Blatter resigns.

[Flosshilde]

Look at the thousands of small clubs and their local support and junior clubs, sometimes kept going with the help of volunteers.

As the thread started as a discussion of Blatter, corruption and FIFA these aren't really relevant - they are lucky if they get a mention in the local press or local radio sports pages. It's the mess at the top that's the issue, and the way in which football has become an all-consuming preoccupation in the press & TV & radio, and the fans used as a cash-cow by greedy clubs and TV companies. Clubs issue new kit at least once, if not more often, a season with the certainty that people will shell out very large sums for replicas, especially for children. These of course carry advertising from the sponsors (often for alcohol), companies like BSkyB pay huge amounts for rights to televise games and then charge people more than the TV licence fee to view them.

[aeolium]

Um - why not?

One of the major issues with football at the highest levels is that so many players are not from the UK, let alone the locality of the club, with a consequent deletrerious effect on the opportunities for young players.

For one thing, it's illegal to restrict professional opportunities in that way, at least since the Bosman and Kolpak EU rulings.

[Serial_Apologist]

Of course - advertising is there to make money for corporations. But the interest in football, and sport historically, long pre-dates mass media advertising: what about all those Greek vases and sculptures depicting athletic prowess? This idea that people are simply being brainwashed, which also crops up in discussions about popular music, always seems pretty patronising to me. It says: "I have been strong enough to avoid being brainwashed, but all the other poor weak-minded folk aren't". The possibility that these people actually like what they watch and listen to (and that advertising is following, not creating, that interest) is not entertained.

Aside from personally feeling lucky in a pop-dominated culture in having my own tastes in music and the like, I think the issue of likes and dislikes is hard to disentangle from that of getting used to what is overwhelmingly on offer and enjoying the feeling of going along with the crowd for the sake of being included, unquestioning. This is the kind of faustian pact most people take on board without thinking until the security of their role along with its supportive cultural accountrements is placed in question by, e.g., redundancy, illness, relationship break-up or even retirement.

Yes, that's partly true. When my mother was a child in West Bromwich, those who played football for WBA had actually to be born in the district. But in a multicultural society surely that isn't appropriate.

As in the case of labour imported at sub-acceptable rates of pay, one has to be more than mindful of blaming those exploited. Multiculturalism should be no barrier to a communitarian basis for sport, I think; it could even be part of an answer.

And it isn't true that modern globalised sport has totally destroyed the community ethic, even though money has badly corrupted sport at its higher levels. Look at the thousands of small clubs and their local support and junior clubs, sometimes kept going with the help of volunteers. It's not all a world of high finance and ownership by foreign billionaires. I think ts has mentioned elsewhere that the German model of football club ownership is far better than ours here.

I hope you're right.

[Flosshilde]

For one thing, it's illegal to restrict professional opportunities in that way, at least since the Bosman and Kolpak EU rulings.

You said that it's not possible in today's multicultural society, not that it's not possible because of EU regulations. I wondered why a multicultural society made it difficult?

[aeolium]

As the thread started as a discussion of Blatter, corruption and FIFA these aren't really relevant - they are lucky if they get a mention in the local press or local radio sports pages. It's the mess at the top that's the issue, and the way in which football has become an all-consuming preoccupation in the press & TV & radio, and the fans used as a cash-cow by greedy clubs and TV companies. Clubs issue new kit at least once, if not more often, a season with the certainty that people will shell out very large sums for replicas, especially for children. These of course carry advertising from the sponsors (often for alcohol), companies like BSkyB pay huge amounts for rights to televise games and then charge people more than the TV licence fee to view them.

I'd argue that the activities of the smaller clubs are far more relevant to the lives of most football supporters in those communities than the international corruption issues, damaging those they are. Relatively few people have the chance to watch live international football, whether at club or national level, but many more watch or play at the "bread-and-butter" level of the sport. And my local press certainly contains reports of local clubs. If clubs go over the top in rip-off merchandising then fewer people will buy it. At the small local club level, advertising is valuable for enabling shirts or other equipment to be paid for, helping cash-strapped clubs (especially junior and women's football) to have fewer expenses.

The corruption in international football administration is widespread and damaging, but there is at least the possibility of corrective action. Football has, like other sports, become a global business as well as a sport, yet it still has almost an amateur style of governance. That governance needs to become professional and accountable. We can't unfortunately go back to the days when all levels of the sport were amateur.

[aeolium]

You said that it's not possible in today's multicultural society, not that it's not possible because of EU regulations. I wondered why a multicultural society made it difficult?

What I meant was it was not possible in an age of global movement.

