Qualified Hysteria

It seems like a very long time since I’ve been excited about June in October – although it’s probably almost exactly four years. The qualifiers for World Cup 2010 are over, and while it’s sad that more of the home nations haven’t made it through, at least England will, this time, have a chance to enter its usual bonkers World Cup Fever mode.

England does seem to do World Cup Fever differently to most nations, however. Apart from perhaps the South Americans, there probably isn’t a national team, nation of fans or national media that manage to combine such outrageous, almost offensive optimism in terms of their team’s chances – i.e. ‘we have a golden generation of players, the best league, the best historical pedigree, who else could possibly win’ and so on – with such nail-biting, excruciating hopelessness and doom-laden prophecies of bad omens, injuries that haven’t happened yet and impassioned arguments for ‘all the teams that are clearly better than ours – Spain want it more, the climate will suit Germany’ et cetera.

Like a lot of what interests me the most about football, the real indicators of this strange, schizophrenic behaviour go on outside the game itself – and this is not purely about the press, though they undoubtedly play a huge part in it. The whims of the press (tabloid primarily, but not exclusively) have an enormous impact on the team’s fortunes; teams have been picked, players dropped and most disgracefully, in the case of the late Sir Bobby Robson, managers have been cruelly vilified and hounded out of their jobs – even out of the country in his case.

More recently, the posing, preening and general twattishness of the infamous WAG culture surrounding the 2006 England team in Baden Baden was a far bigger story for the newspapers than the (admittedly rather dour) displays on the pitch – which can’t have failed to have an effect on the player’s moods or their ability to concentrate on the job at hand throughout the tournament.

Outside of the fantasy world constructed by newspapers and TV pundits, however, even now the signs of a country starting to get twitchy for a major competition are in evidence. It’s tricky to walk into a pub without overhearing (or becoming involved in) the usual amusing post-qualification conversations: they usually begin with someone saying something along the lines of “We can’t get too excited” or “I hope this time there’s less hype and we just let the players get on with it” and then ends with one or two overexcited Englishmen trying to name the squad on not-quite-22 fingers and imagining fantasy World Cup Final scorelines.

I have one friend who, before the 2006 finals, liked to paint a (delightfully unlikely) picture of Gary Neville rocketing home a late winner against Germany (naturally), causing an ecstatic Sven to tear open his shirt, screaming with the sheer Anglo-Swedish passion of it all. This image was conjured again and again, usually ending with everyone attendant adding their own ideas before eventually calming down and, well, looking a bit sad. It seemed so ridiculous – as if we’d been discussing the plot of a fanciful science fiction movie. But still… it could have happened.

And it could happen this time. But it won’t. But it might do.

It’s too easy to get involved in it all – and it’ll be too heartbreaking when it all goes tits up again – but it will make the next eight months fly by, I’m sure of that. One thing is for sure, though, and that’s that the country will be mostly a fun place to be from June 11th onwards. Sure there’ll be the cringe-inducing St. George bunting all over the place, those stupid flags will stick out of people’s car windows and poor old women working in supermarkets will be forced to wear plastic hats and red-and-white tabards.

Sure, The Sun will have COME ON BOYS and ENGLAND EXPECTS (ugh) as front-page headlines at least five times and Gary Lineker will jinx the whole thing by saying, “so are England the team to beat in this group, Lawro?” and there’ll be a live feed from a pub in Aberdeen full of Scottish blokes wearing Argentina shirts and, Christ alive, Des Lynam might even read another Kipling poem out on some doomed digital channel somewhere – but still. England might win the World Cup – and that’s why we do all this, isn’t it?

Modern Football is Brilliant

The problem with starting a football blog in the middle of summer, of course, is that there’s precious little actual football to write about. Not that there need to be matches being played for football to be happening. Comedian David Mitchell wrote a brilliant Observer column last year expressing his frustration at the average football fan’s fascination with the transfer market – or “human resources” – and that it serves to emphasise how dull a game football is. I disagree. I think any period when the transfer window is open is when, for better or worse, football as it really is in the 21st century is on show. It’s a time of genuine insight into how it all works.

