Tickets Please

The BBC Sport report on ticket prices in the Premier and Football League is most welcome. The price of admission to a football match is one of the most important and relevant aspects of football because of the direct financial consequences it has on supporters.

At its core, football is about going to matches. In fact the very definition of a supporter hinges on them turning up at games, paying through the turnstiles and supporting the team. If for whatever reason, you don’t or can’t then you’re not a supporter, you’re a fan. This is why the cost of admission is so important: it is part of what sets the parameters of the relationship that an individual and a community has with their club.

But I don’t believe the Premier League looks at things in the same way. They look at the relationship between a club and a supporter as similar to that of a business and a consumer. Have a look at Cathy Long’s (Head of Supporter Services for the Premier League) piece for the BBC as an illustration of this perspective. Long talks of adding value to the supporter’s experience (through the creation of “family zones” it seems). To me, this seems like another way of saying “Get ‘em in early and get ‘em spending” although I may be a tad cynical there.

The advantage the Premier League has over other leisure industries is a higher than usual sense of customer loyalty. English football club supporters are prepared to make additional sacrifices to follow the team due to the strong connection to their club. This allows the clubs to set their pricing structure with considerably less caution than a cinema or theme park, for example. After all, who ever heard of an Odeon Supporter? On what channel is the weekly radio phone in show for disgruntled Alton Towers fans?

There is an argument that the Premier League offers world class entertainment because the high calibre players the clubs employ and that costs money, lots of money. This is true to a point. But the fact is that football, usually, does not guaranteed entertainment. Sometimes, even the best teams lose or draw or just play badly. If you follow Man City, Chelsea, Arsenal and Man United then it is unlikely that you’ll leave your home stadium unhappy but the same can’t be said for the rest of the clubs in the league, much less for the clubs in the Championship and below.

With TV revenues significantly lower in the Football League, Championship clubs need to keep the cash coming in to try and maintain a manageable gap in the quality of players between the League. Is it any wonder then that it costs more considerably more money to watch a team like Crystal Palace than two times Bundesliga Champions, Borussia Dortmund? This may not be the actual reason why it costs around £30 to enter Selhurst Park on a match-day but it must surely be a factor.

Ultimately, the reason why it costs as much as it does to watch football in England is because enough people are willing to pay. In fact, football has an in built mechanism to keep the prices high and that is set by supporters themselves who regard non-attendance as disloyalty. If the relationship was one of club and supporter then that would be fair enough but it’s not: it’s business and consumer. To be blunt, clubs are exploiting a relationship between themselves and the fans that either does not exist or is not reciprocated.

So what is to be done?

In Germany, there are frequent boycotts by supporter groups in protest against rising ticket prices. However, most clubs in Germany are owned in the most part by the supporters. This has contributed to a culture whereby supporters have a greater influence and whose voice is taken more seriously. Clubs are clubs and not businesses  They are run for the benefit of themselves and their own ends. This culture and the relationships it creates do not exist in England, as far as I can make out. The notion of organising any form of boycott would be regarded disloyalty not just by the clubs but almost certainly by significant sections of the supporter base. Reflect for a moment on the situation at Cardiff City where supporters are divided over the club’s recent change of colours and crest. It is easy to imagine similar unpleasantness occurring about direct action over ticket prices.

Another option is to form a breakaway club. Ultimately, AFC Wimbledon and FC United Of Manchester were formed as a reaction to corporate excess ruining their match day experience. Why not form a new club at a lower level? The trouble with this idea is that it too is divisive and denies the supporters top quality football.

Then of course there is regulation (thank you, I’m here all week). But seriously, a practical suggestion may be compel the Premier and Football League clubs to take a slice of their TV revenue to offset against ticket prices. A “TV Subsidy” if you will.  This idea has the virtue of being straightforward and something that every supporter can get behind, irrespective of club.

While top slicing the Sky money and giving back to the supporters in the form of subsidised ticket prices will negatively affect club’s bottom line, it will make it harder for them to criticise the idea. They’ll probably start by saying that they would have to reduce solidarity payments to the lower leagues but this too can be protected with better regulation.

The final (and most likely) option of course is to do nothing. Perhaps, sooner or later, the middle class forty-somethings who can currently afford a ticket will get bored, suffer one moral outrage too many, lose their jobs or just figure that they're getting too old for this sort of thing and go an find something else to do with their time instead like go to the pictures, maybe. That might do the trick. 

I can't believe he missed Andy Gray: A foreword

As a leaving present for Chris Oakley upon his departure to New Zealand, Graham Sibley and I published a book containing his complete Friday List Of Little Or No Consequence posts for Some People Are On The Pitch and the Football Fairground. Below is the foreword, penned by myself. 

