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Another Hollow Triumph for Money, Murdoch and Man United

Posted on 22/04/2013 | Leave a comment

We deserve the Title! We DO!!! Waaaahh!!!

More than likely they’ll be tenaciously cavorting away in dutiful triumph tonight at The Theatre of Hollow Myths, as Man United celebrate another processional title triumph, brushing aside what I expect to be feeble resistance from Aston Villa..

Since Murdoch bought the game, the Trafford-based club have been on easy street. Better-placed than the rest – given their global fan-base – to capitalise on a league based on glitz and merchandise, their fortunes have been linked inextricably with the fortunes of Murdoch’s Sky TV empire as it has tightened its grip on what used to be our national game.

In 1967, Manchester United won the Football League Championship. Brief flickering highlights were shown in grainy black and white as the champions paraded the famous old trophy. England were World Cup holders, Harold Wilson was Prime Minister and a pint of bitter cost about 8p. It would be two years before Man set foot on the moon and Jimmy Greaves had hair. It was that long ago. Matt Busby and his team celebrated another trophy, but their era of success was coming to an end. Man U would never win the Football League Championship again.

Fast forward 25 years, and Man U came as close as they had ever come to regaining the Holy Grail, only to see it snatched from their sight forever as Leeds United took the prize in 1992 by four clear points, becoming the last ever proper League Champions. But things were about to change, and not before time. It had been a clear quarter of a century since the media’s favourite team had won the league; that most marketable of clubs had failed, utterly, to rise to the top of the game where their profit potential could best be realised. The money men in their grey suits were frustrated. This could not be allowed to go on.

And so the Premier League was born, in a blitz of fireworks, tickertape and dancing girls, complete with cheesy music, the hirsute Richard Keys, a league title trophy modelled on the lines of Thunderbird One and all the bells and whistles an Australian entrepreneur could dream of. Behind the window-dressing, bigger changes were afoot. The money would be channelled upwards, in defiance of gravity and the previous trickle-down economics of the game which had afforded some protection to the relative paupers. The big and the rich would get progressively bigger and richer; the days of the League Title being won mainly on merit were done.

From now on, the destiny of the title would be decided largely on the basis of pre-season balance sheets. From a situation where he who dared, won – we would now see an era where he who spends biggest stands the best chance. One club above all others stood to benefit from this Brave New World – Man U, heralded as the Biggest Club In The World (to a background of incredulous giggles in Milan, Barcelona and Madrid) had built up a worldwide following with their relentless harking-back to the legacy of the Busby Babes and the Munich disaster. Their history had made them everyone’s second-favourite club; now Murdoch’s revolution put them in pole position to capitalise on that, and reap a harvest of trophies from the seeds they’d sown in flogging Man U tat to a globe-full of eager and undiscriminating consumers.

Resistance became sporadic; almost futile (were Man U the sporting equivalent of Star Trek’s Borg?) Man U won the first two “Premiership” titles before a cash-rich Blackburn out-spent and out-fought them in 1995. After that the procession continued, the titles piled up at the Theatre of Myths, only Arsenal, Chelsea and Man City have interrupted the monotonous toll of the bell signalling more success for the most effective franchise in football.

Tonight will see the 20th “Title” for the club that used to be loved by many outside of their immediate support, but are now regarded with a dull hatred by proper football fans. This is put down to jealousy of course; but every fan has a choice, and jealousy is an unnecessary emotion. Tonight’s latest success will see the appearance of more Man U acolytes everywhere, as the need to be identified with size and success sucks in those of questionable character and inadequate self-esteem. More Man U shirts in Torquay and Milton Keynes, more tacky memorabilia sold in Stoke and Londonderry.

The 20th title then – but there remains a clear demarcation. 7 titles in their history up to 1967. 13 in the 20 years since 1993. Is this just a coincidence? Of course it’s not; if anything it’s an indictment of Man U’s failure. Somehow, in seven of those years, they’ve failed to win the league, despite the financial and psychological disadvantages of their rivals, they’ve let it slip away.

The fact is that the titles won since 1993 are devalued by the steep slope in Man U’s favour of the playing field on which all have to compete. Liverpool were dominant in an even competition for the best part of two decades up to the 90’s; it is now 23 years since they were Champions, but their overall record remains formidable. Whatever Man U might want to make of it as they crow about 20 titles to 18, they know in their heart of hearts that the baubles won in the Murdoch era are of a lesser water than the diamonds Liverpool gathered to them. The exchange rate is against them; their achievements are relatively less. If they maintained their current rate of success for another twenty years (and who knows, they might – but it would kill the game), then maybe they could be compared to Liverpool, the acknowledged masters at the time Murdoch’s coup took place.

But for the moment, I say – as a devoted fan of Leeds United – Liverpool are still The Greatest.

