Soccernomics. Simon Kuper
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George saw the ignorance of football in those days from point-blank range. In 1972, when George scored the famous goal for little semi-professional Hereford that knocked Newcastle out of the FA Cup, he was working for Adidas as a ‘football PR’. His job was to represent Adidas to England players, former world champions like Bobby Moore, Bobby Charlton and Gordon Banks. There was little need to persuade them to choose Adidas. Most of them wore the three stripes for free anyway. George says, ‘It is quite a fascinating thing if you compare it with today. There were no great sponsorship deals going on. All that happened is that you would give the players boots. But even then, at the beginning of every season the clubs would go to their local sports retailer and just buy twenty, thirty pairs of boots and hand them out. For a company like Adidas, it was the cheapest type of PR you could imagine.’
Only on special occasions did George have to pay players. ‘When it came to a big international, and the game was going to be televised, my job was to go to the team hotel, hang around there, make myself known, and a couple of hours before the game I would go into the players’ rooms and paint the white stripes on their boots with luminous paint so it was more visible. My bosses used to be keenly watching the television to make sure the stripes were visible, and if they weren’t I would be in for bollocking.’
For this service, an England player would receive £75 per match – not a princely sum even in 1972. George recalls, ‘Bobby [Moore], the most charming of people, didn’t take the money on the day of the game. He just used to say to me, “Let it build up for a few games, and I’ll ring you when I need it.” And that’s what he did.’ Then the most famous defender of the era would pocket a cumulative few hundred pounds for having advertised an international brand to a cumulative audience of tens of millions.
Only in the late 1980s did English football clubs discover that people were willing to buy replicas of their team shirts. That made it plain even to them that their gear must have some value. They had already stopped paying sportswear companies for the stuff; now they started to charge them.
Over time, football clubs have found new ways of making money. However, the ideas almost never came from the clubs themselves. Whether it was branded clothing, or the gambling pools, or television, it was usually people in other industries who first saw there might be profits to be made. It was Rupert Murdoch who went to English clubs and suggested putting them on satellite TV; the clubs would never have thought of going to him. In fact, the clubs often fought against new moneymaking schemes. Until 1982 they refused to allow any league games to be shown live on TV, fearing that it might deter fans from coming to the stadium. Clubs couldn’t grasp that games on television meant both free money and free advertising. There is now a good deal of research into the question of how many fans are lost when a game is shown on TV. Almost all the evidence shows that the number is tiny, and that the gate revenue that would be lost is usually well below the amount that would be made from selling extra matches for television coverage.
It took clubs a long time to realize just how much football was worth to television. When Greg Dyke was chairman of the UK’s ITV Sport in the 1980s, he offered five big clubs £1 million each for the TV rights for English football. In 2013, when Dyke was chairman of the FA, he fondly recalled: ‘It’s funny now, when you look at the money that’s involved: these chairmen had eyes bulging. They couldn’t believe it.’ In total, Dyke bought the entire TV rights for English professional football for £12 million a year. Soon afterwards, he went up to Nottingham to try to talk Brian Clough, Forest’s then manager, into coming back on TV as a pundit. When Dyke arrived at the club, Clough came up to him and said: ‘Thank you. I want to shake your hand, Mr Dyke, because you’re the first person that’s given football what it’s due: twelve million quid.’
In 1992 Murdoch began paying about £60 million a season for the television rights to the new Premier League. As of 2018 the league is getting more than 25 times as much a season from British TV companies alone. ‘I’ve been screwed by television,’ admitted Sir John Hall, the then Newcastle chairman, one rowdy night at Trinity College Dublin in 1995. ‘But I’ll tell you one thing: I won’t be screwed again.’
Or take the renovation of English stadiums in the early 1990s. It was an obvious business idea. Supermarkets don’t receive customers in sheds built in the Victorian era and gone to seed since. They are forever renovating their stores. Yet football clubs never seem to have thought of spending money on their grounds until the Taylor Report of 1990 forced them to. They did up their stadiums, and bingo: more customers came.
All this proves how much like consumers football fans are. It’s not just that they come running when a team does well (although they do). But in addition, it seems that football can quickly become popular across a whole country. All teams then benefit, but particularly those that build nice new stadiums where spectators feel comfortable and safe. That would explain why the three English clubs whose crowds grew fastest over the 1990s were Manchester United, Sunderland and Newcastle. Later, when Arsenal moved from Highbury to the much larger Emirates, the new stadium filled up despite the fact that the club stopped winning trophies. In other leagues, clubs such as Juventus, Ajax and Celtic have also drawn big new crowds to their new grounds. There is such a close link between building a nice stadium and drawing more spectators that the traditional fans’ chant of ‘Where were you when you were shit?’ should be revised to ‘Where were you when your stadium was shit?’
Yet like almost all good business ideas in football, the Taylor Report was imposed on the game from outside. Football clubs are classic late adopters of new ideas. Several years after the internet emerged, Liverpool, a club with millions of fans around the world, still did not have a website. As we’ll see in Chapter 6, clubs were equally late onto social media. It’s no wonder that from 1992 to May 2008, even before the financial crisis struck, forty of England’s ninety-two professional clubs had been involved in insolvency proceedings, some of them more than once. The proportions have been even higher in Spanish football in recent years.
HOW THE TRIBE CHOOSES ITS CHIEFS
Rather than stack up endless examples of the historical dimness of football clubs, let’s take one contemporary case study: how clubs have traditionally hired the person they believe to be their key employee, the manager. Fans are still asking themselves how Steve McClaren ever got to be appointed England manager in 2006, but in fact it is unfair to single him out. The profusion of fantasy football leagues, in which office workers masquerade as coaches, indicates the widely held suspicion that any fool could do as well as the people who actually get the jobs. The incompetence of football managers may have something to do with the nonsensical and illegal methods by which they are typically recruited.
Football ‘is a sad business’, says Bjørn Johansson, who runs a headhunting firm in Zurich. Like his colleagues in headhunting, Johansson is never consulted by clubs seeking managers. Instead a club typically chooses its man using the following methods.
In a panel at the International Football Arena conference in Zurich in 2006, Johansson said that in ‘normal’ business, ‘an average search process takes four to five months.’ In football, a club usually finds a coach within a couple of days of sacking his predecessor. ‘Hesitation is regarded as weak leadership,’ explained another panellist in Zurich, Ilja Kaenzig, then general manager of the German club Hannover 96. Brian Barwick, the English Football Association’s former chief executive, has noted that McClaren’s recruitment ‘took from beginning to end nine weeks’, yet the media accused the FA of being ‘sluggish’. If only it had been more sluggish. Succession planning, common in business, is almost unheard of in football.
One rare slow hire became perhaps the most inspired choice in the game’s modern history: Arsenal’s appointment of Arsène Wenger in 1996. The Frenchman, working in Japan, was not free immediately. Arsenal waited for him, operating under caretaker managers for weeks, and was inevitably accused of being sluggish. Similarly, in 1990 Manchester United’s chairman, Martin Edwards, was derided as sluggish when he refused to sack his losing manager, Alex Ferguson. Edwards thought that in the long term, Ferguson might improve.