Football and the Faustian Pact

There have been several events in the world of football this week that have increasingly worried me. I have come to the realisation that I am a human being first, probably a Birmingham City supporter second, and that being a 'football fan' comes somewhere between 'one-time fruit picker' and 'Year 8 B-Team leg-spinner' in my personal identity.

Before you reach for the 'New Tab' button, let me offer a disclaimer: this will not be an #AgainstModernFootball rant. For a start, 'Modern Football' is the only thing I've ever known, being born in 1993. Secondly, most people who go under that banner do so whilst tweeting in front of Sky Sports' Super Sunday.

I'm still enthralled by the game itself. The ninety minutes of football still holds me in my armchair in a way that a film or TV show rarely can. Forget the moans about diving and play-acting; that's just 1970s leg-breaking tackles in a different guise, branded by the same motif of a natural urge to cheat. It was ever thus.

But that magic is leaving us romantics behind. Football is a sport increasingly played behind closed doors, in the boardrooms and corridors of power.Last week, I went to a Sports Journalism course down in Wimbledon. First up, there was a sports quiz. It was telling of the modern media that most of the questions revolved around chief executives, directors and chairmen. It was perhaps even more telling that I knew almost all the answers.

Which brings me neatly onto the events of the week. I consider myself to be very knowledgeable about the sport, and yet, there have been two players signed this summer, for a combined fee of £60m, that I have never heard of. One is Fernandinho, the other is Soldado. Irrelevant to an extent, but just to give you some sort of context.

Recognise this man? He cost £34m.
http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/article8648505.ece/ALTERNATES/w460/62-Fernandinho-mcpa.jpg

Meanwhile, Coventry City are going to the wall. The football club has been put into liquidation, and the future looks extremely bleak. A club that has won the FA Cup more recently than West Ham, Newcastle, and Aston Villa, a proper, one-team footballing city, bang-smack in the middle of the country. I really wonder how many people knew, or even cared. To discover the ins and outs, I had to watch the local news. Not Sky Sports News. The top story, if Sky was even capable of introspection, should have been how anyone can justify paying such money for the above players, when a club such as Coventry, part of the fabric of English football, have been left to rot? For Sky, and their assorted minions of supporters, it barely registers on their radar.

We used to say it would take a club- any club- to go to the wall to make the clubs and owners sit up and take notice. You think that will happen now? No chance. Now it seems it will take, naturally, one of the Sky Power Elite, to go bust. Perhaps, in 2050, we can have Liquidation Sunday, presented by Jim White's grandson, whereby Ray Winstone offers us odds on which of Manchester United, Chelsea and Manchester City will be wound up first?

It was symptomatic of the media that when I found out the news about Coventry at the course, on a corner of the BBC Sport website, I announced it to the rest of the room. The man taking the class, not much older than us, and a fan of one of the Power Elite, exclaimed 'Oh my god really?! Oh no, wait, actually I don't care'. And so the talk turned back to the Premier League.

Up in Doncaster, a member of One Direction now has a contract. I'm not joking. So what, you might say? If it brings in extra revenue, then maybe Coventry should have wised-up earlier and signed Gary Barlow back in the early 2000s? This move surely signifies the final nail in the coffin of football's meritocracy, the spit-and-sawdust, flat caps and whippets of football's School of Hard Knocks. Think of the young Doncaster trainee, who, following the announcement of the mandatory 25-man-squads, turns on Sky Sports News and sees that Louis Tomlinson has been selected ahead of him. The trainee is forced to move on and disappears into non-league obscurity, whilst everyone laughs at how silly Tomlinson looks trying to play professional football, and the gimmick is over. Unfortunately, so is the young trainee's career. Such is the knife-edge for young players.

Doncaster Rovers' new gimmick- er, signing.
Pic: http://www.calcioweb.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/tomlinson.jpg

Across Yorkshire, Hull City have hammered the final nail into any sort of identity coffin with their re-branding as 'Hull City Tigers'. Their Egyptian owner deemed the suffix 'City' as 'too common'. Imagine! Formed in 1904, but forget it, some bloke passing through in 2013 doesn't like that, so you're Tigers lads, or we're going to the wall. Don't make me sell you to Coventry.

As supporters, if we choose to buy into anything other than the team and the ninety minute experience, are just play-things, or, at the very least, waiting to become play-things. We're kidding ourselves otherwise. And don't worry, there's nothing wrong with a bit of self-delusion. Football is built on such glorious imagination. I'm deceiving myself every day as a Blues fan that we'll retain our identity forever more. And there definitely are teams who still keep their dignity, for now, anyway. But who's to say what's next? Blues will likely have new owners within the next year, and who knows what crackpot scheme will evolve? Merger with Coventry? Don't forget lads, before our rich owner arrived, we were going to the wall. So you'll play as West Mercia FC or I'll sell you to Hull City Raccoons.

It is, of course, easier to whinge from the outside looking in. I can moan about the MCC being an old-fashioned, archaic Old Boys' Club, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't jump at the chance to have steak and chips in the Long Room. I think of the Premier League as a glass prism. Once inside, everything is distorted, phantasmagorical, the light is colourful and magical, and you forget there's a whole world outside. It takes a few years outside the glass prism to really appreciate the ninety minutes for what they are.

Every football fan.
http://www.empowernetwork.com/empowerednetworker/files/2012/08/Devil-and-Angel-Homer-New-300x205.jpg

I would take being in the Premier League in an instant and all it entails, on the pitch at least. And that, I guess, is why Sky Sports and its riches is such a powerful, Faustian drug, and why, for as far as I can see into the future, clubs will sell their souls to eat at the top table.

There's a little bit of the Devil in all of us.