Football isn't supposed to be about competitive accounting
The beautiful game is losing to the spreadsheet
The reaction was all too predictable.
Xavi Simons scored for the Netherlands, team-mate Denzel Dumfries was in an offside position and France goalkeeper Mike Maignan did a convincing job of appearing impeded. The goal was eventually disallowed.
The decision was regarded as the most controversial of the group stage of EURO 2024, where semi-automated offside review has at least sped up the process.
It was a simple coincidence that the referee and the video assistant referee were from England, where the idea that VAR is a positive development poorly executed has sadly been allowed to fester. The Dumfries incident became An English Problem.
Eventually, UEFA threw Anthony Taylor and Stuart Attwell under the bus. All the other decisions, so the story goes, happened much faster. It's deeply unfortunate that the governing body joined in with this lazy bullshit, which will make the work of Taylor, Attwell and the Premier League's referees even more difficult in the coming season.
I say this as a vocal opponent of VAR in all aspects including the time taken to re-referee the game:
It should have been obvious that this particular decision was different than every other VAR offside review of the group stage. That Dumfries was in an offside position was not in question. You can't semi-automatically establish whether he unduly impeded the goalkeeper. Of course it took longer.
Perhaps instead of hanging the officials out to dry – in the middle of the tournament, mind you – UEFA might divert its thoughts towards the real controversial disallowed goal of the group stage, in which Romelu Lukaku of Belgium was adjudged to have handled the ball.
In that case we were treated to the ludicrous charade of football's new snickometer, which revealed that the ball had indeed brushed Lukaku’s hand.
There, too, the fact of the incident was not in question. The contact between hand and ball was visible and obvious and any review of the goal should have concentrated solely on whether Lukaku's clear but accidental handball was an offence.
The refereeing at the Euros has been good. I'm not in favour of VAR but the magic curtain has been in use for a while in some of the domestic football I watch and it's at least decisive.
But the increasingly black and white nature of grey decisions is bollocks. Snickometer to determine handball is just about the silliest thing I've seen in years.
And UEFA had a responsibility to explain why two already demonised English referees were presented with a different challenge than the rest, which it singularly failed to fulfil.
Football isn't supposed to be about competitive accounting
The points deductions scattered like confetti through the Premier League in 2023/24 heralded an evolution of football economics in England. Clubs have been docked points for decades but this was a little different.
This was the season of profit and sustainability rules. The sanctions were telegraphed, each one the outcome of a calculation and a charge in the name of… well, who even knows? Clubs need some form of enforced spending restraint but football hasn't yet cracked that particular code. Not even close.
After the season of PSR came the summer of PSR, a transfer window packed with creative deal-making and clubs trading players and fees in a sequence of back-scratching right out in the open. It doesn't seem like it's really in the best interests of any of the actual human beings involved but it's a solution, of sorts.
Transfer windows have always been tedious affairs, one of the many fault lines in the great fracturing of football culture. The transfer market is the game to some fanatics. To the rest of us – maybe this is old-fashioned – it's the football that matters.
The sport itself is supposed to be the main attraction. Strip away all the crap around the edges and football is still the game it always was, simple and beautiful and dramatic and brutal and brilliant.
The very fact that football has become so connected with commerce and finance is testament to its appeal. It's not the pounds and dollars we remember but the iconic players and famous matches. The hidden truth is that both of those are different for everyone and that's a big part of the magic many of us love and others are missing.
Yet it's deeper even than that. If football is the universal language, it is so because of the traditions and rituals we create as supporters, as spectators, as players of any format at any level. Football is culture and it can't be adequately reduced to a spreadsheet. If it could, nobody would care enough to bother with the spreadsheets in the first place.
One thing football has never been is pure. From its very early days, it's had competitive accounting somewhere in its make-up. From mill owners hiring staff to play for their football teams in the strictly amateur era to today's incestuous sponsorship deals, the nature of sport means everyone is looking for an unfair advantage.
That's unavoidable and it would be mean-spirited in the extreme to pretend it's objectively wrong for supporters to be interested in, even competitive about, what happens in the accounting department of their clubs. People find energy and pleasure where they can.
The extent to which the transfer market at the top end of the game has become sullied by motivations outwith football leaves me utterly cold. Clubs exchanging players for inflated fees is exactly the sort of thing that would typically rile me up, not least because my own club has been at the forefront of its emergence.
The Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules might be manifestly unfit and changing as a result but they are, when push comes to shove, the rules of the competition. They should be followed as such, not regarded with contempt and manipulated in plain sight. Some transactions flout the spirit of the law and that’s exactly the kind of thing I like my club to not be involved in. I can barely raise a shrug.
It’s not that numbers are boring and I just want to focus on the football itself. The business of football is interesting enough and the proliferation of performance data is just fine by me. Breaking down the details is a noble exercise. But when transfers are becoming the game, when valuable players are shuffled around like pawns to meet financial requirements, I’m going to struggle to stay engaged.
It seems to be universally accepted that PSR in the Premier League is broken. It doesn’t protect clubs from their own stupidity (its stated aim) and it doesn’t limit spending in order to set out a level playing field (the aim it should have at its heart), so its main purpose as it stands is apparently to cause more problems than it even tries to address.
Many fans of clubs outside the established order with very wealthy owners think – or, rather, conveniently pretend to think – that the solution to that is a free market outlook that would allow for free spending, or at least spending tied to the ownership’s financial clout instead of the club’s accounting losses.
We have another term for that: doing nothing. We’ve tried it before. There has to be a level of financial sustainability and there should, in my view, be a spending parity conversation into the bargain. Clubs need it and football needs it too. Nobody wants to watch a predictable title procession season after season.
But it’s clear that the Premier League discourse is as much about money as football, and how much a club spends in a transfer window or over a matter of years is now both something to brag about and a stick to beat it with.
That’s not new but the participation of clubs themselves in the game beneath the game – whether they consider it enforced or otherwise – is a new frontier. All I feel is increasing distance.
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“How can it make sense that due to the rules you end up selling an academy player? It doesn’t make sense for the club either because this is part of your identity, part of what makes the club what it is. You end up with nonsensical situations that meet the rules but are counterproductive for the players, but also for the club and also for the fans.”
The words of Maheta Molango, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association. Yep.
Salty beef extracts
Ferran Torres: ‘Lamine Yamal should be banned for what he is doing at 16!’ (The Guardian)
‘Real eye opener’: PFA’s training camp keeps released players fighting fit (The Guardian)
Panenka - the penalty that killed a career and started a feud (BBC Sport)
Scotland the Brave? Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beasties, more like (Unexpected Delirium)
Clive Tyldesley’s ITV exit is a sad day – he’s been Euro 2024’s best commentator (i)
Ligue 1 highlights football's ticking timebomb that could change everything (Game Within the Game)
The trouble with tournament formats (Goodnight Vienna)
Emma Hayes, Carla Ward, and exhaustion in the women’s game (Football Paradise)
Dessert
There’s just no arguing with the Dark Spark Pack from adidas.
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Truly
Great piece and those black predators 🤤