“Anything with Garlic.” replied Archie Gemmill to the now classic “What’s your favourite food?” question asked of all professional footballers honoured to be the subject of the now defunct “Shoot!” magazine’s Q and A section. The answer immediately conjures images of the rampaging Scotsman, wilting the Dutch players on that infamous night in Argentina in 1978, with his garlic fuelled breath, as the wee man met his destiny and Scotland met their end.

I never read “Shoot!” as a boy and only found out about Archie’s appetites through that stalwart of mental ephemera that is The Friday List Of Little Or No Consequence which for five years ran in Chris Oakley’s football blog, Some People Are On The Pitch and later the Football Fairground.

Every week, the list would provide a portion of empirical factitude delivered by the author. The list was aptly named and exemplifies the true spirit of a fan’s passion for the game. For most of us, football is a matter of little or no consequence but the the lists demonstrate the power the beautiful game has over us when we choose to seek knowledge and understanding for no reason other than because it is there.

As much as chalkboards, tactical breakdowns, player profiles and historical & cultural contexts allow us to understand football, the accumulation of hitherto buried trivia gives the game substance. From the sixteen teams in the 2008 Africa Cup Of Nations in Nickname Form to England one cap wonders to ten stickers missing from his “Football 1981” Panini album to 27 Statistics mentioned during the Guardian Football Weekly podcast of 29 December 2011, every Friday the List gave the reader possibly one of the greatest gift anyone could receive: consequence free knowledge; innocence on a web page.

As Chris embarks upon a new chapter in his life, he leaves his disciples these lists, collected in a single volume, as a fitting legacy and tribute to a man for whom no fact was too small, no event too obscure and no genre too niche.

Happy trails, Oakers.

STRIKER: Raging Against The Machine

This post was originally published on 8th September 2012 for the Football Attic.

Steve Earle’s Copperhead Road, Socialist Worker, Ernest Hemmingway’s Men Without Women, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Lethal Weapon Pinball, Selhurst Park, Guinness and Super Nintendo (SNES). If you were to evacuate my conscious mind in the early Nineties and reassemble its elements as some grotesque Mental Pinterest then those fragments of ephemera are what would be displayed. But if I were to place an extra large pin on one of those elements to give it extra significance it would be the Guinness. However, I’ve not been asked to write about Guinness. I’ve been asked to write about an old video game, so for the purposes of this tortured preamble, I’ll say it would be my SNES.

Purchased from the Virgin Megastore in Tottenham Court Road, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System introduced me to NHL Ice Hockey, the glory of World League Basketball (NCAA for readers in the US) and the worst Rugby video game in the history of all games ever created (everyone knows time is not up until the ball goes dead. EVERYONE KNOWS THAT!)

Then of course, there was the king of all football video games, the timeless classic: Sensible Soccer. However, SS looked stupid with its plan view pin pricks for players, stupid sound effects and rubbish player names (who the fuck is Alan Shiarer?) After a week I’d decided that this was a game for people who took this sort of thing far more seriously than me and took up STRIKER instead.

The first thing to say about STRIKER was that it was produced by a company called RAGE Software. For angry Trotskyite class warriors, as I claimed to be at the time, anything produced by something called RAGE was brilliant. RAGE was a force for good. RAGE made a difference. RAGE would kick the Tories out. RAGE would smash the State and end injustice. Whatever else you can say about the name RAGE, it was ideologically sound.



The next thing to say about STRIKER is the gameplay which had an agreeable 45-degree view, sticky balls (if you’ve played Kick Off or listened to the latest Attic Podcast then you’ll know what I mean) and crunching tackles. If there was a normal tackle button, I never pressed it. The sliding tackle was designed to clean out the opposition player and emerge with the ball at your feet. The action generated a satisfying squelchy slippy noise which elicited a feeling of great and surprisingly wholesome satisfaction. There was no commentator (thank Christ!) but whenever something extra cool happened an electric scoreboard would pop up with encouraging exclamations like “OFF THE BAR!” and “WHAT A TACKLE!” and “PENALTY!” and “GOAL!!!”

The games were accompanied by an “authentic” crowd noise which responded to the shifting patterns of play and had a curious reverb that was a little freaky when you played the game on your own. However, when the ball hit the back of the net the crowd would go wild and once you’d figured out how to strike the ball with the correct amount of backspin, straight in front of goal and from just outside the area that net took one hell of a beating.

Having found the game's weakness, I took Palace to League and Cup glory. England won the World Cup averaging nine goals a game. The game had customisable kits and clubs but I didn’t go in for that. I was only interested in the glory of pummelling Arsenal and beating the Germans 9–0.

