What Future for England’s National Game?

The proposed European Super League collapsed amid opposition from all sides. Could reform of company law underpin a healthier future for English professional football?

In 1989 my father Bernard, a primary school headteacher, joyfully announced the birth of his first grandchild to morning assembly with the words: "A fourth generation West Ham supporter has been born!" I don’t know what the other teachers and children made of it, but it had to be said. Blood runs claret and blue in our family.

My grandfather, Eugene McCarthy was first of the four generations. He was born in East London in 1892. Three years later the Thames Ironworks FC was formed as the works team of the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company. Apprentice riveter Charlie Dove paid half a crown (12.5p) to join, a third of his week’s wages. In 1900 the Club was reformed as West Ham United and Charlie went on to play in every position for the team. My grandfather was in the crowd in 1923 when the Hammers lost to Bolton in the first Wembley FA Cup final.

The second generation was my father Bernard, born in 1930. Two years later the Club was relegated to the Second Division of the English League, but my father followed them loyally, and still does.

One of the third generation, I was born in 1958, the year West Ham returned to the First Division and my childhood coincided with years of glory. Bobby Moore led the Club to FA Cup and European Cup Winner's Cup victories, and in 1966 he captained England to World Cup triumph. My father and I watched the TV proudly as Hammers Martin Peters and Geoff Hurst scored the goals that won the final. Moore, Hurst and Peters were all products of the West Ham youth team. Many of the players in the 1960s West Ham sides were local lads. Shouts of “Come on you Irons!” reminded them of their roots and industrial heritage. At that time the bonds between the East End, the fans, the team and the owners were strong. They could all be proud that, sixty years after the Club’s foundation by working men, it could compete at the highest level and produce and retain world class players.

Our family allegiance was replicated in every club across the land. The relationship between supporters and their club is covenantal: supporters not only care about the current team but also venerate the club’s history and look to its future with hope. They share in the club’s identity and participate in its “liturgy”: its chants, sacred places, “saints” and vestments. As my father demonstrated they see this relationship as a gift to be passed on to future generations. If, as Sir Matt Busby said: “football is nothing without the fans” how is it that the owners of our six top clubs wanted to break away in defiance of their supporters? Why are fans so disregarded? How did the bonds break between the clubs and the communities they had sprung from and enlivened? Is there any hope of redemption?  

The disenchantment started in the 1970s as the beautiful game grew ugly. I remember coming out of the West Ham’s decrepit Boleyn Ground, past the National Front recruiters to face menacing gangs of rival fans in the streets around Upton Park. In 1976 a Millwall supporter was killed by a train during a fight with West Ham fans. In 1985 a fire in a wooden stadium at Bradford led to the deaths of 56 people. Later that year a riot of Liverpool fans at the Heysel stadium resulted in the deaths of 39 Juventus fans. In 1989 after the death of 95 Liverpool fans at Hillsborough the Home Secretary commissioned Lord Justice Taylor to hold an inquiry. His report required First and Second Division stadia to be all seater. This meant either refurbishing, and accepting lower capacity, or a complete rebuild. The money had to come from somewhere. Gates were falling in the 1980s and the funds weren’t going to come from the largely working-class men still coming to games. In 1992 the top English clubs took matters into their own hands and formed the Premier League.

The Premiership negotiated its own TV rights with little spared for the rest of the professional game. This concentrated money and power in the big clubs. The European Cup morphed from a knock-out competition into the Champions League with a group stage to avoid teams being eliminated in the first round after just one home game. This secured even more TV money for soccer’s big boys.

Fed and watered by this rigged system the Prem became the most lucrative league in the world, attracting the top players and managers. Positively the stadia are now safe and pleasant, violence is rare, and the fans have returned. There has been a beneficial effect on the rest of the English professional game. In 2019 almost 18.4 million people attended matches in the Championship and Leagues One and Two, the highest number in comparable tiers of the game since 1958-59.

