A tale of bung culture exposes the Premiership's seamy side
All in the Game (Channel 4)
There will, no doubt, be much saccharin sprinkled all over soccer during the next couple of months, but it won't disguise the fact that the beautiful game's English face is pox-ridden. From the overpriced replica shirts carrying advertising logos of a size more suited to sandwich-boards to the past week's undignified auction for the television rights, the Premiership is predicated on, and its results are determined by, money. No one ever seems able to prove anything, but with so much dosh swilling around, vast sums are almost certainly finding their way illegally into private pockets. Channel 4 has got in first with its retaliation for the viewers it will forfeit during the forthcoming tournament: All in the Game (11 May, 9pm) is a gutsy two-hour drama that examines the League's ugly face pore by inflamed pore.
It is set in an unnamed northern Premier-ship club battling relegation under the stewardship of its refined owner, George (Roy Marsden), and Frankie, his frightening pit bull of a manager, magnificently played by Ray Winstone. But the threat of demotion is merely the sub-plot to the tale of the downfall of corrupt Frankie and his son Martin (Danny Dyer), a talent-agency rep who hangs around his dad's club like a bad smell. The main scam these two have going is to buy and sell players for sums that never quite add up, taking backhanders as handling fees. George is aware of what is going on, but in denial. "Do you take bungs?" he asks Frankie. "What's a bung?" comes the cocky reply.
Frankie's coup de grâce is to be the signing of a young black player called Joel (a stocky Ike Hamilton). Joel gets £5,000 a week, sweetened by the promise that he will play for the first team and his mum will move from her current "shit hole" to a £500,000 house. The small print involves him signing what is left of his soul to Martin. After a few man-of-the-match successes, which make Joel's market value soar, it is Martin who sees the financial opportunity of selling him on to a Spanish club. A deal he brokers will get he and his dad £1m apiece. Frankie has a swimming pool to finance, while his son is no less intent on keeping his family in a style to which only the greediest of footballers' wives would become accustomed. The problem is that Joel is enjoying his new life and does not want to go. So they persuade him that the fan he recently slept with was 14 years young and he has to "leave town" or face "a ten-year stretch".
This film should not work for two reasons: the first being that the writer, Tony Grounds, makes the apparent mistake of painting Frankie without any redeeming qualities at all; the second being that the plot is all fall and no rise - like watching only the second half of Richard III. The problems are related, because we never understand why Frankie is so valued as a manager. After a token win at the beginning, he is soon considering a goalless draw "a good result". His coaching technique runs the gamut from heavy teasing to outright bullying. Physically, he looks as if he's about a Bupa check-up away from a coronary; back from a training session, he complains he is "sweating like a rapist" or, if we prefer, "like a blind lesbian in a fucking fish shop".
Yet Winstone gives one of those per- formances you want to cut out and paste in your scrapbook, a Führer in the bunker with nice additional lines in self-pity, self-righteousness and self-hatred. His language is violent and often sexual. "You're a c***," he tells his boss, "and that is not a word I often use" (although a Radio Times writer totted up that he uses it seven times during the play). At the end, when he is sacked, Winstone abandons realism and sinks to his knees, tugging at his chairman's trousers for mercy. So the Premiership becomes Greek tragedy.
The piece is organised by its theme of bad parenting. George, played with agonised probity by Marsden, has ploughed millions into the club to win the love of his son. But the boy's heart cannot be bought, first because his dad has left his mother, and second because, like all the other supporters, he thinks his dad is a crap owner. George is having a Prescottian affair with his secretary, a mother who is secretly in league with Frankie, who has promised to give her son another try-out for the club (once he's finished his sentence in youth custody). Meanwhile it seems that Martin, played by Dyer as a varnished chip off the old block, actually hates his father, whom he disappointed by being no good at games. In some on-the-nose dialogue at the end, Martin tells him: "You treat me like a twat because I don't like football. All football has ever meant to me is pound notes and now I've got them."
But the ultimate father-son relationship is the one between Frankie and the club that has been his life, and which he betrays for personal gain. When George leaves the stadium after the sacking, a bedraggled Frankie approaches him in the rain and attempts an embrace. There is no return for this prodigal son, however. We know Peter Cook's old joke about soccer being a cruel mistress; All in the Game shows her as a whorish and dysfunctional parent who gets the sons she deserves.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
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