South of the border

Here are some recent football results:

Celtic 0 Arsenal 2
Manchester City 2 Celtic 1
Portsmouth 2 Rangers 0
Wigan 3 St Mirren 1
Hearts 1 Sunderland 1
Bolton 0 Hibernian 0
Blackburn 0 Hibernian 0
Hearts 1 Bolton 1
Hull City 0 Aberdeen 1
St Johnstone 1 Burnley 0
Kilmarnock 1 Burnley 0
Rangers 3 Manchester City 2
Dundee United 2 Blackburn 0

Four wins for the English, five wins for the Scottish and four draws.

There is a well-established idea in English soccer that if Celtic and Rangers do go south of the border they will be no more than also-rans in the Premier League. This is generally accompanied by the widely-held belief that the majority of SPL teams would be on a par with the English Championship.

Essentially this belief stems from the fact that the Premier League is reputedly the best in the world, and certainly the richest. Added to this is the fact that the Championship is so strong, being one of the best supported leagues in the world and one of the richest too. The promotion fight is generally regarded as one of the most entertaining spectacles in football – just look at how many times the leadership has changed hands from week to week over the last few years.

However, the other side of this received wisdom is the poor opinion football fans in general have of Scottish football. The SPL is a two-horse joke; the national team is a laughing-stock. Scottish players couldn’t hit a barn door. Scottish goalkeepers are clowns. So if all those Scottish teams came down to play – note that no English fan would ever talk about it the other way round – they would be also-rans. Perhaps Celtic and Rangers would be in the Premier League (and destined for so-called mid-table obscurity), with maybe four or five clubs making the Championship and the rest in the lower leagues.

Where’s the evidence for this?

If it’s a question of money, then undoubtedly the English clubs are much better off. Well, the dozen or so that have received massive cash injections from new owners are better off – but plenty of clubs in England are in dire financial straits. The PL itself is supposedly rife with debt. The SPL has just this year had to re-adjust its budget due to the huge loss of earnings from television rights, but if they were to play in England they would receive a greater share of television money. Foreign investors seem to prefer English clubs, but if all the clubs played in the same league then some rich businessmen would be sure to take a punt on teams from Scotland. Attendances are lower in Scotland, but they would undoubtedly rise given new opposition. After a few seasons there would hardly be any difference between your average Scottish club and your average English one. And in terms of quality, they have Elgin City and East Stirling, but we have Carlisle United and Rochdale.

Population is often cited as an important factor in football success. A mid-2007 estimate of the respective populations of the two countries in question had England with exactly ten times more people: 51 million to 5.1 million. The 2001 census had Glasgow in third place with about 630,000 people, Edinburgh seventh with around 430,000 people and Aberdeen twenty-ninth with some 185,000 people in the city. Falkirk has around 34,000 people; in Annan, there are barely more than 8,000 souls.

However, Birmingham is a city with a population just shy of a million people (with Coventry and Wolverhampton the Midlands boasts another 550,000) whereas Manchester has fewer than 400,000 people and evidently United are far more successful than both Birmingham clubs and all the other Midlands clubs put together. Newcastle, Northampton, Portsmouth, Luton, Preston and Milton Keynes have similar populations and not even the most ardent anti-mag could try to claim that Northampton or Luton Town have been anywhere near as successful as Newcastle United. Northampton supports a successful rugby union team, but then so does Newcastle. And the population of London supports successful clubs like Arsenal and Chelsea but Brentford and Leyton Orient also manage to survive.

Population doesn’t mean much if people aren’t going to the game every weekend. The list of average attendances for clubs in the 2007-2008 season has Manchester United first with about 75,000 fans, Arsenal seventh with c.60,000, Celtic eighth with c.58,000, Rangers fifteenth with c.50,000 and no other Scottish clubs in a top hundred which boasted fifteen PL teams, nine Championship teams and three who are now in Division One. Evidently English clubs attract more fans – but that would mean more fans in Scottish grounds too if the clubs were mixed together.

Perhaps there is only one way to judge how the Scottish clubs would fare – with results. Last night Arsenal beat Celtic in a Champions’ League qualifier with a deflected goal (off somebody’s humpback) and an own goal. Hardly the stuff of legend, for all the supposed superiority of the London club and previous to last night’s meeting the Scots came out slightly better in the usual pre-season friendly matches.

