Alan Tomlinson:

Behind the Spectacle: On Euro 2012

As Poland’s football team scored to go level with Russia at the Euro 2012 football championship finals, on Tuesday June 12^th, President Bronislaw Komorowski, sporting the red and white scarf of the national side, leapt from his seat in joy. The stadium was a cauldron of nationalistic passion and emotion. To the president’s left, UEFA president Michel Platini was calm and controlled, seated and neutral, displaying the self-control of the professional administrator.

A few days earlier, at the opening match of the tournament, the effusive former dissident Komorowski – historian turned politician – was on Platini’s right, and left of the UEFA president was the towering figure of Ukraine president, Viktor Yanukovych. People sometimes wonder how UEFA can award tournaments to a society such as Ukraine, where Yanukovych retains wide popularity as a veteran of Ukraine politics, controversy rages over the imprisonment of former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, and the incumbent president is known as Russia’s man, a Putin puppet from his earlier political career. Why doesn’t UEFA, such thinking goes, with its campaigns and policies for fair-play, equality and anti-racism, question the motives of those in power in Ukraine, ask whether the Yanukovych administration is an appropriate host for UEFA’s four-yearly showpiece? There are several possible answers.

First, football is an a-political arena, and it is the business of bodies such as UEFA to support the regional, continental spread of the game and mount a stirring and memorable spectacle; and that is all. Second, international football is the stuff of international diplomacy and Platini is a guest of the political hierarchy of the tournament’s co-hosts; the protocol is clear, and the guest does not question the host(s). Third, a mere sporting body can hardly dictate the national political and economic dynamics that place people in power and change the overall situation of a country; Ukraine led the joint bid for Euro 2012, the event was awarded in 2007, all in the light of the Orange revolution of 2004 that had elevated Yulia Tymoshenko to the premiership. Fourth, the UEFA president doesn’t want to rock any boats as he lines himself up for the FIFA presidency, for which every national vote counts, in a process that talks football development and not political positions and principles.

The first answer has been long discredited, as international sporting bodies deal with political institutions and processes as a matter of course. It is simply disingenuous for them roll out the old ‘sport and politics don’t mix’ line. The second answer has some practical credibility. Heads of state greet each other across ideological divides, and go ahead with visits when privately disapproving of aspects of a political regime. ‘Why shouldn’t presidents of international sporting bodies do the same?’, Platini might argue. The third answer is defensible; UEFA is not an international body dedicated to combating breaches in human rights, or righting a shattered global economy. We all know what happened to many economies in 2008, though Poland bucked the trend, shedding its own right-wing regime and enjoying a sustained phase of economic growth; whilst in Ukraine, Yanukovych took power in 2010.  And in unpredictable circumstances, honouring the commitment to stage the event offers a degree of certainty in an uncertain world. This is a reasonable argument, should UEFA choose to use it. But then there’s the fourth answer; and this is surely closer to truth of the matter. Make the new stadia; deliver the technology and the crowds (as respectable and civilized as possible please); deliver the fairy stories of the arrogant Dutch defeated by the lively Danes, and most of all of the little 35-year old golden boy Andriy Shevchenko heading host country Ukraine towards victory over the surprised Swedes. And the UEFA president will be happy, rocking no boats, raising no awkward political questions, accepting the hospitality and assurances of whatever host figure comes his way. ‘Football is a cultural product’, Platini has been taught to say, a way of diverting questions about politics, money, and ethics.

Platini came to power at UEFA in January 2007, and was re-elected by acclamation in March 2011. His campaign for the UEFA presidency was in part funded by FIFA, and in 1998 Platini had been the running mate – the face-of-football figure – for Sepp Blatter’s successful pitch for the FIFA presidency. Platini’s vote in 2007 was bolstered by the promises he’d made to east European nations both small and large, linked to the expansion of European club games in the new Europa League competition, and commitments to award big events to those nations. In the first year of his presidency, Platini shepherded UEFA towards the Ukraine (with the experienced pedigree of Poland in partnership) for Euro 2012. These are deep, interlocking networks, rooted in deals and reciprocal debts, and it would take more than the hunger strike of a jailed opposition leader, or the images of her bruised limbs, to bring UEFA out of its internal realpolitik, to address issues of political morality and human rights beyond the stadium or the perimeter of the pitch.

