Sunday, September 26, 2021

The Yesterday League (1987)

From the September 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

With Wimbledon well in the past and the first class cricket season nearing its end, we must be approaching winter and the beginning of the football season. So get out your scarf and woolly hat and get yourself ready for another nine months of cliches and clobbering.

How you view the new season may depend on whether you live in Scarborough or Lincoln. The innovation of automatic promotion and relegation between Division Four and the GM Vauxhall Conference was intended to catch perennial strugglers like Rochdale and Halifax: instead it ensnared Lincoln City, who the previous season had only just been relegated from Division Three and who now find themselves cast into something approaching outer darkness. Their replacement is not a team from the desirable commuter suburbs like Altrincham or Barnet but down-market Scarborough, who are pledged to try and survive by continuing to play part-time. As league clubs cut their playing staff to the bare minimum, the difference between Division Four and top non-league clubs diminishes all the time anyway.

At the other end of soccer's ladder of success. the pre-season headlines were made by the moves of Howard Kendall. Peter Shilton and Peter Beardsley. Kendall, having managed Everton to the League Championship, has been lured by the pesetas of Athletic Bilbao. Even if he returns to Britain after a couple of years, he is likely to be a millionaire by then — easily so if Bilbao win a trophy or two. So he may not stay long enough to need to learn Spanish (or Basque for that matter).

The rest of the transfer market has concerned players rather than managers. Glenn Hoddle left Spurs to join Monaco, who. according to the Guardian, play on the fourth floor of a shopping precinct before crowds of just over four thousand. Shilton has gone from Southampton to newly-promoted Derby County, in a deal widely described as worth a million pounds (most of which will apparently find its way into the bank account of Shilton himself rather than that of Southampton). This is the first big purchase at Derby since publicity-hungry capitalist Robert Maxwell took over as chairman from his son and it surely will not be the last.

Maxwell, in case you didn't know, is also owner of the Daily Mirror. It's an interesting combination, as football clubs and newspapers have a lot in common besides relying on each other for publicity and sales. Both are often poor investments from the ordinary capitalist standpoint, delivering more losses than profits (the continuing ban of English clubs from the European competitions sharply limits the profit-making possibilities). But both can be attractive toys to play with, providing publicity, excitement and a chance to impress people and do down the opposition.

The most shattering pre-season event was the abrupt withdrawal of the League sponsorship by Rupert Murdoch's Today. This proved that Murdoch's rivalry with Maxwell is unlikely to extend to the field of sport-, the big boss of the Sunday Times, News of the World and the rest is interested in the glamour only of a healthy balance sheet. Todays withdrawal may lead to legal action by the League to get some of the money it presumed was coming its way through the sponsorship. This one will run and run.

An extra bit of excitement was added at the end of last season by the promotion/relegation play-offs (a return to something very like the system originally abolished in 1898). While the introduction of these coincided with changes to the sizes of the top two divisions, this could easily have been achieved simply by adjusting appropriately the numbers of teams promoted and relegated. The play-offs were in fact set up purely for financial reasons — which is bad news for. say, Oldham, who got sizeable crowds at playoffs but thereby lost out on a lucrative promotion to Division One. Automatic relegation from Division Four may have helped boost some end-of-season gates too — at least. Burnley don't draw crowds of fifteen thousand for any other reason any longer.

As they say, may the best team win. Sometimes, of course, the best team may win. but more often it's the one with the richest chairman.
Paul Bennett

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