On Swansea City and England

I wish there could be an English Swansea City - a club simultaneously rooted in its community and traditions, outside the control of plutocrats and conscious of football in the fullest global and European senses.  I wish nothing more in the world.  All these things are what I wish for England; they are deep within its history, theoretically possible, never entirely buried.  But I keep fearing there cannot be such a club here, and perhaps never could have been at least in any world that actually did exist (though there could have been had the 1980s and beyond been as Bernard Nossiter envisaged them in 1978), that there is something too profound, something too deep-rooted in our history that prevents it.

There never was proper democratic ownership of English clubs as still exists in Germany, of course, and never could have been outside that hidden path where we meet ourselves coming back, that road not taken.  There never could have been because of the strength and power of the essentially feudal class system in England.  While that system remained essentially unreformed and undefeated, whether by socialism or deregulated capitalism, all that could ever replace it was its modern successor, the repackaged feudalism of plutocracy.  And so it has been; English football went, as we know, straight from aldermen to billionaires - the feudalism of one world to the feudalism of another - without an intervening period of democracy.  It went that way because of England itself, despite, not because of, all the many extraordinary manifestations of creativity that England can take such pride in, but still because of, and not despite, the essential foundation stones of its society, where the new form of feudalism was allowed to take command just when the old one seemed to be on the rack and crumbling.

Germany has obviously not been a freakishly stable state with a moment such as 1066 defining all that followed, and 1066 is certainly not the foundation stone of Welsh national identity and social relations today; the Norman invasion was much slower and more haphazard and was much more seriously resisted.  This is not, I think, a coincidence.  Swansea City can remain locally-owned, with their supporters having a share, and the great clubs of Germany can remain under the control of their supporters, because localism can be democratic in places where 1066 isn't a defining moment (this isn't "Norman yoke" English nationalism, just historical honesty).  In places where it is the defining moment, localism can - I fear - only ever be what it was in pre-Hillsborough, pre-Sky English football, a front for outrageous divisions between the clubs' owners and their actual fans, with the latter treated as wholly different and inferior species without any concern for their livelihoods or even their lives. In Wales, without such a deep feudal division between ruling class and mass, it is that much easier for a club to be locally rooted without exploiting, dividing and conquering its fans, because the fans were always much more part of the same culture and the same world as the bosses, the latter much likely to have risen from the ranks of the former (as Swansea's chairman did, and as many old-school English football chairmen never did).

You realise, based on this, why so many English people - myself included in many of my previous posts here and elsewhere - consider the products of plutocracy to be almost, accidentally, progressive in context and by comparison.  You realise why so many fewer Scots - and, I would suspect albeit in the current absence of relevant sales statistics, Welsh people - want Frank Ocean or Disclosure (note that I am not suggesting for one moment that either of these acts represent Cowellite plutocracy - they are in fact as far as pop gets from it - I am simply pointing out that they are for me and for much of the English Left, along with Motown, a kind of surrogate socialism of desperation).  They don't want them because they don't need them; their ancestral culture is not tainted by feudalism to the point where they have to look beyond for anything progressive.  I need Frank Ocean and Disclosure like I need oxygen because all I can get from my physical environment is feudalism.  English clubs, in some ways, need plutocracy because they could only otherwise be governed by something even worse; small-town feudalism and institutionalised classism against their own fans, as indeed they were for a century. Their environment simply does not contain the potential for a democratic club, combining roots with a sense of 21st Century Europe, such as Swansea City are.  When Richard Scudamore, of all people, describes Swansea's management as ideal, he must be ruefully aware of this; he must know the aspects of English history which prevent it from happening here, the aspects which for 40 years have driven the English Left into being pro-Murdoch by default out of a sense of common enemies, a corner we cannot get out of in the way that Swansea can.

The other aspects which separate Swansea from the norms of English football are also culturally specific; the club's sense of stability, of slow advance and long-term, uninterrupted endeavour, has to do with the fact that the national myth of the buccaneer, the individual who cares neither for the past nor the future, is simply not embedded in Wales (or indeed Scotland) in the way it is in England.  There is much more valuing of order within a gentler capitalism, in part because the idea of "knowing your place" is much less tainted in Wales and Scotland because it can have a progressive meaning, a meaning that can assert working-class pride and openness to the wider world rather than simply being about subservience to a ruling class that hates you - the desire for the internal rules of capitalism to be torn down, as they have been in England in my lifetime, was less potent because localism, maybe even a slight cosiness, could actually be socialist and reasonably equal.  There is a sense in which England's immense creativity in popular culture is born out of that national sense of the buccaneer, the people who gave us everything from Motown to grime, that the short-term culture that has isolated English football is born out of the exact same criteria that make England exciting in other fields, that the mass ownership by plutocrats has the same roots (however much of a perversion it has become) as the internationalism that make England's popular culture so fresh and stimulating - that, in short, for there to be an English Swansea City, rather than merely a succession of paler and paler imitations of Tony Pulis's BNP FC, England would have to become less exciting and stimulating in some other fields.

