Sporting life: political footballs

Come 6th May we should know who has won, the reds or the blues. Not at Westminster, perhaps, where things point to a draw and a period of post-election extra time to sort things out. But in the contest between Manchester United and Chelsea, we should have a Premiership winner.

In Britain, the relationship between football and politics used to be limited. In the 1910 general election, T Gibson Poole, chairman of Middlesbrough FC, ran as the local Unionist candidate. He persuaded his squad to campaign with him and tried to bribe Sunderland players in the local derby. The scam was uncovered, the election was lost and Poole was banned from football for life.

But for most of the 20th century, sport was rarely an election issue. The two prime ministers who were the most serious reformers—Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher—were too puritanically busy to take an interest, other than Thatcher’s loathing of football. Churchill fenced in his youth; Ramsay MacDonald was expelled from his golf club for pacifist views. Alec Douglas-Home played first-class cricket; Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan were good at it too, but these were not thought matters of note.

Harold Wilson astutely made much of his support for Huddersfield FC and bathed in the glory of England’s 1966 World Cup victory. He even partly blamed his defeat in 1970 on West Germany knocking England out of the World Cup. Never a comfortable populist, Edward Heath was an accomplished racer of ocean-going yachts, in keeping with his distant disposition.

But since the early 1990s, with the inexorable rise of football, politicians have had to take note. In contrast to patrician Tories, John Major’s love of cricket was leavened by his support for Chelsea. Tony Blair let it be known that his team was Newcastle… and look what happened to them. Gordon Brown has played up his shares in Raith Rovers, acquired as part of a fans’ buyout.

Such is the game’s significance that the prime minister flaunts his affiliation to lower league football, and weaves soccer into his metaphors and policies. Just prior to calling the election, Brown suggested the nation sing “You don’t know what you’re doing,” to the Tories, as football fans do to berate officials. He recently made a cringe-inducing analogy to Wayne Rooney’s injured ankle to explain why the economic recovery should not be hurried.

More substantially, the government also released policies for reforming the game, including proposals that will require clubs to make up to a quarter of their shares available to supporters’ trusts and give fan groups first refusal when clubs are put up for sale or sent into administration. These ideas serve as a final warning to the FA to overhaul its hapless systems of governance.

Labour is responding to the problems in the economy of football which find some parallel in the wider financial world. In an era of ever-rising turnover, Portsmouth—FA cup winners in 2008—have gone through four owners in one season and are in administration. West Ham’s balance sheet hangs by a thread and Manchester United and Liverpool are hamstrung by gigantic levels of borrowing inflicted on them by foreign owners. The Premiership as a whole carries over half of all the debt in European football. Over 40 clubs in the lower leagues have been in administration in the past ten years and the FA has lost another chief executive, who seems to have found the body ungovernable.

It strikes me that Labour has taken nearly two decades to relearn the obvious: that many things should be owned socially rather than privately, levels of debt should be regulated, and profit maximisation is not the only plausible motivation for economic organisations. It is a shame that their intervention should come so late in the day. Worse, none of these insights appear to have penetrated their understanding of the macro economy.

And there remains the great unspoken question of the moment in both football and politics: England. While their policies are potentially applicable across Britain, the Westminster government’s focus is on the English leagues and the English FA, as the devolved governments take responsibility for their own sport. This is another example of the predicament that Labour’s incomplete constitutional reforms have created, with English society increasingly governed by the thinning shell of British political institutions.

The emergence of a popular English nationalism was the inevitable corollary of devolution. In the absence of any other civic institution around which a popular nationalism could be expressed, the football team has become the lightning rod for this almost stateless nation. In June, when the election dust has settled and the World Cup kicks off, the questions will return. Can England win? Can a new political dispensation be created short of the break-up of the United Kingdom? I don’t think England have a prayer in South Africa, but if you ask me which of the two is more likely, my money’s on Fabio Capello.