The Roman satirist Juvenal gave us the term ‘bread and races/circuses’ (panem et circenses) to account for the profile of popular games and contests in the decaying democracy of classical Rome. Michel Platini’s anodyne adherence to football as little more than a ‘cultural product’ creates a modern equivalent. The primary sponsors at Euro 2012 include Carlsberg and McDonald’s: ‘beer, burgers and spectacle’ might be the most appropriate slogan for Euro 2012 as the live crowds and the global media audience lap up the fare. Meanwhile the Ukraine’s burly president will wine and dine Platini, as former prime minister Tymoshenko lies languishing in jail awaiting charges of tax evasion, embezzlement, and, half way through the first week of Euro 2012, even linked by the Ukraine president – who defeated her for the presidency in 2010 - of involvement in a political killing.

Alan Tomlinson, June 13^th 2012        

 

From Crystal Palace to Lunatic Asylum: The Life and Death of a Local Hero

Review of:

Tommy Boyle – Broken Hero

The Story of a Football Legend

by Mike Smith

Grosvenor House Publishing Ltd., 2011

[This is an extended version of a book review that appears in When Saturday Comes]

Until 2004, when Arsenal’s ‘Invincibles’ went unbeaten through a full Premier League season, Burnley held the record for the longest undefeated run in a single season of England’s top tier of the professional game; this small-town Lancashire club avoided defeat for thirty successive League games, going on to take its first championship in 1921. At the heart of this achievement was a gritty, combative Yorkshire-born midfield dynamo of Irish Catholic parentage, Tommy Boyle.

As Burnley advanced towards its second First Division title in the spring of 1960, the refrain of ‘Halley, Boyle and Watson’, architects of the astonishing success of the club almost forty years earlier, haunted the historical consciousness and hopes of Burnley fans. Could Adamson, Cummings and Miller match that legendary trio? How had Burnley set such a record, and also been led to its FA Cup Final triumph over Liverpool in 1914? Such thoughts were put aside as Burnley pipped Wolves and Spurs for its second title; a new set of names could adorn the bars and stands at the Lancashire club’s ground, Turf Moor. But Mike Smith’s compellingly related, and minutely researched, biography makes some of Burney’s mid-century heroes look like pampered softies alongside Tommy Boyle.

Boyle was a mere 5ft 7inches but dominated the teams that he led and captained, with a physical and psychological presence that willed his team-mates to victory. He cajoled, in part bullied, and consistently inspired the players at Burnley, and before that at Barnsley, to the highest levels of competitive performance. Boyle worked as a miner from the age of 12 to 20, when signing professional terms for Barnsley; he led the Yorkshire side to an FA Cup Final against Newcastle United, before a move to Burnley, where high-spending local backers were building, under secretary-manager John Haworth, one of the teams that would dominate English professional football either side of the Great War. Boyle won one England international cap as well as captaining Burnley to Cup triumph and League glory. He received the FA Cup from George V at Crystal Palace, the first time that a monarch deigned to attend the Cup Final; he was injured, as Bombardier Boyle, by flying shrapnel in no-man’s-land on the French front at Messines Ridge, in 1917. He recovered health and fitness to be called back to service before resuming his position as captain at Burnley, where 8 of the 1914 Cup-winning team reunited to build towards the record-setting 1920-21 feats. For a time, Boyle had it all: the adulation of the ‘lasses’ of the Lancashire mill-town (one of whom he married), money way beyond the reach of working men, the status of the local hero, acceptance and patronage of the local elite. But the peak of 1921 was achieved in a climate of post-war industrial decline, and as his ageing body became less able to cope with the wear and tear of the top-flight game, his world fell apart. Fiery and brief spells as trainer at Wrexham, and in Berlin, were followed by the collapse of his marriage (after the tragic loss of an only child), unemployment and drink-fuelled aggression and violence. Boyle was a talented sportsman, and after his playing days could win good prize-money on the crown green bowls circuit, but this soon went on drink in the bars of Blackpool, where he would arraign anybody with the inclination to listen with stories of how he’d shaken the hand of the King.

Drunken incidents and violent outbursts became routine to the former Burnley captain, and he lost the sympathy and patronage of the local elite. Eventually, Boyle’s former admirers in Burnley put in place the necessary processes to hide him away, with little publicity and so no stain on the reputation of the local community. Committal to the former Lancashire County Lunatic Asylum, under the new Mental Health Act of 1930, followed within days of a muted and forlorn appearance by Boyle at the launch event of the Burnley Supporters’ Club. Boyle died after almost eight years of incarceration, the broken hero of Smith’s subtitle, aged just 53.

