Football's mouthy 'game changers' never read the brief
Do your thing, if you must, but it’s got nothing to do with football
If your professional life happens to force you to spend any amount of time on LinkedIn, you’ll know that the second Saturday in March was a busy one for Mark Clattenburg.
Before the former Premier League referee settled in to watch his wooden performance on the set of Gladiators, he was in the middle of a charity match between Sidemen FC and YouTube Allstars.
It was a 9-9 draw – nonsense – settled by a penalty shoot-out involving some of the worst human beings on the planet. Wembley Stadium was sold out for the event and they could probably have filled it twice.
It’s not my place to question the popularity of football matches played between YouTubers. The attendance and online attention speak for themselves and it would be silly to deny that.
This stuff is big business and it’s all part of a blurring at the edges between what is and what isn’t the game, and it poses significant questions about who is and isn’t a ‘game changer’.
There’s a lot of football-adjacent activity and it was ever thus.
The ability of the Sidemen games to raise money for charity is to be applauded but the pervasive influence of influencers and YouTubers in football warrants scrutiny and is just one of the many aspects of football where big claims are being made by people who don’t really have the cultural authority to make them.
Baller League is surrounded by a wall of specifically online publicity full of promises on its behalf that it will change this or redefine that.
It’s a different format of football organised in a different way and played by different rules. The only thing it will define, the only thing it can define, is itself.
There are smart, talented, football-loving people involved in Baller League as well as at least one indefensible reprobate, but the tone of its bluster is the same bollocks proffered by countless footballish innovations before it.
It’s not alone.
“One reason we created the Kings League is I saw my kids watching a football match and after ten minutes they were on their phones and their tablets and watching other things at the same time,” said former actual footballer Gerard Piqué not so long ago.
“Football is entertainment, so it is not just competing with other sports. It competes with Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, TikTok. Everyone has limited time. Football for 90 minutes is not as exciting.”
Piqué – the owner and president of the small-format Kings League – places his innovation in the context of football, an arena in which it has no business. It’s Kings League. That’s all it is. It’s not revolutionising anything.
The crypto bros are at it too. Of course they are. Clubs including Crawley Town are in the grip of men – it has to be, doesn’t it – who talk industrial quantities of crap about changing the nature of football club ownership.
Crawley were the club that ultimately fell to NFTs, a questionable but potentially viable business model inevitably shrouded in guff about becoming the “internet’s football club” and all the iffy decision-making so characteristic of the type of owner who comes up with it.
“We love underdog stories that have the ability to literally change the game.”
Those are the words of the always delightful Winklevoss twins upon buying into Real Bedford, the charming non-league outfit whose desire to merge with Bedford Town comes with the added sickener of wiping a club off the map that dates back to 1908.
What game’s that then, Vanilla Twice?
What a coincidence…
Football is a social and cultural colossus and people try to make money from it. That’s inevitable. I try to make money from it, to participate in it, to take my little piece of what football is because it’s what I like doing with my life.
That’s not the same as trying to make football something it isn’t. There’s a big red line to be drawn there, which isn’t to say that football doesn’t need change but to urge caution when it comes to outside innovators who attach themselves to the game despite their apparent scepticism about how it works.
Whether it’s the YouTubers and influencers, the crypto lot or the membership/ownership revolutionaries who came before them, there’s one thing they always have in common: the innovation just happens to be towards the thing they sell.
People have every right to pursue their own goals and succeed in business. The world needs good ideas and my cynicism about these particular ideas doesn’t make them wrong or equate to any suggestion that they shouldn’t be allowed.
Football is influential and inspirational, that much is obvious and positive. But the products of that inspiration don’t necessarily have any claim to change the game or even be a part of it.
Big talkers miss the point
Crawley’s ownership status over the last 20 years has been a curious case study in all the weird and wonderful places to which football governance can go.
The club was taken over by current owners WAGMI United, “a group of US cryptocurrency investors”, in 2022. They haven’t had it easy and haven’t necessarily helped their own perception but quite frankly the details are a matter for Crawley supporters alone.
Promising to take Crawley to the Premier League is par for the course when it comes to bold and bolshy football club owners but the plan to do so by corralling a global community of NFT collectors and crypto enthusiasts – to seek to spread adoption of Crawley Town far and wide – is unusual.
When clubs fall into the hands of ideologically motivated owners, the bare minimum is that their impact on the club is additive – make your money, do your thing, help your club. Fine.
But “the internet’s football team” is problematic because it’s not about Crawley Town at all. The club is the host for an idea, stripped of its identity in service of a concept. It doesn’t add. It takes away.
So many vocal game-changers pitch themselves in opposition to a status quo that doesn’t belong to them. Their ideas are framed as revolutionary or redefining a sport they don’t always fully comprehend.
They misunderstand the essential appeal of football. They have no ties to the aspects of football you can’t feel through the television or over social media. These elements are shrugged off in the name of innovation but they matter.
They are, whether Baller League or WAGMI United or Piqué realise it or not, the reasons people like football in the first place.
Just because they call it football, doesn’t make it so
Opening football up to different audiences is important. Just as there’s nothing wrong with new ideas in principle, so there’s no reason not to find ways to attract younger fans to football.
Piqué identified a truth that football must face when it comes to the next generation but his solution is his own. Kings League is a bit like football but it’s not football and it won’t change football.
If football needs to remove itself from its moorings to draw newer or younger or different audiences, maybe those people don’t actually like football. That’s fine.
Maybe they like some things about it but not others and maybe they want to watch YouTubers at Wembley or buy an NFT shirt from a League One club. That’s fine too.
But having an idea and some money doesn’t give anyone the right or indeed the ability to change the game.
It’s parasitic marketing garbage to claim otherwise, not to mention an admission that the only reason they want to clamp their businesses to the game at all is because football is already better than anything they can offer.
Future generations of football are vital. They matter enormously. Gatekeeping is never a good thing – this very article is dangerously close to it and I’m not happy about that – but the fact that these innovators and investors always seem to start by taking potshots at football is bound to put people like me, people who love football and its failings, on the defensive.
There’s loads to enjoy about football in its historic, current and naturally evolved future forms, and no reason to suspect that it should appeal any less to the youngsters of today or tomorrow than it did to you or me.
Football is brilliant. Untouchable. That’s kind of the whole point.
Believing that your idea is what it’s missing, that you’re the answer to a question nobody who loves football has asked, takes exactly the special kind of arrogance that seems to come as part of the game-changer package.
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