Tim Wigmore

Football focus | 27 September 2018

‘Football holds a mirror to ourselves,’ Michael Calvin asserts in State of Play. Modern football is angrier, more brutal, more unequal and simply more relentless than ever before.

The sense of a football club being rooted to its locality has been shattered. Globalisation, and hyper-commercialisation, means that local owners have been replaced by ‘speculators and savants’ from abroad. Locally reared players, victims of football’s global free market in talent, have become rare. To receive the TV bounty that teams in the Premier League enjoy, ‘You have to create the most competitive team, which doesn’t necessarily include young Johnny from the academy,’ explains Scott Duxbury, the chairman and chief executive of Watford — a club once renowned for developing academy graduates.

Yet Calvin’s rounded portrayal of the modern game — raw vignettes garnered from the rarefied elite of the sport to non-league matches which, like the game itself, are by turns surprising, uplifting and dispiriting — shows that yesterday was not always better. The standard of play at the top of English club football has never been better. Women’s football, though it has never completely recovered from the Football Association’s 50-year ban from 1921 to 1971, is buoyant. Though huge obstacles remain, progress is being made to combat homophobia and racism. And England’s World Cup campaign offered a glimpse of football as something more. ‘Sometimes it’s easier to be negative than positive, or to divide than to unite, but England: let’s keep this unity alive,’ said England’s defender Kyle Walker.

Look closely enough and, Calvin asserts, the game still retains a beating heart which separates it from the corporate entertainment that many administrators seem to mistake it for. There are tales of Common Goal, the campaign for footballers to donate 1 per cent of their salary to charity; how Sunderland’s players bonded with Bradley Lowery, who died of cancer aged six last year; and Fans Against Foodbanks, groups of fans who help feed vulnerable people.

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