Whatever you do, don’t take an inflatable football into Forest Green Rovers’ ground otherwise you can expect “the Treatment” from the stewards…
Stewards at Forest Green ejected a Grimsby Town fan from the ground before kick off – apparently for playing with an inflatable football.
Several people – including at least six stewards were seen to physically eject the man from the ground, and one appeared to have him in a headlock.
It’s a rather sad indictment of the media’s coverage that MP for Portsmouth North Penny Mordaunt’s joke speech in the Commons makes the front page of a Sunday newspaper. This at a time when a proper debate is ongoing in the wake of Owen Paterson’s and Cameron’s speeches earlier this week regarding our membership of the EU and immigration.
We’re not sure that a slightly silly speech by Penny Mordaunt as a “bet” on behalf of her constituents warrants front page coverage. But we have long given up on the media having a sensible debate on anything serious as Evan Davis demonstrated on BBC’s Newsnight earlier this week.
However this blog rather more fondly remembers her gallant efforts to remove a certain Andrew Andronikou as administrator to Portsmouth Football Club, efforts which turned out to be successful.
Andronikou had previously been an administrator at Swindon Town FC and memories of his time there are less than kind to this blogger. If we were to be very generous we could consider that he had a questionable integrity. In our original post we slightly pulled our punches and it is the only post which has been published on here that was “legalled” before publishing.
So here on TBF we are entirely grateful for the efforts of Penny Mordaunt…
Without being presumptuous it must have been a rather surreal week for Dan Ware. There he is going about his daily business, his only “crime” being that his house is draped in England flags with a white van parked in his driveway and he becomes, through no fault of his own, the centre of a political scandal and resignations.
It’s rather ironic for a chap who himself admits he does not vote that he has created more political waves by hanging up an England flag than casting a vote via the ballot box. How very revealing…
Labour MP Emily Thornberry, who tweeted a picture of the house, then compounded the feeling that Labour et al are out of touch by attempted to excuse her faux-pas by claiming that it was an “amazing image”. The phrase “you should get out more” springs to mind here. Not unsurprisingly Ed Miliband does not come out of the episode well either as Labour, run by a metropolitan elite, comes under ever increasing scrutiny that it is losing its core working class support.
It’s also interestingly symbolic that the flags on Mr Ware’s house were of England, not of the UK, which he had flown to celebrate the World Cup:
The father of four said he had simply put up the three St George flags to celebrate the World Cup, and that it was ‘not political’.
Here we see an example of this unappreciated and largely unnoticed change in recent years of the increasing tendency of England football fans no longer universally flying the Union flag of the nation team but instead waving the flag of St George. As a national sport, national tensions and issues tends to spill out onto “the terraces” thus it can be a good indication of the nation’s woes – a canary down the mine.
Local rivalries are a classic example – the bitterness surrounding Chesterfield against Mansfield is a reflection of the 1984 miners strike and the reasons behind the intense rivalry of Liverpool and Manchester Untied is laid bare by the reference to the Manchester Ship Canal on United’s badge.
Thus if we look back to the 1966 World Cup final, it is curious from a modern perspective (aside from England actually winning a trophy) to see the number of Union flags being waved among the crowd in support of England:
A practice that continued into the 1970 World Cup in Mexico – here England against Brazil…
…right up to the 1990s. Here are England fans in Italia 1990:
The World Cup in Japan 2002:
…and in 2010 in South Africa:
In addition in 1996 there was also the context that the obviously incoming Labour government, against the loser Major, was openingly advocating devolution, particularly to Scotland as promised by Blair’s speech in Blackpool 1996:
I vow that, with the consent of the people, we will have devolved power to Scotland, Wales and the regions of England…
Devolution was always a Pandora’s Box – give politicians power (in this case SNP) and they want more. Labour is now reaping the “rewards” for unleashing consequences that they didn’t understand nor anticipated. In Scotland it has lead to the independence referendum, which despite the “yes” camp losing has not settled the issue. Labour is also now under pressure from the SNP at the next election. And in England it has lead to a rise of Englishness which even Miliband acknowledged awkwardly in 2012. He put Euro ’96 down to…
Since Euro 96, English football fans have helped to reclaim the flag of St George from the BNP.
