Is Football Broken?

we are living through a golden age of football this sport has never been more widely played or viewed both in stadiums and on television and players have never been better remunerated for their talents so why do so many football fans feel disillusioned with the sports and like something magical that caused them to fall in love with football has been lost is it Saudi Arabia offering 1 billion euros for a single season of Killian mbappe the ease with which Manchester City won their third successive premier league title or social media accounts seemingly celebrating ticket prices increasing by 1660 percent pricing anyone who isn't extremely wealthy out of watching their local team well I would contest that the answer is actually none of the above but rather that they are merely symptoms of a deeper malaise there is rotted the world of football from the inside Club football is now less competitive and more predictable than it has ever previously been and is increasingly controlled almost exclusively by a charcuterie of amoral billionaires and bloodthirsty or authoritarian regimes most of whom actually have next to no interest in their Sports and when you put it like that well it doesn't sound like quite so much of a golden age anymore does it so in today's video I want to try and examine weather as it is so often claimed football really is broken what that word even means in this context when it broke if indeed that is the case who broke it why it is still so immensely popular for something that has supposedly suffered such a fate and what the prospects of it ever being fixed are I know it's quite a lot to get through so I'll cut back on my usual rambling introductions and just get right into it it is an interesting Paradox that football is at its most popular when it is least competitive in theory the weakening of competition and the increased predictability of results and Trophy winners that we see every season or to weak in the sports as a spectacle and as a product what has happened is the precise opposite in the six seasons before the Breakaway of the Premier League in 1992 four different teams won the first division title namely Arsenal Liverpool Leeds and Everton the First Premier League TV deal in 1992 was worth 191.5 million pounds by 1997 five years into the project Manchester United had won four out of a possible five Premier League titles the sole exception coming in 1995 when Blackburn Rovers pipped them to their Title by just a solitary Point yet the Premier League's second TV deal in 1997 by which stage English football's top flights was just objectively much less competitive was worth 670 million pounds an increase of 250 percent the Premier League's foreign and domestic TV right still for the three-year cycle from 2022 to 2025 is now worth north of 10 billion pounds making it by far the most lucrative league in all of world football that is despite the fact that Manchester City have now won five out of the last six Premier League titles one of them by as many as 19 points they won the treble this season and they are big favorites to win a fourth successive Premier League Crown next season very plainly then competition alone or the lack thereof and the accompanying predictability that brings with it is not enough to deter people's interest in football on its own I've long been interested in why that is the case and it is something that we will come on to but first of all it is worth examining why football became so uncompetitive in the first place it's often said that football has always been all about money points tallies have always correlated roughly with budgets and the biggest teams have always hoovered up the most trophies that is maybe 50 true money has always played a role in football having more of it has rarely hurt anyone and the biggest teams winning most of the trophies is almost necessarily true but is just circular reasoning at least if you define biggest as meaning something akin to the most successful huddersville town for example were one of the biggest clubs in England during the 1920s when they were winning things but few would argue that they are now it's also 50 false though money may always have played a role but the suggestion that its role hasn't grown exponentially in prominence throughout the last half century and particularly over the last two to three decades is just flat out wrong sticking with the example of English football just for the time being as the oldest but also now the most lucrative Football League pyramid on the planet until 1960 the football league had a maximum wage and actually sat at just four pounds a week in 1900 the maximum wage was gradually increased over time peaking at 20 pounds a week in 1958 before it was abolished in 1960. in 1939 the eight pound maximum wage for footballers was double the average salary for a man with an industrial job which was used as a justification for it being more than adequate by 1960 however when the wage limit was abolished the highest paid footballers were only paid 1.5 times as much as the average industrial wage so in real terms their pay had fallen 25 in 21 years to put that 1.5 x figure into some