Alan Tomlinson:

The International Olympic Committee and the Olympic System

Jean-Loup Chappelet and Brenda Kübler-Mabbott, The International Olympic Committee and the Olympic System: The Governance of World Sport, Routledge, 2008, 208pp. + xiv  ISBN 978-0-415-43168-2

(This is an amended version of a book review to be published in the academic journal Sport in History)

This is the twenty-fourth book to appear in an ambitious initiative, the ‘Routledge Global Institutions’ series edited by Thomas G. Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson, political scientists based in New York and Manchester (England) respectively – at least sixteen more books are also published or commissioned. But it is the first in the series to focus upon a sport-based organisation: as the series editors say, the book ‘deals with one of the less visible aspects of global governance’ (p. xiii), filling ‘a curious void in the contemporary literature’ on institutions of global governance. Their point is that the International Olympic Committee (IOC), as an ‘informal civil institution’, has had a massive profile in and immense impact upon world culture and politics, but has not really been subjected to analytical scrutiny of its organisational ways of working and its institutional politics. There have of course been innumerable studies of aspects of the IOC’s work, or of particular products (the IOC’s main one of course being the Summer and Winter Olympic Games) or controversies (vote-rigging, bias in decision-making). But Chappelet and Kübler-Mabbott’s brief was to produce an overview and analysis of the IOC and its ‘system’ that could take readers beyond official sources or opportunistic commercial perspectives – an overview that would be of use to anyone from diplomats to undergraduates.

The authors have provided a comprehensive, detailed, and invaluably informative text. It is clearly structured on the basis of their conception of the Olympic system. Early on, we are given organisational graphics – elements of the Olympic system represented as circles, with arrows connecting the different links between those elements, and showing the swirling reciprocity between most of them, in a system that the authors understand as one of negotiated equilibrium in an imperfect world. Reading the book in one go, I was acronymed out, given the thorough coverage of any type of organisation related to the IOC, and the splinter movements that some organisations stimulated in challenging the IOC, or the IOC itself – through, say, a particular IOC president’s cunning, Machiavellian (a word not used by the authors) manoeuvres – put in place. I have read a lot of IOC documents and consulted the increasingly dense detail available on the IOC’s website. Indeed, the IOC is to be congratulated, in the post-Samaranch era – Juan Antonio Samaranch stepped down as IOC president after the Sydney 2000 Summer Olympic Games – on this level of public accountability and organisational and financial transparency; Chappelet and Kübler-Mabbott organise this material in a very systematic fashion and take the reader on a clear journey through the institutional dynamics of Olympic organisations, and some of the politics of intra- and inter-organisational dynamics. For that they are to be congratulated; I felt like a lucky tourist who’d got lots of attention from a top tour guide. But there was so much on the tour, that I wasn’t always getting the full story before moving on to the next item.  

The first chapter overviews the Olympic system, and the different ‘actors’ or ‘entities’ that make up the ‘robust structure’ of the Olympic Movement. The core five actors are the IOC itself, the respective and relatively short-lived Organising Committees of the particular Games, the International Sports Federations, the National Olympic Committees, and the National Sports Federations. Four newer actors are governments and inter-governmental organizations, multi-national sponsors, national sponsors, and professional leagues of teams/athletes. It’s become a closely linked network, ‘a new, expanded Olympic system’ (p. 9), encompassing ‘a broad range of partners: public, private and associative, and national, international and transnational’ (p. 16). Joint governance by this range of partners and interests is, not surprisingly, complex and volatile, so ‘the equilibrium is a precarious one’ (p. 16). Three regulating influences that the IOC has spawned are the Court of Arbitration for Sport (1983), and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the Ethics Commission, both founded in 1999 in a climate of controversy and crisis for the IOC amidst revelations of administrative corruption and escalating revelations of drug abuse by athletes and coaches. The IOC at the end of Samaranch’s reign hardly emerges with much credit here, reforming and restructuring only in response to pressure from the world media, partner sponsors (US company John Hancock in particular) and US Congress investigations. The book’s penultimate chapter is dedicated to the emergence and role of these three regulators, including a lengthy case-study of WADA, and the final, eighth chapter offers ‘five major political and management principles’ (p. 177) upon which a more developed model of adequate governance by the IOC might be based: transparency, democracy, accountability, autonomy, and social responsibility. Chappelet and Kübler-Mabbott are enthusiasts of the IOC and the Olympic Movement/System, reiterating several times throughout the  book that the Olympic Games constitutes an important cultural heritage for humankind, and that the IOC has achieved across its 114 year-long history a remarkable significance as a symbol of international co-operation and , peace (see p. 124 for instance). Yet they worry for the future of the IOC and its system, and the core product of the Games, threatened as the latter is by the scale of the events (the issue of gigantism, as discussed in Olympic circles). Their final words are that there are ‘very real threats to the credibility of sport: doping, violence and corruption’ (p. 181). Their solution is that the United Nations steps in with a global sport policy; and that the IOC stimulates a diplomatic conference to get as many countries in the world as possible to sign up to ‘Lausanne Conventions’ confirming sport as a public good, and ‘the Olympic Games as a world heritage’ (p. 180).