That may have been the unintended consequences, but Miliband overlooks that instead of reclaiming the flag of St George from the BNP, it is a demonstration of the Union fragmenting and England reasserting themselves.
With the England football team’s, not entirely unexpected, dismal early exit from the World Cup in Brazil, we see the usual media post-mortem analysis of where it all went wrong. Two themes always emerge when attempting to analyse what went wrong; that footballers are paid too much and that there are too many foreigners in English football.
However given England’s international record since 1950 both theories can be seen to be clear fallacies. 1966 aside, England’s record in international tournaments has generally been very poor. England has never reached a final on foreign soil and they have won only five knockout games in any World Cup played outside their own country; none of them against any so-called ‘football superpowers’ such as Germany or Italy.
This poor record occurred during the maximum wage era – ended by the landmark Eastham case in 1963 – as well as during the far more prosperous English Premier League (EPL) incarnation. And no one could argue that a half-fit Luis Suarez playing for Uruguay against England only showed passion because he is on minimum wage when playing for Liverpool. Thus that the fault lies with players’ lack of passion due to being paid too much doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
The other criticism is of too many foreigners in the EPL (foreign players currently make up over 60%). However when the English leagues consisted of almost only British players during the ’70’s and ’80’s it’s worth noting England failed to qualify for the World Cup in 1974 and 1978, and as for the European Championships in 1988…well that’s best forgotten.
England’s record has been largely abysmal regardless of how many or how few foreigners play in the English game. And as Soccernomics argues England’s record has actually improved since 1992 (the beginning of the EPL) – averaging 1.69 points per game up from 1.4 per game pre-1992.
Yet the obvious fallacies behind the proposed reasons of England’s poor international record doesn’t stop the likes of the ‘award winning‘ Telegraph football correspondent Henry Winter putting forward ‘solutions’ to England’s perennial abject performances. He complains bitterly:
When England were blown away by the fast, intelligent, ruthless movement of Germany in Bloemfontein at the last World Cup four years ago, this newspaper carried a “10-point plan to save the face of English football following shame in South Africa”. Only three of the points have been achieved, leaving little surprise that England continue to lag behind more sophisticated footballing nations.
And one of his solutions that was not adopted?
The issue of quotas, suggested in Point Eight of “Six plus five adds up”, focused on the influx of foreigners into the Premier League and the blocking of the pathway for younger English players, an issue at the heart of Greg Dyke’s FA commission.
It seems to have escaped the ‘award winning’ Mr Winter’s attention that such quotas, even if they worked, are against EU law. And nor is this an obscure EU ruling. Instead it is one of the most well known infamous moments in English football history – the Bosman ruling. And not just Bosman but also ECJ judgements regarding Dona, Kolpak and Simutenkov.
One of the consequences of Bosman in particular was that it prohibited domestic leagues in EU member states, and UEFA, from imposing quotas on foreign players to the extent that they discriminated against other EU states. The judgement was hardly a surprise given that free movement of people is one of the fundamental freedoms of the Single Market – based on what is now Article 45 (2) of the Lisbon Treaty which established the rights of EU nationals to work on a non-discriminatory basis in any Member State.
Previously UEFA had a rule which prohibited teams in its competitions, namely the Champions League, Cup Winners’ Cup and UEFA Cup, from naming more than three “foreign” players in their squads for any game – a rule which had led to the embarrassing defeat by Barcelona of Manchester United in 1994. After the ruling, quotas could only be applied to non EU-players only.
Mr Winter should (and I suspect does) know better but it’s revealing that he fails to acknowledge this. Thus it appears that it is not just Telegraph political correspondents who have myopia when it comes to the UK’s membership of the EU but football ones as well.
The Bosman ruling had profound consequences right across the EU – in all sports but one of its greatest impacts was felt in the Premier League. To maybe understand why, we need to revisit the consequences of the establishment of the Premier League in the early ’90s.
The Hillsborough disaster in 1989 was a watershed in British sport and it essentially resulted in two main legacies – safer stadiums and its more dubious cousin the birth of the Premier League.
Football in the UK has largely been governed since the 19th century by an uneasy alliance between two bodies; the Football Association (FA) and the Football League (FL).
The FA can rightly claim to be the first such football body in the world which not only first codified the rules but helped develop the popularity of the game. And, not unusually for a Victorian sporting institution, it has always retained an amateur ethos – a determination to remain a “purity” different from commercial interests. It was a public school cocooned world.