There is this niggling, ongoing sense that English football culture is narrow because broader English popular culture is exciting - not least because the latter's instinctive, elemental ties are mainly to the non-football world, which puts English football, as a part of English popular culture, in a deeply problematic position without even intending or wanting or choosing to be.  Swansea's outstanding absorption and development of the Spanish-style passing game, their bypassing the usual Sun-friendly list of Big Names and having the sheer chutzpah to get Michael Laudrup to a club that spent most of his playing career routinely drawing 0-0 with a Mansfield or a Rotherham, their sense of ambition and desire to escape the norms of their environment, to not have to do everything through the great power next door but to make their own alliances and their own friendships and their own alignments, has to do with an instinctive political desire to separate themselves from the Anglosphere, to exist outside the domain of England-as-seafaring-global-trader.

Politically, the latter idea - driving force not only for Cameron but for people, almost unbelievably, far worse - is simply poison, socially terrifying and economically suicidal (which is why the CBI types that the Tory Right desperately wish could support it mostly don't, much to the headbangers' impotent infuriation).  In terms of popular culture, though, it is still - despite everything - a force for inspiration, just when you don't want it to be.  There is much to be admired, socially and politically, about the greater European consciousness of many Welsh and Scottish people (could David McAllister becoming Chancellor of Germany be the moment of serendipity that Scotland still hasn't quite reached, the moment it all falls into place, and finally freezes out any chance of England being what I myself am, against my will, a reason why it cannot be?).  In terms of football it is, as we know, obviously the only way.  But if pretty much everyone in England who understands football knows intellectually that it is the only way, is there something deep emotionally within us - within our popular culture and our working-class consciousness - that stops our football taking that path?  If we accept that football can never be divorced from the context of wider popular culture within the working-class consciousness, we can then recognise that high and low, posh and pop, have been less historically divided in Scotland and Wales and that this in itself may lead to a more mature understanding of football - where a European consciousness is not identified, in that very English way, with "toffs in the Albert Hall" and thus with class treason - that history denies the English.

And maybe this is the reason why there is still a moment when Avicii or Swedish House Mafia aren't quite enough, when that serendipity and social perfection feels like an imperfect evocation of the human condition and specifically of the problem of England.  There is a moment that hits you, just when you wish it didn't, when this almost unimaginably idyllic social democracy of pop (that is what "Don't You Worry Child" is, like nothing in my lifetime), feels incomplete.  You want it to be all you need - and maybe it would be all I needed if I were Scottish or Welsh - but eating away at you is a sense that it isn't, that the aggression and brutality and disregard for all established sensibilities of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, that which has conquered English football with the rest of English popular culture, is somehow necessary too.  And you hate yourself for it.  You wish that "Levels" - shimmering and untouched as if that were not suspicious - was all the pop you needed to be emotionally whole, and that Swansea City could have happened on your own doorstep, with equal and simultaneous longing and sadness.  And you realise anew that, just as the IBA and Sky are different from and alien to each other in every conceivable way other than both being different forms of non-democracy, neither paternalism nor plutocracy representing "the people" in the way the Dutch broadcasting system has been able to do, English football - in terms of its actual ownership and control - never really was "the people's game", that it can only be so in Wales because it is only there, and in Scotland, that "the people" in the sense the Mirror was going forward with, as opposed to "the people" The Sun was going forward with when it first purloined that slogan, have ever really been sufficiently socially cohesive and dominant to run a significant institution.

And yet there are still moments when I wonder if everything I've written above is a lie, a desperate attempt by an English Leftist marooned in the worst, the least historically promising part of England to live second-hand, just as I might in other moods live second-hand through urban pop.  When Swansea fans sing "oh England is full of shit", they can't all really be saying "England is full of plutocrats and Cameronites and Europhobes".  Some of them must, I know, be saying "England is full of spongers and blacks and Asians". When a Swansea fan shouts racist abuse at a Norwich player, I don't invoke post-colonialism to say it is somehow more acceptable than if it were the other way round (and they must surely be two of the whitest cities to have ever had Premier League teams); I actually find it much worse, because in my position - and shoot this down as delusional romanticism by any means - you expect so much more, in terms of openness and tolerance, from those who see themselves as socialistic and European-minded from those who loudly and aggressively do not.

And yet I know that much of the history of Old Labour is a necessary corrective if your vision of the working class is simply as an anti-racist (let alone "anti-imperialist") vanguard, and I know all too well how much the culture of post-industrial areas has changed and how rapidly the tradition of the autodidact, the self-taught working-class intellectual, has been eroded; the change between the Manics and Stereophonics or Lostprophets, barely a flick of the eyelid apart in age, is so vast and so total that it might in other times have required an entire human lifetime to take effect (I always thought this was a factor in Noel Gallagher having, however buried and however perverted by parochialism and fear, some kind of working-class consciousness that his brother completely lacks; his anger at Liam dedicating "Live Forever" to Diana Spencer was surely, somewhere within, a sign of Noel's having been that much older during the Winter of Discontent and the miners' strike, and indeed the political use of her wedding).  I do not, of course, pretend that Swansea City and their fanbase are unaffected by this.  But I still think they have something very good and very necessary happening there, and it still breaks my heart that the weight of history prevents it from happening here.