After their exhaustive collation of the mechanisms, systems and practices of the actors in the Olympic system – chapters 2 to 6 cover the IOC itself, National Olympic Committees, International Sports Federations, Organising Committees, and governments – you can see why they might recommend an even higher level of global oversight of the sport sphere. The authors have certainly captured the transformation of the IOC, and show how Samaranch modernized it and why and how his successor Jacques Rogge has reformed aspects of its administration. They also catalogue some of the cases of corrupt administration that stimulated a review of practices and procedures at the end of the 1990s. And there are some carefully worded assertions, too; former UK prime minister Tony Blair is in effect accused of violating Olympic bidding ethics in Singapore in July 2005, in his intensive lobbying of IOC members just hours before the vote to decide the 2012 Olympic host – but the IOC Ethics Commission chair had not gone to Singapore, so nothing could be done (p. 163). Blair was of course supporting a bid led by former athlete Lord Coe, who became inaugural chair of football federation FIFA’s new ‘independent ethics committee ... FIFA’s third judicial body’ (p. 160) the following year. The authors are very good on the IOC’s belated entry into the Ethics field, commenting that after reading redundant, reworked ethics and rules texts over the years, ‘the impression gained is one of a juridical tangle that is difficult for common mortals to grasp’ (p. 161). But there is, also, a tone to the book of the insider. In their Acknowledgments they express their gratitude ‘to a number of IOC members – including presidents – and senior and junior staff who have interacted with us over the years’, answering their questions and explaining what ‘Olympism’ is and how it works. No interviews or interrogation, it seems: rather, careful cultivation of contacts, assiduous information-gathering and faithful collation. It’s as if, at times, courtesy to your sources prevails over analysis and interpretation. It’s never noted, for instance, that Samaranch came to the IOC with a pedigree as a high-ranking figure in Franco’s Fascist regime. Nothing is really made of Horst Dassler’s role as the Mr. Fixit of world sport finances in the 1970s and 1980s. And when the Swiss government revised its arrangements for sport organizations’ status – including entry to the country, work and residence permits, property acquisition, and taxation of staff – in 2001, this is described as the provision of ‘sufficient flexibility in order for them to function in an unrestricted way as the entities governing world sport’ (p. 109) – isn’t this management-speak for unaccountability? How does this fit with the authors’ own list of necessary principles for good governance? There’s no doubt, though, that this addition to the ‘Global Institutions’ series will be a widely used source for policy-makers and sport lobbyists, as well as academic constituencies. Among the latter, historians of sport may have wanted more on the earlier IOC, its leaders and practices. It’s a fascinating fact that only one country has provided two IOC presidents, but one of these – Count Henri de Baillet-Latour, of Belgium – gets very little coverage: his successor, Swede Sigfrid Edstrom, who preserved the flickerings of an Olympic flame throughout World War II and into the 1950s, gets none, beyond a listing. The topic of the IOC and its networks is vast though, and the authors have chosen to concentrate upon the transformational phase of IOC history from the last quarter of the twentieth century onwards. To do that, lucidly and succinctly, in so much meticulous organisational and policy detail, is a service to the field. As a prospective further contributor to this series – commissioned to write on the world governing body of football, FIFA – I am grateful to these authors for their painstaking attention to detail and their contextualization of the IOC in the world sport system. My own perspective may aspire to give fuller voices to the influential actors, past and present, in world sport, but this valuable study provides a splendid marker for those entering this field of research.

© Alan Tomlinson, October 2008

Understanding Sports Culture

Tony Schirato, Understanding Sports Culture, Sage Publications Ltd, 2007. 150 pp. Price not stated.

Review by Alan Tomlinson

Tony Schirato has written an ambitious book in which we are conducted on a worldwide tour of the history of sport, from the ancient Greeks to the contemporary world of globalized international sport. It is a story that has been attempted before, most notably and even more ambitiously by Allen Guttmann in Sports: The First Five Millennia (University of Massachusetts Press, 2004). Schirato does not attempt a synthesis as comprehensive as Guttmann’s and indeed, Guttmann is one of his major authoritative sources – of which more later. What Schirato brings to his integrated history and sociology of sport, though, is a deep immersion in the writings of Pierre Bourdieu, and a background in literary theory and the cultural analysis and theorisation of visual culture. These are undoubted strengths, and embody a welcome contribution to the understanding of sport from the perspective of what we have come to see as the cultural turn in socio-cultural studies.

