Football Isn’t Coming Home After All

Fifteen years after Baddiel and Skinner assured us that football was coming home to England, it’s slowly dawning on people that it isn’t. Not any time soon, anyway.

The new Wembley stadium is an impressive – if a little tardy in coming – icon of our great city. But this week’s international game against Sweden saw the lowest attendance there for an England football match since it opened its doors in 2007. And elsewhere things are even worse.

John Terry, the captain of our national team, is an odious racist (allegedly, at the time of writing, but I call that YouTube clip as my first witness…) as well as a proven love rat, thug and bribe aficionado. Tottenham Hotspur executives saw no problem with relocating to east London when they thought it would allow them to squeeze more money from supporters already enduring the worst recession in a century. And attending a Premier League game in London is now, with the possible exception of Craven Cottage in Fulham, no longer affordable for the average fan.

What was once a game played by gentlemen with long shorts and neat side-partings is now the pastime of cocky millionaires in Bentleys and Lamborghinis. The sights and sounds of kids playing football are conspicuous by their absence from London’s parks. Perhaps they’re indoors watching one of the hundreds of live games streamed into their living rooms every year by Sky Sports, News Corp’s flagship broadcaster in the UK.

After ushering in a new era in the early 1990s, Sky has been to football what Simon Cowell is to music. Determined to make as much money as possible, by ripping the heart out of an industry and replacing it with vacuous and formulaic lowest-common-denominator entertainment hype.

Ok, maybe that’s pushing it a bit too far. Football isn’t exactly on the verge of collapse. And it’s not all the Murdochs’ fault, despite Tom Watson’s relentless efforts to prove otherwise. But the Premier League bubble is, if not burst, shrinking rapidly as it floats off towards the lucrative markets in the Middle East. Football is still a great sport, enjoyed by millions throughout the city, but you get the feeling that it’s now more about the brand and the soap opera than the sport itself.

Those empty seats at the new Wembley could well mark a turning point and it remains to be seen whether football can maintain its position as the national game. With all eyes on London at the Olympics next year, it’s time for other sports to take a share of the limelight.

Image by joncandy courtesy of Flickr