This ‘purity’ was challenged in the late 19th century by the establishment of the hugely popular football league, a league competition led mainly by the rise of working-class northern clubs who could not afford such luxuries as ‘amateurism’. Professionals they had to be out of necessity. In very simplistic terms such a divide between the FA and the FL can be seen as a north/south one, not too dissimilar to the divide which was more explicitly expressed in the form of two sets of codes in rugby.
Most other countries in the world which started from scratch avoided this seperation of the governing body and the League. Instead they established a single football federation governing the lot…this mistake, not replicated by other countries, would come back to haunt the UK.
From the start the FL was concerned about ensuring a degree of equality between its member clubs – on almost a socialist model it wanted to ensure that money was divided equally within the whole league structure on the basic premise that every club needed each other for a basic competition to exist. A model that largely worked for circa 100 years.
But with the influx of television money in the 1980s the bigger clubs (then known as the big five) in the top division wanted to break away from the FL’s rigid formula of distributing money throughout the leagues and instead keep all the money for themselves. Despite initial resistance from the FA the big five’s opportunity to breakaway came via Hillsborough.
Lord Justice Taylor, in his Final Report, had identified that one of the many failings in football at the time was due to a lack of leadership, a lack of vision, due to the inherent archaic conflict between the FA and the FL. What football badly needed was one strong governing body. In the spirit of Lord Taylor’s report the FL produced a document called, one game, one team, one voice. It proposed an end to football’s historic divisions and the establishment of one joint board, six members from the FA and six for the FL to run football.
However the FA, with self interest most acute, saw this as ‘parking tanks on its lawn’ and thus in response betrayed their own game by instead allowing the breakaway of the top division with its permission in a selfish attempt to destroy the power of the FL.
The result was a Premiership division, under FA governance, with clubs standing on the threshold of undreamt riches intoxicated by the injection of further money by Sky television. No longer would money have to be distributed throughout the leagues, instead the PL kept most of it if not all. But the unintended consequence was that the FA created a monster which it could no longer control.
This PL monster, now greedily independent of the rest of the football league, was then given a substantial steroid injection by the Bosman ruling in 1995.
After the ruling, a player was free to leave as soon as his contract expired. Thus power moved away from clubs towards players; they could now demand very large signing-on fees and salaries, on the basis that the club they were joining had not had to pay a penny in transfer fees. Clubs became powerless to stop their best players leaving at the end of their existing deals. Wages soared and in the UK this was funded by more and more television money. Not expectantly this attracted ever greater numbers of foreign players into the EPL – over 1,500 in the last 20 years and most from the EU. 169 players have come from France alone.
Yet while we take the view from a purist football fan perspective the PL has been negative innovation in destroying the integrity of the English league system, we recognise that the PL is a major contributor to the economy, we cannot avoid the fact that the economic figures it generates are staggering.
In 2011/12 for example the revenue of the 20 Premier League clubs was over £2.3 billion, while five clubs each generated revenue greater than that of the entire First Division twenty years previously.
Last year the contribution of the EPL clubs alone – just 20 of them – to the Exchequer was over £1bn. Just Premier League football in Manchester on its own rakes in the equivalent of an Olympic and Paralympic Games combined for the economy every four seasons and English clubs spent a record sum last summer in transfers amounting to a total of more than half a billion pounds.
The financial behemoth that is the EPL means it is extremely popular with both domestic and foreign fans. In England, for example 32 per cent of the adult population state that they are actively engaged Premier League football. And it was a sector which remained resilient when the recession struck.
And in addition the EPL plays an important part in British tourism. In 2012 there were nearly a million foreign football tourists who visited the UK spending £706million – or £785 per fan – around £200 more than the average spend for a visitor to the UK.
The following of the Premier League globally is 1.46 billion – or 70 per cent of the world’s estimated 2.08 billion football fans. The EPL therefore, liked or not, is a most potent instrument of soft power the UK possesses. As an EU Commission paper noted in 2007-08:
…the Premier League has become much more than just the United Kingdom’s most popular regular sporting competition. It has also become an important economic agent, with a significant impact on employment, GDP and national and local economies. A number of related industries have benefited from the Premier League’s strength, including broadcasting, marketing and other communications industries, and the travel, tourism and hospitality industries. Premier League Clubs have become the social focus of many urban communities and are often the most prominent symbol of their cities in the UK and around the world.