The book begins with an extended analysis of a Nike advertisement featuring male sporting superstars of the early twentieth century. Well-trodden paths are then taken through definitional typologies and debates: the sports of ancient Greece, ancient Rome and Byzantium, and the European Middle Ages and Renaissance (‘forerunners of football and other ball games’ and aristocratic tournaments, tilts and jousts’ [p. 33]), before Western European pre-modern societies are re-discovered at various rustic and far from standardised forms of play. And then we enter the modern period of industrialization, which sees the formation of more organised forms of sport – very much seen to be influenced by an Anglo-Saxon, or British, model; and discussed in Bourdieu’s language as ‘sport as field and habitus’. Various directions of diffusion – or spread – of sports are then identified (sport is shown, following John Hargreaves’s work, to have developed as a form of surveillance in 19th century England; the USA’s distinctive story is summarised, with a revealing vignette of sports entrepreneur Albert Spalding). Chunky chapters are then dedicated to the political, business/economic, and media-related influences upon contemporary sport. The high points of the book include the bold theorising of the history, which constitutes many astute insights and generates numerous cross-cultural and cross-temporal comparisons and claims: for instance, semiotic concepts from Claude Lefort and post-colonial insights from Homi Bhabha are brought to bear on Byzantine factions and British imperial administration respectively (pp. 31 and 64). Problems are inevitable, though, in undertaking a problem of this scale and boldness.

Schirato makes no claims for historical originality, and the book is a textbook, not a research monograph. I can imagine Schirato in the lecture-hall, stimulating undergraduates on the basis of his wide reading and his enthusiastic syntheses. He is also honest about his sources, generous in citation of those on whom he is most dependent: his students, and now his readers, would know his indebtedness to Guttmann for some of his summaries, and to seminal histories by the likes of Denis Brailsford and Richard Holt. But this can create serious scholarly problems. If the accounts of ancient Greece and Rome, or of the violence of crowd factions at the Hippodrome in Byzantium Constantinople in the late 4th and early 5th centuries A.D. that we have here are essentially Guttmann’s accounts, but we are not told on what Guttmann’s account is based, this is scholarship based upon summaries of summaries. Obviously in introductory books and texts we want to engage students, and ambitious and condensed syntheses are a way of doing this: but is the summariser adequately concerned with the source of the initial summary? Schirato talks of Byzantine sport without saying where Byzantium was, or when chariot races of particular types flourished there On some of these topics, a few tips on further reading (for an in-depth understanding) would have been useful for students and lecturers alike.

Where Schirato is at his best is on the media/communications themes. In chapter 7 he subjects Guttmann’s ‘definition of a spectator’ (p. 92) to a sympathetic but rigorous critique, and develops his own take on the relationship between the spectator and new media forms form the 19th century onwards. Here, drawing upon his own previous work on visual cultures, he talks of the nature of the cultural literacy brought to bear by the sport fan in the interpretive process: ‘... the human visual apparatus doesn’t give us the world in an unmediated form. It effectively decodes it.’ (p. 93). Chapter 8 is dedicated to the consideration of the move from ‘sport to spectacle’, conceived as sport’s transformation into a ‘field of business’ – the sport spectacle as an attractive form of consumption to the individual, a commodified capitalist product. The final chapter surveys new media and multi-media forms of watching, interacting with and engaging with sport. The concluding chapter includes some discussion of Michel de Certeau’s work on strategies of everyday living, cites Arjun Appadurai, and provides more engagement with Guttmann, and Bourdieu: the book is actually ‘dedicated to the memory of Pierre Bourdieu’. The final word from Schirato is that, despite the influence of ‘governments, media and capitalism’, sport can be seen to be a ‘set of sites’ continuing to ‘value, provoke, and provide occasions for the disposition to play’ (p. 138). It’s a widely shared conclusion increasingly arrived at by historians, sociologists, political scientists, and cultural studies scholars, a version of the structure-agency problematic at the heart of the social scientific enterprise: whatever the determining structures that mould, re-shape, or reconfigure our sporting practices institutions and cultures, people continue to carve out their own meanings in social and cultural spaces of their own making (with apologies and indebtedness to Karl Marx). Schirato does not cite Marx in this book, but his Bourdieu-inspired framework goes a long way towards confirming this general position.

