Parliament is to be prorogued, the pound is on the slide, the Amazon and the Arctic are burning. In such a context, the demise of Bury football club, expelled from the English Football League (EFL) after 125 years of continuous membership, might seem regrettable, but hardly a matter of wider concern.
One could perhaps make the case that this is another signal of the social and economic decline of England’s small post-industrial towns and cities. However, many of the economic forces and political processes at work in Lancashire are also diminishing and devastating football and its communities across the planet.
In the long view, Bury’s situation is a product of nearly three decades of the globalisation and commercialisation of football, changes that have concentrated the game’s new wealth in the hands of a small number of clubs and created an unbridgeable gulf between them and the great hinterland of English professional and grassroots football. Simultaneously, the FA’s and EFL’s mechanisms for limiting these inequalities, and commercial power in football, have all been dismantled. The regulatory powers that they have retained have proved inadequate, easily evaded and rarely enforced.
The most proximate causes of Bury’s decline are the actions of its penultimate owner, Stewart Day, who recklessly pursued promotion by loaning the club money that was then converted to shares. This allowed Bury to circumvent the minimal regulations governing its finances and to buy players it could not afford. When Day’s property business collapsed the loans dried up and Bury, unable to pay its players or anyone else, teetered on bankruptcy.
Short-term relief came in the shape of a very expensive loan from a finance company that mortgaged the club’s stadium to a Maltese outfit whose own capital came from eight companies registered in the British Virgin Islands. The club was sold for £1 to another property magnate, Steve Dale, despite his failure to demonstrate to the EFL that he had the wherewithal to salvage it. He merely prolonged the agony long enough to arrange an insolvency process in which creditors, including a company linked to Day, were getting just 25% of what they were owed.
If nothing else, this tale illustrates that the idea of business people as just rational profit-oriented economic actors is wrong. Increasingly, they are deluded gamblers and chancers, who try to convert their wealth into pharaonic projects, social standing and, if not perhaps in Bury, into political power. Equally, it demonstrates, in a small way, the power and ubiquity of financial institutions and offshore capital, always ready to profit from others’ disasters. Above all, it shows that there is no protection in this world for the social and cultural capital that football clubs exemplify, for the regulatory systems designed to protect them are broken. In these respects, Bury’s fate is just part of a wider set of global trends in football.
Examples of the rich, the connected and the deluded turning to football can be found everywhere. Myanmar’s longstanding system of club football was swept aside when the junta decided to create its own league, paid for and run by magnates who depended on it for contracts and concessions. Hungarian football is increasingly dominated by allies of the football-obsessed prime minister, Viktor Orbán; leading members of his party, Fidesz, run a majority of the top division’s teams. So too, on their own turf, the royal houses of the Gulf, the presidents of Central Asia’s republics, the billionaires of Mexico, China’s giant corporations, Russia’s oligarchs and India’s industrialists. Everywhere, they have the money, connections and confidence to flout the rules and bend regulatory agencies, from Fifa and Uefa to local associations and leagues, to their will.
African football, a central element of urban life on the continent for more than a century, has been marginalised culturally and reduced to penury by the arrival of satellite TV and the mass export of fans’ affections and custom to European football in general, and the English Premier League in particular. The sharp rise in the number of African football migrants has impoverished the local game as a spectacle and it has as yet to improve its finances, skills base or infrastructure. What money is made is retained by private academies and rapacious administrators. The leading clubs, which could once draw huge numbers, serve as local and regional heralds and help sustain a rich culture of commentary, music and support, now play in front of pitiful crowds, culturally eclipsed by the lure of the European spectacle.
Latin American football, many of whose clubs are almost as old as Bury, has also lost its best players to the rest of the world, leaving just the very young and very old on the pitch. Much of the transfer wealth generated is siphoned off by investors who have bought a “share” of the player’s value, criminal gangs who take a tithe from these transactions and corrupt club directors. Meanwhile, the clubs’ debts to players and the tax authorities grow skyward.
The continent has yet to transfer its sporting affections overseas, but the local spectacle is a shrunken and bleaker version of its old self. The sporting and judicial authorities are unable and unwilling to regulate football’s enmeshment with money laundering and drug trafficking or deal with the pervasive violence and criminality of the game, let alone address its structural economic decline.
It may appear that it is just football clubs that have been colonised, football associations that have been neutered and football fans who have been traduced, but global capitalism will undermine and ransack whatever cultural capital and communities it can commodify, until we choose to try to stop it.
• David Goldblatt is the author of The Game of Our Lives.
