Growing Up

Nauseous noise filled the room, bellowing incessantly off every wall. The acoustics of a room made in heaven could not convert the shrieking cacophony of sounds into anything a human ear could enjoy. In fact let's add cats ears and dogs ears to the list, as they would often leave the room too. Every parent who has introduced music their children's life by buying them a musical instrument can empathise here, with violins and tin whistles being particularly vicious culprits!

My parents were lucky with me. I grew up on sports. Many of my siblings and neighbours were signed up for music lessons, but not me, every minute was spent playing sport or watching sport. You'd seldom see me without a football or some other sporting equipment in my hand. Football or soccer as we often call it, as we have our own traditional Irish football game here called Gaelic football. So like our Australian friends who have Australian Rules Football and our American colleagues who play American football, we often refer to the beautiful game here as soccer, so I may switch between football and soccer as I write this post.

As I've said before, of all the sports I enjoyed as child and still enjoy today, soccer was my first love. I would play with my friends for hours on end. Games like 3 goals in, workd cup knockout, one on one, nods and volleys, two on two, three on three, 5 a sides were enjoyed from morning to night and as we got a bit older, we were allowed stay up later and on the West coast of Ireland, that could mean it didn’t get fully dark until close to 11pm! It brings a smile to my face thinking back on those innocent and carefree days.

On several occasions in recent years though, when speaking with friends or strangers about sport and especially soccer, I find my nostalgic rose tinted glasses slipping a bit. With the ugly warts soccer has developed, I find myself saying things like:

"If I was a young lad again, I'd play rugby as my number one sport"

Or

"The way soccer has gone recently, if I was a child again, I don't know if I'd dedicate so much time to it"

Where is that sentiment coming from? What is the driver behind this changing view of the game I loved so well. Let me break it down for you, and for soccer fans, none of this will come as a surprise.

1) Diving culture

Top of the list for me is the blatant diving which has now permeated the game from the very top all the way down to grass roots level. When I see kids feigning injury and diving at my kids matches, it makes me feel very sad indeed. This should have been weeded out years ago, but instead, it was allowed to fester and today, I challenge you to show me a soccer match at any level that doesn't have some degree of play acting or trying to con the referree. I remember when diving was the preserve of teams in Spain and Italy and it was completely foreign to the teams in Ireland, England and Scotland.

However around the time of the Premier League starting in 1994, the diving mentality was slowly creeping into the Premier League. It should have been rooted out then and there. If video evidence after a game shows obvious simulation, diving, feigning injury or the like, it should result in an automatic 3 match ban. I can guarantee you that this would have done the trick had they enforced it in early 90s and we'd likely have a far more honest game today.

By allowing it to fester and take hold in the way that they did, the problem becomes increasingly harder to fix and at this stage, it's far more likely that nothing will be done about it. Diving these days diving makes me think of one person. You'll notice I didn't say man, as manly he is not, the way he throws himself to the floor.

Here is a collection of Oscar award winning dives from our Brazilian friend Neymar. It wouldn't even surprise me if these were all captured in the same game. His antics epitomise everything that is wrong with our game in my opinion.

2) Money and Greed

Second on the list is greed and the ever increasing level of it. This was brought front and centre during the recent European Super League debacle. I'm not even sure if there was a viel over the greed and corruption, but if there was, then it slipped right down to show the rotten greedy core of Europe’s biggest clubs. In this context, it is disrespectful to call them clubs, instead we should say money-hungry materialistic businesses who care more about balance sheets than clean sheets. They would sell you a Champions League trophy if the price was right.

While the massive clubs at the top table extort, corrupt and buy their way to dominance, the little guys or smaller clubs are left to try and survive on crumbs from the top table. Then when a once in a generation break through like we saw at Leicester happens, they lose their best players to the richest teams in the land, as Kante was snapped up by Chelsea and Mahrez went to Manchester City.

Meanwhile the grass roots teams struggle to survive and get some meagre payments in the grand scheme of things if they are lucky enough to develope a talented player who is later bought for a large sum of money.

The extortionate prices paid for match tickets and merchandise are another one, but I'll cover than in point four below.

3) Squeezing Out the little guy

Who could forget Leicester City's amazing Premier League triumph back in 2018? Any football fan worth their salt, would have been happy for them. Of course they would have liked their own team win the title, but seeing an underdog prevail is just good for sport and good for life in my opinion.

What are the chances of it happening again any time soon? Well fairly slim is the likely answer. I happened upon this excellent opinion piece by sports journalist Miguel Delaney that delves into this subject. Here is the main link in case you want to read it all and I will paste some excerpts below.

https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/champions-league-superclubs-liverpool-man-utd-barcelona-real-madrid-a9330431.html

"We don’t want too many Leicester Citys.” These were the words spoken by a senior figure from the Premier League’s ‘big six’ clubs, in the kind of high-end London hotel you can easily imagine. “Football history suggests fans like big teams winning,” the official continued, to the group of business people and media figures present. “A certain amount of unpredictability is good, but a more democratic league would be bad for business.”

football’s embrace of unregulated hyper-capitalism has created a growing financial disparity that is now destroying the inherent unpredictability of the sport. This is not just the big clubs often winning, as has been the case since time immemorial. It is that a small group of super-wealthy clubs are now so financially insulated that they are winning more games than ever before, by more goals than ever before, to break more records than ever before. They are stretching the game in a way that has caused the entire sport to transform and shift.

The last decade alone, which represents the true rise of the super-clubs alongside the huge rise in money, has seen:

• a second Spanish treble
• a first German treble
• a first Italian treble
• a first English domestic treble
• three French domestic trebles in four years
• a first Champions League three-in-a-row in 42 years
• the first ever 100-point season in Spain, Italy and England
• ‘Invincible’ seasons in Italy, Portugal, Scotland and seven other European leagues
• 13 of Europe’s 54 leagues currently seeing their longest run of titles by a single club or longest period of domination.

Many of these feats appeared to be impossible for decades. They have now all taken place around the same time in the last decade, with the prospect of more to come. Needless to say, they have all been achieved by the wealthiest clubs in those competitions

As Miguel expertly demonstrates, the chances of clubs like Leicester City making that improbable breakthrough gets smaller and smaller each year. The financial fair play rules brought in have been laughable and are always very easy for the big teams to dodge and circum navigate via loopholes etched out by highly paid accountants and financial experts.

4) Ticket Prices

I'm lucky enough to have a decent job and as a result I have enough disposable income to afford tickets for sporting events, but soccer matches are often at the higher end of some of the extortionate prices charged.

Like anything, it is supply and demand and if enough people are willing to pay a certain price for something, the price inevitably creeps higher and higher. What irks me though is that the richest teams are the ones charging the most, like my team Arsenal. These same teams make huge money yearly from TV receipts, merchandise, sponsorship and other revenue streams. Do they really need to price out many working class families from being able to bring their kids or themselves to a match? These early formative memories of being brought to a match are what it's all about. But now, some families can't afford it. If you're a family of 4 and want to go to a match at Anfield, Old Trafford or the Emirates, after food, match programm and a visit to the gift shop, there won't be much change out of €500. That just isn't right and somewhere along the way soccer lost its souk and forgot about the working class people who have supported their teams for over 100 years.

It's a sad inditement of the "Beautiful Game". It seems to me, it's only beautiful if you are an owner or a shareholder. The rest of us just seem to be numbers on a spreadsheet helping the grease the wheels of the world's richest individuals.

Thanks for taking the time to read my post today.

Peace Out