The economic success of the Premier League generates significant taxation revenues for national and local government, giving the Government and local authorities a direct interest in the continued economic health of our competition. It is therefore important to bear in mind that, in considering the impact of the EU on sport, the relevant policies include employment, the internal market, economic development, trade, judicial and legal services, social inclusion, and regional policy as well as sport itself.
Thus if we are to win a referendum, reassurance needs to be made that the world’s most watched league is not adversely affected.
What Margaret Thatcher seemingly failed to appreciate, but largely her Prime Ministerial successors did (albeit some superficially, not naming names – Cameron) is that the majority of football fans, and indeed sports fans in general, are above all else taxpayers and voters. Thus millions in the UK who follow the EPL need to be onside in order to win.
The Bosman ruling is by no means the only EU interference in domestic sport and interestingly there has been long running disputes between the international regulator FIFA and EU law. These we will address in part 2.
Autonomous Mind today highlights the contrast in coverage of the Conservatives and the coverage of UKIP. The UKIP’s stories clearly concentrate on the antics of leader Nigel Farage which is hardly surprising given that the man is the party and the party is the man.
As a consquence it’s not UKIP policies that take precedent but Farage himself still having to justify and deny allegations yet again about his private life – all the while consuming yet more copious quantities of alcohol.
Now it’s true that the Mail on Sunday article portrays a far from sympathetic tone, for example this particular paragraph:
[Farage] had no time for the homeless man who tried to sell him The Big Issue, ignoring him completely.
After the bedraggled toothless chap eventually gave up and trudged off, Farage quipped: ‘That’s the first Big Issue seller I’ve come across for a while who isn’t a Romanian immigrant!’
He doesn’t ‘do’ compassion.
In another article we have this:
UKIP leader Nigel Farage has come under fire for using taxpayers’ money to pay for a swanky penthouse suite in Brussels.
The Euro MP, who has previously criticised the European Union for its wastefulness, is renting the luxury property in one of the most exclusive addresses in the Belgian capital.
In many ways it comes as little surprise that newspapers adopt a hostile tone. When a party aims to overturn the establishment status quo in terms of EU membership, the cosy alliance of the three biggest parties and the media’s self-interest in maintaining that status quo, any upstart is undoubtedly going to be treated unfairly.
The crucial strategy when fighting the status quo is to become grudgingly respected if not liked. This can be achieved by dealing with policy detail, establishing oneself as an authority on a subject (in UKIP’s case the EU) and – in contrast to others – being seen to be above board in honesty; for example not employing your wife, and mistress, on the taxpayers’ expense.
Thus that UKIP would be subjected to smears is no surprise. However shallow smears can always be conteracted by substance. Without substance empty rhetoric is no defence.
The crucial point with UKIP is how much are smears and how much is true? Ironically we turn to Farage to answer this question. He does so by comparing UKIP to Millwall Football Club:
‘We’re like Millwall Football Club, “Everyone hates us and we don’t care!”
Firstly I would suggest that as a leader of a political party it’s not entirely conducive to revel in the principle of “everyone hates us, we don’t care”. It tends not to result in many votes.
It’s true that Millwall’s famous chant of: “no-one likes us, we don’t care” is a masterpiece of defiance, in tune I guess with some aspects of UKIP which Farage indulges in. Yet conversely it is also a masterpiece of irony. If Millwall supporters truly didn’t care, their club would not be defined by a chant that said they didn’t.
But more importantly why has Farage compared UKIP to Millwall at all – a club that is associated with thuggery and violence? Even those of a non-football persuasion are fully aware of Millwall’s toxic reputation. Is Farage suggesting they’re all angels simply misunderstood?
We do not doubt that many Millwall fans are normal law-abiding supporters, unfortunately tarnished as they are by their club’s reputation. Yet as a club they didn’t earn their infamy through unfairness.
No-one sat looking at a map and stuck a pin highlighting South Bermondsey saying let’s just pick on these chaps for no reason. Millwall earned their reputation. They can complain all they like that they are singled out but a mirror is sometimes useful. Yes their coverage is often unfavourable but a significant number don’t do the club any favours.