Football game purists will be spinning in their graves (especially the alive ones) to read this but what made STRIKER so appealing was that it was easy and conveyed a sense authenticity without being authentic. It had an indoor training mode where the players' trainers squeaked which may have been a first for non basketball games. Granted, STRIKER was not as clever as Sensi Soccer but it made you feel a lot better about yourself when you played it. Like left wing politics, STRIKER kept it real and had easy answers. Sensi Soccer, where the basic graphics disguised the realistic game play and advanced engine was more suited to working class Tories for whom, all suffering is necessary. Neither game was entirely healthy and if you’re still playing either today, stop.

But the final thing to say about STRIKER is the theme tune. This game's release coincided with the birth of the FA Premier League. Football was entering its modern era and much of the old game was being swept aside for all-seater stadia, satellite TV, Richard Keys and high ticket prices. The one link to our past was Match of the Day and Barry Stoller's classic theme tune which was played at Agincourt, if the legend is to be believed. The STRIKER theme (still in use today as the theme to the Sound Of Football podcast) evoked that old anthem, and its reassuring subtext, beautifully. Here was a game that looked ahead to a world of football that demanded its gratification in instant form or sack the coach. But it also knew the value of nostalgia and a compelling melody. Truly it was a product of its age.

The goalscorer's fear of the penalty shoot-out

With apologies to Pater Handke and Wim Wenders.

It’s never easy to admit responsibility for your mistakes and face up to your shortcomings. The line between being unnecessarily negative and realistic about your limitations is a fine one and acknowledging that you’ve fucked up seems, for some, to be an admission of defeat and an attitude that is discouraged in some quarters, especially in the professional sporting arena. However, most successful entrepreneurs will tell you that mistakes are essential if you want to be ultimately successful. But when the price of failure is humiliation, abuse and represents a threat to your livelihood, it is perhaps easier to look around for someone or something else to blame.

This is why the penalty shoot-out can be regarded as the ultimate panacea in football. It's arbitrary nature makes it easy for players, coaches and fans to absolve themselves of blame or defend their team for not winning a match over ninety minutes or extra time. Penalty shoot-outs are a dreadful way to lose a football match and are a lottery. While the former is almost certainly true, the latter is not and as long as that conception remains, the chances of a team succeeding through penalties are reduced.

In the absence of replays, penalty shoot-outs are the most efficient and exciting way of separating two teams where two hours of football has been unable to do so. Scoring from a penalty is, on the surface, ludicrously simple: the player, the ball, 12 yards and only the keeper to beat. What could be easier and what could be more terrifying when the alternative is pain and misery? And the closer you get to the Final, the greater the pressure and the stronger the likelihood of failure. The shoot-out is the ultimate test of a player’s class and bottle. Nine times out of ten, a professional footballer should score a penalty in training with their eyes closed. This makes the shoot-out a contest that takes place almost entirely in the mind. One thing that they are most definitely not is a lottery.

A lottery is a game of chance: a series of randomly selected numbers. Penalties are not random, there is no luck involved in taking a penalty. In fact, dodgy penalty spots aside, the goalkeeper in the only external factor. By calling penalties a lottery, you’re introducing an element of fortune or even fate that does not exist. However, it does provide the team who lost the shoot-out with the emotional crutch required to cope with their failure. We gave everything we had but just wasn’t meant to be. Honour is satisfied, blame is apportioned, all that is left is to deal with the emotional scars of defeat and that is nothing that an advertising contract with a Pizza restaurant chain can’t fix.

But is this attitude healthy? By players and coaches consigning their penalty angst to the ether, are they denying themselves to chance to improve their technique? According to this study by Anna Stodter & Matt Pain at Loughborough University, Stuart Pearce’s England Under 21 team practiced penalties in differing conditions for 2 years and lo and behold won a penalty shoot-out in the corresponding Under 21 tournament. This is hardly conclusive evidence that training and development works but it must surely be preferable to leaving it to chance. Especially when you consider that chance has almost nothing to do with it.

Without looking at the statistics, I would suggest that it is extremely unlikely for any team to win a major international knock out competition, club or international, without having to go through at least one penalty shoot-out. Surely it behoves coaches to not leave penalties to chance. I’m sure that the procedure is not quite a slap dash as it appears but you do wonder if teams, traditionally better at penalties like Germany, put more thought into the shoot-out than teams that traditionally are not so good at them like... oh I don’t know, England for instance.

Penalties are brilliant. They’re dramatic, conclusive, and emotional and I can only imagine that the winners never feel more alive when they are over. A true professional should relish the challenge and embrace it without fear of failure. They should step to step up the mark, place the ball on the spot, give the ‘keeper the eyes and with ice coursing through the veins slot the ball home.

It's what Kipling would have done.

Has 24 hour sports news on TV had its day?

This is not a nostalgia blog so I’m instantly weary of making any reference to teletext services in the UK such as Ceefax on the BBC or its ITV equivalent, Oracle. However, the reference is pertinent as these services were for many years the football fans main source of breaking news. For years, people would get home from work, switch on the TV and go straight to Page 302 on Ceefax, anxious to see the latest doings in the wonderful and diverse planet of football.

