proposals for the game:

This week Gordon Brown had discussions with the Premiership regarding the state of the UK game. I was tempted to say Gordon Brown ‘waded into discussions’ but haven’t because this makes football sound like a pub brawl. And it isn’t. Presumably he wants to ensure that “BRITISH players play for BRITISH teams in a successful, and globally competitive, BRITAIN”. Or something like that. Who can blame him. He’s the Prime Minister. It is his job, as he sees it, to crank up the populist rhetoric. I do wish Gordon Brown would stop shouting words like BRITAIN and BRITISH though, as it makes me feel edgy. Like Oswald Mosey’s heavy mob could come bursting into the flat at any moment and start demanding that my girlfriend jumps on the fist plane back to South America.

Gordon Brown is on safe territory as a football friendly PM. Football being Europe’s social cement and everything. If, as I suspect, the national team starts performing better, which it has to sometime, and premiership teams devise better youth and coaching programmes, which they should do anyway, then he can claim part of the credit and his reputation will be swept up in the sense of glory and mild euphoria that flows from successful sporting enterprises. If, on the other hand, nothing much happens, well, at least it looks as if he tried.

Politicians of course love sport, it connects them to the so called common man and aggrandises them simultaneously. Sportsmen and managers love politicians too, because, ultimately, politicians allocate funding, and set tax friendly laws for rich people, and sport always requires either one or the other. So while the Premiership may say that it is apolitical and does not welcome meddling from politicians, and would prefer to self regulate, expect at the very least a bit of two way lip service from both parties as football’s role as a highly entertaining thought-stultifyer of the masses carries on unabated.

Ideologically it would probably be better for us if football went back to being the national pastime rather than the national obsession. If it were a diverting amateur pursuit that eased regional and national tensions rather than a mega-global entertainment industry. Then of course the tax revenue from the game would diminish and the treasury would be poorer, the standards of the game would slip, and the national prestige and social cohesion arising from all this would slip too. We would finally have our priorities right however. As this is never going to happen though let us look at things as they are a bit closer.

Paul Parker, I could just about remember him, was on the record saying nasty things about overpaid foreigners today http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/internationals/7095794.stm. How the Premiership is not the best league in the world, just the best paid one. If you extrapolate any racistish sentiment from his comments he has point. If you want football to operate in what is, rightly or wrongly, identified as the national interest, as opposed to the interests of the filthy rich corporations that embody it, then there should be structural changes.

Let’s float a few speculative proposed changes and ideas into the box then. Sorry for the heavy handed haphazard metaphor there. Unforgivable.

1) Teams to take a more active role in community coaching. For the FA to pay for professional coaches, and ex-players, to work alongside school and local youth teams. Not as a one off, but regularly, week in, week out.

2) For all European club youth teams to consist of a large majority of national players, and, if they wish to recruit from abroad, to properly pay back the system that grew the talent. Effectively contributing to the game abroad, rather than just signing the cream of the crop. The same incidentally should apply in other industries. If the NHS benefits from recruiting foreign nurses they should pay back the third world states who have paid for their education.


3) Any proposals for limits on foreign players to be outlawed and the basis that they are silly, and illegal.

BUT

4) For all European teams to put a limit on transfer fees and wages. No-one, know matter how clever there feet and short the career, deserves to earn more than £50,000 a week. This would calm the transfer market, and increase interest in recruiting homegorwn talent… I’m open to being given a convincing moral reason why anyone should be allowed earn more than 50K a week. But I suspect that it does not exist.

OK- let’s see how we get on with those for now. But one last thing- should England qualify all this talk of improving the game will fade away, and in a few weeks we will be told how the game is in its rudest ever health, thanks to the money in the game.