The 2022/2023 season will go down as a landmark year in world football. The first World Cup held in the European winter. The attempt to create a European Super League quashed by UEFA and, seemingly, Gary Neville on Twitter. FIFA levelling unprecedentedly wide-ranging accusations of financial shenanigans at Manchester City. And much of the world, in the wake of US Department of Justice’s investigations, throwing similar accusations at FIFA of widespread corruption spanning decades.
The good news for the humble football fan is that there is a plethora of new content aiming to unpick the – at best commercialisation – at worst corruption – at the top of the Beautiful Game. My first recommendation for a depressing but comprehensive overview of the rot at FIFA is the four-part miniseries FIFA Uncovered, released on Netflix just before the World Cup. As cynical as I am, even I was shocked at how long-lived and profound the corruption was, starting with the presidency of Joao Havelange, the proto-Sepp Blatter. Between them, they ran FIFA from 1974 to 2015. Blatter’s reign came to an end when the Department of Justice arrested 14 of the most senior FIFA officials levelling charges typically associated with organised crime.
It is well told, well made, and features a lot of interviews with people you’d think would have PR advisors warning them not to on screen. So, while you get the feeling that Chuck Blazer was always a self-aware parasite on the take, Sepp Blatter comes across as utterly without shame. In his own head canon, he’s the hero of the story, disbursing funds to poor countries and funding grassroots sport in Africa and South America. You find yourself wondering if he genuinely believes he’s the hero of his own story, or whether he’s still trying to spin his way clear of legal trouble. After all, neither Blatter nor Platini have actually been held legally responsible for the endemic corruption in the organisations they ran.
Meanwhile the club level of football is in equally dire straits. Ballooning transfer payments have rendered marquee names virtually insolvent (clubs in Spain and Italy) and/ or loaded up with debt (England). Once again, I thought I was pretty cynical about how the transfer market worked but I was shocked, page after page, reading Football’s Secret Trade: How The Player Transfer Market Was Infiltrated by Alex Duff and Tariq Panja, published by Bloomberg in 2017. The sheer level of human exploitation and financial skulduggery over decades was amazing. I had no idea that there was a derivatives market in transfer fees, that FIFA had attempted to outlaw but was still in operation. I had no idea that major European clubs were effectively using South American clubs as scouting operations, or that hedge funds were investing in incredibly minor European clubs in order to wash through transfer fees for players who had never stepped foot in their grounds.
The consequences are clear to see in the fact that team owners are now increasingly desperate to stabilise their income. Imagine that you have a mammoth wage bill, an expensive stadium, but the financial insecurity of not being able to guarantee Champions League football, or even one’s place in the Premier League? Surely, it would be better to create a US-style closed system whereby teams could never be relegated. And so we get the abortive attempt of principally Real Madrid and Juventus to create a European Super League, free from the shackles of UEFA’s peskily competitive Champions League tournament. Public outrage killed the Super League. Or at least, those teams owned by a new breed of deep-pocketed owner, whose entire motivation for owning a club is sportswashing, withdrew. After all, why would you tarnish your expensive PR work in an enterprise so clearly against the spirit of football and hated by the fans. However, the idea is bound to resurface as the financial imperatives have not gone away. Andrea Agnelli, owner of Juventus, makes this clear in his candid interviews in the superb four-part documentary series, Super League: The War for Football, released last month on Apple TV Plus. Agnelli makes it clear that the ESL will come back, because without it major European clubs cannot survive.
The author and journalist Tariq Panja is also featured as one of the interviewees and neatly links decades of corrupt transfer bidding to the current state of the league game. Most shocking is how UEFA, a co-villain of FIFA Uncovered, becomes something of a hero here, as personified by its President, Aleksander Ceferin. He comes across as pretty straightforward in his defense of the idea that in theory, any team in any league could work their way up to lifting the Champions League trophy. Of course, what we also know is that he was protecting his own turf against a rival tournament.
And maybe football fans who still cling to the idea of the essential sportsmanship and fairness of the football league pyramid need a reality check. As often as we cite Leicester winning the Premier League, how likely is that to really happen in a world where you need a deep bench of world class players to truly compete? And even then, merely super-rich clubs can still load the dice by breaking the rules, as shown in the Premier League’s laughably slow to be published charges against Manchester City.
The dream of the small but feisty club punching above its weight is hard to kill though, and probably speaks to the success of the Disney Plus show Welcome to Wrexham, which chronicles the attempt by Hollywood actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McIlhenny to turn around the failing National League club and get it into League Two and some kind of financial sustainability. That show serves as a heart-warming, if schmaltzy, antidote to all the docs and books about the crass commercialism at the top of football. Not least, it shows how league players actually live, far away from the mega-salaries of the Premiership. And in the same vein, if you want to know what it means to volunteer as a sports coach and provide some structure and camaraderie to kids on a weekend, I can also recommend Save Our Squad With David Beckham, also on Disney Plus. Beckham goes back to the small East London club whence he was scouted for Manchester United and tries to help their coach get the team out of the relegation zone. It’s a heart-breaking show because you see the impact that the scouting system has on young kids, especially those picked up and then spat out. But overall, it restores your faith in the power of team sport at the grassroots level to give structure and pleasure to so many kids and allows us to still cling onto that hope that our team can win the League. Which is, after all, what the makes the Game Beautiful.