Over the years the service has become superseded by the World Wide Web and of course rolling sports new channels, specifically in the UK, Sky Sports News. There are many reasons to object to the venerable SSN as a news service. Its tendency to focus only on sporting events to which it had the rights, suggests that the channel was not so much Sky Sports News but News About Sky Sports. On slow news days (and let’s be honest there are more than a few) they would often manufacture stories by asking prominent ex-sportsmen, usually on golf courses, their opinion on the perceived topic of the day and passing that off as news (i.e. John Aldridge believes that Kenny Dalglish is the right man to lead Liverpool). In the words of Angry Dad, “That’s not opinion, notnews!”

There is also the practice of door stepping supporters who happen to be passing by a home stadium to ask them their opinion on the latest club transfer which has a whiff of space filler. Then there is the sight of the lonely reporter standing outside Tottenham Hotspur’s training ground waiting for Harry Redknapp’s car to emerge from the gates, always happy to stop and inform the nation of absolutely nothing before haring off to the M25 to join the throng of travelling salesmen making the long journey home to their families and dogs. And then of course there is Jim White and transfer deadline day, an event that I refuse to capitalise.

Such elements have become as part of the cultural fabric of English football as Bovril, high ticket prices and Match Of The day, perhaps more so. However, whatever your views on Sky Sports News and their approach, what they used to be really good at was delivering actual news and delivering it first and it is this aspect that has changed.

Today (16th May) saw the release of Roy Hodgson’s provisional England squad for the 2012 European Championship and the squad list was broken not on the sports website and certainly not on Sky Sports News. Instead it was broken by the numerous football journalist and editors who had access to the Football Association’s press release or whatever it was that they used to disseminate the squad, on Twitter or as poor old Sky Sports News were forced to report some “social networking sites.” For once, they seemed behind the curve. Last with the News.

It is very likely that the England squad list would almost certainly have been in the hands of the editorial staff at SSN but putting stuff on TV is hard. It takes time to draft the script, prepare the graphics and stop the presenters from talking about whatever they were talking about at the time and report the news. By that point not only did everyone with even a passing interest in football know that Carrick wasn’t in the squad but they were boldly expressing their dismay and outrage that Carrick wasn’t in the squad. It is entirely possible that by the time the names had first ran across their famous yellow ticker, the #Hodgsonout hashtag was trending, worldwide.One can only imagine the carnage as the news broke that Liverpool manager, Kenny Dalglish, had left the club.

The problem is that SSN have become too reliant on waiting for press releases, in my opinion. The “once we know, you’ll know” approach is now redundant. TV channels may not be the last to know something but they are rapidly becoming the last to report it. This is not a problem exclusive to Sky Sports News but there is far too much infotainment on that channel and not enough actual journalism going on. The channel is at its best  when they deliver their special reports or exclusives. News that matters and cannot be delivered in 140 characters should be within the domain of SSN.

Corruption, people trafficking and racism in football have all been covered by this network and while stories like that don’t happen every hour if their journalists were tasked with finding out what others don’t already know and used Twitter to break news that everyone else already knows then the channel has a future.  If not then 24 hour sports news may go the way of the dinosaur, the magnetic cassette and the printed newspaper.

The Hollywoodification of English Football Fan Culture

Interesting to note Carlsberg’s new Euro 2012 Fan Academy campaign, doing the rounds on the Blogosphere is designed to extol the virtues of England fandom: The pride, passion, futility etc. The advert has the usual impressive smattering of megastars from the football cultural landscape, is suitably well polished and not unamusing. 


What I find interesting is the choice of music, A suitably rousing march, reminiscent of the theme to the film, The Great Escape, which as anyone who follows the English national team will tell you, is the unofficial anthem of the supporters and played by that band who are allowed to enter the matches despite being in possession of deeply offensive weapons.
The music in this advert is from the movie Police Academy. I have no doubt that the tune was carefully chosen as not only is it cheerfully rousing, it’s also very familiar to the target demographic. After all, who hasn’t seen that film?




What I find ironic about both pieces of music is that they are composed by Americans. Elmer Bernstein composed the Great Escape and Robert Folk, Police Academy. This leads me to wonder if American cultural imperialism is more than just a concept conceived by leftist under graduates trying to score on a Friday night. The Great Escape theme, ii particular, is layered which contradictions in that the film is, in part, a celebration of British heroism but projected through through a Hollywood prism. England fans adoption of the theme could be construed as them embracing a foreign concept of their own national identity, a concept which Carlsberg (among many others) are all too happy to commodify.


The Hollywoodification of English Football Fan Culture. Now there’s a topic for the close season.