London football

Published in Indian Express- May 24, 2005-URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=70902

Football, for love or for money?

Man Untd fans have been vociferously protesting the takeover by an American

Atul Bharadwaj

Besides the firebrand MP George Galloway, the other person who has been hogging the headlines in Britain is Malcolm Glazer. He is an American sports tycoon, whose claim to fame is that much against the wishes of football fans, he has managed to take over the ‘‘crown jewel’’ of British football — the Manchester United club. The tension generated by the liberalisation of football trade in Britain is almost a repeat of the stories one hears whenever foreign capital encroaches upon locals’ rights.
Last week, Malcolm Glazer became the owner of Man Untd., after securing 75 per cent of the club’s shares. He has bought the club at a cost of 800 million sterling pounds. Glazer has mortgaged the club’s assets, notably the Old Trafford stadium, to borrow 265 million from the US investment bank JP Morgan. Man Untd fans have been vociferously protesting the takeover by an American. The main point of contention between Glazer and fans is that the new owner is seen to be an outsider, with no love for the sport. Glazer is viewed as a profit seeking monster, whose quest for making millions out of the club is likely to ruin the club’s fortunes and future.
Six years ago, Rupert Murdoch had attempted to take over the club. Murdoch’s bid was thwarted by the anti-monopoly rules which are no longer in place. Therefore, the only option left with fans in a free market set-up, (apart from burning Glazer’s effigies) is to boycott the club, akin to not consuming coke to protest against the MNC. They are planning a Gandhi-esque sit-down in the middle of the pitch during next week’s FA cup final.
How far this will be feasible is difficult to assess primarily because football along with associated club activities is almost like opium for the British football fans. Glazer is not the first to commercialise the British working class game. Last year, a 37 year old Russian business tycoon Roman Abmramovich bought the Chelsea club for 250m pounds. Abmramovich is one of the chosen few Russian entrepreneurs who took advantage of the privatisation of Russia’s state assets in the mid-1990s. He is the core shareholder of Sibneft, the Russian oil company that owns the burovaya in western Siberia and 9,999 more oil rigs like it. His company Millhouse Capital is registered in Weybridge, Surrey, UK. According to The Guardian, Abmramovich has close connections with the British elite and Kent aristocracy. After Putin’s drive against the beneficiaries of the post-Soviet sell-out of state assets, Abmramovich shifted base to London.
Abmramovich is not as detested in Britain as Glazer is. One reason for this is that the Russian has invested in the club not for profit motive. May be, it is a gesture to the British, who may have backed the young man to be counted in the list of richest men in the world. Glazer, on the other hand, is seen to be using the club to fill his own coffers. Moreover, it is felt that the Russian may be more easily tamed.
The Russian owner of Chelsea invested huge sums to buy players from football markets around the globe. The result is that Chelsea has won the British Premiership league for the first time in 50 years. This should signal to the fans that free market mechanisms do act in the interest of the sport. However, the basic fear stems from the fact that the market’s penchant for procuring talent from other countries to boost profits adversely impacts on the growth of local talent. Quentin Letts argues in The Wall Street Journal that such an attitude of the Man Untd fans is a result of their failure to ‘‘accept the realities of capitalism’’.
This suggests that the fight is not just about football rights but also about principles of ownership of land and resources. Football is no longer a poor man’s game. It is a part and parcel of the global political economy, where oil is a precious commodity and hegemony is often resisted. It is neither the players nor the manufacturers of sports goods who form the backbone of the sports industry. People’s sentimental attachment and unqualified love for the sport is the basic raw material. It is this love which nurtures future players and takes it to the heights of popularity.
The problem is that the insatiable quest for profits leads one to neglect this support base forgetting that public involvement is a perishable commodity. Neither capital nor technology is capable of sustaining the continuous flow of this raw material. For example, the current communication technology brings the best global football actions into our drawing rooms. But has this been able to sustain Kolkata’s love for football? Kolkatans do watch the game, but with indifference. The result is that they have switched their loyalties to cricket, where their local hero Sourav Ganguly fulfills their spiritual needs.

The writer is a scholar at King’s College, London