I don't want Scottish independence to happen because of pure selfishness and self-interest from my position as a socio-political outcast in my geographical environment.  Unlike many of those in England whose politics are based around selfishness and self-interest (and who often, perversely and paradoxically, also oppose Scottish independence when they, unlike me, stand massively to gain from it), I'm honest enough to admit that.  But it still fills me with shame.  So does only feeling able to live through others, those born to things I wasn't.  But honesty still feels to me like the only way, especially when filtered through with sadness and melancholy.  Hopefully I've shown it here.  Hopefully I've told the truth.

Alex Ferguson: an alternative history of the last quarter-century

The precise timing of Ferguson's career turning points run in such parallel to the modern history of English football itself - itself so much a mirror for the social history surrounding it - that it is almost too perfect to be true. The same years of struggle and uncertainty in the late '80s, the same moment of serendipity in 1990, seven minutes away from Wembley humiliation, a European shut-out in the first year of English clubs' return and probable oblivion, the same moment of celebration as a new kind of elite returned the success whose restoration had become what seemed like a futile obsession, the same millennial ultimate triumph and ultimate old-establishment embrace, the same eternal, endless status - permanent neoliberalism - on the other side. Precise dates can be identified. A YouTube upload of the September 1990 European return, just as BSB headed further and further towards the inevitable, has several commenters stating that they became Manchester United fans that night - six months earlier, they would so clearly have aspired towards the mythos of the NFL (while ignoring its semi-socialist reality) that you do not actually have to be a Palace fan to find reading them a painful experience.

Even the timing of Ferguson's original appointment is symbolic. We know that this has become perhaps the most bitter time of year, when we are reminded most harshly of the market as destructive force, eroding so much of value and lasting potency and power (infinitely more ancient and permanent than exaggerated and misremembered residual anti-Catholicism), and replacing something embedded, and for the most part wholly unthreatening and unprejudiced, with something hollow, empty and utterly devoid of resonance. We may not remember so easily that it was also at this time that, 21 years ago and another 21 years before that, Rupert Murdoch enjoyed two of his three greatest territorial advances, and when a further 13 years earlier an entire culture was discredited, ripped apart, rendered untouchable for an entire generation - a fully deserving fate had it not been for the fact that its replacement, once so promising, ended up arguably even more rotten, even more the detritus of a decaying empire. These weeks, which carry so much historical weight, have become almost unendurable for their meaning in modern times - and Ferguson, in his own way, is as much a part of that as anything else.

Ferguson, I think, suffers from the same underlying problem as the 'Republic of Mancunia' axis; like them, he has continued to regard an affinity to American pop culture (and thus Sky) and antipathy to "official" British culture (and thus the BBC) as somehow rebellious, unorthodox and anti-establishment, even as it has become so embedded in elite institutions that Etonian Tories use it to justify their claims to be more "of the people" than Labour (you cannot help fearing that some of the "Manc Attitude" diehards really do believe that Cameron and his acolytes feel more personal and spiritual affinity to the BBC than to Sky). As with so many of his generation, so anxious is he to distance himself from the squalor and deprivation of his early years in his current job that he views any criticism of the economic state he has benefited from so spectacularly - while pretending to be somehow above it, not fully part of it - as an attempt to drag the game back to Heysel and Bradford, and himself back to the slums of post-war Glasgow, a simplistic view of modern history which exists to close down any serious argument and debate before it has even begun.

Far from representing any kind of challenge to the orthodoxies of the modern game, he is thus their ultimate embodiment, the epitome of the false, either-or dichotomies and the one-way Journey as if there had never been another option. Trapped within the dicta of capitalist realism even as he pretends to be uneasy with them, he epitomises the dilemma of so many British people with post-war, pre-Beatles childhoods, now steadily retiring from the public stage but leaving a legacy which continues to define their successors as assuredly as it will, eventually, define his. Nobody else could be a more fitting bridge between the old game and the new, and precisely for that reason nobody else could have had that level of success. And precisely for both those reasons, nobody else poses deeper long-term problems.

English football and modern England: getting America wrong, badly

(Many thanks, as so often, to David Conn in The Guardian for placing the idea of this article in my mind)

Between the collapse of the culture of imperial entitlement and autarky and the rise of the culture of neoliberalism and institutionalised inequality and poverty disguised as "democracy", getting America wrong was what made Britain great. For all that it may have been used as a sticking plaster on Britain's ongoing failings in so many areas (it is important for those of us who prefer the economic model of that time not to deny that the seeds of its demise were sown very, very early on), the creative misinterpretation of American music - specifically the music isolated and ghettoised in a semi-apartheid society - was the starting point for a cultural rebirth, genuinely convincing many that the collapse of British power could be the starting point for a whole new form of invention and challenge.

