Short lifetime careers (or why teaching should learn from football)

There are a selection of careers that have a shorter lifetime than those the rest of us pursue. And these careers are often the sexy ones we aspired to do when - as I did - you attend, at age eleven, the 'come dressed as what you want to do when you're grown up' party. Firemen, police officers, soldiers, sportsmen and women, models. And, of course, dancers:

Dancers are notoriously bad at planning for their second acts. They underestimate the age at which they'll retire (the average age of retirement is 34), overestimate the amount of money they'll earn, and misjudge the forces that will end their careers. More than one-third of the dancers in a 2004 survey were driven to retirement by an injury; only 5 percent left because they actually wanted a new career. When dancers enter the workforce in their thirties, many are woefully unprepared. Only 3 percent of current dancers say that teaching dance is their preferred post-retirement line of work, but it's the most common fate: 53 percent end up teaching dance in some capacity.

You could write this script for footballers - we look at the mega-star millionaires of the sport and assume that this goes for all the footballers. But only the most talented reach this height, most footballers - like most dancers - ply their trade in the lower leagues. And while the top Premier League stars earn £1,7m per year on average in lower leagues this plummets to between £40,000 and £70,000. These are good wages on the face of it but not if you reckon that most footballers' careers only last 20 years at most. And like the dancers, these retired footballers all end up earning a (not always very good) living from hanging about the game they played - coaching, physio, commentary.

The problem is that, for all the money in elite sport and arts, there really aren't enough jobs out there to maintain the income levels and living standards that retired and redundant dancers and players got used to. Yet we look at the money involved and howl with horror even though, compared to our economy, the money in football, opera or ballet is a drop in the ocean especially given the pleasure sport and art gives to us all.

This problem - in a related but different manner - also applies to careers such as teaching and social work:

In other words, after ten years or so, one cannot remain in the classroom, one must go either upwards, into management or else sideways into a specialist area … or out. The days of Mr. Chips were long gone. One must be perma-vibrant, relevant and up with the latest fad. Especially with Ofsted bureaucrats breathing down one’s neck.

Much of the reason for this is the idea of career progression and that being a classroom teacher in limiting - at least in financial terms. Even with 'career grade' systems in these professions there remains the pressure on the most experienced teachers to spend less time in the classroom and more time doing other important but non-teaching functions. Same goes for social workers meaning that the most capable and experienced end up trapped in an office managing other social workers. In our system - one that presumes the boss is paid more than the people she manages - the teacher or social worker (perhaps also the salesman and engineer too) ends up as a manager, a consultant or advisor rather than spending time doing the thing that person is trained to do.

And this sort of brings us back to football. In football - probably because it is driven by the needs of the tournament - the people paid the most are the ones delivering the product. That £1.7million wage for the average premier league player reflects two things - the transient nature of his career (every time he steps onto the field he knows it could end) and the essence of the game as a contest between teams of the best. And the best are a rare thing.

In this place no-one suggests to the 27 year-old midfield superstar that his only hope of getting more money is to become a coach or a manager. Yet that is precisely the measure we apply to teachers and social workers even while paying lip service to the idea of a career spent in front of a class or in the field. Perhaps we need to change the way in which we pay these vital public servants, to end the tyranny of the spinal column pay scale, national negotiations and a world where school administrators earn more than the best classroom teachers.

Most short term careers have worked pretty hard at making sure there's a life after playing - for public sector ones like policing, fire and soldiering there's a pension and extensive investment in retraining and support. This doesn't stop many of those leaving these uniformed, regimented roles finding civilian life tricky but it shows someone's thinking about the issue even if perhaps not hard enough. In sports like football there's a lot of financial advice and support but just as we saw with the dancers, too many ex-players end up like so many Ghosts of Football Past earning a not especially good income from clutching onto past glories.

But the brightest sportsmen do end up in coaching and management but this is done in a situation where they can't do what got them there - play 90 minutes of high-intensity football. For the other careers we've touched on such as teaching there's really no excuse - we should be begging the best to stay in front of a class.


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Some interesting stuff to read including snowflake bullies, non-racist football, child mental health and why public health lie all the time

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Bullies with a cause - exploring the 'snowflake fascists':

To make matters worse, among “the most consistent findings in educational studies of creativity,” according to psychologists Erik L. Westby and V.L. Dawson, is that “teachers dislike personality traits associated with creativity.” Although teachers report they value creativity, these nonconformist children who act and think differently and don’t quite fit in—the children most in need of teachers’ support and protection—are, research reveals, teachers’ least favorite students.

