Fever pitch

It must have made quite a sight: the 13 directors of the Football Association (the absence of the ‘national’ prefix is a pointer to how venerable the institution is), grey-haired and grey-suited, sitting in judgment over three of its employees indulging in the kind of passes they didn’t teach you at soccer academies. And the ultimate insult: two of them are foreigners! You can almost hear the tut-tutting, as they say, “It would never have happened had we gone for an English coach.” But this scandal has, if anything, rung the Alam on the way English football is run. The most startling revelation of Svengate is not that consenting adults have had affairs with each other, nor even the fact that they all worked in the same organisation. The most distressing aspect is how Mark Palios, Sven Eriksson’s boss and the “other man” in Faria Alam’s life, sought to stab his coach in the back and how he used a colleague to sell the idea to the press. That about sums it up.

Which is sad, because English football — while not approaching the standards of Spain and Italy — is Big Money. The latest annual football finance report of accountants, Deloitte, says it in black and white: England are the biggest earners in European football, and the Premiership, which for most is what English football is all about, generated $2 billion last year as against $1.4 billion of the runners-up, the Italian Serie A. Some of that money comes of course from Roman Abramovich, the Russian oil baron whose takeover of Chelsea has livened up what used to be a two-horse race between Manchester United and Arsenal. More and more, the Premiership attracts top foreign players and not, as it once did, just those looking for a couple of lucrative seasons before retirement. Best of all, it’s attracted top coaches, with three proven winners starting new jobs this season: Valencia’s Rafa Benitez (Liverpool), Porto’s Jose Mourinho (Chelsea) and France’s Jacques Santini (Tottenham).

In the light of that, it’s easy to understand the media’s extended coverage of Premiership football. What has also got extended coverage, though, is the private lives of the top players, and the creation of the Celebrity Footballer. It’s a vicious cycle: the footballers are young, testosterone-driven and wealthy beyond imagination (Celebrity Manager Eriksson, is two out of these three). Their lifestyle provides easy fodder for the media, which brings it to an eager public. Few survive the ride without bruises — mainly to the ego. Because this is a whole new ball game.