Everything in English football that has led to Liverpool's statement of intent yesterday is the byproduct of the years when all that broke down, when Sunday evening Channel 4 brought in a misunderstood image of American-ness - now with no pretence to any kind of true democratisation, merely the neoliberal mirage of "freedom" - as the way out of a dying prole culture that was by then so rotten, so vile, that it didn't deserve to survive. This piece is a brief argument - a whole book could be written about it, and should be - that with different politics and a different way of seeing the world, we could have found a quite different way out, which quite apart from being truer and fairer to the people of modern England, would also have been truer and fairer to the people of the United States.

This is very obviously not how the NFL appeared to British audiences during the Huey Lewis / Miami Vice years that unconsciously begat the Premier League, but American sports are in at least two ways profoundly un-American, at least in terms of the idea of American-ness that defines modern Britain; they have a quasi-socialist structure (a vitally important fact which is not generally known in the UK for all the most predictable reasons; both new and old prejudices are at fault here) and they are not globally exported. If they had been - for which you would probably have needed the US to have been an active, unashamed imperial power in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Oceania when Britain was, rather than mired in its own isolationism whose legacy is still reflected in sport - English football would have been most unlikely to gain its scale of global appeal; it has got this big because England seems, on a broader cultural level, like the Next Best Thing to aspirational Westerners, and the involvement of American capitalists in English football has to do with the fact that it offers them the chance to be American in the most stereotypical (and, within British socialism, pejorative) sense - extreme financial dominance over their lesser rivals, without any institutional structures to bridge the divide and make the sports more fair, and status as a ubiquitous global product - which they could have if they worked in the US film or pop music industries, but which their own sports deny them.

It is a harsh irony that it is Liverpool that should have instigated this; when the Beatles got America wrong, they made its influences much more socialist, much more collectivist than they had been originally (yes, yes, I know, first track on Revolver from now till doomsday, yes, yes, I know, Oliver Smedley, but earlier on they'd taken "Money (That's What I Want)" and somehow, miraculously, made its legacy, its impact, seem wholly compatible with the politics of the Left), but now the city's most successful team - which was at the core of the tragedies from which Thames Estuary politics dictated that neoliberalism was the only way out, even though most of their core supporters knew, and still know, that it wasn't - have taken one of the few aspects of American society that is comparatively socialist and collectivist and made it a parody of greed and selfishness; a parody of its supposed inspiration that only reveals how little it knows about it, and what it is, and why and how it is what it is (Thatcherites, Blairites and Cameronites, in this respect, have actually understood America significantly less than Macmillanites did back in the birth years of British consumerism).

This is the inevitable legacy of the Thatcher-and-onwards interpretation of American-ness which gets its source wrong in a manner as socially alienating and divisive as the beat groups getting America wrong (not least in terms of identifying with its oppressed classes, and recognising the Bobby Vees and Neil Sedakas as the playthings and safety valves of the very same overclass that had oppressed them, here) was socially unifying and utopian. To say that English football has become "more American than the Americans" would be too simplistic, only halfway there; a fairer analysis is that it has become the embodiment of a fundamental misinterpretation of a country which in fact - however it presents itself today - was not founded on mere consumerism and certainly not on glorifying inequality for its own sake, and is every bit as patronising, ahistorical and anti-democratic as any "Greece to their Rome" paternalism ever was. English football in 2011 is not doing America proud. It is, in its own way, letting America down just as much as the Tea Party.

Obviously English football was broken beyond repair in the mid-1980s (which is why those who call Stoke City a "breath of fresh air" are so enraging) but those who, desperate to escape Songs of Praise and Highway, flicked between "St Elmo's Fire" on the Network Chart and the Chicago Bears during the blackout really didn't know what they were doing. It wasn't their fault, obviously; they were the victims of someone else's ideology. But think of the difference; the Beatles didn't know what they were doing when they first heard R&B and Motown, but they did something wonderful and liberating almost by accident. The gridiron class of '86 also did something almost by accident, but something that strengthened and enforced elite power as definitively as pop originally promised to erode it. In the light of what the Premier League has become, that moment stands out as the decisive time when getting America wrong ceased to be a force for liberation and became a force for dehumanisation, when it ceased to be our national saving grace and became, instead - sadly unpredicted and unpredictable - our greatest national sickness.

