Easter Monday brought one of those chance juxtapositions: FIFA Presidential candidate Jérôme Champagne’s third campaign letter bounced into my inbox just as those rumours of David Moyes’s impending departure from Manchester United started seriously swirling.
One of the many things that Moyes’s fate demonstrates is that transition seasons are no longer acceptable among football’s super-elite.
His ousting in this way helps to illustrate the validity of Champagne’s point that a “financial iron curtain” now separates this tiny elite of which United is part from the remaining 99% (or so) of clubs around the world.
But if Champagne’s core observation, expressed with characteristic erudition, is uncontestable, does it automatically follow that his central conclusion – that a better balance is more than ever necessary – is uncontestable too? I am not so sure.
Instinctively, I have to say, I am with him: inequality on this scale cannot be healthy.
Then again, Champagne and I are around the same age. When I was a kid, the only way of seeing a complete football game was to visit the nearest club (or park). Nowadays, of course, you can see world’s finest players live and in close up at the flick of a switch in the comfort of your living-room – and pretty much anywhere else.
Why, if you can afford the subscription fees, wouldn’t you choose that option? Unless like me, and perhaps Champagne, and undoubtedly millions of others of similar vintage, you had acquired in your formative years a taste for watching honest triers flog through the mud as the blood-flow to your fingers and toes congealed to a trickle.
My love of the game stemmed more than anything from enjoyment of playing it. This seems to me the critical point: as long as boys and girls can still join local clubs to play, how much does it matter if the heroes who fill their dreams are from just up the street, or another continent?
Particularly in our rather stridently nationalistic times, you could argue that another continent is better, since it might foster a precocious appreciation of the benefits of multiculturalism and ethnic plurality.
Similarly, for that tiny proportion of kids gifted and dedicated enough to make a career in the game a viable option, isn’t it ultimately better if the sport’s structures enable them eventually to play at the level best befitting their talents, rather than being stuck with a comparatively mediocre club because it happens to be local?
This happens a lot, inevitably, in international football: Gareth Bale, like Ryan Giggs before him, may never grace a World Cup because he happens to be Welsh. So it redresses this particular balance if all players are free to find their natural level within the club game.
Yes, you can debate the age at which a big geographic move away from the immediate family environment should be deemed acceptable, but it is hard to argue against the principle of doing everything possible to enable players from whatever background to fly as high as they can in club football.
I suppose the key piece of evidence that would persuade many of us to side with Champagne over the imbalance issue that he identifies is if there were irrefutable proof that concentration of elite success in so few hands was damaging the game’s popularity.
Perhaps surprisingly, I cannot see much of an indication that this is in fact the case.
Clearly live football is as big a draw as ever on TV; if it wasn’t, broadcasting rights fees for the sport’s most desirable programming would not have escalated in the way that they have.
And it is hard to make a watertight case that the increased predictability that goes along with financial polarisation is adversely affecting stadium attendances either.
Looking at the five big west European leagues that harbour the vast majority of the super-clubs, Germany’s Bundesliga had record-breaking attendance levels of more than 44,000 a game in 2011-12; English Premier League attendances appear relatively stable at high proportions of capacity, in spite of high ticket prices; Spain’s La Liga seems stable too, although Deloitte’s annual review of football finance noted that, excluding Barcelona and Real Madrid, aggregate matchday revenue fell 4% in 2011-12; Italian crowds are far below their late 1990s heyday, but are higher than in 2006-07 when average attendance in Serie A dropped below 20,000; in France attendances and match day revenues have been sliding, although Germany’s experience after hosting the 2006 World Cup suggests that the spate of stadium investment ahead of Euro 2016 may lead to a far healthier trend by the end of the decade. Then again, the spread of business sizes covered by Ligue 1 is now huge, with individual club revenues, excluding transfers, ranging in 2012-13 from around €20 million to €400 million.
I do fear that as the Champions League becomes ever richer and an ever more dominant focus of international attention, the competitiveness of national leagues – and let us remember that both England and Spain might have wholly unexpected champions this season – may be allowed to erode still further.
The rationale for this would be to ensure that there is a strong, experienced national competitor in the Champions League year in, year out.
If I were Barcelona or Real Madrid, this is one of the arguments I would be deploying to counter lobbying for a switch to a collective model for the sale of La Liga’s broadcasting rights. That said, I think that the danger of national competition being sacrificed on the altar of European competitiveness is greatest in the smaller leagues which are never likely to earn multiple Champions League slots.
For one or two national leagues – notably the Premier League – their global appeal may generate sufficient, broadly-enough distributed, income to forestall this.
But this too, as Champagne flags up, has a cost, if it slows the development of national leagues in countries whose populations are glued to the English title race.
For all these reasons I actually wonder if the “least worst” course might not be to go with the flow of present trends and allow the super-elite to set up their own self-contained European Super League if they want to.
There is every chance that this would be a compelling competition. And corralling the giants in this way might allow national leagues to become more unpredictable again.
There would also be drawbacks: national league competitors might be reduced to the status of feeder clubs and could be pauperised.
But I think the pros and cons are more finely balanced than many allow. I certainly don’t think, as Champagne suggests, that creation of a “purely elitist NBA-style competition” would mean the end of football.
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing. His book, Foinavon – the story of the Grand National’s biggest upset, was recently awarded the $10,000 Dr Tony Ryan Book Award. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938.