English versionAn early visit from three wise men

Christmas came early in English football this year, with three wise men heading for the Premier League to handout their very own very special gifts to football’s biggest names. For a league already awash with the finest sporting treasures, the visits were not, however, to handout glad tidings and gold – at least not to the people at the top of English football’s pyramid.

The three men in question have come together to form an unlikely, if not unsurprising, holy trinity: Sepp Blatter, Michel Platini and Lord David Triesman. Blatter has arrived at the Premier League’s stable door following a long-journey fuelled by his dislike of many of English football’s recent developments. Platini, although a relative novice by comparison, is nevertheless a disciple of doom cast in Blatter’s image. The latest recruit to their concerned ranks is Lord Triesman; ’who?’ I hear people from outside Britain asking. A Labour member of the House of Lords, Triesman was made the English Football Association’s first independent chair in early 2008. ‘Lord’ may well prove to be a highly apt title for Triesman, given the interventionist he is seeking to take.

I am not sure whether the threesome has ever been in each other’s company at the same time, but it is becoming increasingly clear that they share one another’s views on English football, particularly the Premier League. Over the last few weeks, their prophecies of what might happen to English (and indeed European) football have been amplified by the deepening global credit crunch. Their worries are threefold: Blatter is agitated by the international ownership of football clubs; Platini is concerned about the development of home-based players; and now Triesman has weighed in, nervous about club debt levels in English football.

Football clearly has a long, noble and illustrious history, played predominantly by clubs from different towns involving teams consisting of local people. While social and geographic mobility in the 20^th Century changed this, football in most countries essentially remained a domestic game. However, as the double-punch of globalisation and the EU’s 1995 Bosman Ruling have hit, the top-tier of English football has become something akin to the United States’ finest: the Harlem Globe Trotters. So much so, that Platini is concerned about the long-term development of home-based and European players.

As if the ethnic diversity of player’s involved in English football is not enough to make Michel wish he had gone home to manage Saint Etienne instead of becoming UEFA President, English club owners have now begun to copy their players. Take Manchester City: they have travelled from Britain to Abu Dhabi via Thailand, and all in the space of one year. As for Chelsea, they have an owner who presides over a Russian republic that is about as far away from England as you can get. Blatter is therefore worried too. The influx of new money into football increasingly seems to be fundamentally undermining the core product in football – the uncertainty of outcome. Many leagues are now so competitively imbalanced that we no longer have uncertainty, we know who will win. Big teams, big money, big players: have the winners ever been so obvious?

Adding yet more fuel to the fire, Triesman has recently launched an attack on debt levels at many of England’s leading clubs. Clearly such debts are inextricably bound up in the EU’s freedom of movement laws, the influx of money from wealthy overseas investors, and spiralling transfer fees and salaries. Triesman has a point too; some clubs are operating at satisfactory wage to turnover ratios of between 50% and 60%. However, some club’s ratios are higher again: may be 80% and above. But some clubs are actually operating at wage to turnover levels of 100%+. What does that mean? Simple: 100% or more of what some clubs earn each year is paid straight out in salaries, without covering any other costs. Result: potential financial disaster, particularly in the current economic climate.

So, these guys are wise men after all? Not quite. There’s a further element to this that few people talk about. In essence, football is becoming a battlefield of corporate, political, and player interests. The pack of global billionaires now scouring the globe for football investments poses a real challenge to the established political order. While Blatter and people of his ilk have a duty to football as its custodians, they will also be concerned that their positions are increasingly being undermined. So much so, that some already foresee the day when oligarchs and billionaires take their clubs out of FIFA and UEFA’s auspices. There are various clubs that may welcome this too. Added to this, growing player power and their financial demands pose a major threat, especially to national team football, something Platini in particular has railed against.

So, these men might seem wise, but there is something starkly reactive in the way they are now behaving. We have a saying in England: ‘shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted’. Having travelled their respective journeys, for two of them a journey of many years, these three wise men now find that as they stand peering in at the Premier League through the stable door, there is little for them to cheer and it may now be too late for them to turn back.