This is a tragic story, well told and with much revealing detail. A delicious aside is Smith’s portrait of Lady Ottoline Morrell, a lover of philosopher Bertrand Russell, and wife of Burnley’s Liberal Member of Parliament Philip. Ottoline, flowing close-to-6-feet-tall Bloomsbury figure and Virginia Woolf lookalike, must have cut a pretty exotic dash at Turf Moor in the years preceding the Great War. She went to the match a few times and saw it as some kind of compensation for the lack of ‘mental culture’ available to the population in the town. The physicality of the professional game and the tribal energy of the crowd certainly excited her, and she wrote of the atmosphere at and after the game with an almost sexual sense of the physicality of the moment: what Tommy Boyle thought of this patronage though is not documented.

Burnley’s slide down the football hierarchy in the later 1920s matched Boyle’s personal decline, with unemployment escalating in the mill town, and Smith draws on an impressive range of sources in conveying this connection between the life of a community and the decline of one of its local heroes. The attribution of thoughts and reflections to Boyle is not always convincing, though, and some parts of the narrative are, as Smith concedes in a ‘disclaimer’, based on anecdote, fired by the author’s empathetic imagination. And it’s a long read with a lot of match reportage and name-listing, for instance, that can jar the narrative flow. But Smith is to be congratulated for bringing alive the fuller story of a figure so dramatically typical of the fluctuating fortunes of early professional footballers for whom the problems of adjustment after the glories of the playing days so often proved insurmountable. And it’s hardly a mere historical curiosity; time after time in reading this haunting tale, I was reminded of Paul Gascoigne’s life story after the magic was gone.

Alan Tomlinson       

 

Blatter: FIFA’s Supreme Leader triumphs again

If a week is a long time in politics, 6 months is no time at all in the world of international football politics. FIFA president Joseph ‘Sepp’ Blatter was trained as a young man by timepiece giant Swiss Longines, pedigree watchmaker since 1842. He must have learned a lot about longevity in business and organisational life. But maybe not enough about timing; switching the FIFA Congress to a date a year on from FIFA’s main showcase the World Cup was supposed to take FIFA business matters such as presidential elections away from the limelight and the media glare. But that’s backfired on Blatter, with the storm stemming from the 2018 and 2022 World Cup decisions in December 2010. Blatter was also a protégé of legendary Adidas sport boss Horst Dassler, when world football finances were transformed by Dassler’s dealmaking in the 1970s and 1980s, and FIFA made exclusive partnership deals with Dassler’s organisational baby, International Sport and Leisure (ISL). Dassler trained up Blatter at his Adidas headquarters in Landersheim, in Alsace, France. Blatter speaks of Dassler as a father figure, in unusually hushed respect and awe. Groomed by Dassler, mentored by FIFA president João Havelange, at the heart of FIFA for a third of a century, Blatter knows the arts of survival in the double-dealing world of international football governance.  

Here, I look at a couple of Blatter moments from December 2010 on the way to June 1^st 2011, when Blatter secured his fourth term as FIFA president, and then comment on the nature and implications of his re-election.[i]

Zurich, early December 2011 ~ In Tokyo in 1964 FIFA’s president, Englishman Sir Stanley Rous, was busy organising the Olympic football competition. He had other matters on his mind too. FIFA’s membership was expanding, and at the FIFA congress of that year 62 national associations cast their votes for a revolutionary plan for allocating and scheduling World Cup finals. By 55 votes to seven the congress authorised that, in future, the executive committee (Exco) rather than the congress would allocate World Cups.

In Rous’s view, leaving the decision to congress was putting a “strain on friendships” and basing the choice of the hosts “on not wholly relevant issues”. In the cosier climate of world football politics of the time, few saw anything at all odd in the change. Patrician Rous could be trusted and in London’s Royal Garden Hotel two years later his committee confirmed that West Germany (1974), Argentina (1978) and Spain (1982) would be future hosts. Dr João Havelange changed many things when he seized the FIFA presidency from Rous in 1974, committing much to emerging football federations in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean in particular. But the power of the executive committee to award hosting rights remained intact. Rous thought that canvassing for votes would end once the big decision lay in the hands of a few honourable committee members. Havelange, his successor Sepp Blatter and their bloated executive committees have had no such qualms, actually encouraging the likes of the FA to spend lavishly within the bidding process. In 2000, this bought England’s bid for 2006 a respectable five votes in the first round, though this dwindled to two in the second-round knockout stage. 