context erling Harland who was the highest paid player in the Premier League last season was paid 1639 times as much as the average worker in the United Kingdom meanwhile the contract Saudi Arabia reportedly offered Killian mbappe would equate to over 15 000 times the average salary in Saudi Arabia so you know that is a slight difference I suppose what's more because there was a maximum wage imposed for so long and pretty much every Club could afford to pay someone 20 pounds a week if they wanted to there was no real Financial incentive for players to move clubs Stanley Matthews who is arguably still England's greatest ever footballer only ever played for Stoke City and Blackpool earning the football league's maximum wage for almost 30 years he could have joined Arsenal or Manchester United both of whom would have loved to have signed him along with everyone else and where he would have been much more likely to win trophies but they couldn't actually have paid him any more money than Blackpool or Stoke since Matthews was from Stoke on Trent then and had all of his friends and family there and owned a hotel in Blackpool where he also spent a lot of time he chose to live and work exclusively in Stoke and Blackpool perhaps if no team could pay a player more than let's say 2 000 or even 10 000 pounds a week now Jack grealish would still be at Aston Villa Luke Shaw at Southampton and James Madison at Coventry City when pressed the North End Legend sir Tom Finney discussed his status as a de facto one club man who devoted his career to his Boyhood Club despite being one of the best players on the planet and the praise that he received for doing so in his autobiography he was quick to point out that he wasn't really that loyal because he couldn't earn more money anywhere else had he been playing now Finney wrote in 2004 then there's no way that he would have spent his entire career at Preston North End by contrast if Stoke City or Preston had a player of Matthews or Finney's caliber now they would most likely be poached for a nominal fee while still playing Academy football or failing that after a single season like Jude Bellingham at Birmingham city it has become impossible now for anyone other than about 11 clubs in all of world football it's a keep hold of anyone with genuine star power for more than a couple of Seasons at most so the money now is totally incomparable to previous generations with the most growth actually having come in recent years when the Premier League started in 1992 John Barnes was the League's highest paid player on 10 000 pounds a week in 2001 Soul Campbell became the League's first 100 000 pound a week player now we are on the verge of the first one million pound a week player in English football and some argue that we may already be there depending upon which reports you choose to believe with regard to erling Harlan's various bonuses and contract Clauses the highest paid player in World football 10 years ago was Cristiano Ronaldo on 21.9 million dollars a year at Real Madrid Kelly and mbappe is reported to have just been offered 775 million dollars to spend a single season playing for al-hilal that is a 35 times increase in just the last 10 years following the same trajectory as that you would have a footballer being paid over 27 billion a year year by 2033 enough to make them the richest person on the planet over the course of a 10-year career of course that is unlikely to happen but who would have predicted that Killian and Bape could be earning 13.5 million euros a week playing in Saudi Arabia next season when he scored a hat-trick in the World Cup Final in December let alone 10 years ago there are no longer any safe predictions in football and certainly not when it comes to the spiraling finances of the sport whereas football clubs used to be owned by wealthy local businessmen merchants and Factory owners now they're owned by hedge funds and foreign countries even someone like Jack Walker who was once the poster boy of Premier League spending at Blackburn Rovers during the 1990s was only estimated to have a master personal Fortune of 600 million pounds I use the word only very cautiously there of course but that sized Fortune would today make him the fifth poorest owner in the Premier League with less than naught Point naught one percent of the wealth of the League's richest donors namely Saudi Arabia's Sovereign wealth fund so it's not just that the money in football is incomparable now to at any stage in the past by multiple orders of magnitude but it's what that money can do the clubs with the most money who pay the highest transfer fees and the most in wages now invariably sign the best players to an extent that just wasn't previously the case the super rich clubs have now started to monopolize talents with their own of financing and football related income cementing their status at the top of the sports food chain and allowing them to make mistakes that would be disastrous or fatal for just about everyone else a significant element of risk and Jeopardy therefore upon which the excitement and entertainment of almost all sports is surely built has long been lost in football the reason why we