Football has become an all-purpose lazy metaphor for New Labour. It is easy to see why this is so. It has more to it than the fact that some senior members of the hierarchy are fans: Alastair Campbell of Burnley, Tony Blair of Newcastle (his confusion over Jackie Milburn notwithstanding) and Gordon Brown of Raith Rovers. Then there is the Demon Eyes football team which has received far more coverage than either its political content or its footballing prowess really warrants.
The connection is more than the sum total of the football fans at the heart of government. It is ten years now since the Premier League was established. Over that decade, football and New Labour have travelled essentially the same course and now there are only five Conservative constituencies that contain professional football clubs. Ten years ago both football and the Labour Party were living off the appreciation of their core support, in their traditional redoubt of class belonging. Since then both have made a major, and for the most part successful, attempt to broaden their appeal. By the same token, their weaknesses and vulnerabilities are oddly similar.
The process has been a gradual unfolding of their appeal across more of the middle-class than either the Labour Party or the football establishment previously thought was likely. In politics this move was characterised by unceasing economic and fiscal discipline. In football it was precipitated by the 1990 World Cup and the appearance of an incipient football literature to begin to rival that of cricket, whose public school boy graduates have always written up with style and verve. Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch started the ball rolling, to make a cliché appropriate. It was followed by Karl Miller’s notoriously over-wrought appreciation, in the London Review Of Books, of Paul Gascoigne: ‘a priapic monolith in the Mediterranean sun’. Since then, coverage in the broadsheet newspapers has expanded to tabloid proportions. Meanwhile, television personalities and Conservative politicians started to fall over themselves to admit that they had been Arsenal and Chelsea supporters since the days when Georgie Graham played for both.
The question now facing both is the same: can this new coalition endure? Is there something intrinsically unstable about the constellation of supporters on which New Labour and new football depend? There is some evidence that football will struggle to escape its origins. The collapse of ITV Digital, based on the predictable fact that audiences for Stockport County versus Grimsby Town were limited to supporters of those two clubs (and sometimes not even them), might be the first sign that the years of plenty in football are coming to an end.
The basic problem is that the purchasing power of the clubs comes ultimately from its supporters and that fund of money is limited. Just over half of the crowd at football is still drawn principally from the ranks of the skilled and unskilled manual workers. The attendance of social classes A and B have grown, to 39 percent, and that of the lowest social classes, D and E, have fallen, to just one in ten of attendees. This latter phenomenon is because the poorest have been priced out of the live game. The average price of admission per spectator has risen from £4.26 in 1987-88 to more than £17 now. This is a lot of disposable income for people at the lower end of the income scale. At the bigger clubs the problem is even more acute. It is difficult to get in without a season ticket and this requires an initial outlay of several hundred pounds, with all the cash flow benefit going to the club. It is also worth mentioning that attendance at football matches remains an almost exclusively white phenomenon. Although around 25 percent of professionals are black or of mixed race, only about one percent of fans are not white.
The continuing reliance of football on its heartland support can be demonstrated by comparing attendance at matches with unemployment rates. Crowds declined steeply from the late 1960s onwards, reaching a nadir in the mid 1980s. This was partly due to Heysel and Hillsborough, but it is no coincidence that this was a period during which heavy manufacturing was declining, cities were becoming less important as centres of production and working-class unemployment was rising.
This postwar decline was offset a little by the rise of a number of
knock-out cup competitions and the
crowds brought by European club competitions, but there is no doubt that many fewer people pay to watch professional football these days than in the 1940s, and that crowds fell fairly consistently from that date at least up until 1986-87. However, since the ‘slump’ season of 1985-86, which followed the Heysel tragedy, crowds in England have risen year-on-year and also quite dramatically in Scotland. Total League attendances in England have risen steadily from a postwar low of 16.5 million in 1985-86 to 21.8 million in 1995-96, an extraordinary rise of 32 percent. Today, it is estimated that between four and five million people attend a football match in England and Wales every year.
There are many reasons apart from unemployment why crowds declined at football in England over the 40 years immediately after the second world war. Social habits changed and many more leisure options became available. Households became more ‘privatised’ and much more entertainment took place in the home. Better travel links reduced the likelihood that people would go to their nearest club, irrespective of their standing. The gradual sprawl of city conurbations
has benefited the larger clubs at the expense of those in the small towns, especially the huge number of clubs within a thirty mile radius of Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds. Moreover, until recently the general standards of facilities at some football grounds arguably failed to keep pace with general improvements in social standards and standards of leisure provision elsewhere. Finally, there seems little doubt that increasingly the experience of, and particularly the fear of, hooliganism did deter at least some fans from attending football matches between the mid-1960s and the early 1990s.
The recovery, like the recovery
of the Labour Party, was led by the deliberate embourgoisement of football. The game was rebranded
with the creation of the Premier League, the listing of the clubs’ equity on the stock market, a huge increase
in corporate hospitality and merchandising, and all-seater stadia in the wake of the Taylor report. And, it all came, of course, at a much higher price, supposedly financed by the major new TV deal with BskyB and the BBC which was reported to be worth £304 million over five years. This settlement shows how absurd was the £315 million paid by ITV Digital for Nationwide League highlights. Gate receipts have, indeed, gone up. In 1958-9 £98,000 was taken at the average First Division club’s gate. By 1978-79 that had risen to £687,000, to £1.6 million ten years later and to £4.8 million in the Premiership in 1994-5. The salary bill in the Premiership for the last season was £747 million. It is no longer really true that the fans pay the wages, or they do so only via the medium of the television companies.
As a consequence of recent changes the market for football, and the market for footballers, shows one of the characteristics of all markets, which is
a large degree of inequality. This will be the first season in ten years that Manchester United have finished outside the top two. The gap between the top six in the Premiership and the rest is growing and the financial penalty for not making the Champions League is enormous. We have more than reached saturation point. Football is a 10pm on Saturday night game, not a mass market earlier in the evening.
It is less a case of abandoning its heartlands as simply not being able to break out of them. In the final analysis, football and the rise of New Labour are not the same. It is a lazy cliché after all.