After witnessing Arsenal once again succumb to one of the Premier Leagueās many sporting mafias, this time Man City ā whose trademark is a uniquely tacky blend of conspicuous consumption with the sprinkling of a Middle Eastern business despotās Midas touch, and whose team resembles a crudely assembled professional footballer human centipede, stuck together with molten bullion and the harvested tears extracted from the children of less financially well endowed clubs, clubs unable to compete within a financial nuclear arms race that seeks to accumulate the best footballer human capital on the planetā¦but I digress ā a symbolic media event occurred.
A post match video soon emerged of a blasphemous linesman, John Brooks, angering the plutocratic gatekeepers of footballās money cult. His crime? Merely bearing witness to an empirical reality: that away fans had paid 62 quid for the privilege of the ball-centred spectacle, and that players would be better off spending time celebrating with them than with himself, a humble linesman.
This is hard to deny. A 2011 study by Dave Boyle for the High Pay Centre found that the cheapest ticket to watch Manchester United in 1989 cost Ā£3.50 ā with a Liverpool ticket costing Ā£4 and Arsenal Ā£5. Adjusted for inflation, those tickets would still have been under Ā£10 in 2011. Instead they went up between 700 per cent and 1,025 per cent, or as one senior Premier League club executive morally pronounced, āwe maximise every seat for the highest amount we can getā. So there! Yet as soon as the media latched on to the linesman video, the evident implication even as they silently relayed the footage without commentary was clear; the linesmanās words were an underhanded attack on money in football. The response to this ātransgressionā by footballās financial demigods was depressingly predictable.
After seeing the video I tweeted:
āThis linesman is a hero, although I canāt help but think he might take a figurative bullet for this commentā¦ā
And sure enough, the next day or so, with horrible inevitability, the Sunās headline read:
ā62 pound lino axed ā The Professional Game Match Officials Limited removed the assistant from the third round clash at the Hawthorns and replaced himā¦ā
So first of all praise be to Funnell, I am Nostradamus reincarnate. But secondly, how marvellous that the lino John Brooks, a man actually employed to uphold fairness and competition in the game, is effectively sacked for merely alluding to a commonly recognised injustice ā obscene ticket prices ā within the un-mucked-out zoo that football has become. In the aftermath to the incident it was widely reported by Sky Sports, the Sun and the Guardian that John Brook had been stood down for his next fixture as āpunishmentā for his remarks. Yet in the days that followed the organisation Professional Game Match Officials (PGMO) claimed it wasnāt a āpunishmentā but was to remove him from the limelight because heās young. This excuse is dubious at best. Why is it necessary to remove a linesman from the limelight who has expressed a popular sentiment? Fear of abusive praise from cash strapped fans? Does a linesman who possesses a disinclination for high ticket prices pose a threat to impartiality in his adjudicating? More over, if this linesman canāt handle the limelight, then why is he employed by the Premier League to work in some of most toxic pressure cooker situations on the planet?
So naturally, who were the finders of this biggest scoop since the Pentagon Papers and Watergate? Of course, none other than Sky Sports, who dutifully picked up on the story in their vintage shit stirrer style, jabbing their cameras and microphones in to the private post match formalities like an unauthorised colonoscopy and discovering the offending utterances. After all, this is Skyās self-ordained role in football. Theyāve funded the games inglorious decline in to financial obscenity, pumping it full of coinage like a foie gras goose with all the predictable undesirable consequences: arsehole egomaniacal footballers, terrible ostentatious hair styles, diving and of course, most fundamentally, the cleansing of historically working class communities which originally gave football a soul and sense of meaning. Such folk are now priced out of stadiums, or bankrupted for the pleasure, due to a combination of the Premiers Leagueās documented End Game: to open football to the middle classes, coupled with exponential rises in players wages that demand increased ticket revenues. This trend was set in motion by the authorisation of unrelenting competition in the player market (no wage caps) and endless increases in TV rights payments, which allows players to plead āplease sir, I want some moreā year after year. The Premier League has essentially, insidiously, presided over football shape shifting in to an unregulated wild west to fill the troths of the rich and, as is custom, human solidarity and general decency are the first victims to fall. After all, the premier league themselves have stated that they are āan association of interestsā (financial) who have allegiance to āshareholdersā. So thanks SKY and the Premier League ā two thumbs up.