have seen the first ever 100 Point seasons in Italy Spain and England and Invincible seasons in 10 yes 10 different European leagues since 2010 isn't just because teams started trying harder or had single fairy tale campaigns it is because of the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of just a tiny number of clubs both domestically and internationally and the increasing concentration of talent that comes with it we see this almost everywhere Premier League hegemony in Europe is now virtually absolute threatened by only a handful of super clubs like Real Madrid and Bayern Munich the team that finishes bottom of the Premier League each season and is therefore relegated to the championship now receives more money in TV Revenue than the team that wins this it's for that reason that a club like Fulham fresh off the back of a season in the championship and with a stadium that holds barely 20 000 fans can take one of sporting star players like joao Paulina off their hands for 20 million pounds this seems normal to us now but it's actually very new even within the Premier League the disparities are enormous Manchester City over the last six years have been the most dominant team in the entire history of English football over any six-year period meanwhile the top six teams in terms of Revenue much as Chelsea did their best to show that it can actually be done last season now find it practically impossible to finish outside of the top eight the only teams outside of the big five of Manchester United are Liverpool Chelsea Tottenham and Arsenal to break into the top four over the last 15 years have been Manchester City and Newcastle United both owned by brutal authoritarian Petro States in Western Asia and Leicester city who won the league during a freak season but now find themselves in the championship it's a similar story in every major Top Flight in Europe the likes of Celtic and in our face the unusual Paradox of seeing both sides of football's enormous inequalities every season domestically where their revenue and budgets far outstrip their Rivals they Hoover up trophies with ease in Europe where all of a sudden they find themselves on the opposite end of those exact same inequalities they're suddenly facing teams with 10 15 or even 20 times their budgets and invariably they meet the same fate as the minnows that they come up against at home between 1985 and 1995 the likes of staubuk arrest Porto PSV Eindhoven Red Star Belgrade Marseille and iax all won the European couple Champions League that isn't that long ago but it is practically Unthinkable now not just that teams from Serbia and Romania could win European football's biggest Prize or that all of those teams could win it in just a 10 year span but rarely that any of them could win it at any stage now between 2013 and 2023 by contrast the only teams to win the Champions League were Bayern Munich Real Madrid Barcelona Liverpool Chelsea and Manchester City Football still has the pretense of unpredictability there are shocks and upsets every now and then throughout the course of most seasons like Brentford doing the double over Manchester City and Manchester United getting battered 4-0 by Brentford and seven nil by Liverpool but at the end of the season Man City still won their third successive premier league title and Manchester United still finished third you can now predict with unerving accuracy the outcome of every major Football League before a ball has even been kicked based solely upon each team's wage Bill and that if we're being entirely honest with ourselves doesn't make it sound quite as exciting as Sky Sportsman would have you believe does it whilst transfer salary and spending records keep getting smashed by the super rich seemingly on a weekly basis since the emergence of the Saudi Abomination clubs who mean everything to their local communities both small and large are sinking Without a Trace here in England we have seen Barry Macclesfield and Hereford United all go to the wall in recent years historic clubs with centuries of history and even a couple of fa cups to their name in Barry's case a similar existential threat faces the likes of scunthorpe United Yeovil town and Oldham athletic clubs who are beset by crises and even larger clubs like Derby County Coventry City and Birmingham city have come perilously close to extinction in recent years heck it's only five years since Aston Villa now among the Premier League's biggest Spenders and back in Europe were threatened with a winding up order by hmrc over an unpaid 4 million pound tax bill the championship is lauded as being the world's best second tier which may well be true but it is also the world's most indebted league as a percentage of Revenue as clubs throw everything at the dream of Premier League promotion treating it at times like a spin at the roulette wheel the entire division is pretty much a disaster waiting to happen or in some instances one that has already happened a majority of English football's 92 premier league and efl teams are technically insolvent meaning that their debts outweigh the combine value of all of their assets the picture isn't any better outside of England