Rod Liddle on form as he discusses why football isn't racist whereas middle-class professions are (and has a go at Beyonce):

It’s not just Millwall, mind — football has done extraordinarily well in accustoming the white folks to divest themselves of racial prejudice. It is still the focus of anti-racist odium from the middle-class liberal left, of course, which despises what it sees as a lowbrow white working-class leisure pursuit. And yet there were more black players on Millwall’s books in 1975 than there were black journalists on the Guardian’s staff. A greater proportion of black footballers then and now than black academics, black lawyers, black MPs, black educationalists, black social workers — name your middle-class profession and the answer will be the same. And black Britons thrived in the same trades as those working-class supporters on the terraces — as electricians, plumbers, labourers.

Frank Furedi in challenging mode as he discusses mental health and children:

Confused and insecure children are likely to be diagnosed as depressed or traumatised. Virtually any energetic or disruptive youngster can acquire the label of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Youngsters who give their teachers a hard time or argue with adults are likely to get stuck with the label of oppositional defiant disorder.

The proliferation of new medicalised categories with which to label school pupils says far more about the inventive powers of the therapeutic imagination than the conditions of childhood. Pupils who suffer from shyness are offered the diagnosis of social phobia. The diagnosis of school phobia can now be applied to label those children who really dislike going to school.

And Chris Snowden explaining slowly and carefully why public health lies all the time about drinking:

The graph represents the relationship between alcohol consumption and mortality. It is, I think, well known that the relationship is J-shaped. This particular J-curve is based on 34 prospective epidemiological studies which collect data on how much people drink and then follow them over a period of years with a view to seeing if they die and what they die of. As this graph shows, the risk of death declines substantially at low levels of alcohol consumption and then rises, but it does not reach the level of a teetotaller until the person is consuming somewhere between 40 and 60 grams of alcohol a day, which is to say between 35 and 50 units a week.

Here's a canter through the weird and wonderful world of consumer apps (this Uber for everything!):

Valet Anywhere will find you and park your car for you. Dufl will pack and ship your bags for you. Zingy, Barkpost, Wag! and FetchPetCare all offer on-demand dog-walking. Over the holidays, I received a breathless pitch for Thirstie, an app billed as a “discovery-to-delivery platform that allows you to stock up on last-minute wine, beer and spirits under an hour.” (Lest you think Thirstie has cornered its market, it’s locked in a Coke-Pepsi-style battle with its arch rival, Saucey.)

Meanwhile the Adam Smith Institute are running against the tide on migration - a welcome challenge to the media-led shouting:

The best international development policy would be to let in more workers from the third world in to work in Britain, according to a new paper from the Adam Smith Institute. Politicians should stop trying to save entire countries with foreign aid programmes and instead help their inhabitants by letting them move to developed countries, it says.

Finally, this is a really great idea:

Using this LoT (Locator of Things) technology, Pixie has basically created a network of items that can correspond and even talk which each other. This does not only create a ‘smart household’, but it also adds potential smart technology to the city. Add a pixie to your bicycle and find it back easily. Let your car give you a sign when you forgot to bring your driver license. Or add a Pixie to your shopping cart and let it find a your pre-set shopping list.

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Local councils, grassroots football and the TV money...

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The Local Government Association, in the guise of Cllr Ian Stephens, chair of the LGA's Culture, Tourism and Sport Board, is worrying about the state of 'grassroots football':

‘There is an ever-widening chasm between the grassroots game, which is being allowed to wither away by the football authorities through pitiful investment, and elite football.'

And there's no doubt that this comment responds to a popular perception about the game - that the huge sums in TV rights and sponsorships aren't trickling down to those grassroots with the result that England's national team is rubbish. As ever, I suspect this is a case of the LGA looking for a source of funding for its parks departments.

But first let's look at that withering grassroots in English football:

Over 7m people play football on a weekly basis and they are supported by 400,000 volunteers, 300,000 coaches and 27,000 referees who give up their time to keep the game going.

There are some issues - more adults (and a thriving market) now prefer to play 5-a-side football and there is the perennial problem of having enough qualified coaches and referees not to mention people to do the dull old job of collecting subs and playing fees, registering players, organising fixtures and ensuring that, come Sunday morning there's a game for the team to play.

The Football Association spends a lot of money (much of which comes from those TV rights and sponsorships) on supporting grassroots football - around £50 million every year directly into supporting and developing all that local club football with a further £50 million spent on other development programmes. On top of this is a similar amount invested by the Premier League - along with the FA through the Football Foundation plus supporting the community programmes of individual clubs. This latter activity plus investment in other community sport (and an overseas programme) will see some £138 million invested by the Premier League in community sport. In its total three-year programme the Premier League will spend over £200 million on the grassroots of football.

