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Brand it like Beckham
The Olympics may be struggling against the likes of snowboarding and windsurfing, but no one has any doubts that the football World Cup remains king of the pitch.
The Olympics may be struggling against the likes of snowboarding and windsurfing, but no one has any doubts that the football World Cup remains king of the pitch. Between this Friday and the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the global sports market is predicted to pass the $100 billion mark. Football may get a fifth of that pie. Let there be no doubt that sports is now a full-fledged pinstripe industry — and is the better for it.
The past decade has seen the transformation of football, easily the world’s most popular sport but traditionally plagued by politics and parochialism. The International Federation of Football Associations, Fifa, ended the last financial year with a record surplus of $ 180 million. It expects to earn a solid $3 billion in the 2007-2010 cycle.
Even more impressive has been the growth in wealth of the European football clubs. The finances of the English Premiere League, the market-friendliest bunch of clubs, are unrecognisable these days. Deloitte's latest Annual Review of Football Finance noted, "In 1990-91, Manchester United had a total revenue of £17.8 million — in 2004-05 the average premiership club's revenue was almost four times that, at £67 million."
Big money has meant the ability to buy the best players, best managers and build global franchises. Recently in Italy, where the Serie A League is being rocked by scandal, I was told by an elderly Roman, "We have talented young players. They need to go to the rich clubs of Britain to learn how to be the best in the world."
The anti-globalisation industry has whinged loudly about this. Sports should be about romantic amateurism. It should be free of the taint of profit or it will be controlled by a well-heeled few. Eventually, they warn, Coca-Cola and Adidas will decide the scores.
The evidence runs strongly in the opposite direction. The idea that ready-made athletes are wandering around jungles and slums is largely a myth. Creating world-beating sportsmen requires a huge logistical backup: school tournaments, academies, training grounds and huge squads of scouts, tacticians and physios. It took a decade of hard training to make a Liberian slum-dweller, George Weah, into the mid-Nineties world’s best footballer.
Wherever the money has gone, the quality of the game has gone through the goalposts. Brazilian club football is notoriously politicised and 'amateur'. Which is why the best Brazilian players flee to the corporatised and professionally managed clubs of Europe. It's partly money, but it's also because the latter have the means to make a good player into a brilliant one. When Pelé made an abortive attempt to clean up Brazilian football, he had Europe as his model.
And until it can find a leader with a corporate vision, Indian football will never dig itself out of its present cesspool of mediocrity.
There is a stronger case for worrying mega-buck teams will dominate forever. If one looks at European leagues in the past decade, three or four teams have dominated in most countries. But go back in history, well before players sprouted logos, and one finds the same pattern. Remember Arsenal's glory days in the Thirties or Liverpool's hammerlock on English football in the Seventies and Eighties? There is little evidence of oligopoly in the main US sports, markets as large as the rest of the world combined.
If anything, because a financier prefers to buy a club cheap and pump it up, big club domination is always imperilled by corporate types. Chelsea is the most glaring case of fortunes turning, thanks to a few billion roubles. When the multinational IMG-McCormack went football shopping in the Nineties, it bought non-household names like Strasbourg and Ferencvaros.
Moneymen know competition is what sells sports and monopoly is the antithesis of competition. That’s why Formula One Inc, the most extortionist sports enterprise, tilted the track against eternally victorious Ferrari.
Corporatisation has also meant a cleaner game. Even when there's a scandal, the clean-up is fast and quick. When Leeds United went bellyup a few years ago, the Premier League released a horde of accountants to sweep out the management. The team is now back in black.
Corporate sponsors, worried their brands will suffer, are the referee’s best friends. They insist on no drugs, no fouls, no bad behaviour off the field. The most stunning example has been rugby. A decade ago it was little more than bar brawling in uniform. Then Rupert Murdoch came along. Today football's watched by men in tweed.
Ultimately, the real check on abuse of profit are the fans. They provide the gate receipts, they are the television audience and they buy the franchised products. If scandal and steroids turn them off, they vote with their feet, eyes and credit cards.
The changing nature of football finance is only giving fans more say. Sports used to be a State-funded affair in the Fifties. It then moved on to the sale of television rights. Today, the fastest growing revenue stream is branded products. Manchester United and the New York Yankees, the biggest sports brands, get nearly half their money from marketing rights. Hence the premium for photogenic players like Robert Owen or David Beckham. This has empowered fans even more, buying t-shirts and keychains is much more of a personal choice than using a TV remote.
There isn't much evidence of homogenisation either. Football, at least, is about as unpredictable as it was a decade ago. World Cup coaches are still watching the African teams fearfully: they inevitably upset someone’s applecart. Please note: all the sub-Saharan teams that qualified for this World Cup have done so for the first time.
Even Leftist Uruguayan novelist Eduardo Galeano, in a recent essay on football, admitted, "The industrialisation of football... tends to impose a uniform style of play and to erase its many profiles. But diversity stubbornly and miraculously continues to survive and astonish. Like it or not, believe it or not, football remains one of the most important expressions of collective cultural identity, something which in this era of obligatory globalisation reminds us that the best of the world lies in the quantity of worlds that the world contains."