there is chaos in France where we have seen recent disasters at Bordeaux social and as nonce in Italy were Palmer Fiorentina and Napoli have all gone bust at various stages along with a handful of Clubs who never bounced back unlike those three and even in Germany where there is considerably better governance of the game herter Berlin Hamburg Hanover Kaiser sloughton Nuremberg and schalke will all be in the second Bundesliga next season which means Germany's second tier will be home to more former Bundesliga title winners than the Bundesliga itself as the volume and concentration of wealth in football has accelerated the amount of money paid to those particularly at the top of the sport has become obscene it is a reasonable view I think and one to which I've always subscribed that if football generates outrageous amounts of money it is probably fair that lots of that money should be funneled to the players themselves after all they are the ones that people pay to watch they are in effect the product and better for hard-working young people typically from working class backgrounds to be very highly paid than for billionaire owners and stay lights to Hoover up even more cash still as was the case with the factory owners and businessmen who owned clubs during the era of the maximum wage I still think that is broadly true but what we are seeing now is something quite different the money comes so early and so fast for talented young players that many are millionaires before they have even left school it's hard for anyone not to lose all sense and perspective of reality in those circumstances and the way in which they are pampered in top academies could engender an unhealthy culture of impunity and entitlement that lasts into adulthood the argument that if football generates X then so and so player deserves why is also now being tested even if we are to accept that X is billions of pounds and why in the tens of hundreds of millions that's because if we take the case of Saudi Arabia as not the only but the most notable current example the salaries they are offering players are not the proceeds of the sport itself or what those players might be worth in the traditional sense of the term Saudi Arabia has just set aside billions of dollars for a football project the Saudi pro league itself in its entirety in fact doesn't generate enough Revenue to pay the salaries of any one of the League's top earners it had become hard to justify footballers salaries when they earn twice as much in a week on average in the Premier League than the average UK worker makes in a year but without that correlation it becomes even more difficult in the UK Jordan a brutal cost of living crisis it costs over a thousand pounds a year to subscribe to all of the relevant Premier League television packages and in excess of 1 800 pounds for all football packages Beyond just the Premier League it is obscene and that's before you contemplate ever actually attending any matches and unlike everywhere else even when you pay over a thousand pounds in the UK there are still loads of games that you're not allowed to watch due to broadcasters only showing one game when multiple fixtures take place at the same time and the 3pm blackout on a Saturday which prohibits any fixtures from being broadcast live at that time in Saudi Arabia by contrast Revenue isn't generated by extortionate matched a commercial or television deals but by the central government via oil wealth which is arguably even more vulgar and obscene there is this idea that Saudi Arabia has unlimited funds to throw at football and footballers for as long as they wish without it ever moving the needle with regards to the nation's finances and it's easy to see how that belief has been able to proliferate in people's minds certainly they have acted as though it were the case during this transfer window the reality as I pointed out in my extensive video on whether Saudi Arabia can buy football just as they bought golf which is well worth a watch of course is that Saudi Arabia's GDP is half the size of Canada's and a third of the size of the United king their GDP per capita is lower than Belgium Austria and islands and their Sovereign wealth fund is half the size of norways this is a country though they don't disclose any official statistics where an estimated 20 percent of the population live in poverty yet the house of Saud is offering Killian and Bape and PSG a billion euros for the Frenchman to spend a single season playing in Riyadh it's all about priorities I suppose Saudi Arabia is a nation which is built upon the extraction and exportation of crude oil of which the country exports roughly 160 billion dollars worth on an annual basis that means that I'm back pay alone for a single season would have cost 0.68 of Saudi Arabia's total oil exports during that time it is almost three percent of what Saudi Arabia spent on transport and infrastructure throughout the entirety of 2022 that is not Limitless even if you behave as though it were the fact that Saudi Arabia is such a regressive and brutal dictatorship with one of the world's most appalling human rights records further disillusions a lot of football