A few thoughts about racism in football

Posted on December 24, 2011 by admin

Football journalism can be a bizarre world sometimes… especially when it comes to off-the-field reporting. Witness the outrage at Sepp Blatter’s racism comments a couple of weeks back, accompanied by calls from the British press for zero tolerance, and yet the same people are now describing the Luis Suarez eight match ban as harsh. Well, you can’t have it both ways…

As ever, the truth probably lies somewhere in between. I doubt Luis Suarez is a racist while Sepp Blatter simply couldn’t do his job if he was. There are mitigating cultural circumstances as far as Suarez is concerned but that can’t hide the fact that England is some way ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to not only dealing with racism in football but also in the wider social context. And that is why both Suarez and Blatter were caught out.

It is a shame that the race issue has got caught up in the anti-FIFA campaign in the UK. It is obvious that the press in Britain and other Anglophone countries will not give up in their relentless pursuit of FIFA and in particular Sepp Blatter. Every month brings another story – last month poppies, this month racism, next month… who knows?

I watched the truly awful David Bond – surely the most feeble sports editor in the history of the BBC – conduct an interview with Blatter and fall into the age old trap of believing that the whole world sees things through the eyes of the British. “Do you understand why people were offended?” he asked Blatter about the poppy debate, “Do you feel regret towards the war veterans?”

What have British war veterans got to do with Blatter and FIFA? Does David Bond feel regret that BBC hasn’t honoured the war veterans of Uzbekistan or Burkina Faso? Of course he doesn’t because it’s got nothing to do with him, just as British war veterans have got nothing to do with Blatter.

It’s such an ignorant question. Maybe he was playing to a British audience but the BBC has respect around the world because in the past it has not allowed itself to pander to the prejudices of the British people. This seems lost on Bond and is not befitting of a corporation that has given us the World Service.

I have not been popular by defending the FIFA stance on poppies but I knew I was right when comic genius Andy Hamilton came out in support of FIFA on BBC One’s Have I got News For You. Hamilton was unequivocal in his belief that poppies were a political symbol and that it didn’t matter whether you supported that symbol or not – they shouldn’t be put on a football shirt because you leave the way open for any despotic regime to do the same.

Back to racism… Yes, we still have serious problems, but Britain is a different place to what it was 20 years ago and English football and the FA can be rightly proud of the role they have played in supporting this. In terms of shifting perceptions in the related area of women in society, I would say the Football Association is actually ahead of the curve…

The irony here is that in terms of both racism and women’s rights, FIFA has also played a hugely important role. I have interviewed Blatter on a number of occasions and he doesn’t strike me as a racist – quite the opposite in fact. And correct me if I am missing the point here, but surely two players getting together at the end of the game is exactly what is needed to tackle racism… It can’t be the only thing but then it isn’t. The FA and other football associations, FIFA and many national governments already provide the framework to tackle this problem, but despite all the laws and regulations the only way to rid someone of their prejudice is by one on one contact with those they are prejudicial against. Luis Suarez may have received an eight match ban but it doesn’t mean a whole deal unless he genuinely changes his views and actually talking with Evra is going to be the best way forward.

If I do have an issue with football it is in relation to sexual intolerance. Rio Ferdinand has been vocal against Blatter but where are his tweets condemning the sexual harassment of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transexuals? Has he ever even heard of LGBT? My apologies to him if he has been prolific and supportive on the subject. Gordon Taylor of the players union has also condemned Blatter and called for him to go but I don’t ever recall him launching a campaign to rid football of the anti-gay prejudice that clearly exists in the game.

And then to completely muddy the water we have John Terry…

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Fog in Channel – Continent Cut Off

Posted on December 10, 2011 by admin

… So ran the (probably apocryphal) headline. I hadn’t heard it for years until Stephanie Flanders reminded us of it last night on Newsnight. Is there a better description of the English mentality not just in football but also in our relations with Europe in wider political terms following David Cameron’s actions on Thursday night? It’s all about us and to hell with the rest.

Last year my friend Michael Church, who is the Almanack’s Asian correspondent, was fuming after not a single BBC journalist turned up to the AFC Asian Cup in Qatar, even despite a healthy Premier League contingent playing for Australia. He simply said “One day the English will wake up and they will realise that the Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Koreans and co will have not only caught them up but overtaken them. But by then it will be too late to do anything about it.” He was talking about football of course but I suspect his words may have a wider political and economic resonance to them as well.