A decade later, as the UK’s prime minister, heir-to-the-throne-but-one and most glamorous and famous footballer flattered the Exco members at breakfasts and lunches in the swishest hotels in town, they might as well have been blinded by the blizzards blowing outside by the lake. England’s first-round elimination with just two votes was a much worse performance than in 2000: with one low-profile English executive committee member (who unlike his successful counterparts from Russia and Qatar took no part in the final presentation) already in the bag, England’s ill-advised bid for the 2018 World Cup finals garnered just one vote. A relatively conservative estimate of the cost of that vote is £15 million.
England's presentation pitched royalty, politics and celebrity to FIFA, and during its presentation its chief executive oleaginously – or was it sarcastically? - congratulated FIFA General Secretary Jérôme Valcke and his colleagues for the “superb way they've managed this complicated bidding process”. The England delegation wasn't congratulating FIFAcrats when Russia’s name came out of Blatter’s envelope. Vladimir Putin was soon en route to Zürich to thank FIFA, and no doubt his faithful mover and shaker Roman Abramovich, who had been with the bid team. When asked which win pleased him most – getting the 2014 Winter Olympics for Sochi or this World Cup – Putin simply smiled and said how much he likes to win. Russia’s bid prioritised development and new football markets, in a post-communist climate, in the biggest country in the world. It fitted a mission that was laid out in Havelange's manifesto of 1974. England's bid was patronising in at least two ways: offering national associations help from English clubs during the finals; and proposing a Football Utd scheme to match FIFA monies that have been committed to grass-roots and world football development, in effect an economic partnership with much-maligned FIFA.
The England bid looked even sillier as Exco “promises” were counted. “Given the promises that were made to us”, the England bid boss asked, “how could the vote have turned out the way it did?” You couldn’t get much more naive than this in the world of FIFA politics; it’s not a gentleman’s club. Executive committee members have said to me that you always accept a bit of bad to go with all the good and former International Sport and Leisure (ISL) excutive, and architect of UEFA’s Champions League, Jürgen Lenz told me: “FIFA's now so corrupt” that it no longer knows that it’s being corrupt. English prime minister Cameron’s charm and courteousness doesn't work in this world. Heir to the British throne Prince William was out of his depth in far-from-neutral Switzerland. These could never match Machiavelli’s star pupil Blatter. A “wise prince”, recommended Niccolò Machiavelli, makes sure that his citizens “are always and in all circumstances dependent on him and his authority”, so that they will “always be faithful to him”. Insiders reckon that Blatter has at least 148 faithful dependents among FIFA's 208 national associations and many of these are represented by long-serving Exco men from the continental confederations. Russia was always in the driving seat and a Russian victory could keep the rhetoric intact and the accounts books closed. How could a three or four-day England charm offensive have ended any other way than it did on Thursday afternoon?

 

Wales, 14 March 2011 ~ “Fayre and Square” isn't the motto of FIFA. It’s the bargain slogan of the pub chain that includes the New Inn, Langstone, just off the M4 at Newport in south Wales. There's a Wacky Warehouse kids’ area, two dinners for a tenner all day and everyday, and rooms at £49 a night for as many of the family as you could get in there. The International Football Association Board (IFAB) was in town for the first weekend in March, but it wasn’t patronising the New Inn.

Just along the road and up the hill is the Celtic Manor Resort, sprawled across 1400 acres. There, you don't see many kids and it’s nearer £152 a night in the Manor Hotel. That’s where IFAB gathered for the much-awaited annual meeting to decide on goal-line technology and player attire, the main items on the agenda of its 125^th Annual General Meeting. Football’s Laws of the Game are actually the product of (and authorised by) IFAB, a body made up of the four UK football associations and FIFA. The board began in 1886, FIFA joined it in a fragile alliance in 1913, and in 1958 current voting rights were approved. In decision-making terms, it’s one vote apiece for the UK associations and four for FIFA; for a proposal to carry, a three-quarters majority must be achieved, six out of eight. So while the guest list at the Celtic Manor numbered 61, for whom Friday night fireworks at Cardiff Castle provided a dazzling welcome evening, just eight men were deciding on whether the game would be better for the introduction of goal-line technology. It was no great surprise when FIFA president Sepp Blatter confirmed that tests with selected companies had proved as yet inconclusive. Turning to new FA chair David Bernstein, Blatter expressed much sympathy for the “blatant” injustice of Frank Lampard’s disallowed goal at South Africa 2010 but, pressed by a Sky Sports News reporter claiming to speak for the wronged England fan, asked for “just a little bit of patience”, what actually amounted to another full year’s testing. David Bernstein was smiling diplomatically, saying that the outcome was not perfect but that the principles supporting the introduction of goal-line technology were wholly accepted by the IFAB; we could be positive about its future. Not imminently though. Any IFAB decision cannot take effect until July 1 following the date of the decision, so a 2012 IFAB decision in February or March is already too late for Euro 2012 in Poland/Ukraine. But roll on Rio – Blatter conceded that Brazil 2014 could herald the end of the over-the-line, in-or-out debates and legends concerning what might have been. Of ten companies, including the FIFA president’s former employee Swiss Longines, three “have a good chance” in the extended test period in live games themselves. And a newcomer, Hawkeye, was also now among the invited companies.

