The recent closing of the transfer window in England has led to all sorts of recriminations. Once more, the media, supporters, players and managers are expressing outrage at the amount of money being spent on footballers. The transfers of Fernando Torres and Andy Carroll – which came to a combined £85 million – have people talking in almost apocalyptic terms. Listening to these critiques, one would believe that a new watershed has been reached.
Torres contributed to this narrative when he argued that the decision to move to Chelsea was, in a sense, not a difficult one. Countering allegations of betrayal, Torres claimed that, when it comes to football, the ‘romance is dead.’ Thus, he felt no qualms about moving from a club that at one point he claimed to be a supporter of to one of their main rivals.
Many journalists seem to be taking this utterance as being indicative of a very modern and new malaise. Indeed, over the past decade or so, it seems that this sense of millenarian anxiety has been expressed more and more. While Torres chose to articulate this change in terms of romance, the more usual formulation which is used goes something along the lines of “football has lost its soul.” A Google search for those exact terms yields 6,860 hits, mostly newspaper articles bemoaning the rise of transfer fees, wages, and other extravagances in the modern game.
This idea also forms the topic for discussions on television and radio, and seems to have infected popular culture more generally. See, for example, the outraged reaction to the Thierry Henry handball against Ireland in late 2009, which was the subject of special TV investigations which gathered together former players, journalists, and social scientists to explore the idea that a corruption of values was linked to sporting modernity. They always agreed.
I have written before that money has always been in football, and it has always been spent lavishly, sometimes outrageously. The transfer of Tommy Lawton – England’s star striker – in 1947, is the prime example. Lawton, a star at the peak of his powers playing for Chelsea, was the subject of a record £20,000 transfer. Where did he go? To Notts County, in the third division. Money has always been there, and players will always chase the money, loyalty and professional prospects bedamned. David Goldblatt, the author of a wonderful history called The Ball is Round, has argued something similar.
It appears somewhat obvious to state that money has been a major driving factor in football for over a century. There is more to the story. In my own research I have come across some interesting examples of the same anxieties about the morality of football being expressed by contemporaries for at least a century.
For example, during the First World War, footballers were the subject of criticism in the media – in both journalistic articles and letters to the editor – for not taking wage cuts in line with other workers. As they had not ‘done their bit’, they had deviated from the founding spirit of the game itself. The Edwardian spirit of ‘fair play’ and ‘playing the game’ had, through this lust for money, been lost.
In 1928, an interesting debate emerged in the letters pages of The Times. The Dean of Durham wrote (‘Transfers and Coupons’, The Times, September 28th, 1928, p.6) that escalating transfer fees had led to football losing touch with the moral values of a previous era. It had lost the public respect of sports like rugby or cricket, he argued. In response, the President of the F.A., Sir Charles Clegg, argued that this was not the case, as rising revenue in football allowed for a greater degree of cash to be reinvested in charitable works. Thus, football still brought with it the moral component which the Dean of Durham claimed was being lost. (‘Association Football’, The Times, October 3rd 1928, p.6)
There are many examples of similar rhetoric being used in media discussions about football, especially when it came to two key issues: cheating and the rise of money.
What I would like to suggest here is that the idea that one of the dominant narratives (if not the dominant one) which runs through (English) football for at least the last century is the idea that it had sacrificed its once lofty morals to a ‘modern’ fixation on money and winning at all costs. So, rather than the history of football being one of occasional great change or rupture, it seems that there is a great continuity in the perception of the game across the century. This anxiety could perhaps be linked to wider social issues at a given moment, such as during the war. However, while society was changing, the perception remained the same; namely, that football had lost its way and should try to reclaim the high moral values of a bygone age.
There is no romance in football, and people have been talking about it forever.