In 1999 I took my sons, the fourth generation, to a game at the partly refurbished Boleyn Ground. That year West Ham’s squad included four rising stars from the youth setup who went on to amass 277 England caps between them. But money lured them all away from Upton Park. West Ham could still produce world class players but could no longer retain them. By 2019 Prem players had become the best paid in the world with average annual salaries of nearly £3.2m. They are now world stars and global commodities. At the start of the 2019-20 season only 30% of Premier League starting spots were filled by players eligible for England, falling to less than 20% at the previous year’s top-six clubs. If owners and sponsors want quick success it makes sense to buy talent rather than grow it. This makes it more difficult for English players to be developed and break through, with inevitable consequences for the national team.

Financial success has not been built on income from the turnstiles, but on global TV deals, merchandising ratcheted by cynical annual rebranding, and sponsorship, most commonly by gambling companies. Premiership clubs are now largely owned by oil sheiks, oligarchs and Chinese or American plutocrats, and often loaded with debt to pay the loans raised to buy them. Supporters are regarded as mere customers. Ticket prices have soared and the advent of pay to view TV means that less well-off fans are excluded even from watching at home. The proposed European Super League would have been a final sundering of the links between the clubs involved and the places and communities that had nurtured them. Guaranteed membership for the founding clubs would have dispensed with the possibility of relegation and, for the owners, attained the paradisiacal state of a lucrative oligopoly.

Things could have been different. The German Bundesliga reflects the principles of the Christian Democrats who built West Germany after the War. Clubs are real associations, with more than 50% of the shares owned by fans. This means that private investors cannot take over clubs and potentially push through measures that prioritise profit over the wishes of supporters. The rule provides continuity and stability, as well as safeguarding the democratic tradition of German clubs. Grassroots members participate in their clubs, electing Chairs and influencing development and ticketing strategies. Players are not rewarded as extravagantly as in England, but the Bundesliga claims to have the highest average attendances in world football, low ticket prices and a great fan culture. Sponsors are generally local industrial companies. Although the proportion of German qualified players has fallen recently it is still over 45%. One clear measure of the relative success of the English and German systems is the performance of the national teams: persistent disappointment and underachievement on one hand and consistent quality and success on the other.

So what chance for positive change for English professional football? Our clubs are public or private limited companies and there is no possibility of supporters being able to raise the funds to buy out major shareholders and replicate the German model. However the failure of the European Super League and increased supporter activism should prompt clubs to reconsider their priorities. Brexit might allow new regulations about the proportion of non-UK players employed by Prem clubs. A proportion of match day gates could be shared by home and away clubs (as they were up to 1983), allowing a fairer distribution of income, strengthening smaller clubs and so increasing competition.

Tracey Crouch MP has been appointed to carry out a root and branch inquiry into the governance of the game. She is an excellent choice: a football coach and a former sports Minister who resigned on a point of principle. Her inquiry might usefully reflect on a 2016 a paper from the Centre for Catholic Social Thought and Practice which argued for a reform of company law. The proposal is based on the moral claim that a company’s workers have a natural right of membership of the company that employs them. Legal recognition of this right would require companies to adopt a corporate purpose beyond the pursuit of shareholder value. Directors would have a duty to promote the success (not just the profits) of the company for the benefit of its members (not only its shareholders). This principle could be applied to football clubs so that supporters could become members and formally recognised as part of the enterprise. Directors would be required to take their views into account and to take a wide and longer-term view of the club’s success as guardians of its social and financial capital. It’s worth noting that clubs became limited liability companies to protect their investors from personal ruin, not so that directors could ride rough shod over fans or treat the club as a vanity project.

Such a reform would mean that football clubs were once again what they were always meant to be: clubs, organisations of people with a common purpose and interest, who meet regularly to take part in shared activities. Football would be returned to the people, and clubs would become a source of genuine local pride, youth opportunity and community celebration. This could only strengthen our national team. We might even beat Germany in a match that mattered.

Unless it came to penalties. Obviously.

Phil McCarthy is a GP in Bristol. He holds an MSc in global ethics, and for five years was the CEO of Caritas Social Action Network. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Edward Cadbury Centre for the Public Understanding of Religion.