Miguel Delaney paints a depressing picture of how football teams have become the playthings of the rich in a sport that feels increasingly rigged
Most fans sense something is deeply wrong and, if pressed for an explanation, would probably come up with a one-word diagnosis: money.
Miguel Delaney would agree with them, but his magnum opus on the subject runs to some 160,000 words and explains in magnificent but sometimes exhausting detail how, where, and why the game has gone wrong, and what might be done to fix it.
The term “financial doping” coined by Arsène Wenger almost 20 years ago barely begins to cover the problem.
In a sense it isn’t new. Rich, powerful and dangerous people have long sought to use football for nefarious purposes. But they never controlled the game or bent its structures to their will quite as those threatening football do now.
Over the last three decades, Big Money, mostly toxically from autocratic oil sources and US private equity giants, has moved in, eroded competition and hijacked tournaments.
It used to be relatively small-scale tycoons who owned top clubs. Now autocrats and countries do. The game’s administrators and ruling bodies — variously short-sighted, foolish, compromised — have either waved changes through or been powerless to stem the tide.
The grim story starts in Italy in 1986 when media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi bought AC Milan and began to mix football with a new kind of commercial television. His aim was to make money and gain political power. He dominated Italy for two decades before being priced out of football by the revolution he helped foment.
In 1992, two new vehicles for future dystopia came into being: the English Premier League (dubbed at the outset as ‘the Greed is Good League’ by the great writer Brian Glanville), and the European Champions League, a money-spinning behemoth that replaced the smaller, more meritocratic European Cup.
Thanks to the Premier League’s TV-derived riches, English football, once a largely parochial affair, began to attract top coaches, players and a new type of owner. The most consequential was the mysterious Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who was richer than any previous club owner in history.
The Qatari leader got Lionel Messi to wear a traditional bisht garment: a visual hijacking that became the defining image of the 2022 World Cup
In 2003, with no questions asked by the Premier League, he bought Chelsea and started spending previously unimaginable sums to hire the best coach and players. The previously mediocre London club were soon champions. Abramovich’s hundreds of millions distorted the transfer market and ancient principles of sporting competition.
His close ties to Vladimir Putin eventually brought Abramovich down, but his approach was soon copied. Putin, having obtained the 2018 World Cup by dubious means and used it, as Hitler did with the 1936 Olympics, to whitewash his regime before launching a war of conquest in eastern Europe.
Meanwhile, Gulf states and bitter rivals — Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and, later, Saudi Arabia — came to see the possibilities of exerting geopolitical power and influence through the world’s most popular sport. Qatar corruptly acquired the right to host the 2022 World Cup and bought a club: Paris Saint-Germain (PSG). They then paid absurd sums for superstar players who squabbled and failed to gel into a successful team. They have, though, as Delaney says, turned the French league, which they win every year, into “a joke”. They, too, wildly inflated the global transfer market and damaged other clubs.
The UAE were smarter. They, too, bought a mediocre English team, Manchester City, poured in money to make Croesus or even Abramovich blush, and ran it cleverly, and eventually recruited the best coach in the world, Pep Guardiola. He redesigned the club to his specifications, bought every player he wanted and created a new kind of tyranny.
City now win almost everything every year and play football which, in other contexts, would be seen as beautiful. But few fans are charmed because they don’t exactly fit the classical hero narrative that involves overcoming challenges. Well-loved teams of the past were built organically, with limited resources.
Meanwhile, the Premier League has become a global menace. Its top teams are the tools or playthings of the mega-wealthy. It asset-strips talent from all over the world, and, thanks to TV coverage, has eclipsed and damaged every other league. But how long will fans invest emotion in a sport that increasingly feels rigged?
Across Europe, wealth differentials, largely caused by annual qualification for the lucrative Champions League, has created a dreary pattern of domination by single clubs. PSG win almost every year in France, Olympiacos in Greece, Red Bull Salzburg in Austria, and so on.
Power in the game has shifted from its old heartlands in Europe and South America, and the Qatar World Cup set a pattern that will continue. Saudi Arabia, whose de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman has eyes on much else in world sport, will host the 2034 tournament.
Delaney covered the World Cup in Qatar and was appalled by the contrast between its elite opulence and the suffering and deaths of migrant workers. He wasn’t impressed, either, when Qatari ruler Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani got Lionel Messi to wear a traditional bisht garment before receiving the World Cup: a visual hijacking that became the defining image of the tournament.
A chapter entitled Land of the Fee paints a similarly gloomy picture of the increasing power of US owners. American sports are relatively protected from predation, but football is wide open to those, like the Glazer family who took over Manchester United, who see clubs and competitions as “investment opportunities”.
Widespread outrage and a grassroots fans’ revolt saw off the threat of a European Super League three years ago, but super-clubs and a slew of proposed new competitions such as a Club World Cup still seem certain to change the game for the worse.
Is there a chance to stop all this? The various iterations of financial fair play (FFP) rules might effect change, but it seems unlikely. The goalposts keep moving, and the Premier League faces City’s army of top lawyers as they belatedly pursue the club over 115 charges relating to alleged FFP breaches.
Delaney sees a chance to remake football on a human scale, by emphasising and building on its value as a communal good. He admires the Swedish league’s success in reinventing and reinvigorating itself through — among other things — greater fan control of clubs.
Delaney has been everywhere, talked to everyone and read the right stuff. Some of the details he reveals are eye-popping. Real gold was used for tickertape at the end of the 2022 World Cup. The power of the Premier League means AC Milan, who once bestrode the world, now find themselves financially out-muscled by Brentford, who used to barely bestride their own little corner of west London.
He gives Gianni Infantino and Aleksander Čeferin (heads of Fifa and Uefa, the world and European governing bodies) a deserved kicking for their vanity and many failures.
This is an important and well-researched book, but I do have one quibble. Fine and passionately engaged reporter that he is, Delaney, despite his penetrating insights and flashes of wit and humour, is not really a great stylist.
In his much shorter and excellent journalism pieces, his passive voice and occasional confusing sentence seem lovable eccentricities. Across 436 pages, they made me wish for a more rigorous edit.
States of Play: How Sportswashing Took Over Football by Miguel Delaney
Sport: States of Play by Miguel Delaney
Seven Dials, 436 pages, paperback €15.99, e-book £12.99
