We Are the Damned United

by Phil Rostron

  ‘There are plenty of smashing lads involved now, but whether they could be bothered with something like that is a different story. The difference is they don’t live in the real world. They’re cosseted in a way we never were. I’d say 99 per cent are totally uninterested in politics.’

  The players might not be interested, but in its own way modern British football is a deeply political affair. Just take a look at the Premiership to find out what 15 years of hot-housed free-market economics looks like. From the first BSkyB broadcast deal in 1992 the revenue from subscription television has utterly transformed the game. The new Sky and Setanta TV contract is worth £1.7 billion over three seasons, a significant amount of which will end up in the pockets of the men kicking the ball around. The escalation to a current average Premiership wage of £12,300 a week has been like an unplanned social experiment. The players have come to represent an acme of consumption, a brutally linear expression of a certain way of living. In our footballers we see a funfair mirror reflection of the same forces working on the people watching them from the stands. We don’t admire them so much as aspire to their lifestyle, crave their large American cars and holiday homes in Dubai, bandy their salaries around with a Gollum-like mixture of avarice and disgust. The top tier of British football stands as an extreme expression of a certain kind of politics, rampant capitalism with the volume turned up to 11. A Premiership socialist? It might not even be possible.

  This is all relatively new. We’re not talking about golf here. Historically, football’s politics, such as they are, have tended to loiter on the left wing. The majority of Premiership clubs have their roots in either a local church or a local pub. For 100 years these clubs existed as an extension of their local community, a living riposte – albeit an occasionally violent and shambolically administered one – to the Thatcherite notion that there is no such thing as society.

  Bill Shankly is probably still British football’s most celebrated socialist. Wisecracking, dapper and a charismatic orator, Shankly was a hugely successful manager of Liverpool through the ’60s and early ’70s. What seems most remarkable about him now is his insistence on talking politics, even while talking football: ‘The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It’s the way I see football, the way I see life.’

  Shankly traced his political beliefs to his upbringing in the Ayrshire mining village of Glenbuck. A childhood spent in areas dominated by heavy industry and trade union influence has been a common theme among football’s senior socialists. Sir Alex Ferguson was a Govan shipyard shop steward before he became a player with Rangers. His backing for the Blair Labour leadership is well documented. At the last general election he posted a message on the government’s website praising ‘two brilliant barnstorming speeches from Tony and Gordon’. Ferguson, with his fine wines and his multimillion pound racehorse ownership disputes, has frequently been subjected to the familiar jibe of ‘champagne socialism’. Football is fond of this kind of reasoning, based on the idea that those with socialist beliefs are expected to live exemplary altruistic lives, whereas rightwingers can pretty much do whatever they want. Nottingham Forest legend Brian Clough, a sponsor of the Anti-Nazi League and a regular on picket lines during the miners’ strike, had his own riposte. ‘For me, socialism comes from the heart. I don’t see why certain sections of the community should have the franchise on champagne and big houses.’

  Clough was pretty much the standard-bearer for football socialism in the 1980s, a decade that saw the emergence of a new strain of rightwing footballer. Certainly something about Margaret Thatcher touched a chord with the aspirational pre-Premiership player, with his golfing sweaters, his sponsored Rover and his first intimations of the spiralling financial rewards that would reach frantic levels in the decades to come. The famous photo of Kevin Keegan and Emlyn Hughes cosying up to Thatcher on the Downing Street steps remains a pungent image. It wasn’t just Keegan. Thatcherism mobilised footballers in unprecedented numbers. Coventry players Keith Houchen and Steve Ogrizovic campaigned for their local Tory candidate at the 1987 election. Footballers even managed to muscle their way in among all the Tarbies and Brucies at the grisly party glad-handings: Arsenal manager Terry Neill and star striker ‘Champagne’ Charlie Nicholas were among those to appear on stage at a Thatcher rally. For reasons that are still unclear, Thatcher herself was installed as honorary vice-president of Blackburn Rovers.

  In the 20 years since, the footballing socialist has all but disappeared. Certainly, we’ve not had a lot to go on: Thierry Henry wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt; Diego Maradona smoking Montecristos with Fidel while detoxing in Cuba; Eric Cantona and his elusively loopy left-of-centre persona. ‘Perhaps you may find it odd that I think happiness does not come from being able to buy a car that one wants,’ he challenged in his autobiography, before reminding us that ‘the woods are full of bows and arrows’.

  This is a confusing time for any top-level footballer with a twitching of social conscience. The problem is, he often ends up looking a bit silly. Take Rio Ferdinand, for example. Ferdinand is an intelligent man. He lent his name to a campaign against knife crime in London. Peckham-raised, he discreetly offered his support in the aftermath of the Damilola Taylor murder. But somehow it seems that just making a bit of a difference isn’t enough. Not when you’re this important. ‘I want to join forces with the Government,’ he wrote in his autobiography, before going on to describe his plans for a countrywide rehabilitation of the nation’s youth via his inspirational chain of Ferdinand-branded leisure centres, a vision of a brighter tomorrow he once tried to share with Gordon Brown after discovering they were staying in the same hotel (‘unfortunately he had gone out for something to eat’).

