A clear-eyed investigation into English football
For a few weeks each summer, it used to be possible to forget about football. Nowadays, even without the European championships or World Cup to fill the gap, there's always plenty going on: managerial sackings, transfer speculation, Champions League qualifiers and so on. What might look like strange timing on the part of David Conn's publishers – a book about last year's Premier League champions, brought out now – is really a reflection of the 365-days-a-year modern game.
It's a book as much about money as about football, but certain games are described in detail, none more dramatic than the one that the perpetually disappointed supporters of Manchester City assumed was at last ushering in sustained success. They'd gone into the game as favourites but as the final whistle approached they found themselves needing two goals – typical City, they'd gone and blown it again. The first goal, at the end of normal time, seemed mere consolation. But deep in injury time, amazingly, came a second, and the fans went wild, Conn among them: "I was on my feet too, of course I was, stunned by the drama, of football's natural capacity to create stories, by what was clearly, apparent even then, a landmark in the trajectory of the club."
No, this wasn't the climax of last season, when Manchester City scored twice at the death to win the Premier League, but the Third Division play-off final against Gillingham in May 1999, which City won on penalties after drawing 2-2. For Conn it was a turning point in more ways than one. Though excited to be part of the crowd, he also felt strangely detached, as though this wasn't his club any more and that "somebody who really did not deserve it was going to make a great deal of money out of all this."
The story will be familiar to anyone who loves football but dislikes a lot that has happened to it over the past couple of decades. One of three boys growing up in a middle-class Jewish home in the late 1960s (his father was a solicitor, his mother a freelance journalist), Conn became a City fan almost by accident, when he was six: asked to choose between clubs, he looked at their two badges (United's a red devil with horns, City's a rose beneath a ship) and opted for light blue. The choice would mean him missing out on a good deal of glory. But City were a good club in those days and he saw some famous victories at Maine Road.
Back then, tickets weren't expensive, there was no club store selling overpriced tat, and you stood rather than sat to watch the game. Conn preferred watching football to playing it. Partly it was the bleakness of the municipal pitches round Salford: the freezing wind, the mud, the piss-smelling changing rooms. Out in the cold, on the lost fields, you felt lonely, even though part of a team, whereas watching City, in a crowd, was an ecstatic collective experience.
Or could be. The club declined horribly over the next couple of decades, for reasons that Conn documents lucidly. He too went through many changes – his parents broke up, the family moved, he studied Eng lit at university, then trained as a lawyer. Retaining a season ticket at City was the one constant – "a rock, a freedom and a pleasure". But the pleasure could be melancholy. At some point City fans adopted the melancholic "Blue Moon" as their anthem. When City went down two divisions, the fans sang a comic, surrealist ditty of disbelief as well: "We are not, we're not really here, / We are not, we're not really here, / Just like the man from The Invisible Man, / We're not really here."
These days the same words express a different kind of incredulity – that City have Carlos Tévez, Yaya Touré, David Silva and Mario Balotelli in the team; that the club, owned by an oil sheikh, is now the richest in the world. It's quite a turn-around, even bigger than Chelsea's, after Roman Abramovich took over. But it doesn't gladden the heart of neutrals – or the heart of David Conn.
As the subtitle says, this is a tale about growing up, which in his case meant getting wise to the commercial realities of the game. The moment of revelation came long before Sheikh Mansour bought the club from the former Thai prime minister and tax avoider Thaksin Shinawatra. It came in the mid-1990s when the despised chairman Peter Swales was deposed in favour of Francis Lee. Lee had been a hero as a City player, the scorer of a goal so breathtaking that the young Conn, seeing it on television, crawled across the carpet and kissed Franny's face on the screen. But when Conn (now a budding investigative sports journalist) examined the small print, he uncovered a world of corporate greed, stock market flotations, executive dining suites and naked self-interest – not the football club he thought he knew, but Man City plc.
Probing further, Conn went to Lancaster Gate, to study the rules established by the game's governing body, the FA, at its outset. Among them was Rule 34, brought in to prevent investors exploiting football clubs as business opportunities. After Sky came along with its bonanza of TV rights, several top clubs including Manchester City found a way to bypass the rule, so that shareholders could walk away with large profits. That these clubs might be owned by their supporters, or share some of their winnings with smaller clubs, or benefit the often deprived areas in which they're situated were ideas that were trampled on in the Premier League gold rush.
Some of what Conn unearthed is well known by now, but no other journalist has pursued the story so exhaustively. And though to a lay reader the financial and legal detail in this book can seem excessive, and the treatment of City's Abu Dhabi owners surprisingly gentle (even Conn seems surprised by how much he respects them), the case against the privatisation and financial carve-up of the game is passionately made. He contrasts how things are in England with the German model, where clubs are more inclusive and fans don't pay exorbitant prices to see games.
These days Conn no longer prefers watching sport to playing it. Indeed, as a runner and five-a-side regular, he's evangelical about the benefits of physical exercise: rather than sit watching multimillionaires run around, people should get off their butts, he writes. Still, he was there in the crowd in May, when City won their first title for 44 years. And despite the detachment he thought he felt, he couldn't help welling up.
• Blake Morrison's The Last Weekend is published by Vintage. Read More [category Sport][tags Sport and leisure, Books, Culture, Manchester City, Football, Premier League 2011-12, Premier League]
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