Whatever happened to that sport called football? You might remember it. It was fun, it was cynical, it was populated by error, it was often good, often rubbish, the big teams usually won and it was fertile ground for glorious cliche. Like: it’s a game of two halves. Like: the league table never lies. When trust frayed, there was a reliability to it; we shouted at hapless referees, we fumed at players who dived, but that fury fuelled our noise, even when we were wrong. There was beauty in the mess of it.
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Football in 2024 is a game of acronyms: PSR, VAR, FFP, NFTs, WTF. Football in 2024 is a place where the league table never lies, except when it does. Football in 2024 is a game of asterisks, where nothing is what it seems, inside or outside a stadium. Football in 2024: throw away your sticker albums, kids, and pick up your spreadsheets! Got/need/swap your best young players to ensure compliance before the end of the financial year!
Please don’t get me wrong; football is still fun, still cynical, still full of error, often good and often rubbish, and even though the big teams still tend to win and my team never does, I love being part of it. But I do wonder and worry how dangerous this creeping, incremental lack of trust may become.
The obvious response to pompous, doom-laden half-questions like this is… not much, in all probability. The imminent bursting of English football’s bubble has been predicted on numerous occasions over the decades, but the Premier League snowball rolls on, picking up money as ticket prices go up, the cost of television subscriptions go up, kick-off times are changed with no regard for convenience, other competitions are shunted around and marginalised, and we still go and we still watch.
So, basically, this is all your fault, you idiots. Now please listen to my podcast.
Before anybody says anything, I am very much aware that this line of argument is exactly what angry old people come out with. To which I respond a) if the cap fits, b) things actually were better in my day, d) what happened to c? c) oh, sorry I lost it along with my reading glasses, e) why do I now find myself starting random conversations with strangers in supermarket queues? f) and no, I don’t understand your music.
But, at its heart, football is about belief, isn’t it? Quite why 11 people kicking a bag of air around while wearing a particular colour of shirt should represent my town or city or region is one of life’s wonderful little mysteries, but when that goal goes in*, try and tell me and the myriad of flailing bodies around me that it doesn’t matter. It matters more than anything. It matters because we believe it matters. It isn’t real, but it is alchemy.
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(*VAR check in progress: that goal, in fact, didn’t go in.)
Yet in 2024, we can’t believe anything any more. We can’t believe anything that happens on the pitch, because everything is being looked at and double-checked, so we don’t trust what we’ve just witnessed. Those lose-yourself moments are themselves being lost. We can’t fully believe what happens off the pitch, not when Manchester City, our best and most blissful team, still face 115 charges for alleged financial breaches.
When the new season rolls along, the league table will be a form of deception, with points deductions feasibly on the way. Last season it was Everton (eight points) and Nottingham Forest (four) and in the last few weeks we’ve seen clubs scramble to get business done with various degrees of mania in the hope they won’t follow suit. With a fair wind, we might find out about that by January. January, can you believe it? No, you absolutely can’t.
Mentioning — OK, fine, ranting about — VAR might seem peculiar right now given we’re in the midst of a European Championship where technology has been deployed with a relatively light touch (albeit with a caveat; who are the snickometers and microchipped balls really for?), but that is actually the point. It reinforces the question of why the EPL or PGMOL or FFS or whatever it’s called has sought perfection when perfection does not exist and nobody really wants it, in any case.
“It’s this relentless march towards bureaucracy for everything,” says Alex Hurst. “PSR, VAR; it’s like a parent telling a child that something they hate is actually good for them. It’s hectoring. If you say you don’t like it as a football fan, you’re just told that you’re wrong.”
Hurst is a Newcastle United supporter and a podcaster for True Faith. Since Newcastle’s Saudi-led takeover in 2021, life has been overturned — the Champions League! A cup final! Club-record signings! Actually being quite good! — and yet uplift is not unrestrained. “It’s completely alienating,” he says. “You spend this time and money and this emotional investment on clubs and teams to forget, to not have to worry. We’re losing that.”
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An admission: this column was born on Tyneside, in the sense that a ringside seat to Newcastle’s desperate attempts to comply with PSR effectively made June 30 a second (or first) summer transfer deadline which left everybody wrung out and p***** off, ramming home some of the inconsistencies of PSR. But it is absolutely not an excuse for that desperation, which my excellent colleague Chris Waugh delved into here.
Another admission: it was born from having a drink with Alex, who is also a friend. Maybe we just infected each other.
