Despite legitimate anger at US-inspired initiatives like the failed European Super League, the creeping influence of America in football need not be universally bad
New Chelsea co-owner Todd Boehly raised the hackles of some of English football’s most annoying people last week when he suggested that the Premier League could learn from America and consider introducing an All-Star-style game to boost TV revenue. “US investment into English football is a clear and present danger to the pyramid and fabric of the game,” thundered Gary Neville on Twitter, in an emblematic reaction. “They just don’t get it and think differently.” In response many have pointed out that pundits like Neville owe their very livelihood to the Americanization of English football: without the influence of America’s example, the whole shebang of the modern Premier League – as a business structured around massive TV deals, as an endlessly mediatized spectacle, as a hegemonic cultural form – would not exist. Suggestions like Boehly’s are directed at furthering the commercialization of English football; this is not “thinking differently”, but the very essence of the sport as it has developed over the last three decades.
But there’s a further irony here, and it’s one that warrants closer examination as European football travels deeper into its suicidal spiral of salary inflation, bailouts, spending, and debt. The merit of gimmick matches like Boehly’s mooted North v South encounter notwithstanding, the American model of professional sports – in which spending is restrained by salary caps, player acquisition is tamed by pre-season drafts, and commercialization has to contend with a form of collectivism – offers a way for leagues to live within their means while ensuring even competition. Starting in the middle of last century, America – the most intensely capitalist society on earth – developed equalizing structures in professional sports, even as its leagues ruthlessly exploited every opportunity to turn the spectacle of athletic competition into profit. England – in football at least – went in a different direction, embracing commercialism without embedding American-style restraints to ensure equality of competition at the highest levels of the sport. Some quite spectacular cultural inversions have flowed from this divergence. America – the land of 24-hour service, calorific overload, and the ten thousand-dollar emergency room visit – is now a paradise of sporting equality, a country that has seen 12 different winners in the last 15 Super Bowls. Over the same period England – cradle of socialized medicine, the local pub, and the village green – has become a footballing oligarchy, with only five different clubs winning the Premier League. If competitive balance is essential to preserving the “pyramid and fabric” of English and European football, as it surely must be, there is much the Old World can learn from the New – a point that Uefa president Aleksander Čeferin, a consistent if unsuccessful advocate for Europe-wide salary caps, has recognized.