It may be the case that more could be spent but to suggest that the grassroots of English football are withering away is pretty much untrue. The truth is that more money is now spent on developing football than has ever been spent. Those glory days when West Ham won the world cup for England were not brought about by investment in grassroots football because the infrastructure was all in place - even the cubs and scouts had extensive and organised leagues or cup competition.

The English Schools Football Association (ECFA) reports that 6,432 teams were entered into its competitions - this includes boys, girls and mixed teams. To provide some context, there are around 24,000 maintained schools in England suggesting to me that the biggest change in English football since 1966 hasn't been the lack of support for the game from the top teams or the big leagues but rather the collapse of competitive school football.

The Liberal Democrats recently call for 5% of the money from the Premier League's TV deal to go into the 'grassroots'. The new deal - the biggest ever - is for £5.136 billion over three years. Just so we're clear, 5% of this is £256.8 million. Under the current smaller deal the Premier League will invest over £200 million in grassroots football, community sport and the development of local football infrastructure.

What we're seeing here from the LGA - pig ignorance aside - is a crass bid for the FA and the Premier League to give local councils money:

The LGA said if the money invested in local pitches was increased and administered by local councils, it could help councils build upon grassroots initiatives.

 

This isn't about grassroots football at all. It's about local council budget choices.

 

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Television sponsorship, star players and oligarchs have made English club football great again.

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I'm prompted to write by a book review in The Spectator. Not, I'm guessing the first place to turn to for any deep or insightful assessment of football. And the review doesn't disappoint:

For all the sophistication of his analysis, Goldblatt provides no convincing answer to the question of why clubs, originally rooted in their communities, still command such loyalty when few of their teams contain local lads, and some not even a majority of English ones, but transient mercenaries.

Now this is a review of a book written by a sociologist which means we can be pretty sure that the author isn't an enthusiast for capitalism raw in tooth and claw. Indeed the review quotes Goldblatt saying football is  ‘social-democratic game in a neo-liberal world’. And as we all know, dear reader, anyone who uses the term 'neo-liberal' without irony is probably to the left of most mainstream politics in the UK.

But it's not Goldblatt's assessment that bothers me (and to be fair I haven't read his book) but the reviewer, Michael Beloff's view that television sponsorship, pampered star players and the vanity of oligarchs should be blamed for the current sad state of English football. Indeed, the truth - whatever this reviewer may say - is that English football is in a pretty good state. Unless of course you measure its success purely on the basis of how the national team performs.

Let's start with attendance - although levels have levelled off in the past couple of years, the numbers of paying customers for football matches in England rose steadily from its low point in the mid-1980s.

It's true that attendances after the last war were vastly high - we've all seen those images of packed crowds stood shoulder to shoulder. And, of course, we also know that the spread of leisure choices means that those days aren't returning. What is remarkable is that, given the range of leisure choices (and what seems like wall-to-wall TV coverage) well over a million people pay to watch football every week of the season. And this includes some 150,000 or so who stand on a cold terrace with a pie watching non-league games. The idea that a leisure industry can sustain this level of business in a very competitive market tells us that, far from English football be in some sort of trouble, it is thriving.

But - and here Beloff makes another sweeping statement - what about the players?

Like many other sports, football was invented in England; yet the balance of power has shifted elsewhere. The true superstars play in Spain, Italy or Germany.

Wow! Hard to know quite where to start with this observation - perhaps the clubs of the world cup finalists? Again Beloff couldn't be more wrong - there were eleven clubs with ten or more players at the 2014 World Cup Finals, five of them in the English premier league. And the English leagues provided 119 of the players - fully 38 more than the next highest, Italy's Serie A. Finally 22 England players play in England compared to just one of the Uruguay team. The idea that all the superstars play somewhere else really is arrant nonsense.

Thirdly Beloff suggests that the Premier League is 'uncompetitive' suggesting that the prospect of the big prizes - league champions, qualifying for the Champions League and the FA Cup - only exists for 'half-a-dozen' clubs. Here's the current top of the table - I think this proves Beloff wrong (and not just because I'm a West Ham fan):

Underlying all this argument is a common political point - that the greed of players has somehow stolen 'the people's game' away from the people. There's a sort of nostalgia in this political point, a harking back to a mythical golden age when star players lived in terraced houses and went to training on the bus. We ignore the huge profits made by wealthy club owners - made possible because of wage caps and a transfer system that was tantamount to slavery. It was a time when clubs were full of 'local lads' wearing chunky brown boots to trundle across pitches that, half the time, would be better suited to planting wheat than playing football.

