Stick to football. It doesn’t really work does it? The big problem with sticking to football is that football doesn’t stick to football. Instead, football keeps sticking to other things, such as nation building, geopolitics, contrived Hollywood bro-ship vehicles and cruelty.
Before that football stuck to European industrial wealth and colonial governance. In the future football is promising to stick to rootless global product, the unceasing scream of the digital hive mind, and everything else. Tricky isn’t it. Does anyone just want to talk about VAR?
With this in mind States of Play, Miguel Delaney’s new book about the mega-politics of modern football, is an important, perfectly timed and hugely necessary attempt to transcribe and make sense of the world scrolling past the window in real time.
This could be a dry topic in outline, a non-football football book, one that for long periods isn’t even about football governance, but just, like, governance. Instead, it is a detailed, boisterous, big-hearted tale that reads like a rollercoaster colour match report, if only because the basic story taking place behind the noise and colour is so gripping.
For the past 20 years football has been going through its own period of supercharged climate change. This is no longer a warning. It’s here now, unstoppably present, and still oddly underdocumented even as Saudi Arabia jogs grandly towards the tape in its own uncontested World Cup 2034 final eliminator.
States of Play is the first significant attempt to make a joined-up hard-cover record of the extraordinary modern history of state interference in global football. It kicks off by covering the backstory, the way in which antiquated and dictatorial governance, plus greed, plus nonexistent regulation offered an open door for the present: the dictator’s plaything template in club football, and the alpha-dog world saviour leadership dynamic at Fifa and Uefa.
There’s an early romp through the ripe pre-modern landscape, the age of Berlusconi-ism, Irving Scholar, satellite launches and the blindsided uselessness of the Football Association. Here we have Saatchi and Saatchi doing a product pitch for the new “European Television League”. Hmm. While we’re at it let’s build a small box and fill it with all the evil in the world.
The notion of sportswashing is defined and traced, with the correct conclusion that the word itself is far too mild. Not much is being washed by the sovereign states involved in elite football. This is hard sport power.
Soon we’re into the age of Roman Abramovich at Chelsea, and a template for all that would follow. Delaney gets to restate the evidence the UK courts eventually allowed Catherine Belton to publish in her book Putin’s People, that there are sources in Russia who say Abramovich was told to buy Chelsea by Vladimir Putin. With all due caveats of course: Abramovich wholeheartedly denies this. And Sergei Pugachev is, as a matter of court pronouncement in a separate case, an unreliable witness.
From there we head in gripping detail into Manchester City and Abu Dhabi, Qatar in Paris, and Fifa and Uefa, organisations run like fiefdoms by “two relatively random men”. From there on into the golden Saudi future, the goal of which is ultimately “to buy football itself”.
Delaney is the chief football writer at the Independent, a job that takes him from Donetsk to Doha to Riyadh and Zurich, ringside seats at the wider global circus. There is some lovely detail here, from Gianluigi Lentini’s signing by Milan for a scandalous £13m, described by Pope John Paul II as “an offence against the dignity of work”, to Roberto Mancini’s catchphrase at City (“never speak to me again”) and tales of Mancini shouting “fuck you, fuck you. And fuck you” at his players during the title-winning QPR game. On the Glazers’ odd behaviour at Manchester United: “So many stories got back to the writers of Succession that they considered a similar show based on football.”
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There is also just some welcome plain speaking, a major part of the book’s value in a time of moral relativism and whataboutery. The Qatar World Cup is summed up as “held for the planet’s wealthiest people and made possible by the poorest”, “an immoral tournament” at which “the very staging of football caused human suffering”. Football, we are reminded, is not intended for all this, is meant to entertain communities, not to enable dictators. There is a story of one football executive laughing out loud at the notion, often parroted, that sovereign wealth funds are not instruments of the state (“that’s the worst argument I’ve ever heard”). These things need to be said until they make sense.
One person who perhaps won’t enjoy States of Play is Amanda Staveley, who is criticised strongly in the course of a few pages examining perceptions of her role in Newcastle’s takeover. Not that any of that matters. Staveley’s persistence in helping to enable this world would ultimately win the day. Elsewhere the book is far more sympathetic to the people that genuinely matter. These are of course the fans of the clubs involved in a process that essentially makes fools of them, weaponises their passion, makes them dance, loyalty harvested and sold on like personal data to a marketing giant.
It is a process that essentially transforms clubs into host bodies, representatives of a government not a community. As Nicholas McGeehan, co-director of the football body FairSquare, says: “That is a misappropriation of something incredibly important. They’ve bought your name, they’ve bought your asset. It’s a Dr Faustus story.” It is also, like Faustus, a tragedy, one that continues to play out at giddy speed.
States of Play by Miguel Delaney is published by Hachette, £22
