Football, the world’s most popular sport, played by laws drawn up in London in 1863. The Premier League is the UK’s greatest soft power export. Premier League clubs are owned by a deputy prime minister of Abu Dhabi, the public investment fund of Saudi Arabia, a billionaire based in Monaco for tax reasons and a disappointing assortment of investors and private equity funds.
And what, really, could be more British than that? Football truly is the national game. What the Manchester City case has exposed is just how difficult it is to regulate some of the richest and most powerful bodies in the world.
While the wait for the verdict was frustrating, it’s perhaps unavoidable given the possibility of legal objection at every turn when a leaked email from City’s in-house lawyer during Uefa’s action against the club had threatened to “spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue them for the next 10 years”. You didn’t get that with Albert Alexander Sr or Peter Swales. Football clubs in England and Wales still represent their communities, a relationship that may be strained in certain cases by the pressures of a globalised entertainment economy, but remains broadly true.
Arsenal can feel like the club of choice for the nouveau fan from across the world, but the scenes of celebration when they ended their 22-year wait for the league title last season were an undeniable expression of local pride. The idea that there was ever an idyll when clubs were run by benevolent potentates for the good of those communities is romantic nonsense. But just because there was no golden age is not to say that the situation has always been as bleak as this.
How did we get into a situation in which clubs are flotsam on the swirling currents of geopolitics and the world economy? Chelsea alone in the past four years have had a Russian oligarch forced to sell the club after falling under UK government sanctions, while a subsequent American co-owner has been forced to sell his minority stake after his insurance business came under federal investigation in the US. It’s a curious world in which the professional gamblers feel like a welcome breath of fresh air.
The days of the local businessmen, the owners of mines, shipyards and factories, the hauliers and scrap-metal dealers, are gone. Some invested because they genuinely wanted to give back to their communities or liked the sport. Others did so because it was easier to fund a local football club than to improve working conditions or pay a proper wage.
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