IFAB also ruled on snoods – not allowed, quite simply not permitted in the Laws of the Game. I thumbed through Law 4, looking for what would permit goalie’s caps or anybody’s gloves, neither included in the “basic compulsory equipment of a player”. Sepp and IFAB were a bit quick off the mark here, the FIFA president even suggesting that snood-wearers were endangering their own deaths by strangulation. At such absurd moments you can only wonder how IFAB has survived so long. You have to look at the rituals and protocol of the board. Blatter sits amid generally silent and acquiescent football administrators from the British associations, and guests and partners were well catered for – the Ladies’ Day Agenda took in museums, the Millennium Centre and a tour of the Welsh National Opera. All gathered together again for the Gala Dinner on the Saturday night in the Celtic Manor’s Beaufort Suite, where the SFA president, George Peet, toasted the Queen and Heads of State, the IFA president, Jim Shaw, toasted the Ladies, David Bernstein of the FA toasted the IFAB and host president Phillip Pritchard of the Welsh FA toasted FIFA.

The UK men had five minutes each for these speeches; keeping the proportional principle going, Blatter was allotted 20 minutes for his response. Whatever their private thoughts on FIFA’s modus operandi, the UK men weren’t going to rock this lawmaking boat. Blatter ranged wide in the IFAB press conference, confirming his determination to lead FIFA for a fourth presidential term: “I'm not tired at all ... just to make it clear, for my next four years I will dedicate my work to the social and cultural impact of football in society.” Nobody laughed.
The IFAB is seen as the guardian or custodian of the long-established laws of football. It’s a pseudo-independent body that operates essentially as Blatter and FIFA’s lapdog, but allows Blatter to control access to it from within FIFA. It’s the president and the general secretary who are routinely the FIFA men with voting rights, plus two others – the chair of the referees’ committee and a senior vice-president. There’s no transparent route to these positions, they’re effectively in the FIFA president’s gift. Blatter flatters the UK associations and their historical legacy, bankrolls the IFAB and does, for the most part, exactly what he wants.

 

1 June 2011 ~ Three months later, back in Zurich, and the little Swiss has done it again. Faced with what commentators and pundits, and opponents, were calling FIFA’s biggest-ever crisis, his Congress gave him his strongest mandate yet, 186 national associations backing him for his fourth term. The Football Association (England) mustered just 16 allies in its clumsy attempt to postpone the election, in the wake of allegations and counter-allegations of corruption emerging from within the FIFA Executive Committee (Exco), and the withdrawal of Blatter’s rival in the presidential contest. Main sponsors issued soft slaps on the wrists to FIFA, image-cleaning was soon in process, and Blatter marched on. In a FIFA FACTsheet issued by the presidency itself in recent years, the president is confirmed as “the supreme leader of FIFA”. There’s mess to mop up, spin to get right. But does Visa really want the global spotlight on how it shafted MasterCard  to become a primary World Cup sponsor? Wouldn’t Adidas be a little embarrassed were its close dealings with FIFA Exco personnel past and present – including outgoing committee member Franz Beckenbauer – subjected to close scrutiny? There’s work to be done to deal with the allegations of corruption, without undermining the credibility of, or alienating, powerful continental confederations whose presidents have faced and continue to face investigation by FIFA’s ethics committee. But as Machiavelli wrote nearly 500 years ago, the “wise prince” creates dependencies, and prefers to be feared than loved. Blatter may look like a bit-part actor in a comic opera; underestimate him, though, at your cost.

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[i] These pieces were initially written for the WSC Daily in When Saturday Comes: ‘FIFA’s executive committee unimpressed by celebrity’, 6^th December 2010; and ‘Sepp Blatter’s archaic British lapdog does his bidding’, 14^th March 2011. See WSC.