Professor Alan Tomlinson
University of Brighton
August 19th 2008

The Beckham of the Cobbles

Harry Potts – Margaret’s Story, by Margaret Potts and Dave Thomas, Sports Books, Cheltenham, 2006, pp. x + 310, and 64 pages of photographs/documents

Review by Alan Tomlinson

[This review is a longer version of a review that appears in When Saturday Comes]

Harry Potts played for and managed Burnley Football Club in some of its most successful periods from the late 1940s to the late 1960s, and managed the club again in some less successful times in the 1970s. This book combines the memoir of his wife Margaret with the broader context portrayed by football writer Dave Thomas. It is an engaging book, a richly illustrated portrait of a time and culture a million miles away from the economies and excesses of the post-1992 English football élite. As a boy growing up in Burnley in the 1950s and the 1960s, for me the success of Burnley Football Club was a taken-for-granted fact of life (I delivered the morning papers to the modest semi-detached residence of England internationals; the Potts’s daughter Linda was in the Girl Guides with my sister at the local church). Harry’s and Margaret’s stories just seemed normal. Margaret’s story as related in this book brings the time and the culture alive, though, locating biography in history, and conveying the excitement and adventure of the success of the small-town club and its national success and European adventures.

Harry left his home of Hetton in North-East England, playing for Burnley before and after war service as a Physical Training instructor in the RAF, where he met boxer Freddie Mills and cricket legend, Brylcreem Boy Denis Compton. He played for Everton after his Burnley playing career was over, and coached, managed and consulted at Wolverhampton Wanderers, Shrewsbury Town, Blackpool and Bury, as well as Burnley. The North-East Lancashire club and Turf Moor were his base, though, to which he continually returned with local girl Margaret. Harry died in 1996, after suffering from Parkinson’s Dementia. Even up to his death, he would relive games and goals and memories, replaying them in his nursing home with a boyishness that he never seemed to have lost. This is a gracious book, in which few have a bad word to say about Harry: he may have exuded boyhood charm, but he also generated loyalty from generations of players who saw in him an ideal combination of surrogate father and gentlemanly dignity.

Which isn’t to say that Harry was a soft touch. A lifetime at or near the top in professional football takes survival skills and a tough hide, and Margaret’s Story reveals the complex contradictions behind the gentlemanly courtesies of Mr Potts the manager. Harry was enraged, as a manager, when he thought that his players and teams had been cheated, or got a raw deal from some referee (a routine injustice, it seems, on the European trail); but as a player Harry was the diver of his day, tumbling forward unlikely yardages to claim to have been felled in the penalty box. Harry was the charming and supportive family man, but rarely at home; his love was the training ground, the talent-spotting journeys, the deals to be struck. Harry was a trained sports professional, with his RAF pedigree, his well-earned coaching qualifications, and Burnley’s pioneering training facilities and practice drills; but in his later days he lampooned sports science-based analyses of the lack of physical conditioning of professional footballers. Harry was the glamour boy of his day, all blond hair, smiling good looks and public charm; but the personification of the Protestant Ethic at work, and ascetic at home. Toasted crumpets, Dick Barton on the radio, Ovaltine or cocoa and bed at 9 o’clock was a typical evening in for Harry and Margaret in their early days: ‘he needed a lot of sleep, his mother said. If there was a match on Saturday there was no sex after Thursday’. Margaret’s apparently innocent but acidic asides are targeted at a considerable rogue’s gallery: her battleaxe mother-in-law, Burnley’s infamous chairman Bob Lord (and his wife), Potts’s captain of the 1959-60 championship team Jimmy Adamson (who was to usurp Harry as Burnley manager). But the book never slides into sentimentality or hagiography. Harry was also the nearly-man, hitting the bar at Wembley in the Cup Final of 1947, managing Burnley to the championship too soon in season 1959-60 Burnley, and then to the ‘lost’ League title and FA Cup double of 1961-62 when ‘homespun’ Burnley lost the Wembley final to glamorous Tottenham Hotspur. But on the whole he was a winner. The road outside Turf Moor was renamed ‘Harry Potts Way’ five years after his death. Harry Potts - Margaret’s Story documents the changing football culture in England and the UK. Once ‘little’ (a widely used adjective in the book) Burnley could still compete with the metropolitan powers: the domestic and familial stability of Margaret, born and raised in the town, widow of Burnley’s ‘Beckhamesque figure amongst the cobbles’ (p.7), is testimony to a culture of locality and loyalty that is increasingly rare in the money-ridden culture of celebrity that characterises the modern, globalised game.

Book Review: Raymond Boyle, Sports Journalism: Context and Issues

Raymond Boyle, Sports Journalism: Context and Issues
London: Sage Publications, 2006. 198pp, ISBN 1-4129-0798-5

Raymond Boyle’s study of the practices and conventions of sports journalism is based upon his long-standing grasp of the nature of contemporary sport media, and his balanced concern with both the interpretive scrutiny of journalistic texts and output, and the nature of the professional world in which professionals in the media work. He has interviewed or talked to 19 or so professionals in the field, and their observations and insights pepper Boyle’s accessible prose and informative text.