English football: a final word

Tell many - I fear, most - English football fans that you like even one film by Godard or Antonioni and you're "not one of them"; you've let the side down; you cannot be a "real" football fan and any claim you may make to love the game is fake, bogus, mythical. Refer to "Camp Nou" and you hate the game that is played better there than anywhere else in the world (I'd love to believe that nobody has ever told me this, but they have). The best part of two decades since the "New Football Writing" and its related myths were presented as having put an end to that bull-headed ignorance, it is as embedded as ever in the existence of the game's middle mass; strengthened, not undermined in any way, by the specific economic forces which appear on a superficial level to have changed the demographic basis and the origins and backgrounds of participants in the English game.

But what English football culture believes does fit in with a love of the game is just as telling as what it believes doesn't. Godard and Antonioni came from countries which have both won the World Cup in the last 15 years, and which contested the 2006 final. But while a love of their films - or anything else (don't come the "Club Can't Handle Me" with me, now; you know that doesn't count and you're just being pedantic to avoid the point) that originated from any other country outside England where football is the unrivalled top sport and a fundamental, overriding passion for millions - is seen as alien and unfitting to a love of football, an absolute and uncritical absorption by one country, and to a much lesser extent three other minor-functionary footman nations, where football has (at least until very recently) barely registered at all, is seen as entirely natural and entirely appropriate to a love of the game - in fact, more appropriate than a love of anything that existed even in this country pre-Murdoch. English football, like no other major sporting enthusiasm anywhere in the world, is bound up with an adoring worship of those parts of the world where the sport plays at best a minor role, and a sneering dismissal of anything whatsoever that originates in those parts of the world where the sport enjoys equal or greater popularity to that it enjoys here.

There is a direct connection between this unfortunate fact and the dismal performances of the England senior side against Switzerland (incidentally, isn't Bombardier beer - advertised as always before the game - an extreme example of Ploughman's Lunch syndrome? I had never heard of it before about 2005) and of the England Under-21 side in Denmark. The non-football world is more real to the players and especially to Stuart Pearce (repeat unto infinity if you're still stuck in 1987: the Lurkers were worse than George Benson) even than their own country; the football world is fake, Not Like Us, an unknowable phantom. They've never listened to Spanish, Ukrainian or Czech music or watched a Spanish, Ukrainian or Czech film; ergo those countries have nothing to teach them about football. They might as well not exist. That is why English football, worsened in this respect by Sky, is still every bit as removed in the way it is played and the values it incarnates from the rest of the football world as it was before 1992. That is also the root cause of the FIFA standoff (yes, I know capitalist greed is capitalist greed wherever it happens and isn't any better just because it isn't the work of Anglo-Saxons, yes I know the FIFA elite represents the capitalist greed of several "races" just as much as the NewsCorp elite represents the capitalist greed of another "race", but there is something peculiarly odious about one "race" of greedy capitalists attacking other greedy capitalists for being the wrong "race" of greedy capitalists while pretending to attack them simply for being greedy capitalists full stop).

If you have a sport whose entire culture is rooted in hatred for all the other countries that can teach it anything about that sport, and genuflection towards one country and its three footmen (who used to be our own footmen and are still ludicrously imagined to be so when it suits us) that can teach us nothing at all about it, you'll get English football. You'll get Stuart Pearce, the BNP lookalike with his good honest bone-crunching roast beef tackles sending people who listened mostly to the same music as the England players of the day, and ate the same food, and drank the same drinks, but did often have far more left-wing political views, back to their opera houses and onions and cognac and invading Poland. I hope you're all very proud of yourselves. Personally, I rather wish you'd all stuck with the NFL you were all watching instead when "Livin' on a Prayer" came out and had led our own football shrivel to crowds of 240 at Blyth Spartans and Rooney was the first European captain at the Superbowl in 2015. At least that would have shown where you belong. At least that would have been honest.

English football has dressed itself up as having escaped a world of insularity and xenophobia. The Under-21 side reveals this as the biggest lie of the last 20 years. We've swapped honest xenophobia - however odious it was, '70s blokishness never pretended to be anything else - for something which pretends to be "global" while actually being so only in the sense that the "Sweat" remix is. Let those words lie on Pearce's grave, after Montenegro have won Euro 2016.

Keys, Gray and dinosaurs

Yes, I know, four months, &c, &c, &c.

But cast your mind back, if you can bear it, to August 1992. Working-class culture and unity as a political force had just received its final defeat - indeed, now it was not only socialism but social democracy that was decisively beaten - but one important aspect of working-class culture, which had teetered on the brink of oblivion through the years of squalor and violence which were a natural consequence first of the working class's abandonment of its side in the Butskellite bargain and then of the revenge destruction that followed, was BACK! Not only was it back but it was reborn and reinvented for a new era. A new, ostentatiously classless and mid-Atlantic face of football was, it had to be accepted even by the most fervent socialists considering what we'd been through in the previous decade, the only way out.