[Sir Velo]

Yes, but how often do you see people, especially on this forum, asking to be protected from doing things that they like? They tend rather to want to stop other people doing things that they like (and the critics don't like). Everyone, it seems, knows how other people should be living their lives.



And smoking is not a valid analogy - smoking kills people, playing or watching sport hardly ever does.

Give me a break! Heysel; Hillsborough; Escobar; gaming cartels etc. Stabbings at matches (not only this country of course). Referees killed (South America; Africa). The hooligan element in football is rife. I used to attend games in the 80s and 90s; the behaviour and language was appalling - and that was just the players.

[Serial_Apologist]

Give me a break! Heysel; Hillsborough; Escobar; gaming cartels etc. Stabbings at matches (not only this country of course). Referees killed (South America; Africa). The hooligan element in football is rife. I used to attend games in the 80s and 90s; the behaviour and language was appalling - and that was just the players.

But not at the local, amateur level to which aeolium refers. Apart from pushy parents, of course.

[aeolium]

Give me a break! Heysel; Hillsborough; Escobar; gaming cartels etc. Stabbings at matches (not only this country of course). Referees killed (South America; Africa). The hooligan element in football is rife. I used to attend games in the 80s and 90s; the behaviour and language was appalling - and that was just the players.

It's not nowadays statistically a high risk though, is it - most of your examples come from a generation back? Just think how many games are taking place world wide every week. Compared with, say, going for a Friday night out in some cities, or flying, or driving anywhere, I'd say it was pretty safe these days.

[DracoM]

It's descending into a grim and spiralling farce - Blatter in office and presiding over FIFA for the rest of this year!!!! Absurd.

And his likeliest successor from among a raft of shadowy back room boys, power broker, wheeler-dealers. Makes 'Goodfellas' look like the Vicar of Dibley.

[P. G. Tipps]

I don't enjoy football - never have, except in the most distant way (I watched England win the World Cup and Southampton the FA Cup). But 'anti-football' is one presumption too far. And 'elitist' - what is that supposed to mean (and why do you think you know me that well?

And why do you somehow assume that I was referring to you? I was clearly making a general point with the 'winkeye' indicating it was not meant to be taken too seriously!

However, I have little doubt there is an element of snobbery attached to some of those who turn up their noses at anything to do with football. In England class still dominates everything and football is considered very much a working-class pastime. So 'elite' schools continue to promote rugby instead.

Moronic behaviour by participants and fans is not confined to football. I have often witnessed it at rugby, cricket and tennis matches and even on the golf-course.

The problem does not lie with any of these sports but with the small minority of morons. Also, with the advent of sponsorship, vast amounts of money at the top level is very much part of every major sport now, not just football!.

[teamsaint]

Um - why not?

One of the major issues with football at the highest levels is that so many players are not from the UK, let alone the locality of the club, with a consequent deletrerious effect on the opportunities for young players.

With 5 English leagues of full time teams, there are probably more opportunities than ever for UK players.Local players also often earn excellent money in the semi pro leagues, which again probably offer better earning opportunities than ever before. What has actually happened is that a kind of super league has been added to the top of the structure.

that said, a reconnection with local communities, by way of having more local players in top level teams would be great.
It is known to those in the game as the Francis Benali factor.

[MrGongGong]

"Football is not just a matter of life and death: it's much more important than that'' - Bill Shankly

Doo bee doo bee doo

I can't talk b*llocks as well

[EdgeleyRob]

To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink. For a shilling the Bruddersford United AFC offered you Conflict and Art; it turned you into a critic, happy in your judgement of fine points, ready in a second to estimate the worth of a well-judged pass, a run down the touch line, a lightning shot, a clearance kick by back or goalkeeper; it turned you into a partisan, holding your breath when the ball came sailing into your own goalmouth, ecstatic when your forwards raced away towards the opposite goal, elated, downcast, bitter, triumphant by turn at the fortunes of your side, watching a ball shape Iliads and Odysseys for you; and what is more, it turned you into a member of a new community, all brothers together for an hour and a half, for not only had you escaped from the clanking machinery of this lesser life, from work, wages, rent, doles, sick pay, insurance cards, nagging wives, ailing children, bad bosses, idle workmen, but you had escaped with most of your neighbours, with half the town, and there you were cheering together, thumping one another on the shoulders, swopping judgements like lords of the earth, having pushed your way through a turnstile into another and altogether more splendid kind of life, hurtling with Conflict and yet passionate and beautiful in its Art. Moreover it offered you more than a shilling's worth of material for talk during the rest of the week. A man who had missed the last home match of "t'United" had to enter social life on a tiptoe in Bruddersford."

J B Priestley (The Good Companions )

[Beef Oven!]

I can't talk b*llocks as well

You are too modest on your abilities in this regard.