The case against the Premier League and Game 39
The cultural contract behind international broadcast rights
This is pretty weird and nerdy but I occasionally catch myself thinking about what attracted me to my football club and what drew other people to theirs.
How do we find our football homes? Why is it that fan bases, whatever their level, seem to have a sort of collective character?
When I was growing up, most of my peers ‘n’ pals supported their local teams or the team supported by at least one of their parents. I was born into an Aston Villa family, so I support Aston Villa. Easy.
But later in life, non-league football came into the picture and brought with it another factor: choice. When I moved to the Warwickshire area I visited a few different clubs, most of them more than once.
Coventry Sphinx wasn't just the one that stuck. It was the only one that came close to sticking. It was the one that made me feel something, and that something is still a mystery to me more than a decade later.
We seem to either be attracted to clubs that embody what we want football to be, or we shape ourselves around our clubs. I truly don't know which it is.
Anyway…
The case against the Premier League and Game 39
Reports that the Premier League is in talks about reviving plans to play an extra round of fixtures abroad passed with little more than a shrug. The details were barely commented upon because they simply don't matter.
The reaction from football supporters with experience of the sport outside their bedrooms, as far as I could tell, was one of understated defiance and calm confidence in their ability to kill the idea if necessary. The news agenda just moved along.
The Game 39 concept is more than just a middle finger to supporters. It's a footballing atrocity that must be resisted, and the only surprising thing about its re-emergence is that it took so long to happen.
The timing of the latest reports was awful. Still yet to emerge from the long shadow cast by unpopular changes to the FA Cup, elite English football showed its arse once more.
If cup replays are being abolished because of the risk of player fatigue in the age of UEFA’s freshly bloated club competitions, adding an equally unwelcome match to the docket is a rum move to say the least. Worse still, this extra round of games is by definition a long distance affair with all the travel, tiredness, environmental impact and other dilemmas that come with that.
Game 39 is ultimately about greed. It’s not some noble campaign to bring the most in-demand league to its global fans, but football colonialism. The aim of colonialism is to make its sponsors rich.
When Game 39 was birthed in 2008, it met with swift and significant opposition. The football community united around the cause. The feeling was that the Premier League – then embodied by Richard Scudamore, whose already poor reputation never recovered from the Game 39 debacle – just wanted as much money as possible.
The revival is evidence that the greed is not all internal to the Premier League. It’s even more complicated now because the Premier League, even if chief executive Richard Masters were to surprise us all and stand robustly with supporters on such matters, has been made vulnerable by the influx of American ownership and continuing growth of international broadcast revenue.
If money gets what money wants, scheming executives are intent on delivering it. If club owners see Game 39 as an economic opportunity, people like NBC Sports president of acquisitions and partnerships Jon Miller will seek to move heaven and earth to exploit it.
The catalyst for the Premier League’s popularity in the United States of America (the specific destination market of Game 39 Mk II) is international broadcast rights. That’s a powerful force; overseas broadcast revenue for the Premier League currently stands at £1.8bn per season, of which a reported £333m is accounted for by the USA.
But that doesn’t buy everything. Whether they like it or not, international broadcast rights buyers agree to a cultural contract when they invest in the Premier League. They pay the money to show the football, or they don’t pay the money and don’t show the football. That’s it. Finito.
Money from abroad doesn’t equate to any right to control over the Premier League, nor does it absolve the broadcasters of their moral responsibility to not act against the interests of the game.
It’s common for the global reach of English football to be pitched in opposition to its traditional values. Growth and evolution necessarily unravel the outmoded cultural tapestry of the game.
Those of us who believe that a sense of place, community and identity matters are naysayers for the sake of it, standing stubbornly in the way of progress. But we know – and, deep down, so do they – that big money from both the UK and overseas has been buying into the Premier League for thirty years precisely because of what we are and what we’ve been.
Nevertheless, traditional football culture in England has been under constant attack for decades, always on raw economic grounds, and Game 39 would represent the excision of another root. The public reaction to Miller’s talks with the Premier League was so muted, so nonchalant, because supporters know that this root in particular might just prove the most important root of all.
There are myriad issues around which football supporters like to threaten their withdrawal. If they bring in goal-line technology, I’m done. If a ropey billionaire buys my club, I’m out. If they play an extra round of Premier League games in America, that’s it for me.
It’s usually bollocks. The existence of football supporters in the first place is partly the result of addiction. We’re not for packing it in easily. Game 39 is different. Game 39 won’t be tolerated and people would walk away in their hundreds of thousands.
The backlash mightn’t sound much in the face of the lion’s share of two billion quid a year, but that’s the point, isn’t it? Nobody’s paying that if what they’re buying has been weakened domestically to that degree. That’s before FIFA, UEFA, CONCACAF and other national leagues get a proper chance to have their say.
Supporters turning their backs on their clubs and the Premier League is the nuclear option. But it’s an option, and that means it’s power. The value of English football to foreign markets is in its culture, its history and the intensity of the supporter experience. That the addition of a 39th match is a line that can’t be crossed is a rare opinion mostly shared.
The sporting integrity of the Premier League comes under question with ludicrous frequency, usually in bad faith. Barely a weekend passes without the supporters and even managers of some club or other pressing the big red button over a refereeing decision or the fixture list.
But the competitive integrity of the Premier League is safeguarded by the balanced schedule. We take it for granted that our teams play each other once at home and once away, no more and no less. Not every league has that. Insofar as an economically unequal competition can be fair, 38 games is fair. Simple maths dictates that an additional one is not and people won’t stand for it.
For all the global acclaim, colossal television deals and arguments that the Premier League is a de facto super league, it is England’s top division. To fight for it as such is not to be unwelcoming, but to ensure that those we welcome into English football from all over the world have something worth caring about. It’s better to have a league you can’t watch in person than to lose one because it tried to export itself onto your doorstep.
Should Game 39 come to pass, not everybody would walk away. Those who wouldn’t are often framed in terms of travel costs, as if they’ll be looking for ways to dig deep and fork out to cross the Atlantic for a football match. That’s not the issue. The cost is so obscenely prohibitive that it’s actually a matter of lost access. What’s Jon Miller’s spin on that, I wonder?
Game 39 would be the beginning of the end – or the middle of the end, at least. The Premier League isn’t going away but if it pulls itself apart to pander to overseas television money, the product it’s selling will deteriorate and the money will decline with it.
English football is successful because of the social fabric that underpins it. Television, domestic or international, can never properly convey that to its audience.
Game 39 is one of a handful of changes that might genuinely threaten that social fabric. It’s not just a harmless, if greedy, Premier League marketing strategy. It strikes at the heart of everything domestic professional football in any country should be.
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“It has also led to the unmerited targeting of me, personally, by certain participants and pundits. Such reactions and outcome was not expected and is regrettable, as it is my sincere belief that there is a place for and value in such a role in the modern game.”
Mark Clattenburg has been reading High Protein Beef Paste. For better and worse.
Salty beef extracts
Echoes of errors: why has VAR sparked so much fury this season? (The Guardian)
Is it any surprise Sancho is shining away from Manchester United circus? (The Guardian)
‘Ryan Reynolds never had to deal with this’: the slow death and (possible) rebirth of Southend United (The Guardian)
West Ham’s next manager should strip Kurt Zouma of the captaincy (i)
‘Typical Doncaster’: The 10-match miracle run that shook up League Two play-offs (i)
Dessert
The new 2024/25 Corinthians kits from Nike have been launched in the name of anti-racism. That’s a good thing. They’re also very fetching. That’s a good thing too.
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