/ 23 September 2011

Top teams mop up the market

Top Teams Mop Up The Market

A few weeks ago, stunned and angered by the 8-2 Manchester United mauling of Arsenal at Old Trafford, I went back to American Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson to see what he would make of it. Writing about Walmart in Valences of the Dialectic, Jameson quotes a nameless chief executive who complains that “they [Walmart] have killed free market capitalism in America”.

He adds: “Walmart is … the purest expression of that dynamic of capitalism which devours itself, which devours the market by means of the market itself.” He could have been writing about European football and the way Manchester United; their local rivals, Manchester City; Chelsea, owned by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, and Spanish giants Barcelona and Real Madrid have overtaken every other team to emerge as the top teams in Europe.

Most of the world’s best talent ends up in one of these teams. During the last transfer window Arsenal’s Samir Nasri went to City, Sergio Aguero (Diego Maradona’s son-in-law) left Atletico Madrid for, yes, City; Cesc Fabregas moved from Arsenal to Barcelona.

As long as Uefa does not address this trend it will continue, further consolidating the strength of these teams. Unless something drastic happens one of them will, for the foreseeable future, dominate its local league and win the Champions League — and in the final one of them will play the other.

Yet Manchester City manager Roberto Mancini, after watching his team blow a two-goal lead against Fulham at the weekend, did not believe the reasons behind the eventual draw were tactical. “We’re lacking players at this moment,” Mancini said, suggesting the totalising ethic of capitalism to which the Shona people allude in the proverb about the evil nature of a snake that kills what it does not eat.

Mancini is the manager of a club that has spent £300-million on players in the past three years, yet he still believes he needs more of them. The club has acquired not only the best of the world’s talent but whoever else is on the market. It reminds me of AC Milan in the early 1990s, mopping up the market by buying every available player, not always because they needed them but to make sure their rivals did not lay their hands on them.

Those who disagree will quote some results from last weekend: Levante beat Madrid 1-0 and Manchester City drew at Fulham. But these are aberrations. Levante could play Madrid 100 times and lose 99 of those games.

The power of the big five
A more interesting weekend result that gives one a glimpse into the power of the big five is Barcelona’s 8-0 thrashing of Osasuna. In the season’s opening fixture Barcelona beat perennial Champions league team Villareal 5-0. But do the Barcelona fans actually enjoy these netball scores? As John Crace writes in his new book, Vertigo, it must be boring being a fan of these big teams. “One regulation win after another, with no one really needing to break sweat … Where’s the fun in that?”

It is fun being an Arsenal fan, even though the team last won a trophy in 2005. Watching them play is entertaining and maddening. Take the game against Newcastle last year. By the time the first half was over the team was 4-0 in the lead. So I sat back and thought the game had been won. Imagine what I felt when Newcastle racked up four goals to level the score.

In some ways Arsenal reminds me of Turkish team Besiktas, a club with fortunes that do not compare at all with those of Turkey’s top two sides, Galatasaray and Fenerbahce. The chant of their fans, captured by the New Yorker’s Elif Batuman, is: “Besiktas is the most surreal team in the world. Fenerbahce and Galatasaray care only about winning, but Besiktas is essentially irrational and therefore essentially human.”

This is, to be sure, not a celebration of mediocrity but a recognition of the essentially irrational nature of football, which is what endeared it to fans in the first place. It was unpredictable, it was competitive; a mirror of life’s troughs and highs.

Will this oligopoly football continue? Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger does not think so. A few weeks ago he forecast that football’s bubble will pop soon. “People feel football has been untouchable, but that will not last. I am convinced that Europe will go into a huge financial crisis within the next three weeks, or three months, and maybe that will put everything into perspective again. All our income could be a little bit under threat in the next few months.

Signs of resistance
We have seen the first signs of resistance already in Spain,” he said, referring to the opposition by other La Liga teams — futile in the end — to the television deal that disproportionately gave 35% of television revenues to Madrid and Barcelona.

I will not waste time watching Barcelona beat Valencia 5-0. Unless one has some latent sadistic tendencies, that surely cannot be fun. It is better to check the highlights later. So what is the local football fan to do? The first step is to frequent the local stadium as often as possible.

This does not apply only to the Soweto derby. In fact, I find the derby ritual elaborate and contrived. I have always found it strange that a derby game, played on Saturday, is normally sold out by Wednesday and yet an equally competitive game, say Pirates versus Santos, struggles to fill the small-capacity Orlando Stadium.

A few decades ago the Italians recognised that there was nothing more dispiriting than a sparsely populated stadium. They made going to the game as cheap as possible. At R40 our tickets remain affordable and there is no reason for stadiums to remain empty.

As Uruguayan thinker Eduardo Galeano wrote: “Did you get, ever, in an empty stadium? Try it. Stand in the middle of the floor and listen. There is nothing less than an empty stadium empty.” There is probably something worse than an empty stadium: watching Madrid or one of the big teams slaughter some small team with no resources in La Liga or the English Premier League. I refuse to be witness to that.