The trouble with football...

So I've been driving my friends, the boyfriend, and twitter feed mad with my complaints about why professional football (aka soccer) in this country is completely poisonous, and how it's starting to make me hate all football as a result. This is mainly a rant about the media and the FA, but I've realised the other tenets of my argument have a lot to say about how we view sport in the UK too.

First of all, let me say the good things about football in Britain:

• It's our national sport. Especially in England where it's pretty much the only sport we're good at. I mean cricket is going ok at present, but it does seem to be mainly a summer obsession and it's got some faintly snobbish overtones that seem to put people off. Scotland isn't quite as good at football, but the Scottish certainly have the same passion for it. I'm not sure how Wales fits into this one... 
• Football is our national sport for a few strong reasons: it comes from, broadly speaking, working class roots, it's easy to watch and to play and to talk about in the pub. A football player is something that kids grow up aspiring to be. Pretty much anyone can play on a Sunday or 5-a-side team and failing that, eat pies at the match or sit in the pub and talk about it. You don't need any special equipment and it's possible to play with one referee (or often none, judging by the boyfriend's 5-a-side team...). "Jumpers for goalposts."
• A certain level of fitness is required to be any good at it, and people getting fit is a good thing.
• It promotes town/ city/ county and national pride. 

And now, here are my big problems with the state of football:
There are actually other sports!
So the Olympics are going to be held in London this year, 2012! (End of the world notwithstanding). The British government has paid lip service to promoting sport, getting behind the sports played in the Olympics, funding more sports and generally trying to get people off the sofa. It doesn't really seem to be working though. Last night for example, I watched the scrolling news channels for about 2 hours. The story? The England football manager, Fabio Capello had quit. Despite having really nothing at all to say beyond speculation, BBC News and Sky News managed to spin that out for over 2 hours. People are getting bombed to death in Syria and it got about 5 minutes coverage. Over the week, the sports news (and I mainly listen to the BBC) on the radio referred to player transfers between teams, some things that some players/ managers had said, some stuff from Twitter and some mild analysis of the one or two games that had actually been played. Harry Redknapp's court case got most of the attention. I think cricket was mentioned once or twice. There was a notable half an hour on Sunday morning when 5Live managed to go an entire half an hour discussing other sports, and 5 minutes of that was about Scottish football teams. My point is this: if the media spent half the time covering other sports that it spends on professional football, people may actually have heard of them and want to go out and watch them or see them on a TV channel that isn't obscurely buried somewhere behind the adult channels. Sports that are newsworthy for any reason do get some seasonal coverage - notably the cycle races such as the Tour de France. This went apparently unnoticed here for several decades until Lance Armstrong became news... viewers realised it was interesting to watch... Britain got some good cyclists with some good sponsors... there's now a lot more TV and radio coverage of the Tour and the Giro. My point is, if the British government was actually serious about getting people into sport, they really could influence the funding and the media coverage of sports that are not football. I've just spent hours staring at a Sport England grant application and I can tell you, they are not making this easy.
The other sports in this year's Olympics: http://www.london2012.com/sport

It's actually quite boring
This never used to be a criticism I held of football. I grew up in a family that took it pretty seriously; watched, played, knew all the rules, but perhaps without the passion of some families as we didn't have a real team loyalty. England matches were pretty sacred and also how I learned that my dad did know swearwords. I played hockey at school and the rules are pretty similar so I never questioned it. But now, here's a strange thing... and once you've started to think it, you can't unthink it. It's like someone telling you how magic tricks work. Turns out the Americans were right. You can get through a whole football match without either team scoring. The players can literally pass the ball to each other for half an hour, or there might be a whole load of "ooooh" moments when a goal is narrowly missed, is saved, the ball hits the post. But face facts here - that's quite boring, it messes up the statistics (play the pools? have a fantasy league team? a no-score draw doesn't get you much, does it?) and I've actually watched fans walk out of the ground before the match ends. The commentators start to talk absolute drivel, and probably just read out some tweets. It seems to be one of those British things that we just accept this. The only way to score in football is to get a ball in the goal -you might get 3 or 5, but you might get 0. Your team might get some points without a score, but then, if you're not obsessed with where it is in the league table, are you really bothered? I only really noticed this when I started to watch other sports more. You can't watch an entire game of rugby league without anybody scoring anything, can you? It's also easier to see which team has the advantage at any given point in the game. I was always amused by American sports which seemed to have 5 minutes break for every minute of play, but guess what? They are entertaining to watch. Sports fans love the baseball, the basketball, the tennis, the NFL because stuff actually happens, points are scored, and not just by that one flukey moment when the ball actually goes in the goal. My latest theory is the more complicated the rules are, the harder it is to take your concentration off the action, and therefore, your interest is more often rewarded. Sports fans love to watch ice hockey, NASCAR, Gaelic football, rugby league, rugby union, roller derby because contact is made between the competitors and also it's great to shout "Hit someone!" while you're watching this... and because quite often a fight actually breaks out as well. Especially in ice hockey. The rule here is, any game that needs a large number of referees and officials is going to have those moments. Not sure? Watch five minutes of football and watch what the players do with their arms. If they look stupid, you've just learned how the magic trick is done. Now go and watch a contact sport. Or the movie Dodgeball.