The book is primarily UK-based, and the sports journalism and sports journalists whose characteristics we hear about and whose voices we hear are for the most part men, and men whose professional preoccupation tends to be (men’s) association football, that is, soccer. Sports journalism across the globe remains a male-dominated, male-orientated sphere of the news industry, in both written press and broadcasting forms. Boyle acknowledges this in his seventh chapter, where he confirms that all-male enclaves pervade the sports desk of the tabloid newspapers (p. 157). Things seem to be worse in the UK than elsewhere: ‘Across the national press there are no female sports editors, despite … American journalists holding this post as far back as the late 1970s’ (p. 157). Another UK-US difference is noted by one of Boyle’s respondents: the UK sports journalist is more focused on the specialist sport ‘beat’, whereas in the US the journalist could move from one big sport to another (p. 167). The evidence begins to add up to show a rather parochial and patriarchal profile for the UK sports journalist. There have been innovations, of course, including an aspiration post-Nick Hornby towards a more literary style: again, the US was well ahead of the UK game in this, as Boyle’s acknowledgement of Ring Lardner’s early twentieth-century fame and profile in Chicago recognises.

Boyle notes that within journalism studies and research, ‘sports journalism has been largely under-researched’ (p. 12). This is surprising, given the expansion, in the UK media certainly, of sport supplements, sport sections and pages and sport-based broadcasting (in both radio and television). There is clearly an opening here for keen analysts in media, journalism or sport studies. Boyle’s overview will point such analysts in a predictable direction, essentially the study of cosy male preserves reproducing themselves in the name of market forces: recently, the sport editor of a quality UK Sunday broadsheet said to me that there is no point employing writers to cover women’s sports as few people are interested in them. So the format is reaffirmed, and – apart from the Olympic Games and the odd woman superstar - men dominate the content, the writing and the readership of the sport pages.

Whilst Sports Journalism: Context and Issues can be used in dip-in fashion, a chapter here a chapter there, it lays out an analytical framework that pervades the overall analysis. This is what Boyle calls ‘three implicit strands that run through the book’ (p. 2), factors that shape any current sport journalist’s working environment. These are: globalisation; digitisation; and marketisation – ‘key underlying aspects of any analysis of contemporary journalism’ (p.3). It is one of Boyle’s notable qualities that factors of such complexity can be presented with great clarity. His examples of globalisation are the FIFA World Cup and the Olympics, but he notes how widely sport expresses national or local dimensions too. His stress on digitisation highlights the new levels of immediacy between producer and consumer, and the controlling capacities of new technologies. The marketisation process emphasises just how much branding and celebrity cultures have influenced trends in the field, how traditional types of sports journalism have given way to differently driven forms of journalistic writing about sport. This overall framework provides an effective conceptual and interpretive perspective for thinking through the particular issues and themes that are raised as the text proceeds.

Boyle prefaces his book with quotes from two sports journalists: the lyrically capable Englishman Richard Williams of The Guardian, on anticipation and recollection of the sporting event; and the debunking Irishman Tom Humphries of The Irish Times on burnout and booze, but also the anticipation of the occasion. The book captures these men’s occupational culture well, mixing original quotes from illuminating interviews with overviews of relevant US and UK research literature, and insider accounts by journalists themselves.

The opening chapter sets up the terms of the developing debate, pointing out the neglect of sports journalism by researchers in journalistic studies, most what writing there is on the culture of sports journalism having been produced by media sport researchers (p. 14). Changes in the direction and style of sports writing are noted here, raising the question of what categories now characterise the sub-genre. The second chapter provides a broad historical overview starting, most usefully, with the US experience, especially the ‘generation of sporting myth-makers’ of the years around the 1920s. The British historical background is more contemporary, concentrating on journalists’ changing relationship with their sources in recent times, the beat system of reportage, and the changing markets – from the local and regional base of the craft, to the expansion of sports coverage across the print and broadcast media, particularly from the 1980s onwards. More might have been made here of the Cold War and the Olympic context and the pivotal moment of the Los Angeles 1984 Summer Olympic Games. Most importantly, though, Boyle tackles the ‘growing colonisation of elite sport in the UK by BSkyB’ (p. 55), a new set of political and economic forces shaping the field.

