To m any Prospect readers, the idea that sport is not taken seriously in modern Britain will seem absurd. Never has more money or media attention been lavished on it. I am a sports fan—and as it happens I am writing this in my study in the shadow of the Arsenal football stadium—yet even to me the law of diminishing returns applies all too often to today's brash sporting culture. David Goldblatt's cover essay does not, of course, deny that there's a lot of sport about. Rather, he argues that we still generally deem it unworthy of proper intellectual or political attention (there has never, for example, been a Reith lecture series devoted to sport). This may be becoming less true, as Goldblatt partly concedes. As societies become richer, people want to spend more money on sports and leisure activities—both actively as amateur participants and passively as spectators of professional sport. So it is only natural that the business and the politics of sport take up more room in the national conversation. But Goldblatt is surely right that we still tend to regard sport as a second-order phenomenon. Things are played out through sport (collective local or national identities, say), or we see sport as a metaphor for changes originating somewhere else (such as the hyper-capitalism of the Premier League).
As we went to press, news about the Premier League was, for once, straddling the back and front pages. The league has been a huge commercial success over the past 15 years, and with big games broadcast in 150 countries, it has become an instrument of Britain's "soft power." Yet it has also widened the gap between the rich clubs and the rest, priced poorer fans out of the stadiums and, arguably, reduced the pool of domestic talent that the national team can draw upon. If, as seems likely, England fail to qualify for the European championships, the issue of whether there are too many foreign players in the Premier League will rumble on. As it happens, Michel Platini's Uefa and the EU have come up with a sensible list of suggestions that would help to deal both with the issue of domestic inequality and the "too many foreigners" problem: salary caps, more redistribution from rich clubs and limits on foreign players. The Brown government shares many of Uefa's aims. It does not want football to go the way of tennis, where Britain provides the global platform at Wimbledon but doesn't perform significantly itself. Behind the scenes, it has been pressing the rich clubs to plough money back into the communities that sustain them. But at the same time, the government does not want to be seen to be bowing to European influence and, as with the City of London, wants to safeguard the Premier League's commercial success and freedom from regulation. Can it have it both ways?
