Recently, I guess because I know how fucked our politics, economics and climate system are, I’ve felt compelled to spend time watching a sport I used to love growing up instead.
I’ve always liked Football (Soccer), but haven’t watched it much in the last decade or so. It’s the game itself I like. The passing, the tactics, the formations, the goals, the athleticism and skill. The reason I haven’t watched it is everything else that I see as being broken with it. Unsporting behaviour, violent conduct and cheating. The obscene money (in the men’s game so far). The ridiculous inequality of talent and lack of competition league wide in every country I know of.
Now that I’ve gotten back into it, it’s been in a different way. I’m watching a lot of women’s football, and the only men’s football I’m watching (aside from a bit of initial curiosity around Spain and Italy) is Scottish (mainly Celtic because of Palestine and their general left wing appeal), German (St. Pauli for similar reasons), and Japanese (because Japan is pretty respectful even in football). Otherwise it’s all been women’s leagues. The SWPL (Celtic of course, but also most other matches I can watch); WSL and Women’s Chanpionship in England, Serie A, Liga F, WE League. Anything I can find (except maybe NWSL).
I am enjoying these games, but there are still a lot of issues that I want to see addressed, and that I don’t see anyone else talking about in a serious way. People talk about financial differences between teams, but never about a way to solve it. And for the most part, they still hold the minnow teams to the same high standards they expect of title contenders with far more resources. There are elements of cheating and bad sportsmanship creeping into the women’s game, but I think a lot of that could be remedied by the other systemic changes I have in mind. So without further ado, let’s get into what reforms I would implement if given the chance.
A more equal method of player allocation
This is the biggest change of all, and can be done in various ways. Within the current neoliberal system, probably the easiest way would be to implement a confederation (UEFA, AFC etc) wide team salary cap and / or individual player wage limit. The highest cap would apply to all top division leagues under the UEFA umbrella, and there would be lower caps for each division below the top, and be uniform across all countries as much as possible. Obviously depending on how many football league tiers each country has. Presumably it would be 3 or 4 in most cases, although I’m not sure on that.
This would already make a massive difference to the competitiveness of leagues. You wouldn’t just have 3 or 4 title contenders and a bunch of no-hopers in the bottom half, just trying to lose the least games and not get relegated.
However, I’d personally go a lot further. Similar to what the ACO does in Le Mans endurance racing, where they rank drivers gold, silver or bronze; and then stipulate that you can only have certain combinations of those ranks in your 3 driver teams per car, in order to ensure a competitive field. I’d like to see the same principle applied elsewhere.
Every year, we see EA Sports rate every player in the leagues that are present in their game. Obviously, this wouldn’t be adequate for an official FIFA player rating, but you can see that it wouldn’t be that difficult to create such a system. presumably it would be significantly easier to achieve than what the IPC has to do for the Paralympics. Here, you’d only need to categorise players into a handful of ratings. As opposed to the huge variety of disabilities and severity of impairment in Para-sports. There probably would be a few controversies, but nothing serious. A player that falls on the wrong side of a gold or platinum rating would be highly sought after since they wouldn’t count towards a team’s top category allocation. So they would almost certainly end up at one of the most historically successful, most popular teams under the existing system.
You can see that while the existing top teams would still have a competitive advantage as far as being able to get the first picks of top platinum and gold players, the inequality and competitiveness gap in leagues would close dramatically, to the point of relative parity. It would just be like getting picked in high school PE class where you’d have alternating picks. You end up with broadly comparable teams in the end.
Ending in-season transfer windows
One of the worst things about all team sports now is the frequency of player transfers. It really loses so much of the joy in supporting a team when you are constantly losing players. It’s no coincidence that the most popular players among any fan base are the ones who have been with that particular club for a decade.
High player turnover may help your team win, but any victory will always be more hollow when it’s not with “your players” who have worked and improved for years until they win. Maybe you’ll have a couple of new additions each season under a new system, but no big scale revamps every offseason; and no in-season transfers.
There’s nothing worse than in-season trades for player stress, fan disappointment and disillusionment. Of course injuries are a big thing in football, and you need to replace those players. However, teams should be forced to bring up academy players into the senior squad in these instances. It would encourage investment into academies. These players will also be rated though, so if top players are discovered, a team might have to give them up or make room on their rosters to account. Transfers would still have to happen, but they would be far less frequent, and far less traumatic for the players and teammates involved.
Another aspect that I forgot to mention earlier in the equality of player distribution section is regarding large squads. Very often we see top teams filling their benches with quality players who could start for many other teams. This leads to intense frustration and talent being wasted. It also means that the top teams can avoid having to face these players. It’s a kind of power move so emblematic of this practically unregulated capitalist system. A change to a more egalitarian way of doing things will also alleviate this. Top players will always be playing and starting games. And decent players will always get good amounts of playing time off the bench at the very least.
Slashing player salaries and introducing wage brackets
This is a simple one. Male players in general are paid way too much, and I would even argue that the top female players are also paid way too much. I would cap both male and female pay at around £100,000 a year for platinum rated players. From what I’ve seen, there are women now making 8 times that. And Ronaldo in the men’s game something like 250 times that, which is beyond insane.
From there, it would go down progressively for the different ranks, to something like £50k for the average first division player in any league. This is just a rough estimate, but you get the idea. There wouldn’t be a huge wage discrepancy from bottom to top.
Ending corporate pay TV deals to get the money out
The current system where many games are behind expensive paywalls for sports TV and streaming packages simply doesn’t serve the fans. Even if you pay for all of the services, you still are very limited in the number of games you can watch. If you’re a fan of a team, you should be able to watch every game. Either for free, or for a small and reasonable fee. Paying through the nose for a very limited service makes no sense. This is another thing the Americans get somewhat right (aside from rookie player drafts). If you’re a fan of a team, you can watch every game. It’s still far from perfect, but it’s better than what we have in the UK and many other countries.
We need some combination or free-to-air TV, free streaming, affordable club or league specific streaming services or TV channels (with full access to all games if paid).
Fan-owned teams
This is an obvious one really. The fans are so crucial to football clubs. They’re such an integral part. They should collectively own the teams. It’s a model that works in Germany and elsewhere. It can easily be replicated. Get the capitalists out once and for all.
Conclusion
I think if we can achieve all or even just some of these things, the game (and other sports that are infected with capitalism) will be so much better. The focus needs to be back on fun and friendship, while still being competitive. At the moment, the money and high stakes (even in the women’s game now relatively speaking) encourages cheating, unsporting behaviour, and harder tackling which increases injury risk. And just generally it makes the sport much worse. The game as it exists now is far from “the beautiful game”. It’s an ugly, selfish, miserable game when you look beyond the glitz and glamour the slick media facade falsely presents. We need to take it back for the people.
