A Super Week For Football Fans - Or Was It...?
Fan power won out this week as the Super League was squashed, but rich people are used to getting their own way. They'll be back.
Perhaps the best tweet I saw about the whole soccer Super League fiasco was one from the Guardian’s chief football correspondent David Hynter, who quoted a line from the first Star Wars movie.
The quote refers to Luke Skywalker being attacked and Ben “Obi One” Kenobi coming to his rescue. The Sand People scurry off, but old Ben knows better than to hang around.
The first attempt at launching a Super League may have been unsuccessful, but you can be sure that the cosseted billionaires who own the world’s biggest clubs will be back with a different version soon enough. They don’t just want a bigger slice of the pie. They want the whole pie, and at most they intend to share a few crumbs of it.
Yet again though, what was surprising is that people were surprised. Gary Neville, a man made a millionaire in the Premier League era using pay-TV money and Asian expansion, was incredulous that billionaires could treat fans in this way.
This is the same fella who saw fans paying a pound a letter to have his name printed on the back of a t-shirt (a football shirt is a t-shirt, and if you believe any different you need to ask yourself about your relationship to marketing) that cost a fiver to make and that fans paid more than ten times as much for.
The same thing with fans. The European game has been drenched in blood money and the deaths of 6500 migrant workers were met with not a whisper from them, but float the idea of a closed, invitation-only competition and they took to the streets in a matter of hours to defeat it.
Year Zero for this soccer shitshow was 1992, when three seismic things happened - the Champions League and the Premier League came into existence, and the smartphone was invented.
Of course, competitions existed before then. The old English First Division was the gold standard of football leagues and, as yet unsullied by billionaires, it was relatively competitive and entertaining even if big clubs could dominate for periods.
The Champions League and the Premier League were a response from “big clubs” to the explosion in TV coverage; Real Madrid and Liverpool and the like wanted not just more money, but more guarantees of money. Getting knocked out of Europe early by Lech Poznan was not part of the plan, and shrewd Swede Lennart Johansson came up with the idea of the Champions League, which proved to be an enormous commercial success at the same time as it opened up for the kind of discriminatory elitism that we saw culminate this week.
Far more important than those two events though is the advent of the smartphone. IBM’s first model was unveiled in 1992 and though they were quickly overtaken by other manufacturers, the change was seismic. Technology was going mobile and we would soon have a world of information in our pockets.
This has destroyed the way sport and everything else is consumed, and that fact is known by every sports administrator all over the world. Young fans of music no longer buy albums and lovingly place black vinyl discs onto a machine before listening reverently - that is a pastime reserved for (mostly) men of a certain age whose hair growth has shifted south from their skull to their chin as they seek to relive their dim and distant youth.
Similarly, young people do not sit down in front of a TV to watch a game that can last up to two hours - why would they, when they can see everything of relevance in a few seconds while doing something more exciting?
The average age of the American sports fan is shockingly high. In 2017 the average Major League Baseball fan was 57 years old. For NASCAR it was 58. The National Football League and National Hockey League faired slightly better at 50 and 49 respectively, while the National Basketball Association had a positively youthful 42.
All had increased since 2006.
The Super League was of course about money, but it is also a battle for the future - how we are entertained, and how and what we are prepared to pay for it, but also who it is aimed at. And if you’re 40 or older, it’s not you.
You’re over. Done. Out.
Last week I hosted a number of discussions on the subject of over-the-top television platforms, the technology that enables us to broadcast even the most niche sports from the most inhospitable locations to micro-audiences around the world.
I’ve done it on many occasions, not least with the fast-growing sport of swimrun which makes for spectacular TV.
The question, as always, is how to monetise these things.
Football and basketball better placed than almost all sports to survive. They are truly global games that created idols and heros long before the advent of TV, never mind the Internet.
I hold Bill Russell to be the greatest basketball player ever to play the game, despite the fact that there is limited footage of him doing so and that he retired two years before I was born.
But the next generation will not consume sport in the way I do, and chances are they won’t do it in the way you do either.
The men behind the Super League know that, and they also know that whoever solves that particular equation will continue to control the game and the wealth that goes with it.
The proposal itself makes sense. In an attention economy, given the choice between Liverpool playing Real Madrid or Brighton, the vast majority of sports fans will choose the former. That’s because, thanks to seven decades of television, the vast majority of sports fans are interested in entertainment, not sport.
The biggest problem for the hardcore fans - the match-going season ticket holders who protested on the streets - is not that the clubs see them as mere customers. It is that they don’t see themselves in that way. The Super League fiasco has shown them that their love is worth nothing.
Their only power, as this week has shown, is as paying consumers.
If fans are to harness that power - and that'’s a big if - they could change not just football, but the world overnight.
To do so they will need to return to their roots and the idea of community from which their clubs came. By banding together and saying “no” to the greed of the game they have taken the first step; if they have the courage, they can claim it back completely from the billionaires and the broadcasters who have been picking their pockets and stealing their game from under their noses.
The Podcast this week happened in the middle of the Super League shenanigans and contained many of the thoughts above.
Have a great week, wherever you may be.