The FA
http://www.thefa.com/
As a national, European, and international body. Now this is where I have to admit, I don't know that much about the governing body of any other sports. I play roller derby and the governing body is still in its quite early days, still mainly run by volunteers who play(ed) and love the sport, so maybe I'm biased. Still. It makes a mockery of any sport when all officiating, rule sets, funding, affiliation etc is overseen by a bunch of older white men sitting in a room, operating as a network of "old boys" who all know each other, and if they didn't go to school together, took a bribe from someone to get a decision made. It's known the whole thing is totally corrupt, but no-one seems to challenge this. Last week, BBC3 showed a documentary about homophobia in football. Barely any teams or players from the Premiership or top English leagues would comment and the FA seemed fairly closed off. Eventually, the presenter got an interview with the Equality rep from the FA. Who was a black woman. I ought to be fairly impressed with this, but I'm really not. If a Harry Redknapp-esque older white man with a London accent had invited the presenter into his office and had the same conversation I would have been more impressed, because I might have believed it. Standing outside Wembley with the token woman from the FA just looked really really staged, and for all I know, she might be the only woman who works there. It just added to the fact that the FA appear to be doing nothing about homophobia in football. Yes, there was a very successful campaign to "get racism out of football", but I think this had more to do with the players who were already role models to young men in this country. It was supported by the media, and the law was very clear, forcing the FA to act against any racism with fines, investigations, banning fans etc. I can't see that this has been done in every country in Europe thus far. The FA do what they like and they go where the money is.

The WAGs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAGs
Oh my god, the WAGs! Yes, any sport or profession with any glamour attached is going to attract media attention and hangers on, but really, this has been one of the worst things to drag down the reputation of professional football. The reason that many young lads grow up wanting to be a footballer is not because they want to be an athlete and represent their team or even their country. It's because they want to make loadsa money, drive fast cars and drink champagne with over-impressed women in nightclubs. It's a good thing that David Beckham, Wayne Rooney or Rio Ferdinand can demonstrate that talent and hard work can get you all the way to the top, and there are some true rags-to-riches stories in football, as there are in American football and basketball. Where the rot sets in is that this has become an aspiration, a reason not to try hard and get a good education. In turn, there's now a generation of young girls who aspire simply to be the wife, girlfriend, or even the mistress of a famous footballer. Instead of being themselves, they think society wants them to dress and act a certain way and the media is feeding this. If the government and sponsorship really got behind attracting young people to other sports it would do a great deal for their self esteem instead of telling them that having an affair with a footballer is a good thing. One of my new year's resolutions was to put my money where my mouth is and stop buying celebrity magazines, because otherwise you look at the fallout from Jordan and Imogen Thomas and Ashley Cole and go "we created that monster." Idolatry is dangerous, plain and simple. If you're still struggling with this concept, I have one question "Peter Crouch: would you? Really?"

In conclusion: The twenty-first century is all about having more leisure time, more choice in how we spend our time and money (if we have any left), being able to connect with anyone, any time through all these different forms of media we use every day. It's time Britain stopped being all about "any given Saturday" and enjoyed some other sports and past-times on some other days of the week. Preferably some that aren't controlled by a single-minded news media and a corrupt governing body. You can risk your life and spend your money trying out extreme sports, you can teach your children to actually be good at tennis or golf or cricket or another glamorous sport that brings home the cash, or you can just go down your local leisure centre and whack the odd shuttlecock about. It's your life. If you do love football, love it for its heroes, its history, for your team loyalty... and not for putting an England flag up once every few years and having an excuse to shout at the telly in the pub because you've got nothing else to do.