Football "Pride" all but gone.

Wanted to post a thread on this - thought I might after comments made on a couple of other threads and wondered how other people felt about the "beautiful game".

I watched (by accident) a small video of the U-21's training. I couldn't have been ore underwhelmed...."Right, let's get to work. Knock it, shoot. Knock it a different way, shoot. Knock it to me, I knock it back, you shoot. Right, let's get the cones out and play keepy-uppies. Oh, and don't forget to pick up TWENTY THOUSAND POUNDS PLUS ENDORSEMENTS for your 4 hours "work"."

Wow. Many a footballer has commented on how desperately unfortunate their life would have been without football. Thank Christ it pays salaries that make Investment Bankers blush, then, eh? Yet what contribution do we see? 90 minutes of fcking around with a ball every week, sometimes to a very average scale. Now that's a useful way to spend billions of pounds. At times, it barely passes as entertainment.

Scandal surrounds the fashion world with the constant use of Photoshop in pictures. Airbrush here, extra curve there...why, these images just aren't REAL, dammit! Ladies & gents, I give you.....Sky TV and the British Media. Talk about painting a different picture - we discussed Townsends' prospects the other day and how overblown he was. We talk about the grand achievement of qualifying for a World Cup - from a group where the Ukraine were the toughest opposition. Go on - name their starting XI. Name half. Hell, just tell me the goalkeepers name and I'll give you a biscuit. Yet our multi millionaires were there for the nation, they stood up with three lions on the shirt and were brave, so brave......meanwhile, the Frank Spencer VHS gets loaded up in Afghanistan for a bit of light relief for a few blokes and girls who are just doing a job, one that pays infinitely less and is infinitely more difficult.

There has been mention that the bubble will burst on this game. I hope it does, I think it should. My hope is the wider public will just grow tired of lining pockets of men far, far richer than they. Be that owners, shareholders, footballers or agents. Football is being run as a capitalist society like much of big business, but in reality these "companies" do not post the kinds of revenues to be so revered. I could name a dozen IT companies with a greater revenue than Newcastle United, who employ far more people and serve their customers far better. I just wonder if the ropes will hold in the long run. Will the public, in a growing age of information, happily pay owners and players a like slices of pure profit? Will folks look at the price tag on the replica shirt, realise it's about as fashionable as sideways-ironed flares with pockets in the knees and consider putting that £50 into something more useful. Will they then consider what other things could be done outside of routinely and mundanely following a football team? When did it stop being recreational and start being mandatory? Not for me, of course, I'm just a social commentator on it.

 

I've thought for quite some time that the game is slipping away from the common man and players play for the wage packet and not the shirt.

 

Another good one RolyD, well worth 5 's.

 

Test

 

It slipped away about 10 years ago from the common man, sadly!

....

 

Great article, but the bubble will never burst. Just as it's about to FIFA will begin trialling multi-ball and goals o'clock, fastly restoring waning interest. There's too much money to lose all the way from the bottom-feeding media to the Barca-****ing top to ever let interest fall

 

FIFA will look after their own interests at all costs.

 

See, I'm not entirely sure I agree. More than likely it's my own wishful, sadistic thinking, but Football is essentially built on loyalty, correct? That's what got us where we are. Loyalty is dying with the old souls who remember what it once was. I think loyalty was still fairly prevalent up to the mid-90's, but then commercialism started to overtake. And with commercialism comes the bright lights, faster, harder, better mentality. Football is really like pubs - you know your favourite, you always go and the thing can only stay in business if it retains its regulars - but the people at the top are trying to make it like IT. It won't work any better than adding middle-managers to the NHS to make it "work better".

I thought about writing something that draws parallels with pub culture, so here's as good a place as any to do so. Pub's were built on an almost religious pull, often linked to football itself. As the traditions died, as family life escalated, as immigration dissolved traditional communities, as commercialism gave us ever more inventive ways to spend our time, so the pub has died. Those pubs that have survived have been reinvented by corporate investment, or have had to change models to be more appealing - gastropubs, plasma screens, sports bars, and so on. The only traditional pubs able to keep up are those that have a fairly big, if relatively non-affluent fan base (a nice parallel to Newcastle Utd).

Now the owners of clubs believe what we want is streaming media, ten strips a season, flashing football boots, aftershaves in the name of players. But football isn't technology. Gizmo's and gadgets, iPads and Galaxy S27's are there to connect us better (or so we can see boobs whilst having a dump, two of life's greatest pleasures rolled into one). As I said above, football is loyalty, it's tribal. The media bull, the commercialism, simply dilutes this away so that we're left with no identity anymore. And if I can no longer identify with my club, I'll probably not be interested in what happens to it either. The thing about technology is it's indispensable, or argues that it is. For the affluent, it is - the haves will always 'have' some. Football isn't the same - Man Utd is marketed to appeal to kids in the hope they'll become adults and follow them to the ends of the earth. But I don't believe that's the case. If Man U finish 10th a few seasons in a row, support that isn't in the blood will simply shift to Bayern, or Barca.

Maybe I'm wrong and it will continue to thrive. But I can't see it. I can't see people just accepting that FIFA is somehow fit for purpose. I can't see the Champions League being anything other than a breakaway in coming years. I wonder if the likes of Newcastle will still survive the aftermath - it'd be nice to say adios to a few of the uber-rich and be in a tournament we can win. But my fear is that loyalty will have been bought by someone else and SJP will become little more than a museum.

 

I know where you are coming from mate, but I have to take my hat off to MA.
I normally call him allsorts but by driving the away ticket thing, and putting in place the 8,9,10 year price freezes on ST's he is at least going some way to making our games affordable.
I read somewhere that we are one of the cheapest tickets in the PL so that's something to be happy about.
Obviously we can't legislate for the way the players behave though......

