A question of loyalty
By
Mickey Blue Eyes

Usually I don’t bother with BBC TV’s “Match of the Day” on Saturday nights. Too formulaic by half. But I do make a point of watching “Match of the Day 2” on BBC 2 on Sunday evenings. The programme’s main talking head, Adrian Chiles, seems to me to have the right temperament and pitch for his subject. Nobody who watches could fail to miss his fervent attachment to West Brom. Yet he manages to show it with unfailing good humour and straightforward common sense coupled with an almost childlike love of the game. Wants some doing, that, given West Brom’s current playing fortunes.

Last Sunday his two assistant junior talking heads were Gordon Strachan and Alan Ball, both of whom have played for and managed a number of top clubs and know their stuff without suffering any lingering illusions about the professional game. There was only one point when they looked nonplussed. It was when Chiles ran an item about a truly astonishing eighty years old West Brom fan who had missed only a handful of games in sixty-odd years of support. He still goes to away games. When the piece finished Chiles asked Strachan and Ball what they thought of the loyalty and commitment of fans who followed their clubs year in, year out, whatever their playing fortunes. In response both of them looked and sounded genuinely baffled. They truly couldn’t understand it. You could easily see why. These are two men who have made their living by moving from club to club as players and managers. For them it was and is a subsistence necessity in the same way it is for you and your family if you get made redundant or dislike your employers or look for promotion or better prospects elsewhere. It is as obvious as that.

Yet how many fans stop to think of it in these terms? How many fans stop to consider a professional player – if he is lucky – has a maximum of twenty years earnings ahead of him, that relatively only a few earn the megabucks we hear so much of? After that, managerships and media punditry aside, they might as well be on the moon as far as the game and its fans are concerned. For the players, misty-eyed supporters’ nostalgia won’t feed their families or keep them in old age. That is the cold edged reality of all professional sports and always has been. Only an iniquitous retain-and-transfer system prevented current circumstances from pertaining much, much earlier. Much of the “loyalty” you hear old timers talk of so gushingly was in fact enforced by an evil system of tied employment almost feudal in its nature. Its stranglehold was only gradually broken and didn’t completely disappear until the advent of the European Union and its employment laws. And strictly in terms of human rights you have to say “good riddance.” If you wouldn’t tolerate that system yourself you can’t properly wish it on someone else.

To illustrate, the great Bill Dean once met the equally great American baseball player Babe Ruth in the 1930s. Dean told Ruth he earned eight pounds a week. The American was amazed, saying if he had played in front of a crowd of “World”(!) Series size, as had Dean, he would expect to get two thirds of the gate money. In our current era of extreme right wing monetarist policies who could argue with the cold commercial logic of that? So, what price loyalty?

For us at Everton the subject is still quite fresh – not to say raw – because of the transfer of Wayne Rooney to Manchester United last August. Since then he has played in two games at Goodison and been barracked mercilessly on each occasion. Where, most of our fans ask, is Rooney’s loyalty? This is quite the wrong question. Which should surely be, “How do we construct a system which encourages more loyalty BY ALL PARTIES.” Rooney, like all players in a similar situation, is entitled to ask in riposte, “Where is the loyalty in a system that sells human beings and/or their talent as a commodity? Where is the loyalty in fans who cheer you one minute and then try for whatever reason to make your life a misery the next? In those circumstance why should I CARE?” Which is more or less what he has said, albeit through some rather obvious public relations coaching by his deeply despised agent.

The thing to remember is that none of this is new. The first cracks in the old feudal system appeared shortly after the Second World War, then broadened in the 50s and 60s before finally splitting wide open in the last decade. Early dissident players such as Charlie Mitten, Neil Franklin and George Eastham were vilified by fans and football establishment alike. Now it is a free-for-all overlooked benignly by a system that is little more than institutionalised corruption. I have outlined the history of it many other opinion pieces on this website during the last few years.

In short, what we are up against here is the age-old clash of Communal V Individual rights, how to codify a satisfactory settlement, and how to get the consensus respected. And for that to matter we need some mutual understanding and respect. Right now all we have is a sort-of-tolerated financial anarchy that occasionally breaks out into organised or spontaneous hatred. Who can forget the leaflets circulated urging the dismissal of Howard Kendall, our greatest ever manager? Or the madman who actually got to the bedside of Peter Swales’ sick and aged mother? The very culture of the game becomes subject to the crazy witterings of some deluded fans who think all you have to do is acquire the “right” sponsorship or employ a CEO from some business or other and you are off and running. Hey presto! Your revenues go up and everything is fine and dandy. Except, almost self evidently, it isn’t. Do you REALLY need me to quote countless hapless examples from the last fifteen years?

All of which makes the barracking of young Rooney sound and look as puerile as similar actions by other fans in similar situations. The fans’ emotions might be understandable, and certainly not helped by some of the lad’s baffling words and actions since he left, but they are mostly a waste of sound and fury unlikely to do anything other than set his jaw a good deal harder for the next encounter. The look on his face after he volleyed that phenomenal goal against Newcastle spoke volumes. He was a very angry young man indeed. That is a measure of just how good he is and how great he is likely to become. Once-in-a-lifetime talent like his belongs to no club, not Manchester United, not Everton, not Barcelona, not anybody. I am willing to bet he won’t last in Manchester simply because he will want to try his hand sooner or later on the continent. The only loyalty he owes is to his own natural talent. And I say that with due regard for the amount of protection David Moyes and his staff tried to provide for him, which one day will become evident to him, probably when he has time to reflect on his career.

In my view the way forward has to be through political action in the European Union, for it is in that arena the sport’s current woes were manufactured. If sport is more than mere money-making why not make each sport a trust administered by a joint body of fans, administrators and players? Within that, each club to have its own similar trust. Then each club stands or falls on its own merits and according to its support, but with due understanding there will be limited communal backing at difficult times. The initial administrative structure would be tricky but not impossible. Incoming private finance would be welcome within strict guidelines. The PLC would be abolished as inefficient and not in the game’s interests. The game’s problems are identifiable, quantifiable and capable of resolution with a reasonable amount of good will and common sense all round. The founders of the Football League knew what the dangers were and structured the embryo professional game accordingly. There is no reason why there can’t be a modern Europe-wide equivalent. But it MUST be Europe-wide. Individual club trusts would be annihilated in the current Premier League set-up. The catch line must surely be not that no man is an island, but that we all live on the same island. If the professional game is to survive in an attractive form then communal organisation of some sort is the only worthwhile alternative. Anything else is on the same road to slow oblivion now travelled by manufacturing industry.

The question of loyalty, then, is not whether misguided and manipulated youngsters like Wayne Rooney “betray” you. They don’t, anymore than Howard Kendall “betrayed” Manchester City or Harry Redknapp “betrayed” Portsmouth. They simply get on with their imperfect lives in a system that badly needs modernising. The paradox – there’s always one – is they still made a free choice. For the fans, you can’t have it two ways, cheer when it works to your advantage, then bleat when it doesn’t. The real question is whether you want to be loyal to a set of accounts, a bunch of two-bit spivs and an iniquitous system or whether you want to reconstruct the system to leave something worthwhile for your kids.

Remember that next time you think of booing Wayne Rooney. (28/04/05)

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