I’ll start with a confession: I’m not a football fan. I’ve never supported a club. My nearest and dearest do, so I’m familiar with the highs and lows, passion and rage; but, like for Boris Johnson, it’s really not my thing. However, I am interested in what this four-day European Super League drama can tell us about achieving change, and the role of people power in driving it.
After all, public outcry and soul searching also followed the immeasurably more important Grenfell fire, Iraq War and the many injustices that fuelled the Black Lives Matter protests. These events and the movements they spawned achieved some changes, but none led to the kind of total reversal that we’ve seen the European Super League suffer in the last few days. So, what made the public objection to this proposal so much more effective than other social and political movements?
I believe there are four factors:
1. Pantomime villains
We’re a nation of pantomime lovers. The billionaire owners of the six English clubs involved in the Super League were perfect villains for us to boo and hiss as they oozed onto the stage. Very few social or economic problems are genuinely in the gift of a small, named group of people to perpetuate or solve. We can blame the prime minister, a secretary of state or the chair of a business for our discontent, but even very powerful individuals rarely have the ability to independently and immediately act to remove our grievance.
2. Deep and broad public engagement
Football is not a universal passion (despite what its coverage might lead you to believe), but an enormous number of people follow it, cutting across geography and social class. The depth and breadth of engagement with football is greater than for any social or economic issue likely to feature in the next election.In recent days, politicians from all sides have leapt to condemn the Super League, with no need to worry about which groups they might alienate and whether that trade off made sense electorally.
Football is also deeply connected with our sense of place. Almost every small town has a football team. Towns where other sources of pride have withered can still turn out to cheer their local team. In British politics, following football is our closest parallel to the American obsession with religious politicians. In hit show The West Wing, Arnold Vinick’s presidential campaign was nearly sunk when it emerged he didn’t go to church. David Cameron felt obliged to feign an allegiance to Aston Villa, but opened himself to endless ridicule by confusing it with West Ham. It was refreshing this week when Johnson took the highly unusual step of admitting that he didn’t particularly like football himself but recognised its importance to others.
3. Unusual levels of knowledge
Because of the emotional engagement and football chat and analysis across the media, very many people have a pretty good grasp of how the football system works. They understand how changes at the top of the pyramid will affect all the smaller clubs lower down. They have an instinctive connection with the core values of the sport—the requirement for genuine jeopardy and capacity for upsets when underdogs win. This is incredibly rare. Millions of people feel the effects of the housing crisis, and almost everyone agrees there is one. But very few of those facing unaffordable costs, mounting rent arrears and possible homelessness could explain how the lack of social housing and inflated land values directly affect their lives. Worryingly few politicians understand how the social security or planning systems work.
4. Fast, simple solutions
High levels of public engagement and understanding may have been important, but my hunch is that the most significant factor in the swift resolution of this crisis is less to do with people power and more to do with policy.
Uefa, Fifa and the UK government had at their fingertips multiple effective, easily understood policy solutions. They could opt for very fast, proven measures such as fining clubs and deducting points, or charging them for the full cost of policing ESL matches. Even more fundamental reforms have precedent overseas and substantial public support, such as changing ownership rules to mandate community or fan control of clubs. Banning Super League players from competing in any other league or representing their country, or even refusing them visas, would represent more significant and controversial interventions, but still seemed eminently possible.
Any of these steps could have been taken with massive support and little cost to the government. Most social and economic issues have few quick, simple and popular solutions. Spending very large amounts of money can occasionally achieve change quickly, but the impacts on taxes and the public finances mean that this always comes with a fight and is no guarantee of success.
Given all this, can we expect any lasting change from the Super League drama, either in football or other areas of our national life?
For football, I think there might be. It’s hard to imagine any wholesale unpicking of the globalised, monetised nature of the modern game. But the government has announced a “root-and-branch” review of football governance, to be led by former sports minister Tracey Crouch. She has a brief to look particularly at how to give fans a greater say, including the German model where fans have a majority stake in their club’s ownership. Thinking ahead to the next general election, a timely announcement of changes to ownership rules which returned clubs to their communities would be the ultimate in satisfyingly low-cost retail politics.
For those of us interested in other social and economic changes, perhaps the most important lesson is that harnessing people power depends on the public being able to connect changes in broad economic or social systems to their own daily experiences. That requires us to break out of our policy bubbles, co-create solutions with those at the sharp end of the problem we’re trying to fix, and locate those solutions in the wider concerns of communities.