So in many ways Farage’s analogy was correct in a way he probably did not intend. Many of those in UKIP are hardworking volunteers let down by a minority. With no exit plan, a lack of a decent website, a party bereft of policies that are not “drivel” is it any wonder that the media have little else to concentrate on?
So a great deal of one of the Daily Mail articles contains Farage having to deny that he had an affair with Annabelle Fuller:
Has he had sex with Annabelle Fuller? ‘I don’t think we should go into the grisly details.’
Has he slept with her? ‘No.’ Has he kissed her? ‘No. When you work in a tight team, I understand why people might get the wrong idea.’
Why hadn’t he denied it immediately in the European Parliament? Farage falls back on his best weapon: wit. ‘There’s an old saying, if you pick a fight with a chimney sweep you get covered in soot!’
A denial despite that this has been an open secret in the party for years and Fuller herself has openingly boasted about said liason to UKIP delegates in the past. Farage is being less than candid here. Ultimately regardless of Farage’s unconvincing response the entire episode detracts from any kind of important issues that UKIP might campaign on. His personal life, paid for by the taxpayer is becoming a hinderance.
And still there is much more to be released about Farage and his entourage. That they have not been made public in media is down to use of Carter Ruck. Thus we suspect that some of the current “smears” are schadenfreude on behalf of journalists who have been on the receiving end of Carter Ruck when investigating numerous alleged misdemeanours – resulting in non-disclosure settlements. For some journalists, with fingers burnt, it’s become personal.
Like Millwall, there are smears and facts – and often the former depends heavily on the latter. Criticising those that point out that the emperor has no clothes does not necessarily make them incorrect however uncomfortable the truth.
In the spirit of Farage we’ll use another football analogy – we may criticise the manager if he’s not up to it, but to do so does not make us a lesser supporter of our club.
Three police officers whose “honesty and integrity” have been questioned by the police watchdog will not face disciplinary action over allegations that they lied to try and discredit Andrew Mitchell at the height of the plebgate affair.
So reports the Guardian. It was pretty clear at the time that the policeman’s account was somewhat inconsistent, not that means anyone will be disciplined. Interestingly though the former Tory whip states:
“It is a decision which will undermine confidence in the ability of the police to investigate misconduct when the reputation of the police service as a whole is at stake.
Well yes but it’s hardly anything new, but the only reason it makes the news in this instance is precisely for the reason he is a former Tory whip. Mitchell continues:
“My family and I have waited nearly a year for these police officers to be held to account and for an apology from the police forces involved. It seems we have waited in vain.”
At this point one might consider that those of Liverpool have waited nearly 25 years for police officers to be held to account in one of the biggest police corruption scandals in UK history. A cover up that went right to the top of the political tree and remained so for years. Mr Mitchell’s concerns are not police corruption per se but those that affect him directly
As someone who has been stopped and searched under a Section 60 (a policy introduced incidentally by the Tories) more than once and had £20 notes ‘confiscated’ from my wallet because “they could potentially be used as weapons” the disclosure that policemen have; “honesty and integrity” issues comes as no surprise whatsoever.
Perhaps, unbelievably, the England national team might manage a more dignified defence tonight of our country than Cameron.
I truly can’t be bothered to devote much of my time to providing a critical analysis of this pathetic article by the Telegraph;
A limited package of new laws reflects the approaching general election, and points the way to Conservatives and Lib Dems living separate lives, says James Kirkup
Only to say…in a word; Brussels.
It comes to something when a football manager’s resignation genuinely has more significance than the Queen’s speech.
While reading in the Telegraph a report of the inept performance that was England last night, one is amused by the adverts that appear underneath (pictured above)
One wonders if it’s 5 days early, a Freudian slip by the pro-EU paper or the Telegraph’s odd way of mocking the Cypriots?
Just seen this from a Guardian report on Friday about recreating football matches played during the Christmas truce of World War I as part of next year’s centenary celebrations. Andrew Murrison, Minister for International Security Strategy, in the Ministry of Defence said (my emphasis):
…that staging a football match in Belgium on the battlefields where soldiers had briefly put down their weapons was “a no-brainer in terms of an event that is going to reach part of the community that perhaps might not get terribly entrenched into this”.
One wonders if he could have worded that better…
The Boiling Frog 
