Why London’s football clubs keep rolling on the back of capital’s richesThis is a sport geared around money, an environment in which London’s extreme disproportionate wealth cannot help but begin to exert its own gravity
• United tipped to overtake Real Madrid at top of money league
What is unarguably true is that for more than a century being based in London was no real advantage in football, but now it is.
As Samuel Johnson said: when a man is tired of London, he’s probably been there for about half an hour or so. And what a city London has become these days, with its restaurants, its tall buildings, its brain-mangling weight of financial and social pressures. The fact is, and I write as someone who has lived here all his life, these days it feels as though nobody really loves or even likes London that much. Not least because London doesn’t actually want to be liked, but presents itself instead as a beautiful, frightening, frictionless economic machine.
A city founded on trade and commodities finds itself given over more or less completely to both, populated by those forced to endure the city out of economic necessity, and headed up by a sharp-elbowed uber-population of the well-heeled and the hungry. Spend enough time here and you quickly realise that the old saying there’s an ***** in every village isn’t true any more, because they’ve all left and gone to live in London, a city whose turbines run on arseholes, that positively seeks them out, promising not only to enrich them but to comfort them with the presence of others.
Among the various consolations in all this for the rest of the country has been the historic lag between London’s economic power and the success of its football teams. Despite the city’s prosperity, even London’s most illustrious clubs have more often been B-listers among the elite. Chelsea may well win the Premier League this year, but it will be only the 10th time a London club has won it since the end of the 1970s.
Chelsea may also be the most recent English team to win the European Cup, but London still has only one trophy to its name. And so far, it still feels true to say football is at heart a northern game, as it has been since the birth of the professional league and the skulking off of the public schools.
Except, what’s that rustling in the tree line? It has been a gradual process, masked by quarter of a century of sustained and sustainable success in Manchester, but it is no secret English football’s wider geography is shifting a little beneath our feet. When the Premier League was “launched” the capital was just another place where football happened. An all-time points table of the old Football League years shows London clubs at numbers two, six, seven and 16 in the top 30. Fast-forward to the Premier League era and London clubs are leaping out at numbers two, three, five, 11, 15, 20, 21 and 28. London may not be sweeping the headline honours, but it is hoovering up the space in between, expanding to fit the gaps, a shift that looks from here as though it is going to become more pronounced.
There are various reasons for talking about this now. This week, the first domestic final of the season edged a little closer to an all-London affair. The same day, Deloitte published its list of the richest clubs in the world, which shows London out on its own with four clubs in the top 25, just as London is the only city that has two clubs in the Champions League every season (they might even have three again next year).
What is unarguably true is that for more than a century being based in London was no real advantage in football, but now it is. This is a sport geared around money, an environment in which London’s extreme, disproportionate wealth – one-tenth of the world’s billionaires live in London; average household wealth in the south-east is more than twice that of the north-east – can’t help but begin to exert its own gravity.
London may have been irrelevant to the wider TV rights-led enrichment of the Premier League. But within this rising tide there is still a hierarchy of possibilities. Most obviously the Financial fair play rules offer London clubs a clear advantage in a world where matchday and commercial revenues – or in other words how rich your fans are – will dictate to an extent how good your team is going to be.
Arsenal look like the model of the modern super-city super-club, a business model that couldn’t exist without piggybacking London’s broader economic thrust. It is a pattern being followed energetically elsewhere. West Ham and Spurs have new super-stadiums in the works. Chelsea are all set to start filling in the side return and digging out the basement. Even Brentford are about to transform themselves into mega-Brentford with a move to 20,000-seater Lionel Road.
The effects of this very modern kind of global-scale property are already in the Premier League. Newcastle can sell 50,000 tickets but their average matchday haul is still half that of Spurs in a smaller stadium. On a more basic level, Arsenal’s Alexis Sánchez might well have gone to Liverpool in the summer if Liverpool had looked a bit more like London, been located pretty much where London is and been able to offer all the London things London does. And so London keeps rolling on, a self-propelling home advantage
There is no real answer to any of this. We are simply spectators, not only of football but of the markets that drive it. And this is perhaps the wider point. The measure of how much English football is a London game is not in the number of clubs near the top of the money list, the fact that West Ham are richer than Roma. It is instead present in the way a league that was always a business is run entirely on London principles: hungry, transactional, a place that wants you, but more than that, wants your money.
London looks like football: football looks like London. Looking from one to the other, it is already impossible to say which is which.
Guardian