Chapter 3 concentrates on the rise of television and radio and the expanding profile and influence of audio-visual media; chapter 4 on the 24/7 context in which the print media must now compete with the newer media. Things have now moved on a long way from match-reporting and event evaluation; sport is seen as a serious business as well as entertainment, as Colin Gibson, former sports editor of the Daily Mail has noted (p. 92). Chapter 5 considers sports journalism in the promotional age, including the theme of collusion with sources, and provides a riveting little vignette of spin doctor Alistair Campbell’s experience (and ineffectiveness) as media and communications consultant to Sir Clive Woodward on the British Lions Rugby tour of New Zealand in 2005. Chapter 6 homes in on the digital theme, identifying consequences of change such as wireless ways of working, and the growth of freelance writing for an increasing number of outlets. In all of this changing world, though, there are persisting continuities, and chapter 7 confirms the male-dominated base of the profession, quoting the misogynistic Brian Glanville: ‘One can be a woman in print without it noticing you can’t see the lipstick and smell the perfume … But … You’d never trust a woman with something as important as a football result’ (p. 150). The sports journalist’s image and status are reviewed in the eighth and final chapter. Are the sport reporters and writers still the ‘toy department’ of the journalistic department store? Has the profession become more competitive and more professional?

Lynn Truss – who knows a thing or two about market surprises after selling more than three million copies of Eats, Shoots and Leaves – was a columnist and sometimes football writer for The Times in the mid-1990s. Boyle quotes her at the head of his conclusion to the book: ‘Uniquely in journalism’, she writes, the appeal of the journalist ‘to the reader is entirely in the presentation of the simple fact: “I was there”. I saw it with my own eyes; it happened once and it will never happen again”’ (p. 176). Of course it’s more complex than that. Some writers were never there; mediated viewing has its own authenticity; and there are multiple ‘theres’. But Truss conveys the essence of the sport journalist’s challenge, skill and craft, despite the maelstrom of forces that has transformed the context in which sports journalists write and sports fans consume their writings.

Boyle’s book catches the central contradiction of the booming sports journalism business; it is exciting, often edge-of-your seat technologically driven stuff of the cultural cum creative industries; it is also complicit with sources, packaged for promotion, the antithesis of the Fourth Estate role. I send annually one of the University of Brighton’s sport journalism students to work on Arsenal Football Club’s website (in London, England). The students are understandably excited. ‘None of that investigative stuff, Alan’, the web boss tells me. The odd few seconds for a question to manager Arsène Wenger or superstar Thierry Henry might come the keen intern’s way. But as this book demonstrates: ‘The reality for contemporary sports journalists is that getting close to a subject, on their terms, has become next to impossible’ (p. 115). Unless you’re a superstar sports journalist yourself, like the former chief sportswriter of The Daily Telegraph Paul Hayward, writer of/for England soccer player Michael Owen’s sport biography, and lured to the Daily Mail for an annual salary reported to be almost £250,000 (p. 165).

In offering with such lucidity an overall conceptual agenda, stressing globalization, digitization and marketization, and illuminating the practices and contradictions within the profession, Raymond Boyle’s study is essential reading for all students, teachers and researchers of sports journalism. His careful, conceptually accessible and splendidly informed text is vital equipment for both teachers and students in a burgeoning sport journalism field.

Book Review: David Conn, The Football Business: Fair Game in the ‘90s

David Conn, The Football Business: Fair Game in the ‘90s, Edinburgh, Mainstream, 1997; The Beautiful Game? Searching for the Soul of Football, London, Yellow Jersey Press, 2004.

David Conn, Britain’s outstanding investigative football journalist, has combined his literary and legal trainings in a distinctive contribution to the investigative journalist’s art. Conn sub-titles his second book (2004) ‘searching for the soul of football’. His search takes him from the heights of Arsenal and the lows of Sheffield Wednesday’s recent history to the community roots of the game at smaller clubs such as Crewe Alexandra, Bury, and non-league Glossop North End. He notes the ‘oddly passionless’ atmosphere at an Arsenal-Chelsea match (p.10), and his investigative journey celebrates the commitment and passion of fans of the smaller clubs, surviving and reviving without any significant support from football’s new riches in the post-Premier League era. A central theme in his analysis of the contradictions of ‘the beautiful game’ is the betrayal of the game’s wider interests by a Football Association increasingly dominated by the narrow and self-serving interests of Premier League chairmen. Conn captures in evocative fashion the persisting cultural vibrancy of football, but also condemns the motives of the money-seekers who have moved into controlling positions in the game since the formation of the Premiership. Conn’s search is an idealistic, romantic one, championing the minnows of the football world. His analysis of a truly rounded, balanced football club and culture takes him outside the cocooned ranks of the Premiership élite. It is to Crewe that he turns to evoke the soul of the game. Dario Gradi has been the manager at Crewe since 1983, and the Christian chairman John Bowler believes that ‘football has a special place in society. It unites people around a common cause, and we have a responsibility to use that to benefit the community’ (p.263). The club makes a profit, Gradi has presided over well in excess of a thousand games, young players are nurtured through the ranks and in some cases move on to success at the very top, the fans respect and support the club and its community programme, and companies clamour to sponsor the club:

