I am not a football fan. Reactions to plans for a European super-league remind me why. According to the BBC ‘critics say the move is being driven purely by money.’ Whereas in the prelapsarian days of, say, last week, professional football was all about craft and community?
Free marketeers should be relaxed about this. You could argue that the super league members’ decision is a matter for them and them alone. They are private businesses supplying a product – entertainment – to paying customers in a market. If they want to supply that product via slightly different arrangements, why should anyone else care? If the public anger in today’s headlines and pixels is really that deep, there’ll be no demand for the product and the league will fail. The Super League may be all about money, but there’ll only be money if people pay to watch it.
Public fury about the move is therefore an interesting illustration of human psychology. Either the people raging today are hypocrites who would actually pay to watch the Super League, or they think that ‘Other People’ will do such a bad thing. If you really believe that no one wants a super league, why bother raging about something doomed to fail?
I’m not a fan of the phrase ‘virtue signalling’ but I suspect a lot of the noisy anger about the Super League is exactly that, a way of saying ‘I am a real football fan, better than those other people who would cravenly give cash to big companies in order to watch sport.’
The Super League may be all about money, but there’ll only be money if people pay to watch it
No one has much sympathy for club owners, but it’s not that hard to understand why they thought that people who tacitly accepted the transformation of football clubs into an investment class would swallow another incremental step down the same road.
I do get some of this though. I do understand that football is different. It’s one of those products that people don’t like to think of as a product, even though it’s created and delivered by a market mechanism. A mechanism that, in England, has allocated more financial resources to football than almost anywhere else, with concomitant increases in quality and output.
For a couple of decades, England has been happy enough to go along with this marketisation of football, which we’ve taken to unusual lengths. Even US sporting franchises are subject to tighter market rules than English football clubs, especially over salaries and player drafts.
In that, football has been an illustration of the open market approach of Britain after the Cold War: we’ve been happy to welcome foreign investors and owners into almost every part of our economy, and we’ve largely benefitted from that openness.
But those benefits haven’t been properly shared around, or properly explained. Economic benefit in aggregate doesn’t benefit everyone because we don’t live in aggregates: no one experiences GDP. Money alone isn’t enough: you can’t buy legitimacy.
So the Super League row is really a proxy for a debate about economics and politics that we haven’t really had properly yet.
Once the anger fades, I hope the Super League saga might just hasten the start of a proper conversation about what we want and expect from economics and from businesses. A lot of companies and investors are now focused on the ESG agenda, which measures business not just by return on capital but by its impact on the environment and society and by its standards of governance.
There’s huge potential in ESG, potential to save capitalism from itself and build a new form of open market economy where private capital is allocated freely around the world to uses that generate profits while also doing some good.
But how to define that ‘good’? And who should come up with that definition? These are questions that politicians haven’t done enough to answer yet. But their enthusiasm for commenting on the Super League shows there’s a role for them in defining new standards and expectations for business conduct.
MPs might even realise that they’ve already passed a law that should have more importance here. Section 172 of the Companies Act 2006 says company directors should have regard not just for owners’ profits but the interests of stakeholders, including customers and the community. Fans don’t generally own shares in clubs but they’re clearly stakeholders; big clubs clearly operate in a community.
The full meaning of that law has never been clarified by the Parliament that passed it, so it’s been left to governance wonks and lawyers to ponder. I’m not a lawyer but I think politicians today talking about reforming rules on football club ownership would be better off looking at rules and norms around companies and their stakeholders. There’s surely a case to be made that the directors of Super League clubs aren’t meeting the requirements of Section 172.
So when the shouting about football is done, I can only hope that the people who are today commenting (perhaps without realising it) on questions of political economy, corporate governance and democratic capitalism stick around. Trust me, if you can find the offside rule and 0-0 draws in the rain interesting, then fiduciary duty, corporate reporting and stakeholder models of capitalism will thrill you.
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