But what we were already seeing was the purloining of a genuinely progressive agenda by short-term capitalists who, only a few years earlier, would have been happy to see the sport collapse into oblivion. The game was, in truth, saved not by the Murdoch organisation but by the strong efforts of the fanzine movement, the well-organised mobilisation against the Thatcher government's identity card scheme, the genuine public sympathy and goodwill and desire to save such a significant, embedded part of British life which spread, quite unexpectedly and quicker than most newspapers sensed, after the "never again" moment of Hillsborough, the impetus for reconstruction set out in the Taylor Report, and a couple of fortuitous moments of good luck for the game spread entirely through terrestrial television - the Liverpool-Arsenal match six weeks after Hillsborough which convinced the residual aldermen of the Football League, and many others besides, that the game and dramatic live television could be the most natural bedfellows, and England's well-documented World Cup campaign of 1990.

All these occurred at a time when Sky was struggling to stay afloat, and showed no interest in football other than as co-owners of the original Eurosport. When the triumvirate that remained unbroken until this week - Richard Keys, Andy Gray and Martin Tyler - all deserted an ITV knowing that its original role could not last, they in fact joined the Sports Channel of BSB, the IBA's doomed attempt to keep the old broadcasting values alive in the new world. This organisation's very name, like most of the positive and progressive forces without which Sky would never have had a product to market at all, has rarely if ever been mentioned by Sky, for the simple reason that - like the overwhelmingly socialist fanzines and equally heartfelt left-wing campaigns against both the Tebbitists and the unashamedly lumpenproletariat thugs who posed an equal and remarkably similar threat to football's future at that time (what were the former, ever, but a more "respectable" version of the latter?) - it is politically embarrassing to acknowledge, not least because Richard Keys spent those years working for TV-am, the Daily Mail on screen and the place where the organised working class decisively lost its stake in broadcasting. The truth is that, just as the Labour Party was already in a strong electoral position on 12th May 1994, football was recovering anyway without Sky, and would have continued to do so - and in a direction that would have maintained the best elements of the old game while, if anything (because far more left-wing and democratic in the true, non-Blairite sense) more determined to throw out the worst aspects, especially the attitudes that Keys & Gray never even attempted to lose.

As their purloining for ultra-capitalist means of reforms that could never have happened without deep-rooted left-wing convictions gathered pace, Sky benefited initially from the fact that there was still a residual Reithianism at the BBC and a residual "right-on" stance at Channel 4, which gave them a sheen of rebellion and outsiderdom that they didn't deserve. The undeniable technical advancement for the time of their early Premier League coverage, coupled with the unprecedented commercialism of their presentation (mainly derived, as were many other aspects of their coverage, from the Channel 4 coverage of American football which had reached its peak at our own game's nadir), made veteran pundits such as Jimmy Hill, who twenty years earlier had reinvented football coverage just as much as Sky would do, and especially Saint & Greavsie, who quickly disappeared from ITV's shrivelled coverage, seem how Keys & Gray seem now - stupid, irrelevant old men. But this, as has been made brutally clear this week, was only on the superficial level of appearances. The actual attitudes and assumptions remained as backward and outmoded as they had ever been, rendered more so by the very force - global capitalism - which made them falsely appear to be different.

If Keys & Gray's neo-imperialist arrogance could very briefly claim to be set against a residually social democratic or paternalist broadcasting establishment, this was only the case at the very beginning of the Premier League era, for a number of forces rapidly came together to ensure that Sky's values gained more and more influence over the established broadcasters. Halfway through the first season of Sky's Whole New Ball Game, Channel 4 began to sell its own advertising airtime, effectively eroding the window of opportunity which for the previous decade had given Guardian values a mass television platform. The new system of ITV introduced at the same time decisively ended the era when even the most populist face of British TV had to be backed up with serious and unashamed aspirations to public service respectability. And even the BBC, faced with the unappealing alternative of the "Himalayan Option" which would have removed forever its claim to universality and confined it to an ever-diminishing Reithian ghetto (and of course destroy the outlet which was soon to spawn Britpop), began to play more and more by the rules of the market. Moreover, the cultural and political Left in the mid-90s decisively abandoned many of the principles that had guided the likes of the old Channel 4 and the fanzine movement, and began to accept if not actively celebrate neoliberal politics, a crude success-orientated attitude to popular culture, and social views (with wafer-thin justifications of "irony") far closer to those displayed at Molineux last Saturday than to anything that could be described as progressive. Keys & Gray were setting the agenda for an age. While it was always acknowledged that, say, the "New Football Writing" of the mid-90s came from a different cultural starting point, they were widely seen as at least allies of convenience for such a movement to an extent that, like much else about that era, is truly shaming when looked back on today.