The obscene amounts of money are usually the focus of the press, understandably, but with the tedious side effect of drawing every old school football man out of the woodwork to decry today’s game as having lost it’s way (whatever it’s “way” was – was the game really better in the 70s and 80s? Underpaid undervalued and poorly trained indentured servants playing in front of crowds of thugs on crumbling terraces? I’m not sure its so black and white).

The money is what makes the game what it is now, but that’s certainly not to say it has an entirely negative effect. (I’m going to play devil’s advocate a little here.)

The money started flooding in, in England, certainly, with the television deals that kick-started the Premier League. This in turn has meant that rights to show the English league have been sold all over the world – the fact that the densely populated nations of Asia are the biggest markets for replica Manchester United shirts tells us everything we need to know about why oil-rich Middle East consortiums are buying into, most recently, clubs like Manchester City and now Portsmouth. (The other model for super rich footballing power, of course, is that of Real Madrid, which is run more like a nation than a mere football club, or even a multi-national corporation.)

My argument, however, is that the increased revenue and ambitious foreign owners can only improve the game as a spectacle, and make it more exciting as a contest. Most would retaliate to this statement by arguing that this might well be true for the “big four” and their ilk – pointing to the gulf in finances as the reason why it’s the same four teams in the top four every year and only a handful of teams have a realistic chance of winning the Champions League.

But one only needs to look at Man United’s (and, to a lesser extent, Arsenal’s), stranglehold on the Premier League in the late 90s and early 2000s to realise, surely, that when Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea it made the league infinitely more interesting to watch – even before the mighty press-baiting presence of Mourinho. Sure there was initially an enormous gulf in financial clout between Chelsea and the next most able contenders, but this must be better for the game than a tedious duopoly continuing unbroken. Better a three-horse race than a two-horse race.

Suddenly players were moving to a club with ambition for the future, rather than to clubs who believed their rich heritage entitled them to continue winning forever. A takeover for Liverpool followed and, while not on the same scale, the new money has thrust the club (admittedly in no small part thanks to the American owners sticking with Benitez) far closer to challenging for a first Premiership title than they ever could have imagined before the foreign owners came in. Better a four-horse race than a three-horse race!

Look across the top half of the Premier League now and there are plenty of clubs who can seriously push the big boys – if not for the title itself then for vital, historic European places and not-to-be-dismissed domestic cups. While it may very well be that the top four remains unchanged this season (I for one actually think this might just be the year when Arsenal get pushed out), no one can with any real confidence pick the order of the teams that will finish from 1st to 7th. This was certainly not the case before foreign owners came in and “ruined” the English game.

On the same subject, a story that I’ve found heartening this week is that of Sven Goran Eriksson’s appointment as Director of Football at League Two side Notts County. This, it appears, is a true statement of ambition, both for Eriksson (who could just as easily have been sat in the manager’s chair at Fratton Park) and for the team’s mysterious new owners. And even if it is with a significant financial advantage, should the Magpies actually manage to make it to the Premier League in 5 years or so, what a story it would be! Imagine how those fans and players will feel! Eriksson and his sidekick Tord Grip will deserve the praise they hopefully get for going out of their way to try and make something truly extraordinary happen.

I think what I’m trying to say here is that while modern football has plenty wrong with it (Sepp Blatter has mostly seen to that), it’s wrong to dismiss it as having been “killed” by the enormous amounts of money flowing through it. And the summer transfer merry-go-round is more than enough amusing distraction while the players sit on the beach (or are up in court).

Owen to Man United? John Terry to Man City? (never going to happen by the way.) Real Madrid smashing the world transfer record twice in a week? Sven in League Two? Modern football is brilliant.