In the end, Newcastle did enough, or think they did (maybe we’ll find out in six months — can’t wait!). They have been striding towards this precipice, constantly warning about Financial Fair Play then spending more than intended on new players, so the desperation is on them, although the context was inheriting a club which brought in minimal commercial revenue, had been starved of investment on infrastructure or signings, and was circling the drain.
The irony, says Hurst, is that Mike Ashley, Newcastle’s former owner, would have been a “PSR poster boy”. Financially, the club was solvent under Ashley. In football terms, it was “ticking along” in the memorable phraseology of Steve Bruce, but what that actually meant was a quiet implosion. At a club where fans turning up regardless was a USP, a dirty little secret was that up to 10,000 season tickets were given away — given away! — when Rafa Benitez, Bruce’s predecessor, left after his contract expired in 2019.
“Ashley’s Newcastle drove thousands of people away, not just from within the ground but from having an emotional attachment or an interest in the club,” Hurst says. “Now the city and fanbase are re-energised. I know some people think that’s horrific because of the Saudi element, but PSR would rather have Ashley’s Newcastle than the current version. How can PSR be good for us? We almost didn’t have a club before. It existed on paper and fulfilled its fixtures, but that was it.”
And so, like many other upwardly mobile clubs who don’t have the baked-in commercial headstarts of Manchester United or Liverpool, for example, or don’t have a spare hotel to sell, like Chelsea, Newcastle sweated and squirmed their way towards the PSR deadline and jettisoned two of their young, talented players in Elliot Anderson and Yankuba Minteh, because that was the easiest route to profit.
GO DEEPER
Elliot Anderson at Nottingham Forest: Making sense of an opportunistic signing
“How can that be the model to get round PSR?” says Hurst. “Who decided that was the way to do it? This joyless, spreadsheet existence where youth players need to be sold to allow you to comply with arbitrary lines that aren’t based on cash you have in the bank just seems… Well, completely rubbish.”
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And then the clock turns to midnight, it’s July 1, the accounting period resets and Newcastle somehow have licence to spend again. At a time of year when fans could switch off, go on holiday, think about something else, allow anticipatory feelings to ferment, or even enjoy the Euros — ha ha England, fat chance, ha ha — they have fretted and wailed, with departures weighed on the “good business” scale.
To which I find myself (allegedly) quoting Boris Johnson, the former UK Prime Minister, which is not something I would have ever foreseen, but it is what is and we are where we are: F*** business.
On VAR, Hurst says: “It’s like a ‘have you got a licence for that’ kind of culture. It’s ‘are you sure about celebrating this goal? Because it looked offside and it’s going to take us six minutes to check’. What you lose in those moments isn’t worth what you gain. The Premier League has said that 96 per cent of decisions are now correct, but football is supposed to be fluent and full of emotion and anything can happen at any moment. With VAR, anything can be taken away at any moment.”
In the old days (yes, yes, my days), referees would make a mistake. When they made several mistakes, you might call them a cheat, but it would end when the booing stopped or last orders were called. When VAR makes a mistake, piling subjective error on top of subjective error, it is easy for the language of conspiracy to take root, because if they can have all this technology and still get it wrong… Exhibit A: Forest last season.
When Wolverhampton Wanderers called for a Premier League vote to scrap VAR they spoke about an “erosion of trust and reputation” which fuelled “completely nonsensical allegations of corruption” and they were absolutely right. They lost the vote. Nobody asked us.
These things encourage the swivel-eyed bit of football which exists within all of us. It’s not supposed to be logical, it is supposed to partial and ridiculous and ‘nobody likes us’, but there is no reason why it can’t be transparent, visible, understandable, and more simple than it is. But you don’t believe what you’re seeing in normal time and then you can’t believe what happens afterwards.
There has been a similar tone to the PSR debate. Nobody wants to see clubs go out of business through reckless spending, but isn’t that solved by what Hurst calls “better governance and not letting people with no money buy those clubs in the first place”?
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If the idea was to create a level playing field then hooray for that noble idea, but the reality is a protectionist system that calcifies the position of the richest clubs. And so as clubs look to exploit every possible loophole in a system they themselves created, the language again becomes about corruption and cartels and unfairness.
None of this feels particularly healthy to me. And I’d certainly prefer not to be thinking about it in early July, but it is impossible to turn away. Without us really expecting it, June 30 became another transfer deadline, albeit with less joy, more fear and big dollops of paranoia, and the repercussions will continue to ripple out.
Football in 2024: the year of acronyms and asterisks. Football in 2024: SOS.
GO DEEPER
How did Premier League sides overcome PSR issues? And can they now spend?
(Top photo: West Ham United fans last year; by Julian Finney via Getty Images)