The usual attitude with friendly games is that if you lose it was an irrelevant event, but if you win important omens can be seen in the result. But is there such a thing as a friendly between an English club and a Scottish club, especially with this argument as the ever-more-important constant backdrop? No. However, if you insist, we’ll look at results that mean something.

In spite of the fact that the lack of competition in Scotland leads to fewer England/Scotland ties in Europe, there have been fifty-nine games including last night’s. So far England have recorded 29 wins to Scotland’s 13, with 17 draws. Not too impressive. But most of those games were in the sixties. From the 1997-1998 season up to last night’s kick-off the record reads England 4 Scotland 4 with 4 draws. Looks a little different, doesn’t it?

Of course you can’t really compare games from European trophies either because access to European competitions is based on the very assumption that this article is trying to question, that Scottish league football isn’t as good. Those twelve most recent games involved only two clubs, and ten of the ties involved only one, Celtic. And friendly games over the past couple of seasons have thrown up some strange results between some even stranger starting elevens.

This lop-sidedness in Scottish football makes two clubs richer and the gap ever wider. We’re back to money again. And it’s not just the big European leagues that make more money, even the Mexican first division and the J-League earn considerably more income than the SPL, and now with the Setanta affair the money will be even tighter. Crucially, the Championship earns more too, and indeed earns more than most countries’ top flights. And money does bring more talent and better facilities. Reputation is an important factor too, and brings in important TV revenues, which have been the thing that has set the PL apart from the rest for well over a decade now.

But again, if the clubs were mixed together the reputation would be for all of them, and the kudos, and the cash. At the end of the day the Scottish clubs may start off at a disadvantage but they would soon reap the benefits and would pull level.

The only way to find out is to put the leagues together and let them sort it out on the pitch. And in twenty years’ time come back and we’ll look at the statistics again.

The million dollar question

There seems to be no greater bugbear to the modern football supporter than seeing another team trying to buy success. Not even diving dandies or Scandinavian referees will provoke the bile of the average fan as much as the prospect of one team spending £100 million of one man’s money in an attempt to buy some silverware.

The two clubs that attract most contempt are Chelsea and Manchester City, but this phenomenon is by no means limited to England. Contrary to the belief of those who seem to think it’s confined to dark blues and sky blues rich men all around the world buy their way into football clubs in an attempt to buy glory that can’t be found in the business world – Patrice Motsepe and Mamelodi Sundowns, Xu Ming and Dalian Shide, Fernando Roig and Villarreal, the Tanzi family and Parma, Sergio Cragnotti and Lazio, Bernard Tapie and Olympique Marseille, Dietmar Hopp and Hoffenheim. Why buy another jet if you can buy a shiny bit of silverware?

This habit isn’t even something rare in England, where Liverpool, Manchester United, Aston Villa, West Ham United, Sunderland, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Blackburn Rovers, Derby County and Wigan Athletic are among the many clubs that have benefitted from a cash injection from some rich admirer over the last fifteen years or so. Neither is it a tendency exclusive to the Premier League as Peterborough United, Ipswich Town, Brighton etc, MK Dons, Darlington, Reading and even Truro City will testify.

Everyone’s done it – so what’s the problem? Perhaps the only people who don’t like it are those whose clubs have been overlooked by the sugar daddies. Or maybe there’s a hierarchy of preference – Irish money isn’t as good as English money, but it’s better than American money, which in turn is better than the Russians. And anything’s better than the Arabs, apparently.

Whatever the problem is, there is certainly a degree of snobbery involved – Arsenal’s shiny new stadium found no disapproval, and neither will Liverpool’s, whereas Manchester City’s flashy new signings, or attempted signings, are roundly criticised on every forum and in every journalist’s article. It’s as if there was a typically English class system at play in football. People talk of Arsenal’s financial stability and ignore the financial situation that Liverpool’s owners will have the club in of they go ahead with the new ground. “Financial stability” masks the snobbery about new money. Especially Arab money, apparently.

Let’s face it, when someone offers £200 million for your club, should the owner say no? And should the supporters say no? Even huge clubs like Newcastle are not exempt from trouble. Lifelong fans of Luton Town, Bournemouth, Rotherham, Chester City and a host of other car crash clubs will tell you that they would have loved somebody to come in with a huge wad of cash and save their clubs. Football is business because ever since the dawn of time somebody will make anything into business. Where there’s a demand for money there’s a supply. And football is about community, and too many towns have seen their team practically disappear because they had no money.