Yet this is completely consistent within our paradigm of āthe market is inherently goodā in which any squalid outcome, no matter how much it self evidently offends our better judgements as sentient beings, is not only correct, but holy and inevitable. The market has spoken, Allah, Rand, Thatcher, Reagan, Greenspan be praised! Now, as the grotesque spectacle unfolds in front of us all ā with Harry Redknapp only this week describing football agents parasitic behaviour as reminiscent of āgang warfareā ā Sky skip around gleefully like Willy Wonka directing his own big budget porno. Sky document the decadent carnage theyāve helped to unleash on a handheld camera, then audaciously sell a self created scandal involving a linesman acknowledging high ticket prices (therefore their enemy) like fish food to the dribbling (and once again paying) masses via their sister news outlets. Thus Sky is the ultimate self-sustaining profit shit machine and make no mistake, despite the economic apologists protestations, football is worse for it, just ask John Brooks.
My nostalgia for footballās good old āthe grass was greener before Skyā aside, what does this case illustrate about sport and football today? For me itās simple; footballās foundations are rotten from the saturation of the corrupting capital itās hooked to like a crack addict; itās incredibly undemocratic and its authorities are shockingly unaccountable and unrepresentative (The FA Council has only one female member for example). The whole purpose of the game now is unfettered subservience to profit making mechanisms and its self proclaimed right to endless growth by extracting from fans, one overpriced hotdog at a time. As such, dissent, even from an obscure linesman (who didnāt strike me as a part time Socialist Worker seller) is unacceptable.Ā Yet his nonchalant ticket price reference was a symbolic affront to the financial monopolists and cronies that dictate and own the now ugly game. Too much is at stake for this kind of ā62 quid a ticketā insubordination to stand and when real power structures in our society are challenged, however subtlyĀ (in football or elsewhere) the consequences are swift and brutal. Because sympathetic sentiments lamenting the plundering of sports fansā wallets could feasibly lead to sustained protests, reform, revolution! Sparks have to be extinguished before they blow up the fireworks, and so the linesman got whacked JFK style; Skyās camera may as well have been a sniper rifle.
And yet none of this is at all surprising. A few weeks ago the respected American Sports hack, Dave Zirin, said on Democracy Now āsport is like a weather vane for the wider political and economic cultureā. Heās right, and so sport serves as an early warning system for the rapid decay of our communities, who continue their unstoppable free fall in to the cold grasp of an unholy alliance between profiteers and their unaccountable apparatchiks they both breed and depend upon. We need to reclaim football and subject it to a little idea called ādirect democracyā (a little bit like the Germans) and stop privatised tyrannies holding the reigns to something that should belong to us all and rightly or not elicits so much emotion.
Even today as I finish this article I notice Britainās most radical revolutionary body, the UK Parliament, has released a document calling for measures in the spirit of what Iāve described. When parliament acknowledges thereās a problem with something, you know it be must rotten and its reform probably should have occurred decades ago; the UK Parliament, the eternal sea anchor to any meaningful progressive change in anything.
But for allowing this unmitigated football gluttony we must look at ourselves. As an executive ofĀ Supporters DirectĀ put it: āClubs have continued to exploit this reservoir of goodwill, but we have to ask ourselves whether weāre prepared to continue to allow that to happen.ā If we donāt take ownership of our democracy in sport, the economy, or civil society, we tend to become owned by others. So we must ask ourselves, why do we collectively express false outrage at drug doping cheats, and yet wilfully turn a blind eye to the greatest sports enhancing drug of all, money? John Brooks speaks for us all and he should be defended as such.
Editorās note: this article originally included a quote from a former executive of Supporters Direct; it has been updated to include a more current perspective.