  The suspicion is that socialism – in the everyday sense practised by the likes of McQueen – is simply incompatible with the life of the Premiership footballer. Leftwing sympathies are still present in isolated gestures. Liverpool player Robbie Fowler celebrated scoring in a European Cup-Winners’ Cup game in 1997 by pulling up his shirt to reveal a T-shirt expressing support for striking Liverpool dockers. As a gesture it was widely appreciated. But solidarity only goes so far: Fowler is also English football’s fourth-richest man, estimated to own almost 100 houses as part of a £28-million buy-to-let portfolio (inspiring the ‘Yellow Submarine’-style terrace chant ‘We all live in a Robbie Fowler house’). Wigan manager Paul Jewell’s dad was a trade union activist in Liverpool. He keeps a pet tortoise called Trotsky.

  And then there’s Gary Neville, the man most people would pick out as an example of a modern footballing socialist. Neville’s ‘Red Nev’ nickname was given to him by the tabloid press after his stewardship of a revolt in the England dressing-room over Ferdinand’s punishment for missing a drugs test. It’s not exactly flogging Marxism Today outside Sainsbury’s, but the nickname has stuck.

  Neville is one of the Premiership’s more thoughtful players. He has called on his colleagues not to use agents, although having always been represented by his father makes this an easy position to adopt. He signed up to the recent initiative for footballers to donate a day’s wages to a nurses’ hardship fund. He might even, you never know, see himself as a socialist. Still, you come up against the insurmountable stumbling block of his profession. In Neville we can see an intelligent man placed in an unintelligent situation. Earning £80,000 a week for playing football places him on one side of a very real divide, whatever his potential leftwing leanings. The old distinction of champagne socialism doesn’t really do it justice, unless perhaps we’re talking about taking an Olympic swimming pool-sized Jacuzzi in the stuff every morning. Which is possibly something Neville might be planning to do in the £3-million home with golf course, gym, pools, stables and a cinema he is having built in Lancashire. Clough is right. Socialism doesn’t necessarily exclude you from living in a big house; but there are limits to everything.

  Does any of this matter? Certainly, football’s central relation
ship, that between fans and players, seems to have suffered some collateral damage. The working man’s ballet is now very much the middle-class man’s ballet, too. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but the speed with which the demographic of football’s target market has shifted is unprecedented. Not least in the idea of actually having a target market in the first place. Andy Lyons is editor of When Saturday Comes, the UK’s only independent national football magazine. WSC began as a fanzine in 1986, at a time when following football was a relatively marginalised activity. ‘There used to be a sense of a shared experience of being a football supporter,’ Lyons says. ‘This has splintered now, due in part to the sheer weight of numbers of the Sky generation of new supporters.’

  Various forces have been working on this relationship between supporters and players: the repackaging of the game as televised entertainment and the dilution of the idea of a geographical fanbase; the hyper-inflationary hikes in ticket prices and the emphasis on football as a corporate hospitality product. Going to watch a game at Arsenal’s new Emirates ground feels more like attending a stadium rock concert or visiting the Ideal Home exhibition. Your relationship to everyone else inside the stadium has changed. You’re united by consumer choice. The people performing in front of you are skilled entertainers.

  This is not necessarily what football’s traditional consumers (formerly ‘fans’) actually want. A feature of some recent Liverpool home games has been a habit among home fans of a concerted holding up of scarves en masse and singing of their traditional anthems in a self-consciously ‘Liverpool Kop’ manner. Always a club tradition at bigger games, at every home game it is a relatively new thing, fetishising the club’s own past, perhaps out of a sense of nostalgia for a still-present but undeniably fragile sense of footballing community. This feeling of a collective identity is what sustained football through its lean years. Will it still be there when they come again?

  British football is ahead of the rest of the world here. Lyons believes that in other countries players are not only more openly political, but possibly also have a greater bond with their supporters. ‘You find in countries where the working classes tend to be more political, such as Argentina, where there is still a strong trade union movement, there tends to be more of a sense of communal identity,’ he says. ‘Society is perhaps based around older social patterns that no longer exist here, such as heavy industry. In among these, football is one of the forces that bind people together.’

  There are plenty of examples of political South American footballers. The World Cup-winning Brazilian striker Romario is a high-profile supporter of the progressive President Lula and has also assisted with projects to relieve poverty in the favelas. Italian club Internazionale were persuaded by their Argentinian captain Xavier Zanetti to donate 5,000 (£3,400) to help Zapatista rebels in Mexico. ‘We believe in a better, unglobalised world enriched by the cultural differences and customs of all the people,’ Zanetti said, possibly surprising some of his teammates in the process.

  Where all this leaves us is hard to say. Is it really impossible to be a socialist and a top-level footballer? Probably, in the hard line ‘property is theft’ sense of the word; the bar has simply been raised too high. But then, all of this is very new. There is no precedent for the Premiership, outside of the transcontinental sporting conferences of the US – never exactly a hot-bed of leftwing politics and, what with the market-led sports ‘franchise’ system, certainly not an environment where the social bond between supporters and club is valued.