The rebels, just like the Blairite rock'n'rollers to whom they became so close, had become the rulers. They had conquered the awestruck heights of British broadcasting; the whole system was being reshaped in their image. Incompetent and ill-thought-out attempts to dethrone them - such as ITV's idiotic attempt to develop digital terrestrial television as a low-rent competitor to Sky, and to build its own pay-TV sports channel around the continuing Football League and lesser Champions' League matches - only made them stronger, and made their competitors ever more laughable, caught frustratedly between the stools of erstwhile public service duopoly and hamfisted attempts to find a deregulated niche. No matter that huge numbers of the population never had, and have still never had, Sky; it became impossible to live without its influence unless you chose to isolate yourself from all mass media. The result was the inevitable outcome of those whose sole definition was how "anti-establishment" they were becoming the unquestioned, unquestionable rulers; like their counterparts in Blairite (and of course latterly Cameronite) rock music, they became drunk on power, so certain of their position that it never occurred to them to think before they spoke, or to think very much at all. All the time, right up to this week, the pretence remained that, just as Keys & Gray had moved the presentation of football on from the 1980s, they had also moved it on in terms of underlying attitudes and values. What really died this week is an important sustaining myth of the Britain of the last 15 years.

On an internal level for Sky themselves, the challenge now is to reinvent their own coverage in the same way they reinvented football coverage generally when Keys & Gray were the fresh young faces. No doubt, with the immense political and cultural power they have developed, they will succeed. But for the rest of us a more interesting point is this: if the faces of Sky throughout its existence are now recognised and accepted to be the very definition of dinosaurs, does that not show that the people they got rich by taunting with that description simply for daring to be socialist were never anything of the kind, merely people who had the temerity to hold to unfashionable ideas? If these most potent faces of 90s and 00s neoliberalism stand discredited and ruined, just as their creed is taking a more extreme and dangerous form in government than ever before, that could be an unexpectedly potent way back for the rest of us.

At any rate, a delusion died this week, a delusion that has shaped the second half of my life so far just as assuredly as the different (though related) delusions of Thatcherism shaped the first. Richard Keys and Andy Gray have fallen on their swords by the crudest rules of trial by media. To destroy the myths of neoliberalism which they so deeply embodied will be a far deeper challenge.

What would entirely new football grounds built circa 1960 or circa 1970 have looked like?

Despite the odd burst of invention - Chelsea's West Stand, built specifically to target the smart metropolitan bourgeoisie but fatally opened in 1974, precisely the time that class was decisively scared off football until the 1990s, and almost bringing the club down for good during the decade in between, springs irresistibly to mind - we all know that many British football grounds were largely frozen in time between an era of municipal/parochial (delete according to opinion) civic pride, in which football crowds were supposed to fit in an organic identity which was ultimately little more than an evolved feudalism transplanted to industrial Britain, and the era of mass psychological and cultural privatisation.

The fact that, during the long years in between, the old identities curdled away almost to nothing and simply could not cope with the new world coming - so could only reduce themselves to the racism and thuggery that put so many off football in the 1980s - has been repeated far too often to need going over again here. But what has been intriguing me recently is what would have happened had the development of football grounds not been largely held back, except in isolated, piecemeal fashion here and there, for so long. It's easy to imagine a generation of stadia built circa 1960 with a certain sort of "Macmillan Pride" design - that particular 1961 stand at (heartbreakingly) Hillsborough that Simon Inglis specifically compared to Yuri Gagarin's journey beyond springs to mind - but what particularly intrigues me is what might have happened later in the 1960s and into the early 1970s. Might a generation who are consensually and rather lazily mocked today as "autocratic socialists" have considered football an ideal platform for the mass education (cynics would loadedly - and, yes, that is a pun - say "re-education") of the working class, and designed uncompromisingly brutalist football grounds? How would fans have taken to them, and how would both the grounds themselves and their reputation have survived the decades to come? Would they have gone the way of the Tricorn or would at least some of them have come to be regarded as modernist classics, perhaps with one being listed and symbolically surviving a la Craven Cottage?

Their full implications would not have sat comfortably with the game's new masters. Sky are equally desperate and equally determined to hide all hints of both late Victorian and early 20th Century paternalistic provincialism and 60s/70s socialism, albeit for slightly different reasons. A large part of me wishes that Sky had had a brutalist legacy to live with, which might have been even harder to reconcile with neoliberalism than the Saltergates and Field Mills. I'd be interested in anyone else's views on this particular piece of alternative history, especially from those who really do know this territory.

Not in their name

One of the happiest events of the weekend - and I hope their win will not cause temporary satisfaction; these things are wrong in principle - was the Liverpool fans' demonstration against the club's ownership by unaccountable American plutocrats.

This was particularly gratifying because, all too often, we hear the apologists for football plutocracy justify it by saying that if it hadn't happened we would inevitably have had another Hillsborough, and that it has somehow been done in the name of those who died there, at Bradford and at Heysel. This is the same dangerous and misleading "either with us or against us" argument used by apologists for the Bush administration's foreign policy, and for so much else that is unjustifiable: those who lost their lives in those terrible events would probably have wanted the old-style, petit-bourgeois, provincial, small-scale capitalism which once controlled football clubs to be swept away, but in common with all other socialists (and that, considering their geographical and likely social background, is what the vast majority of those killed, at least in the two Yorkshire tragedies, almost certainly were) they certainly wouldn't have wanted it to be replaced with a grander-scale version of the same thing. They would instead have been infinitely more likely to want a true democratic ownership, controlled neither by aldermen nor by billionaires, with each citizen having a stake in what was theirs - everything the fanzine movement was calling for in the 1980s.