And with all that, they are arguably competing way above their natural level, lasting five seasons in the First Division before going down then bouncing straight back again. Crisis in football: what crisis? (Conn, 2004: 263)

Such bouncing form makes Crewe an exciting place to watch football. In season 2006-7 Crewe was back in the third tier of English football, but playing smooth and fluent football that was a league above the standards of that division; and affordable. Conn’s study warns that the new riches at the top level of the game have inflated the cost for fans so that new generations scarcely feature at the matches: ‘In 2003, just 7 per cent of season ticket holders [in the Premiership] were aged 16-24’ (Conn, 2004: 63). The increasingly expensive glossy product of the Premier League has a real problem in that, despite superficial financial prosperity, it may be offering a cultural product with a diminishing core following, susceptible to the whims of a media-savvy generation of consumers with little in the way of deep-rooted commitment to the game and its traditions and legacies.

In his first book (1997) Conn’s acknowledgement section shows how the most prosperous and powerful institutions of sport/football are difficult and challenging to research: ‘Obtaining interviews with people in the upper level of professional football involves a gruelling obstacle course: letters, faxes and constant reminder telephone calls which are rarely even acknowledged. Despite its massive media profile, Premier League football seems determinedly reticent of explaining itself. The contrast could not be greater at other levels of the game, amongst supporters and the grass roots; in preparing for this book, all attempted brush-offs from Premier League press offices have been outweighed many times over by enlightening, often inspiring conversations with people whose involvement in football springs from their love of it.’ (p.7) His acknowledgements for the 2004 book reiterate this: ‘A great many people readily provided research and information for this book, and several people in senior positions in football refused to be interviewed. The difference is always striking between the men running the game who are so difficult to reach and so often unaccountable, and the crowds who give of themselves to football and are always open and eager to help.’ (p. vii)

Work like Conn’s combines a passionate populism – claiming to speak for the people, and the powerless – with a reforming zeal. In the final chapters of The Football Business (chapter 18, called ‘the cock-up theory’, and chapter 19, called ‘to the millennium’) Conn develops his analysis and argument around an interview with the then chief executive of the FA, Graham Kelly. He concentrated in this conversation on why the Premier League redistributed so little. The interview is used to good effect to lead Conn to conclusions about the traditional and ramshackle nature of the FA, and the need for reform (quotes on pages 282 and 284): proposed reforms are a windfall tax on Premier League and club companies; widening ownership and the introduction of democracy; an administration around a principle of unity, with ‘a single governing body, to run the whole of football for the common good.’ (p. 295); the use of a regulator (this could be the governing body); involvement of the local community more fully; uniting with local authorities to improve municipal facilities; and the extension of coaching qualifications. None of these reforms, or at least not very many, can be left to the football entrepreneurs: ‘… business alone does not preserve history, magic, soul’ (p. 297).

Conn interviewed Kelly’s successor, Adam Crozier, after Kelly left the FA. Crozier had been joint chief executive of Saatchi & Saatchi, and produced documentation on the reshaping of the game in response to his brief, which was to bring a more commercial element to the administration of the game. The purpose? ‘… to lead the successful development of football at every level … to use the power of football to build a better future’ (p. 354). This is a reminder that investigative work is not just about observations and good quotes, but also about the interpretation of documents. Get hold of what people put on paper, accumulate all that you can and examine the values that are transmitted to the written word. In this way, investigative work uses material not as news, reported then forgotten, but as constantly developing and update-able sources and evidence – here Conn references back to his interview with Kelly, mentioning muddy kit on the floor at the first interview, to give colour that is actually critical analysis and interpretation in itself.

In these studies, the fruits of a loving labour supported by The Guardian and The Independent, David Conn provides a model for a balanced investigative framework for the analysis of football’s booming economies and get-rich-quick excesses. If his analysis, in conjuring up a lower-league utopia, or a nostalgic less ruthless football past, has an element of idealism about it, it remains nevertheless persuasive. Conn shows the hypocrisies at the core of the English professional game, but does so with compassion and dispassionate insight, an unusual blend to achieve. If you want to do genuinely investigative work on the economies and the politics of professional football, David Conn is your ideal guide.

© Alan Tomlinson, November 2006

Book Review: Niall Quinn - The Autobiography

Niall Quinn - The Autobiography (London, Headline Book Publishing, 2002)

Niall Quinn played football for Arsenal, Manchester City and Sunderland, a career spent almost wholly in the top flight of the English game, from 1983, when signed by Arsenal and brought over to London from the Republic of Ireland, to 2002, when he retired after the 2002 World Cup. That is almost two decades, during which Quinn also played in the World Cup Finals and the finals of the European national championships for Ireland: he played in all the qualifiers for the 1994 finals in the USA, but a cruciate (knee) injury prevented him playing in the finals tournament. Quinn’s career crossed several boundaries, not just the cultural one between Ireland and England, and the political one between Gaelic games and association football. The book emphasises the difference between the culture of the game in the 1980s and the post-1992 Premiership-led football culture: money is at the heart of this transformation, producing a different breed of recruit - less innocent, more grasping, less loyal and much more mercenary.