  It would be nice to see someone trying, however. In the future, perhaps a few of our footballers might be willing to challenge their environment, rather than simply accepting its rewards. Former England goalkeeper David James made the relatively radical suggestion last week that players might be paid only on a performance-related basis. This might not exactly be up there with Paul Breitner, a West German World Cup-winner in 1974, who combined a mastery of attacking full-back play with growing a bushy beard, espousing Marxism. But James’ notion of footballers-as-estate-agents at least goes pleasingly against the tide. It’s an acknowledgment that there might be another way. And, like Lucarelli, who cuts a slightly cartoonish figure with his Che Guevara T-shirts and clenched-fist salutes, it’s also appealingly silly; a counter to the po-faced sense of entitlement that has too often been the Premiership player’s defining trait. This is only football, after all. It doesn’t have to mean anything. But it’s usually much more fun when it tries.

  * * *

  With Clough’s rejection of me and the Daily Star confirmed beyond doubt, I was back on the M1 and in a no-win situation. It’s a poor strategist, however, who has no plan B, and I turned my attentions instead to the Liverpool goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar, who, like Clough, was larger than life and would certainly add some colour to our pages. This was much more straightforward. We met one evening in a city-centre restaurant in Liverpool and the contract was signed between courses there and then.

  The ink on the contract was barely dry when, on 15 April 1989, Liverpool met Nottingham Forest at Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough stadium in an FA Cup semi-final. In the most tragic event in British football history, 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death in unforgettably traumatic scenes, with the match having got as far as the sixth minute before police ordered it to be stopped. The disaster was to dominate both the front and back pages of the newspapers for months to come, and almost the first words Grobbelaar produced for the Daily Star formed his own heart-rending account of those terrible events as they unfolded in front of him from his place in the Liverpool goal. The Zimbabwean was so badly traumatised that he had great difficulty writing this first-hand account, but he summoned the courage, strength and compassion, in a deeply touching piece, to paint a picture of his adopted city in mourning.

  In view of Clough committing what he later admitted was a serious error of judgement when, in his autobiography, he wrote of the Hillsborough disaster, ‘I will always remain convinced that those Liverpool fans who died were killed by Liverpool people,’ I have often wondered since whether fate intervened to save me from a whole heap of embarrassment. But that was Clough: enigmatic, unpredictable, controversial.

  It would be remiss of me not to record here my own admiration for Brian Clough, as a man, a manager, a personality and a character. In a modern world rife with blandness, political correctness, denial of culpability and abdication of responsibility among those in positions of power, he is sorely missed. I adored him. English football was much the richer for his impossible-to-ignore presence, and it misses now the likes of himself, Ron Atkinson and Tommy Docherty, men who knew how to entertain off the field as well as on it and felt it incumbent upon themselves so to do.

  I feel much the same about that incredible Leeds United team of the early 1970s. They were fabulous. Quite possibly the best England has ever produced. You did not have to be a supporter to appreciate their brilliance.

  The fact that the best manager in England and the best team in England failed to hit it off was a great shame and something of a mystery. But I offer up my own conclusion: the day they first crossed paths, an irresistible force met an immovable object.

  WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

  DAVID HARVEY

  Leeds’ last big season of achievement coincided with a huge stroke of misfortune for David Harvey. He was injured in a car crash to the extent that he missed the European Cup final against Bayern Munich, replaced by his understudy David Stewart. Stewart did little wrong, but Leeds were beaten 2–0 by Bayern Munich in Paris.

  Harvey’s 16th and last Scotland appearance came in 1976. He stayed at Leeds until 1980 and then went to play in Canada with the Vancouver Whitecaps. He returned to Leeds in 1983, after the club had been relegated. By the time he left in 1985, he had played under three of his old teammates – Allan Clarke, Eddie Gray and Billy Bremner.

  Harvey played for Bradford City under another old Leeds mate, Trevor Cherry, and then drifted into non-league football until retiremen
t. Now 61, he works as a farmer and postman on Sanday in the Orkney Islands. Statistically, he is Scotland’s most successful post-war goalkeeper.

  PAUL REANEY

  Now 64, Reaney is still involved in football, running half-term coaching sessions for children at a leisure resort in Norfolk.

  BILLY BREMNER

  Bremner finally left Leeds United in the late summer of 1976 to join Hull City. He had played 772 games for Leeds, putting him second behind Jack Charlton in the club’s all-time list. Though winding down his career, Bremner emerged as a big success at Hull over two years before he joined Doncaster Rovers, managing an admirable four seasons there before retiring at the age of 39. In 1978, Bremner became manager of Doncaster Rovers, where he stayed for seven years.

  He then succeeded ex-teammates Allan Clarke and Eddie Gray as manager of Leeds, aiming to restore happier days to the club after their relegation in 1982. However, they did not achieve promotion to the top flight and Bremner was sacked in September 1988.

  At the beginning of December 1997, he suffered a heart attack at his Doncaster home in the small village of Clifton, South Yorkshire, and was rushed to hospital but died two days before his 55th birthday. He was voted Leeds’ greatest ever player, with a statue standing outside Elland Road in his honour.

  GORDON McQUEEN