Sadly, the way it is
By
Mickey Blue Eyes.

Review of
“The Beautiful Game? Searching for the Soul of Football”
By David Conn
(Yellow Jersey Press 2004)
Nineteen chapters, bibliography, index, photographs, 400 pages.

“Out often late at night on the tough estates, Watson discovered a
simple truth about football: most people, boys at least, really do love it.
‘So many kids are cynical and alienated because of the situations they’ve
found themselves in., but football is a catalyst for reaching them. Being
attached to a professional club gives it some glamour too – they were
always aware of Orient’s modest place in the football pecking order, but
they were still fascinated to be part of something run under the name of a
Football League club.”
AUTHOR – Chapter 18, page 341.

Naturally I was flattered when asked to review this book by an author whose previous work I greatly admired and had therefore reviewed independently. This book won’t let you down either. I urge you to read it to confirm you better instincts despite the free review copy I received. It really is a very important contribution from a talented and honest writer.

I must admit I balked a little at the title. After all I am an atheist. Which inevitably means in my opinion Conn searches in vain. But we all know what he means. Given the content, poetic licence is allowed. Gawd (if you’ll pardon the poor pun) knows in recent years we have had enough emotionless one-dimensional accountants, “businessmen” and “entrepreneurs” to fill a football club bankruptcy court. Moreover, the author doesn’t shrink from admitting his own loyalty. He is a Manchester City fan. If that doesn’t induce your sympathy nothing will. If souls were to exist, it would be amongst City fans seemingly in permanent purgatory.

The subject is even more imperative for Evertonians given the appearance of the offshore Fortress Sports Fund based in Brunei and its infusion into our financial affairs. You are entitled to ask who they are and what are their fiscal intentions, just as you are entitled to ask the same questions of, say, the officers and executive committee of the Everton Shareholders Association. Fat chance you’ll get any worthwhile answers, though. But I urge you never to cease asking. What is important is that your questions are as sensible and courteous as are Conn’s interviews of important individuals. In these circumstances calling someone “a cunt” deservedly gets you precisely nowhere, and that’s where you deserve to be if you behave like a big-mouthed thug or a third rate spiv.

But this “soul” business is important because you hear a lot of well-meaning footy people – David Conn included – throw the term around as though it is some form of panacea. Well, it isn’t. It is a distraction. You won’t find any “soul” in football for the same reason you won’t find it anywhere else. It doesn’t exist, never has and never will. Funnily enough, Conn demonstrates this rather well in his uncompromising very short partial history of the founding of professional English league football, particularly of how some clubs got into the league in the first place. He is particularly good on how Arsenal squirmed into the set up, as he is on Glossop North End. No evidence of “soul” there, then. And in fact none anywhere in the history of the founding of the codified professional game. The league founders were all practical men of the kind of (commercial) existentialism even Jean Paul Sartre would have admired. The religious element in the founding merely helped rein in worst inclinations, and is to be welcomed for it. There are rough parallels here with the founding of the Labour Party, thus demonstrating how contemporary history and culture simply cannot be divorced from the game. It doesn’t exist in a vaccuum.

This remains one of the drawbacks to this kind of football business book. Essentially it boils down to a list of things wrong and corrupt and how the advent of the Premier League suddenly made it much, much worse. Which really isn’t anything most informed footy fans didn’t know anyway. Nevertheless, it is an important task, this listing. Fans can have no excuse for saying they were uninformed. And David Conn spares nobody, not even himself. Example, at one point he wonders aloud if he may have misjudged the late Peter Swales. Perhaps he did when you read what happened subsequent to Swales’ ownership.

Another drawback is a failure to address fans attitudes and actions in any real detail. There are laudable if perfunctory mentions of fans trusts and similar bodies and how some of them have performed heroically to save their clubs, including an excellent section on the usefullness of community football. But mostly the extreme club chauvinism that has harmed the game so much goes largely uncriticised. As we all know, the same problems simmer below the surface, where middle aged ex terrace thugs still spout their diluted poison to impressionable youngsters. Instead, Conn has only the usual stuff to say about all seater stadia “lacking atmosphere.” Well, as someone who has lived through both aspects I say I’d rather have the current facilities than the way it used to be, no sweat. If that’s the social price we have to pay, so be it. To hell with the kind of so-called “atmosphere” that led to decades long self-delusion by everybody connected with the game. Until it was way too late.

All of which makes Conn’s sensitive and intelligent update of the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster the more compelling. In this, he opens his account with a sideswipe at the cold uninformed chauvinism of some Sheffield fans and local and national administrators, and then goes on to provide some valuable additional insights into the true cause and coverup. More than any other football writer I know he has empathised with the innocent victims and their families in a most moving and rational way. Your average tabloid writer could learn a lot from him, but probably won’t. More to the point, he won’t let go of the truth of the matter and after all this time that is almost beyond praise. He could so easily have let it go like most of his media colleagues.

The black hole of Yorkshire football figures prominently in the story. The dismaying collapses of Sheffield Wednesday, Leeds United, York City and Bradford City are all analysed with a sense of barely muted outrage, the kind of feeling only a true football fan or genuine moralist can bring to bear. The story relays the gradual construction of institutional corruption now accepted almost as the norm as are the number of clubs in administration. There’s no question the picture he paints is a bleak one tinged with tenuous hope, despite a chapter titled “A Positive Future.” If greed continues to dominate you can assume things will get worse and worse. Somehow the worst instincts have to be reined in once again or the professional game will be a truly worthless spectacle owned and performed entirely by cheats.

However, next time he might care to probe deeper and wider amongst the fans and their motivational attitudes, to examine the part played by altruism versus hate, how the latter still exists in primitive but seated condition, and how it all relates inevitably to contemporary society. Passivity plays its part as much as committment, but to what extent? Why are some fans committed to fighting (sometimes literally so) for their clubs but not the game? After all, the greed and spivs couldn’t flourish for a single second longer than the power of sensibly organised fans would allow it to. Then again, the same self-righteous fans who seem to hate everybody are usually the self same people who demand their club borrows itself into oblivion to achieve “success” of the kind “enjoyed” by Leeds United. In my opinion too many fans have completely lost sight of what the game has to offer as a healthy outlet and escapist obsession. Maybe that’s what Conn really means by “soul.” Just as a taster – could the Premier League ever have got off the ground without the horrors of extreme right wing politics of the eighties and since? I do not see how the two can be separated, any more than I can see how non-conformism can be separated from many of the attitudes of the founders of league football. For all that, I get the feeling that if anyone could produce a sensible manifesto for the game it would be this author.

Once again, David Conn has done us all a great service in writing this book. And I’m not just saying that because I got a free copy. (18/11/04)

M.B.E. INDEX