English soccer is in a tizz of self-recrimination. Not before time. This new autumn season has seen attendances drop alarmingly in the Premiership. Goals have dried up and so, correspondingly, has the excitement. Two–nil is now a goal glut. The mercenary players are overpaid, over-praised and over here, and the fans, we are told, are fed up with them for, you might say, taking the money and not running. Those die-hard supporters themselves are now generally considered by much of the country as way out of the loop, not just touching weekend hobby-obsessives in striped scarves any more, but simply mad, sad nutters being taken for a ride while ashen-faced supremos of their squads debate whether entertainment and enjoyment, fun and laughter, are anything to do with them at all. For sure, however, they know that one–nil equals three points and their own wallets are full to bursting.
Television continues frantically to laud its declining product as more hand-wringing goes on over exorbitant ticket prices and barmy kick-off times. As the estimable Jim White asked in the Daily Telegraph the other day, ‘Why bother to spend upwards of £50 a ticket being bored at your local stadium when your Sky subscription entitles you to be bored at home for just over a tenner a week? Television isn’t a replacement for going to the match. If it were, why would anyone bother turning up for a televised game? Rather, it is a litmus test for the attractiveness of the product on offer.’ Should it be seriously and worryingly significant for football that the Tuesday evening after that hoorayingly bonny Monday at the Oval when cricket’s Ashes came home to England, League champions Chelsea and European champions Liverpool began, respectively, their challenge for and defence of soccer’s European Cup? All three matches were on terrestrial television. On Channel 4, the Monday cricket audience peaked at 7.9 million; Tuesday evening’s soccer on ITV next day could raise only a top rating of 3.8 million.
To be sure, as the footerati say, it is still ‘early doors’ to pronounce definitively that the world has changed. Yet a trend, for sure, is becoming apparent — attendances down already this season by 5 per cent, goals down by 20 per cent, and ticket prices going through the roof. Before travel, crisps, pop, programme and whatever, to take a single child to Chelsea gives a dad not a farthing change from £90; for Birmingham City or Newcastle United, dammit, make that £60 — still a ludicrous heist, wouldn’t you say, compared with Real Madrid’s equivalent of £28 or Bayern Munich’s paltry £12?
Simply, the glory’s gone. The illuminating win of the European Cup by Jock Stein’s Celtic in 1967 (and Matt Busby’s Manchester United the following year) did more, really, to spark English football than the World Cup victory of 1966. Before the hooligans’ rage and, when they’d gone, the Premiership’s avarice, there was an astonishing 10 years from 1975 when English clubs contested eight European Cup finals and won seven of them, which gave the game here a further healthy, swashbuckling swagger based on a single sentiment — that voiced to author Hunter Davies, at work on his classic book, by the onliest Danny Blanchflower: ‘The great fallacy is that the game first and last is about winning. The game is about glory, about doing it in style, with a flourish, beating the other lot and not waiting for them to die of boredom.’ So Hunter had his title: The Glory Game.
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