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A Winter World Cup in Qatar

Posted on December 4, 2011 by admin

So Michel Platini has come out and said that the 2022 World Cup in Qatar should be played in winter – shock horror! He said “If we play in winter it’s not a problem. Instead of stopping the season in May you play until June and then stop in December. Where’s the problem?” Thank god for common sense. Compare this to to extraordinary rant by Ian Holloway in the wake of the decision to award the 2022 tournament to Qatar which I have linked below…

Ian Holloway Qatar World Cup Rant

I actually really like Ian Holloway. He is entertaining and is not scared to speak his mind – something of a rarity amongst all the blandness we have become used to. But this clip illustrates just how out of touch we are in Britain with football in the rest of the world. Holloway’s assumption is how dare we change the date of the World Cup and disrupt Blackpool’s Christmas fixtures? The scale of his ‘Little Englander’ attitude is staggering. He says that Platini is useless at his job… one assumes that at this point in the interview he is simply getting carried away, spurred on by the giggles of the lapdog journalists in the press conference. Platini may have made some mistakes – I think expanding the Euros to 24 is a monumental error – but on the whole he is a force for good in football. Perhaps Holloway would like to focus on the positives… a winter World Cup would mean that the top professionals would get a proper off season in a World Cup year which should please the likes of Sir Alex Ferguson. Also, because the tournament would be played in mid-season, the players would be much fresher than they would be at a tournament played at the end of the season.

Ultimately, it’s up to the Qataris to decide but the bottom line is that the principle of shifting a World Cup to January is ‘just’ if the circumstances dictate. Why should a whole raft of countries be ineligible to host the tournament because it is too hot in the European off-season? That doesn’t seem very egalitarian or fair. Using the term ‘winter World Cup’ also smacks of western European arrogance. For many nations around the world December and January is mid summer…

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Financial Fair Play

Posted on November 24, 2011 by admin

So Manchester City posted a loss of £197.5m last year with wages accounting for £174m of their spend – higher than the clubs earning of £153m. If City want to take part in European competition from the 2014-15 season they have got some serious adding up to do. UEFA will only allow combined losses of £38.5m between now and the end of the 2014-15 season in an attempt to reduce the impact of wealthy owners on clubs and in an effort to get clubs to balance their books.

All very laudable aims you might think and I am usually a big fan of Michel Platini but I think he has got this wrong, just as he did with increasing the size of the European Championship finals to 24 from 2016. What this policy does is just further entrench the position of clubs like Manchester United who are already at the top. It is going to stop clubs like Manchester City, PSG or Malaga attempting to change the football landscapes in their country and that is a bad thing. If you have an owner who is prepared to ‘give’ money to a club and indulge their fantasies, well good luck to them. I wish one would fall in love with Crystal Palace.

Of course, what no-one is saying is that UEFA should have gone even further and made clubs share everything evenly – gate receipts, TV money and sponsorship so that there is a truly level playing field, not only among leagues but also national federations… Now there’s a radical idea that would make football a better game.

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Poppies

Posted on November 10, 2011 by admin

A compromise has been reached between the English and FIFA over wearing poppies on the England shirt for the match against Spain on Saturday. They will now be worn on black armbands so will not technically be part of the shirt.

In my opinion we are venturing into really dangerous territory here. I am from a generation where my parents lived through the second world war whilst my grandparents experienced the horrors of the first world war. Indeed, my grandfather somehow managed to survive despite fighting at Gallipoli and on the Western Front – having lied about his age to join up. His best friend was not so lucky. Boyhood friends, they joined up together but he was killed a couple of days before armistice day in 1918.

Poppies have always meant something to our family because of this and I never saw wearing one as a political act. However, I don’t think that is the case anymore. Why the resurgent interest in wearing them? Because of the soldiers dying in Afghanistan and before that in Iraq… It is no longer about the first and second world wars and whatever David Cameron says there is now a very strong political element to it. Whatever the rights and wrongs of Iraq and Afghanistan there is considerable resentment around the world – and not just amongst Muslims about these two wars.

I believe FIFA was right to take the stance it did. What is to stop a Muslim country honouring the hijackers who flew the planes into the twin towers. That would seem outrageous to most people but one mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter… What is now to stop the Palestinians commemorating the suicide bombers who they believe are fighting a just cause in their ‘war’. Even closer to home the catholic community in Northern Ireland have always seen the poppy as a symbol of British rule. I’m not sure the Northern Ireland team would ever cause such a fuss to wear a poppy on their shirts and I think that speaks volumes.

Poppies are political and I await the response of journalists like Martin Samuel from the Daily Mail when someone asks FIFA for a dispensation to wear a political symbol that he doesn’t agree with.

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Jim Boyce Interview

Posted on October 20, 2011 by admin

A good interview with FIFA vice-president Jim Boyce. It’s great to hear someone other than myself make the point in the British press that FIFA does a tremendous amount of good around the world and that the whole of FIFA should not be tarred with the same brush as and when members of the FIFA Exco are found to be corrupt – a point I made to the Culture, Media and Sport Select committee in my submission to them for their 2018 World Cup bid report.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/15385413.stm

It was depressing, however, to hear Nicky Campbell make the same old tired points, even if Boyce responded well to each of them. Tired, lazy journalism at the BBC when it comes to sport – no change there then!

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Premier League Foreign Rights

Posted on October 14, 2011 by admin

I’m glad Dave Whelan has spoken out against Liverpool’s Ian Ayre and his ‘scandalous’ posturing over the foreign rights to the Premier League. American involvement in English football – Hicks, Kroenke, Lerner etc – is largely down to the fact that the game here allows the clubs the freedom to get rich at the expense of others, something that is not possible in American sports where everything is divided equally.