fans as much as the finances themselves what's more this isn't a case of short-term spending with the aim of long-term gain purely in terms of the finances football will never be profitable Endeavor for Saudi Arabia this is a case of reputation management both abroad but particularly at home where Saudi Arabia has a young population that is very enthusiastic about football you cannot protest organize freely Express yourselves or say anything vaguely critical of the House of Saud but you can have Ronaldo and Benzema seems like a fair trade-off to me freedoms are overrated Marcelo brozovic on the other hand well he has always been permanently underrated if you ask me welcome Marcelo to al-nase there's also an element of swinging for want of a better word the oil dependent nations of Western Asia are all desperately trying to diversify their economies and sanitize their reputations as their economies are built almost entirely on something that is literally rapidly destroying the planet and even if it wasn't is still a finite resource the UAE has been able to do this much more effectively than Saudi Arabia today through cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi and in football Abu Dhabi has enjoyed enormous success at Manchester City whilst Qatar has attracted some of the world's biggest names to PSG as well as hosting the FIFA World Cup Saudi Arabia is playing catch-up then but wants to illustrate that it has the longest town and if you don't want Elite level football to become a phallus measuring contest between some of the world's worst people and the Petro states which they run as their own personal chiefdoms well too late I'm afraid because it already is football's enduring popularity despite all of these problems which plague and you could argue have broken and continued to inflict further damage upon the integrity and appeal of the sport I think owes to a number of things firstly football is just a fantastic sport it's simple it's accessible it's low scoring which makes it more unpredictable and it has the remarkable Knack of throwing up iconic and unratable moments even if the end of the script has become all too easy to predict there is also an element I think in which watching supremely talented people excel in their fields is entertaining even if the outcome is already a foregone conclusion everybody knew who would win the men's 100 meters are the 2008 Olympics in Beijing but seeing Usain bolts set a new olympic record and run it in 9.69 seconds while celebrating before he had even crossed the Finish Line still had enormous public appeal because there is just something enjoyable about seeing that also obviously a lot of football fans support the roughly 11 elite clubs that can still keep hold of their best players and compete for trophies and you're less likely to see a lack of competition as being as pressing or urgent of a concern if your team is benefiting from that lack of competition and further concentration of wealth as to whether football can be fixed well that is a bit of an odd question because as far as the people who run the sport are concerned it isn't yet broken enough I have made videos in the past about ways in which football could theoretically be fixed for once of a better word but it is a futile exercise when those in charge have zero interest in bringing about the same changes the URI might consider to be desirable it is too late for all of that English football certainly has been flogged off to the highest bidder and anyone who thinks that the glazes clearly capital or the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for crying out loud have the best interests of football fans or the Integrity of English football at heart is so delusional that even q and on conspiracy theorists are looking at them with a sense of sympathy and embarrassment no for now I am just football's obituaries earlier I said that there are no certainties in football anymore but that's not quite true it is a certainty that nothing will improve things can only get worse and it's just a question of whether football or the fragile planet that we call home implodes first still it's only a week to go until Hull City versus Norwich in the first game of the season and I reckon Euro 2024 should be great you might as well enjoy it whilst you can that is it for today's video but thank you all very much as ever for watching hit the like button if you enjoyed it let me know your thoughts Down Below in the comments and of course make sure that you are subscribed and have notifications turned on both for this Channel and my backup Channel both of which should be on your screens now along with a couple of videos that you might want to watch after this one you could also find me on Instagram or on Twitter via the username at hitc7s should you wish to do so

Channel: HITC Sevens

Views: 216,193

Keywords: HITC Sevens, Football, Soccer, Broken, Is, Mbappe, Premier League, Saudi Arabia, Saudi Pro League, Manchester United, Qatar, World Cup, Why, Ruined, Documentary, Footballers, Money, Finance, Wages, Kylian Mbappe

Id: jrvgql7gYuI

Length: 28min 48sec (1728 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 29 2023