 

I don't think I've ever hidden my disdain for much of modern football. If its not Newcastle or England then in the main I don't watch. This season for whatever reason I've been watching a lot more (at home and abroad).

However it will never die out to the extent where people turn their backs - well not for the forseeable future. People are just too willing to give in to their need for their football "fix". I felt the pub analogy is a good one but there have been several strands to the death of pub culture. The prices hike from the breweries being a key one but lets not forget that the smoking ban had a cataclysmic effect on pubs nationwide over night. There are many fesable alternatives socially to pub culture. What are the alternate options sporting wise to football? It is not impossible but many of the alternate sports are either elitist or equally expensive. Not that sporting interest cannot change, you only have to look at Austrailia and how their sporting interest has diversfied through the years, but it takes a long time. As such the money men in football don't care, the here and now says they are gonna get paid.

 

This.

With that said though, football is just entertainment and you can opt in or out of it.

Something like property prices, for sale or rent (king of the road) are absolutely horrific and obviously essential. It's not like you have an option for living somewhere or not... you simply have to pay it. I've noticed the huge difference in property prices as i've moved down the country.

Devon isn't too bad in general but nowhere would have been as good value as I was getting living in Fenham.

Hmm, I seem to have drifted a bit off-topic...

 

That's kind of the point. Look at Cinema. That was thriving, booming a few years back. Very much entertainment without loyalty, pay-as-you-go. It's on its' knees now.

When football becomes entertainment, it will start to visibly die. It's already a hollow tree. All the life's been sucked out of it by money, FIFA and Sky. Football without loyalty is a pub without regulars.

 

I can't agree more with this. I don't think that the pricing of any other sport is much less prohibitive, I think we are just over saturated with football.

Whenever I turn on sky sports there seems to be football or football discussions happening. If I've left the radio on 5-live after I've been listening to a match 3 days earlier, they are still discussing the game. The back pages of the papers are 75% football, 15% Racing and 10% Everything else unless there's an Olympics or Rugby WC etc happening. When the media is saturated with so much of the sport then eventually the human brain will just become bored with it.
Hell, I come on this board more for the interactions and banter between you guys than I do for the basic football talk. Yes when it's specific to Newcastle I have an active interest but any other club news just bores me now.

I feel that the Mitchell and Webb Sketch has become more and more like reality over the last few years
[video=youtube;VF_uOgyBK1c]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF_uOgyBK1c[/video]

 

I get the loyalty point but i think the sizeable income from PL fans from other countries far outweighs ours, and frankly the drama and the shining lights appeals to a lot of them. I still think they'll buy the shirts, buy the required channels and consume sufficient merchandise so that English fans losing interest wouldn't burst the PL bubble. Tradition and history is just another part of the excitement to them, not something to fiercely defend. I honestly think the attempt at the Cardiff name change along with the kit was to appeal to Audiences outside of the UK, ignoring the fury of those within it. I think football is self-sufficient enough it could deal without a whole generation of disillusioned loyal fans losing unrest and still survive (though i guess we make the atmosphere which is a rather large pull to our league)
Secondly, the cinemas and pub deterioration, in my mind, lies in the realisation for most folks it was more costly and more hassle than doing the same thing at home. Whilst this could also be said of football, most people have a Sky subscription if they like football and don't attend games, so English football continues to make money from it rather than supermarkets with pubs and things like netflix with cinemas.
I just think football is a corrupt business that has its best interest well and truly sorted for a long time to keep their heads above water and, whilst this continues, it perhaps becomes harder for 3rd parties to intervene on people like Blatter whom, on paper, has overseen football and fifa gain millions. It can rely on being the biggest sport in the world for a long time and, after using the world cup in Japan to garner interest from those areas of Asia, they will do the same with Qatar. But i guess time will tell, in some ways i hope your right and we can do some form of rebuilding football, i just can't see it

 

The cinemas turned to **** when they stopped putting butter on the popcorn, for health and safety reasons so I'm told. They should stop charging £24 for a sweaty hotdog as well.

 

£24 sounds a bit high for a hot dog.

 

Footlong.

 

Football's evolved from the local community game where the guys get a Saturday afternoon out after a week of 12+ hour shifts to a worldwide sport. So why pander to the 50,000 locals when you can put it on TV and get half of Korea supporting your brand?
Cardiff's re-branding exercise was aimed purely at the Malaysian market where dragons are a revered symbol and red is a lucky colour.
Bit of spin with the welsh red and dragons, but essentially **** 100 years of history and the locals, there's more money half the world away.
When my dad was a kid you supported your local team. Likely because you couldn't travel anywhere else and bringing a cup home was a momentous occasion.
The premier league came about and brought success into everyone's living room.
Kids supported Man U even though they couldn't point at Manchester on a map let alone old trafford. Hell there's kids in my street who've supported a different team every season. Fans support teams "because they play in blue", "because insert name here plays for them", "because the name translates as something funny in my language".
Something on TV the other day talked about the difficulty Oceania has in gaining football support over more popular games like rugby.
So FIFA gave them their own TV set up in order to flood the market, essentially making football a 24/7 thing so people get hooked.

Look at NFL. I remember as a kid in the 80's having an NFL top, collecting keyrings with bubblegum and playing madden on the megadrive.
Never understood or followed the game, but it was marketed, failed to catch on, went away and now its back on TV every Sunday, even at Wembley. Talk of a UK based team. Flood the market, people will take it on.
It's gone the same way as football here, Too expensive for the common fan and too detached from the real world.
A lot of Americans follow college football now so to get their money they send NFL global.
I can see UK teams franchising and, when the bubble bursts here, teams moving on, justified by the bigger fanbase elsewhere.