The other side to this story is whether or not money really can buy success. The universally reviled Chelsea and Manchester City appear to demonstrate the two different possibilities. In 2003 Roman Abramovich bought the companies which owned Chelsea and the club went on to win three Premier League titles, (finishing as runners-up three times too), two FA Cups, two League Cups and reach a Champions’ League final. While some would argue that the revival started in the late nineties with two European trophies and the influence of Vialli, Zola and Gullit, followed by excellent managers in Ranieri and Mourinho, there can be no doubt that money has played a part.

Manchester City were taken over by the Abu Dhabi United Group in September 2008, and while the Group have poured astronomical amounts of money into the club the players have as yet done nothing impressive. Of course impatience is yet another aspect of this financial phenomenon.

What about other clubs that have been blessed with rich benefactors? Cragnotti’s Lazio won one league title (and were twice runners-up), three Italian cups, two Italian Super Cups, the European Cup Winners’ Cup, the European Super Cup, and reached the UEFA Cup final, while Parma collected two UEFA Cups, the European Cup Winners’ Cup, the European Super Cup, two Italian cups, the Italian Super Cup and were runners-up in Serie A.

However, when Franny Lee moved in to Manchester City – there’s that club again – they dropped to the third division for the first time in their history. Randy Lerner’s Aston Villa, Jack Walkers’s Blackburn, Lionel Pickering’s Derby County and Jack Hayward’s Wolves did absolutely nothing compared to their earlier glories. John Madejski’s Reading came up but went back down again. Darlington ended up with a luxury stadium they can’t fill and George Reynolds ended up in prison.

Real Madrid are not bankrolled by one person, but Florentino’s first project was an abject failure compared to their gilt-edged past, while Sunderland – first with the Drumaville Consortium then Ellis Short have had poured money in and simply went from the depths of the Championship to the depths of the Premier League, and although it’s a miracle they didn’t drop straight down, the rise is generally regarded as being due to Keano’s management. (Sorry, that was the only way I was ever going to see Sunderlandnil in the same paragraph as Real Madrid!)

Success is relative, as the proud recent history of Wigan Athletic, Truro City and Villareal shows, and patience is essential for Brighton, Ipswich, Peterborough, MK Dons and the other newly blessed, but none of them can claim to have bought a stack of silverware with their rich daddies’ money.

If you want success, take Liverpool – Gillett and Hicks may have come in with their money in 2007 but Liverpool is a club that wins things with people, not money. Or have a look at Manchester United – the Glazers may have bought the club, but United were winners under Busby and have been winners again since Ferguson arrived. Again, money not people.

Your club will be more likely to enjoy success with the right people at the top. Herbert Chapman brought Arsenal their first period of success and Huddersfield their only success, Ferguson revived a despondent Manchester United, Bill Nicholson made Spurs great and Bill Shankly made Liverpool great. And they certainly weren’t swimming in cash.

So maybe cash isn’t the route to success. But we shouldn’t criticise a club for suddenly becoming the object of desire of some rich entrepreneur. Perhaps the fans object because they themselves are generally not rich people and do not wish to be treated as little rich boys by association when their club comes into money - it's considered more noble to struggle through life like Rochdale. But none of them would knock back a lottery win.

Of course there is a danger that the money is in the hands of the wrong man (Reynolds, Ridsdale, Shinawatra etc) – but this alone does not justify our being against a cash injection. There is also the argument about how money at the top starves those at the bottom – all the more reason why clubs outside the “top four”, and indeed outside the Premier League, should be allowed a piece of the billionaires’ pie too.

And we should stop behaving as if this was an exclusively modern problem because money has been a contentious issue in football from the very birth of the game as we know it. Accusations of professionalism levelled at Preston North End in 1884 opened a can of worms – Bolton, Villa and Sunderland were also paying their players – but the solution was not only easy, it was to the benefit of all. Just go with it and see what happens.

A really nice man

Bobby Robson was many things, all great, but the best of all was that he was simply a really nice man. There’s not many of them around, and Bobby will be sadly missed by everyone.