Allowing the clubs the freedom to negotiate their own foreign TV deals would kill off what competition is left in the league and Whelan is right to point to the example of Spain where all the clubs apart from Real and Barca are totally irrelevant.

One would hope, however, that Whelan would take his sensible logic one stage further and realise that the Premier League is trying to do to countless other leagues around the world what Liverpool wants to do to the Premier League.

I can understand that English clubs want to earn more money to compete with Barcelona and Real but surely the best approach is to try and reign in the Spanish giants and spread the income in Spanish football more equally rather than embarking on what would be football’s equivalent of the arms race.

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Fool’s Paradise

Posted on September 28, 2011 by admin

In 1999 I did an interview with the then Aston Villa chairman Doug Ellis. Known as ‘Deadly Doug’ he was in reality actually quite affable. After the TV cameras had been switched off we sat and chatted for about half an hour, talking mainly about the history of the club about which he had a passionate interest.

At one point I said to him “You have a great stadium, your training facilities are excellent, you are top of the league and your players are paid money most people can only dream about and yet clubs like yours are constantly looking to earn more. What can you do with any more money that you earn?” His reply was remarkably simple. “It will go on the players” was all he said.

To me this sums up the football industry over the past decade and its consequence is the behaviour of Carlos Tevez during Manchester City’s Champions League tie against Bayern Munich last night. Michel Platini once went on record to say that the only people who matter in football are the players and in the unregulated free for all that is European club football, his fool’s paradise has become a reality.

Don’t get me wrong… some of the top players may well deserve the money they earn. I think it is unfair that we still quote their wages per week – £100k a week sounds so much more obscene than five million a year – but the bottom line is that fans have been the unwitting victims in football’s drive for prosperity, especially in the Premier League.

My nephew is a Chelsea fan. His is local to the club and has been all of his life but he can’t afford a season ticket and is reluctant to fork out £70 to watch a match. Sensibly he doesn’t see that as great value for money. Why hasn’t a proportion of the money that has gone on players wages not been put aside to keep ticket prices affordable?

The answer is that European club football is governed totally by market forces. It is the perfect working example of when capitalism is given free reign with no checks or balances. The irony of that surely can’t be lost on anyone – the working man’s sport that is now the bastion of unbridled capitalism. Does it not seem strange to anyone that the USA, home of the free market, thinks that it is a bad idea to leave it’s sports unregulated and as a consequence organises baseball, American football, hockey and basketball on what can only be termed as communist lines?

My belief is that when left unchecked, capitalism will eventually fall. Greed destroys everything and everyone around it – just look at the problems banks and the bankers have caused us.

Are the actions of Carlos Tevez symptoms of the start of football’s very own banking crisis? One journalist has suggested that Man City should pay up the rest of Tevez’s contract and just let him go! Extraordinary… My view would be that City should sue Tevez for every penny that they have paid him so far. Not only has he damaged the image of the club but his refusal to play may have cost the club dear on the pitch. This really is a Sir Fred Goodwin moment for football…

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Everton – fighting against the odds

Posted on September 27, 2011 by admin

Former Everton Chief Executive Trevor Birch has just come out and made a point that pretty much sums up the conundrum that the Premier League finds itself in. In an interview he stated that the club can not ever consider challenging for the league title again – at least not until they spend in the region of what would have to be at least a half a billion pounds to clear their debts, invest in players and, crucially, build a new stadium.

It proves how far football in this country has gone from being a sport. Birch is right when he says that David Moyes has done an amazing job at Everton. In a different era he could have been another Brian Clough, taking Everton to league and even, perhaps, European success. Now his achievement is measured by finishing seventh in the league and a solitary losing appearance in a cup final.

That’s not sport. That’s a farce.

The one thing that the Premier League has going for it is that at least there are more than just one or two teams capable of winning the title – unlike Spain. The entry of Manchester City onto the big spending scene will almost certainly be detrimental in the long term for English football but at least it is making the league a bit more interesting, just as happened with Chelsea.

I do feel sorry, however, for the likes of Everton, Sunderland, Aston Villa, Wolves, Leeds – all title winning clubs from the past – whose fans can say with absolute certainty that they will never be witness to their team winning another title, or let’s be honest, travelling to Wembley to see their team win the Cup. Perhaps, maybe, a League Cup but one wonders whether Birmingham City earlier this year was the exception that proves the rule.

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Historic match in Turkey

Posted on September 21, 2011 by admin

I’ve just watched the most incredible league match in Turkey between Fenerbahce and Manisaspor where the entire crowd of 41,000 was made up of women and children. Instead of playing the match behind closed doors following crowd violence during a match against Shakhtar Donetsk, the Turkish FA decided to let in only women and children under the age of 12. The result was a spectacular success as you can see from the footage I have linked to here.

Was this a one-off? Could it happen again? Would it work as a sanction in other countries? The extraordinary thing about the footage is that the women are all wearing replica shirts and seem to be committed supporters. Will they be coming back when the men return? Was this their first time at a game? I’m sure we will hear more about this as the story develops.

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