, this raises some important logistical issues. Without a fixed schedule, the disruption to arrangements is another headache and inconvenience to the long-suffering football supporter. Nowadays it has become almost impossible to plan well in advance to attend matches.

Judging by a limited fans survey on BBC Football Focus website, only 32% found this to be a problem. What the survey does not say is whether these were attending supporters or merely TV viewers - both of whom deserve to have their needs met in our opinion. But this does throw up a very important point. Why can't supporters pay to view whatever match they wish to view when it is being played? Not just Manchester United versus Liverpool or Arsenal versus Chelsea, but every game in every league. Cameras are there anyway so additional technical costs would presumably be minimal. At the moment we are force fed whatever matches TV companies agree to show and the way contracts are drawn up, clubs have to be shown a certain number of times. Blackburn versus Wigan for example, will presumably be very interesting to supporters of those sides but frankly leaves most neutrals pretty cold. By having to make this commitment, many matches shown hold little interest to neutrals - gone are the days when TV-starved football supporters would watch any live match being screened. Conversely, it is unfair on supporters of say Wigan, who invariably get to see their team live only when they are being thrashed by one of the Big Four. This has undoubtedly led to supporter 'fatigue' where TV is concerned. Without going into specific details, mainly because we haven't got them, our limited research shows that, whilst the numbers of Sky subscribers has increased significantly, viewing figures for individual matches are falling.

With this mind, RTG calls for all matches to be live with a simpler, fixed schedule. This would allow supporters to view whatever match they choose or attend matches with improved ability to plan ahead. What?! Showing all matches live will hit attendances won't it? Well, we're not so sure it will in fact. Firstly, most keen supporters currently attend matches even when they are on live and will continue to do so. Secondly, the cost for neutral supporters simply to attend a game because they 'fancy it' has become prohibitive. In addition, over-hyped, media-fuelled rivalries have led to many supporters to feel that they are betraying their own team if they attend as a neutral, especially as they are filling the coffers of a potential rival.

We believe that having all matches live will increase significantly the revenues to football in general. Aaah, we here you say. All that this will do is to propel the so-called Big Four into a financial stratosphere that will forever render competition as meaningless. Not so. Clearly, a much more equitable form of distribution across both the Premiership and the Football League must be introduced.

In the end, we have no empirical evidence to support what the impact will be. However, we believe it is only a question of time before it will happen but we want to be in a position where the game as a whole benefits not just a few wealthy owners. This echoes a key platform for the reasoning behind our campaign to Reclaim the Game. It is clear that the corporate vultures circling the English Premiership would push for this in their own interests. Consider this. The worldwide audiences for a key Premiership clash can measure in the hundreds of millions if not billions. If viewers pay only £1 to watch, the revenue from one match could be more than the combined annual income of the top six clubs in the world (taking 2005/6 season figures). Clubs could afford to even let us in for free!

Radical as this idea might sound, the key issue is how this revenue would be distributed amongst the clubs and the England national team. However, given the current corporate ownership taking over the Premiership, this is extremely unlikely to happen. It may be that certain key steps have to be taken first such as clubs being owned by supporters' trusts (a cause we wholeheartedly believe in). It's about time this debate happened.

RTG Weekends' Events

• Henk Ten Cate, the current Ajax manager, seems to be the new flavour of Abramovich's month. Talks are in progress for him taking on a role at Chelsea - views vary as to what role that will be - though it would appear to be initially under the new manager, Avram Grant. Is this some new insight into the structure of football management that Abramovich (or god forbid for Chelsea's sake, Peter Kenyon) have adopted for the future? It will be interesting to see how this pans out. Watch this space.
• MaClaren Drops Alonso for Next Season, ran the sports news ticker... . Quite right, actually, not only is he bad for the English cause, RTG don't think he was eligible to play for England anyway! Oh, oh I see... China formula 1. Now we get it....
• Steve Bruce: looks like now that Birmingham's takeover is finally going to happen, he will be replaced by a more "fashionable" manager, despite his very good record at Birmingham. We're told it's because his face doesn't fit. With the, non paid for re-arrangements of his face, it wouldn't, would it?

Hats Off, Take a Bow (or not)

Player of the week: Afonso Alves of Dutch First division club, Heerenveen who scored 7 of his side's 9 goals in thrashing of Heracles Almelo this weekend. This included 4 in 10 minutes! Not English league, we know, but it is a Dutch record and extremely worthy.

Villain of the Week: Dida. Cheat. Simple as that. Plus, we still can't work out who the hell voted to make him the World's no. 1 goalkeeper. Over-rated.

Cliche of the week: Shevchenko and anything to do with him and the various Chelsea staff he seems to get on with/pissed off with. If he would just play like he used to do, none of this bullshit would be coming his way.

Shock of the Week: Underhyped England team doing very well! Ok, it was Rugby, but at least it didn't go to penalties!