Another Day in the Death of Leeds United

Posted on 12/02/2013 | Leave a comment

It’s not safe to identify any one day, defeat or disappointment as the nadir of Leeds United’s fortunes just now. At the moment, takeover and “fresh start” notwithstanding, we appear to be plummeting downhill faster than a greased pig. The loss of top scorer Luciano Becchio – to bloody Norwich City AGAIN – was another notable low point; but Leeds United has long had this unfortunate habit of losing top players in January transfer windows. Worse still, the results since Christmas have been appalling, in the league anyway. Beaten at home by Cardiff, as usual – chucking away a 2-1 lead at Wolves in injury time, and a poor performance to lose away at Middlesboro to a side which had lost several on the spin. In this last game, the Leeds fans were exhorting Neil Warnock, an increasingly isolated figure, to make a change and pep the team up, and he actually applauded them sarcastically, an absolutely fatal thing to do for a manager who was never the most popular. Bad, bad times. And yet, you somehow have that uncomfortable, chill feeling – even as a committed Whites fanatic – that, however bad things may seem, there’s plenty of scope for them to get worse.

Indeed, it’s arguable that things HAVE been worse – much worse – in the fairly recent past, than they are today. The run-up to the 2007/08 season, the club’s first in the third tier of English football, was catastrophic. Administration had brought about the unprecedented penalty of a 15 point deduction, leaving the beleaguered giants 5 wins short of zero points as the season started. But that season turned into a triumph of sorts – promotion was narrowly missed, and the whole points-deduction saga seemed to galvanise the support. On the pitch, the team delivered, particularly in the early part of the season, and a seemingly irresistible momentum was built up. Leeds really were United at this lowest ebb in their history.

At present, in some superficial measures, things are better – but in the most fundamental ways, they appear significantly worse. Obviously, the club now enjoys a higher status within the game – the dark days of League One football are receding into the past, at least for the time being. There have been high spots too, famous Cup victories, including the recent defeat of Spurs, and the odd satisfying away performance. At Elland Road, once a fortress notorious for intimidating opponents, form has been patchy. And yet other Premier League teams have been put to the sword, and generally speaking the team will give anyone a game on their own patch – apart from Cardiff, apparently. The underlying problem now though is more insidious than the acute emergencies immediately post-administration. It is the creeping cancer of apathy that pervades the club now.

It’s not difficult to see the signs of this. Read any of the fans’ forums, and a pattern swiftly emerges. The supporters, by and large, are sick of the way the club has been run over the past few years. Sick of paying top dollar for a distinctly second-rate product. Sick of the club’s habitual prevarications over transfer policy, of seeing our best players form a procession out of the exit door, sick to death of seeing lesser clubs easily out-match us for wages and transfer fees, despite the fact that our turnover and potential remain at the top end.

Leeds United, a great name in English football, by any measure, appears to have been run on the cheap for a long time now. Investment is minimal, the ability to retain promising players practically non-existent. The supporters’ expectations, born of great days in the past, remain high – and why shouldn’t they be? But those expectations show no sign of being met, or even approached. Last summer’s long drawn-out agony of a takeover saga descended too often to the depths of farce, as rumour countered rumour, and we all rode an internet-driven roller-coaster of optimism and despair, over and over again. But once concluded, that saga has not spawned a legacy of more investment and better club/fan relations. We appear to be stuck with more of the same; the changes appear to have been purely cosmetic.

On Saturday 12^th January, Leeds United played Barnsley away, a fixture that had produced humiliating three-goal thrashings in the previous two seasons. This time around, it was only a two goal thrashing, but the manner of defeat – the abject failure to muster any real threat up front, and the spectacle of midfield players gazing skywards as the ball whistled to and fro far above them – was too much for the long-suffering band of away fans in Leeds United colours. They complained, loudly. They advised the manager to be on his way. They questioned the fitness of the players to wear the famous shirt. The FA Cup win over Spurs offered some brief respite, but now an almost identical scenario has been played out at Boro’s Riverside Stadium, a ground where we’d previously had a good record. After the match, Warnock spoke learnedly, but with that annoying chuckle in his voice, of the “need to win games” and of how he was baffled at how chances were being missed. We’ve heard a lot of this, all season. The supporters feel they are being taken for mugs, and they have had enough.

All this has been true for a while – but for much of the past year, change has been in the air, and it has seemed reasonable to expect that things might be about to get better. Some of us dared to dream. But after the final whistle at Middlesbrough, it was all of a sudden quite clear that the options for change have been exhausted, and that the future remains as bleak as it has been at any time since top-flight status was relinquished nine long years ago.

Some of the fans – not all, but some – feel that there is now no way back for Leeds – not to anywhere approaching the pre-eminence they once enjoyed in the game. If that’s the case, then the question arises: what is a reasonable aim? To gain promotion to the Premier League, and strive to survive? To become a yo-yo club, with promotion and relegation in successive years, never becoming established in the top-flight? That might be enough for many clubs, but at Leeds the memories of glory are that bit too vivid for the fans to settle for any such precarious existence, scratching around in the hinterland of old rivals’ success.

It may well be that, on a cold night on Teesside, realisation dawned that the club Leeds United once were is now dead and gone. What is left behind may well still be worth supporting, but it is likely to be a pale shadow of what we once knew. Recently, during the transfer window, there were rumours of high profile signings – and you knew, you just KNEW, that we were being softened up for more bad news. Then Becchio was off, swapped for a striker in Morison that Norwich didn’t want, and we heard reports that recent loanees didn’t want to stay “because of the money situation up there”. It all stinks of a club rotten to the core, and dead at the top.

Leeds United – one of the truly great names in English football. RIP.