26 Books

I really don’t have much to add to what Shane said about this book a few months ago. Since Conn wrote it, in the early days of Abramovich’s reign at Chelsea, the financial scales have shifted slightly so that there is now the chance that there could be a big five (watch the clamour for the fifth Champions League place) instead of a big four. (Even as I was writing this post the madness continued as it emerged that Manchester City have had a £24 million offer for Joleon Lescott accepted by Everton.)

If you’re a fan of one of the lucky few, everything seems rosy. Sure, most weeks you get to see your reserve team roll over manifestly inferior opponents live on Sky at 6 o’clock on a Sunday, but you also get the Sky Sports Sunday Showdown Special between your club and one of the other three who have the remotest chance of winning the title six times a season.

The Beautiful Game?

David Conn
Yellow Jersey 2005, Paperback, 432 pages, £9.99

If you’re anything other than a fan of the big four your options are limited to being a fan of the game generally (a kind of ’supporter’ that I hold in particular contempt), or the fan of a club that has no chance of winning anything ever. People will point to Portsmouth, winners of the FA cup a couple of seasons ago, as an example, but I guarantee you they’re going down this season, and they’ve had a staggering amount of money thrown at their squad to achieve the modest goal of a single trophy.

My own club, QPR, in the doldrums for many years since finishing as the top London club in the inaugural Premier League season – that’s right, higher than Arsenal or Chelsea – are now owned by some offensively wealthy people, and yet my enjoyment has decreased to the extent that I am boycotting the club entirely this year. An escalating wage bill, enormous and unsustainable debts and ridiculously inflated ticket prices (£50 for QPR v Derby, for example) can only be bad for the game, and yet, as David Conn lucidly shows, there are powerful figures at the heart of the game who are determined to ensure that the gravy train keeps calling at their station.

I have a particularly extreme form of hatred for Arsenal Football Club. Sure, you’ll tell me that they play lovely football (not my kind of football, I’m afraid – I like to see players with muddy shirts and knees), but that elegance is a recent thing. Their former eminence grise, David Dein, took them from the blood, guts and offside of George Graham to the twinkle toes stuff Wenger serves up every week. But, he did it by being a senior official of the organisation that polices the competitions that his club competes in. No one thought that there could possibly be anything wrong with that approach.

Conn comes as close as he can to accusing Dein of being a crook without actually doing so, and it’s worth noting that Dein has not brought a successful libel action against him. My impression is that this book was heavily lawyered before publication, so we can be sure that there’s other dirt available but that didn’t meet the lawyers’ requirements. Lawyers are a very conservative bunch – publishing ones especially – so you’re left hungry for much more. Football is a game that is particular appealing to chancers and financial wizards who suddenly turn out not to have any money at all, and there is a depressing succession of them on view here.

This is a painstaking book, and a passionate one too. Conn travels all over the country in search, as his subtitle says, of ‘the soul of football’. It’s a relatively easy quest, really. The soul of football is in the fans. Fans who turn out to see their team no matter how rubbish they are, who have been doing so for decades, through bad times and, more often than not, more bad times. It is not to be found in the luxury seating at the Emirates stadium or in the executive boxes at Stanford Bridge, and certainly not, their advertising notwithstanding (’we know how you feel about football because we feel the same way’), in the Sky boardroom.

Conn shows in The Beautiful Game that football in this country is fundamentally broken, and any grounds for optimism are quickly countered by the fact that the situation is worse now then when he wrote it five years ago. No case is more shocking than that of York City F.C. The story is too long to recount here, and it’s worth buying Conn’s book to read this astonishing story alone.

Football is the only sport that can genuinely claim to be a global one. It inspires passions as no other game does, and attracts supporters in numbers that dwarf any other sport. Naturally, the cynical money men have their hooks into it so deep there’s no way we can free ourselves from their odious influence without substantial harm to the game in the short term. But we must suffer this pain if we are to hold onto the game that we love. No example is more inspiring than AFC Wimbledon, born from the ashes of fans’ hopes after their betrayal by Peter Winkleman, and now climbing the divisions. The toothless, faceless, blazered bureaucrats in Soho Square need to take a long look at the lessons they can learn from that shameful episode in football history and so many examples of venality in the game. But there is nothing whatever to suggest that they will. I fear that the greatest game on earth is ruined beyond repair. To see how, and by whom, every fan of every club should read this excellent and passionate book.

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