As manager of Liverpool football club, Rafael Benitez, has a respectable record and (for the moment) enjoys the loyalty of the club’s fans. Yet for all that he is lavishly rewarded, Benitez has no more job security than some casual worker. The Spaniard’s future at the club depends on the whim of Liverpool’s trans-Atlantic owners, the Texan tycoons Tom Hicks and George Gillett, who apparently regard him as eminently expendable.
It is true that job insecurity is nothing new in the world of football management. However, the premium set on soccer success has become higher than ever before. In the past, managers were given time to build a winning side. Now, as the inconsistent Benitez is painfully aware, the margin for error is minimal. In an age when football has become a branch of international commerce, with top football clubs functioning as lucrative global brands, the demand for unremitting success on the part of soccer managers has assumed a wholly new intensity.
Increasingly, the material, not to mention psychological, well-being of entire British communities has become bound up with the performance of football clubs. So big a factor is football in the British economy that the ramifications of the game are now a formal part of academic business studies; there are even professors of football finance. What was once just a popular sport has acquired an altogether vaster significance and the burden of expectations born by top football managers has grown accordingly. Struggling to remain even moderately successful, Newcastle Football Club recently got rid of their manager Sam Allardyce, even though he had only been in the job for a matter of months. In desperation, the club has persuaded their volatile former manager Kevin Keegan to return, hailing him as the “messiah.”
Such communal emotion sorts oddly with the hard-nosed commercialism that rules today’s game. What is making Rafael Benitez’s position so undignified is that for Liverpool’s foreign owners the club plainly amounts to nothing but a business proposition. The leaked news that one of them had been secretly sounding out the former German footballer Jurgen Klinsmann as a possible replacement for him has incensed the club’s fans. Feeling that they are being treated with contempt, great numbers of them have rallied to Benitez’s cause. Many believe that it was a mistake for the club to have become involved with the Texans in the first place. A fan who was on hand when the pair paid a rare visit to Liverpool’s stadium, Anfield, commented ironically: “Look at these two. Anybody would think that they owned the place!”
Others, bristling with anti-American feeling, are waving banners warning the owners not to mess up Liverpool the way their compatriots did Vietnam and Iraq.
The supporters’ naive assumption was that American money would enable Liverpool to compete on equal terms with wealthier rivals like Manchester United and Chelsea; that the Americans were actually borrowing the money to buy the club and might prove dubious benefactors hardly occurred to them. Some have become eager to see the club bought by the Dubai International Capital, the investment arm of the Dubai government, that sought to take it over last year. The fans of a once proud British club have been reduced to hoping that the Arabs will save them from the Americans.
With its foreign owners, foreign manager and predominantly foreign players, Liverpool epitomizes the dramatic transformation of British football. It is a transformation which has occurred with such speed that its implications have hardly been digested. The game was spawned in the nineteenth century by British industrial cities like Liverpool and Newcastle, and its mostly working-class heroes were objects of immense local pride. Not long ago, it would have seemed inconceivable that fans would pack out British soccer stadiums to cheer on teams dominated by foreign players. This extraordinary phase in the game’s evolution has come about largely because of Rupert Murdoch. Having acquired exclusive television rights to live satellite broadcasting of top-level British football, the media mogul poured millions into the game, setting the stage for the creation of the Premier League and the globalization of British football.
It is true that the premiership often produces tremendous entertainment. Full of blood and thunder, its best matches command the attention of football fans all over the world. The trouble is that the British football’s wholesale capitulation to the free market has ultimately meant that only games between a handful of exceptionally rich clubs are truly competitive. For some years, Arsenal, Manchester United and Chelsea have been dividing the spoils of the Premier League between them. When the top clubs play the lowlier clubs in the Premier League the outcome of the game is all too predictable; it’s scarcely less predictable when they play the middle-ranking ones. It must also be said that the new ethos of British football has been accompanied by no little corruption, with a number of agents and managers allegedly making huge sums of money out of the horse-trading of foreign players.
It remains to be seen how Premier League clubs, with their astronomical wage bills, are going to cope with an economic downturn. Will sufficient numbers of fans be prepared, or even able, to go on paying exorbitant admission prices for top games? One thing is certain: The foreign domination of football has done nothing to enhance the health of the native game in Britain. Indeed, by embracing globalization, British clubs have contributed to the decline of soccer as an indigenous sport. Fewer and fewer English players of international stature are emerging, and the same goes for English managers: witness the appointment of the Italian Fabio Capello as the England team’s second foreign coach in ten years
As Liverpool’s indignant fans are discovering, the globalization of British football is proving to be one of the ways in which British people are losing control of their own destiny.