Two other sporting cultures feature prominently in the book: the community-based Gaelic sports of the Republic; and horse-racing, including not just attendance at racing meetings and some dabbling in ownership of horses, but also the gambling into which past generations of professional footballer were often drawn. Quinn’s story also reveals the deep-rootedness of the drinking culture for his generation of player, in particular in his young days at Arsenal with other publicly-declared victims of alcoholic excess, Tony Adams and Paul Merson, when all-day and all-night benders were the norm for single young men living alone in unglamorous accommodation in unfashionable parts of a strange, seductive city; and in the setting of the international calendar of the Republic, when a day or two before a vital match, a surrogate manager – Jack Charlton’s son, whilst Charlton himself was off on one of his extra-curricular ‘earners’ – would weakly plead with the squad to stick to a mere six pints before considering some sleep.

Quinn has written the book himself, it appears, as there is no acknowledged co-writer, collaborator or ghost-writer – though in his acknowledgements, he does thank Tom Humphries, ‘a literary giant disguised as a sports reporter.’ The book is written in the first-person, and in switching tenses. Typical of this latter technique is the following: ‘Spain started well. They fancy that they might win this strange World Cup, and for a little while we could believe that’ (p.3). This is the objective tone of the chronicler mixed with the observation and interpretation of the commentator or pundit. It lends authority to the writing – gives you a sense of ‘I was there, and you can trust that I know what I’m talking about’ – and tension to the commentary – ‘will they, won’t they’ we think, even if most readers know that they (Spain) didn’t. For over four hundred pages Quinn sustains this technique, providing analysis as well as anecdote, reflection as well as headline, throughout seventeen chapters, a prologue and an epilogue. If Quinn is the warm-hearted, grateful, long-lasting, lucky Everyman of his own story, his foil is the troubled Manchester United and Republic of Ireland captain Roy Keane. Cleverly, the structure of the book is based on a double narrative: Quinn’s crossing of the cultures and boundaries mentioned above; and Keane’s infamous walkout from the Irish squad on the eve of the World Cup Finals, in Japan in 2002, and the subsequent fortunes of the Keane-less squad. This is effective and canny. Quinn himself, despite the record he holds for goals scored for the Irish national side and the impressive, injury-defying longevity of his career, was no household name in the lobby displays of national bookshops. Keane though would be, and this ensures that the Quinn autobiography is more than one man’s story: in some ways, produced as promptly as it was in the autumn following the 2002 finals, it stole some headlines from Keane, whose own autobiography was published soon after. Alongside this, the revelations on the nature of the drinking culture within football ensured that publication would secure extensive coverage and reviews. Indeed, the book won the award for Sports Autobiography of the Year.

The prologue is titled ‘A red Carnation’. This is a reference to Jack Doyle, who is pictured (between pp. 86 and 87) prostrate on the canvas, concerned personnel taking the gumshield out of the sprawled boxer’s mouth. This image is captioned: ‘Whatever disasters befell him, Jack Doyle always walked on the sunny side of the street. His attitude to life has been an inspiration.’ Quinn’s father Billy used Jack Doyle as a metaphor, a shorthand for the vicissitudes of fate and fortune: ‘Don’t do a Jack Doyle on it now, will ya … Don’t do a Jack Doyle’ (p. 2). Whatever befell Doyle in life - imprisonment, VD, bankruptcy, stardom and Californian romance, friendship with movie stars, destitution - he ‘took it all without bitterness and even in his destitute days he’d walk the streets of Dublin with a red carnation in his breast pocket, still a little swagger about him’ (p. 9). Quinn ‘loved that story’, and reports that it sustained him in all the lonely absences from the teams through injury, through all the excesses in the bars and bookmakers of North London, during the tortured introspection of the Roy Keane affair, and at the heartbreaking penalty shoot-out as the Republic lost to Spain on penalties ‘somewhere in South Korea.’

Quinn’s autobiography touches on the classic themes of the socially mobile working-class male who achieves the metamorphosis to the status of successfully enduring sport professional: the early loneliness and yearnings for the childhood and community culture, the self-doubt, the fear of injury, the comeback, the faith in mentors, adaptation to new settings and a nostalgia for the culture that he entered, and redemption via the love of a good woman. It is especially good on the loss of innocence and the context of that loss: the transformation of football into marketed commodity within the wider framework of a celebrity culture.

© Alan Tomlinson, November 2005