The idea that there are only two possible ways, dangerous squalor or ever-increasing elite control and inequality, is like the idea that the only two cultures in the world are Coca-Cola and Home Service (often trotted out by those who mock my concept of European pop) - a deeply depressing narrowing of the parameters of debate. If you were to tell those Liverpool fans who demonstrated at the weekend that control by plutocrats was justified in the name of the 96, you'd be viciously and scathingly condemned in no uncertain terms. As you should be. It's reassuring to know that not everyone has fallen for the myth that the new-style capitalists care about them any more than the old ones did.

Setanta and the myth of the market

When Setanta's UK operations started they fairly quickly found a niche (much as Eurosport, which everyone now forgets was the first sports channel Sky ever had anything to do with, has done in recent years) - the Scottish Premier League augmented by a range of European football beyond anything any UK broadcaster had ever got together before (the top divisions of Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Portugal were all shown at one point) and by relays of RTE's GAA coverage (which was the reason why my father subscribed). They had a raison d'etre. They had a position, and (better still) one which reflected the much greater European feeling and awareness of the Celts compared to the English. That's supposed to be what the modern-day market economy encourages.

Unfortunately, in practice, it doesn't. The system that theoretically encourages diversity in reality merely encourages smaller companies to make desperate attempts to copy larger ones, and when they inevitably fail merely reinforces the logical end of the alleged free market, namely oligopoly. ITV found that out some years ago when, instead of having the sense to create something akin to what Freeview has become now, decided instead (mainly out of a desperate and self-destructive hatred for Sky which had festered throughout the system since ... well, since at least 1989, really) to attempt to build another Sky Sports on the second tier of English football, and feigned shock when it failed.

In the case of Setanta, what they thought would be their route to status as a genuine competitor to the oligopoly in their particular field began - ironically - as an indirect result of the very same factors which for some of us give Michel Platini all the justification he needs; namely the fact that, in the context of the involvement in Europe of the political state dominated by England, Sky money is blood money. Anyone who understands how international politics work knows that the EU's insistence that no one company could own all six packages of live Premier League games had more to do with a completely justified wariness of precisely what Sky represents, and where its money is coming from, than anything else. The problem is that the very system that has elevated Sky to its current status - a system which the EU if anything currently intends to further institutionalise - cannot really stand competition (a natural aftereffect of the UK's inability to reach a halfway house during the 1970s, and the way it was all thrown away when it had almost been arrived at).

Armed with its 46 Premier League games, Setanta then started to acquire as much sport as it could from under the noses of Sky, often sport which could not be more now, more part of the rules of big business and post-colonial rules-reversal (most obviously the Indian Premier League). It is true that the economy had yet to fall off a cliff at that stage, but the warnings were there, and right from the start Setanta ran the very serious risk of being beaten by the very game it was now playing. That which is supposed to empower minorities all too often ends up merely reinforcing the tyranny of the majority.

The company's likely fate is yet further proof of the truth that unfettered market capitalism doesn't even work by its own criteria. Quite apart from anything else, it could have severe political implications. For a company of Irish origins to indirectly bring about the financial ruin of Scottish football clubs through its obsessive chasing of the English market, at a time such as this, could go quite some way to further unbalancing the Union.

Incidentally, considering how little ITV seem to be interested in him, the BBC should really get Jon Champion back. Like Barry Davies before him, he pisses off pseudo-rebellious inverted snobs so much that he really has to be defended - no commentator who angers those who regard a command and knowledge of their own language as actually A Bad Thing can be without merit, and Champion has a scope of knowledge and awareness of both the game and the wider world far beyond most of his contemporaries.

The best piece I've seen so far on Newcastle United

by David Conn in the Guardian

As I sort of predicted in January 2008, Newcastle's demise is running ever further in parallel with that of New Labour, aptly enough because both were, essentially, the same thing.  Both were projects built on reinventing something which had seemed dead in the 1980s, killed off by Thatcherism and the collapse of British industry.  Both attempted to use American and/or neoliberal techniques - the strategies of marketing generally, the presentation of American football specifically - to regenerate something local, culturally specific and rooted in history which was dying on its feet.  Both were an ingenious hybrid of social and market values, either post-Thatcherite, post-Cold War reformed social democracy for a new era or reheated Thatcherism with a human face depending on how kind you were to the mechanisms which had brought them into being. Both only made sense for as long as the long boom continued.  Both are now being very, very publicly exposed as having been built on a lie, or at least on exceedingly weak foundations.  And both, if they lose power this year or next, might never get it back.