In the end football - and the desire to watch exciting players gracing the hallowed turf of 'our' club - reflects the world as it is not some sort of rose-tinted, patronising image of sturdy working-class yeoman playing and watching. And the liberalising of the game - opening up the transfer system, more overseas players, better management (everywhere but Leeds United) and ending wage limits- results in the Premier League producing a spectacle that is a vast improvement on the sluggish, muddy and foul-ridden game of the 1970s and 1980s.

There's plenty to worry us about football but it really isn't the clubs, the players or the management of leagues. Nor is it support for junior and lower level football - the grassroots is thriving (although it could use more of that FA cash). And neither is it the fans (Beloff has a little bien pensant pop at racism and homophobia - presumably to tick the London metro-liberal bingo card).

No, the problem with football lies with FIFA, UEFA and the FA, with the administration of the game. Rather than pretend there was some golden age of football writers like Michael Beloff would be better served directing their criticism to the corruption and fixing, the tinkering with rules, the refusal to embrace technology and the training of referees.

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On the popularity of politics

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Us politicians like to think that what we do is grabbing the attention of the masses. We kid ourselves that people are actually interested in out rants, ramblings and petty spats. The truth is that people aren't interested - only about 1% of the population joins a political party and perhaps less than 10% is actually interested in politics.

An illustration of this comes from election news aggregator, Electionista, who tweeted the top seven most followed political parties in Europe:

Most followed parties in the EU: 1. @mov5stelle 2. @PPopular 3. @PSOE 4. @UKLabour 5. @EELV 6. @pdnetwork 7. @conservatives #EP2014
— electionista (@electionista) March 5, 2014

What is interesting here isn't the order but the number of followers - the 'Five Star' movement in Italy is the most followed with 270,000 followers, not surprising for a web-savvy populist movement. For the UK, the two big parties have far fewer - 125,000 for Labour and 104,000 for the Conservatives. To put this in a bit of context here are the seven most followed premier league football teams:

Arsenal 3.56m

Chelsea 3.46m

Liverpool 2.40m

Man United 2.01m

Man City 1.55m

Spurs 775k

Everton 376k

Only two premier league teams have fewer followers than the Conservatives (Crystal Palace and Hull since you ask) add Cardiff City and you have the three teams with fewer followers than Labour. This might not be an entirely fair comparison but it does suggest politics has something of a problem. Or maybe we are a mature enough society not to be all that fussed about the antics of us politicians?

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Why football is better for its millionaire players

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Tom Finney was a great player. I have this on good authority - Stanley Matthews, Matt Busby, Bobby Charlton, Booby Moore all said so. Who am I to argue.

And it was a different age, the grounds were packed, crammed to the rafters with fans of all ages. But the players, for all that we described them as heroes, were treated like corporate chattels:

On a pre-War summer tour with England against Italy, Austria and Switzerland, he was made an astonishing offer by Prince Roberto Lanza di Trabia, millionaire president of Palermo in Sicily, a then astonishing £130 a month, a villa by the shore, a Ferrari, flights for his family whenever wished, and a £10,000 signing-on fee.

With the retain-and-transfer slavery employment of the Football League, by which a player could never leave without his club’s approval, Finney could do no more than quietly make his way home. To the end of his days, he would smile quietly about the memory. 

Because Preston North End wouldn't let Tom Finney go his wages - the maximum wage - were just £20 a week. And there was nothing he, or any other player, could do about this, the clubs - private businesses - were profitable, taking the money from millions through the turnstiles but living under the football league's rules meant they could keep that money. The people who brought the fans in their thousands every Saturday afternoon - Finney, Mortenson, Matthews and so on - they didn't get to see that cash.

Today the biggest chunk of the money the fans pay to watch football goes to pay the wages of the players not the dividends of the clubs' owners. "They're not worth it", we say. "Whatever happened to the working class game" we exclaim. And we are wrong. The game is better for player power, better for so much of the money going to the men who make the product, who provide such glorious entertainment for us and who are the focus of childhood dreams and adult passion.

Football is a better game for its millionaire players.

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Football and booze - New Puritans kick the messenger again

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It remains the case that, generally speaking, the purpose of advertising isn't to get new customers. Oh, I know, you don't believe this any more than the "scientists" who work in public health. But it is true. Brand advertising is about heuristics, about the choice architecture and the limited selection which consumers (existing customers) use to decide a purchase.

The problem is that advertising is an easy target for the Church of Public Health:

Researchers have called for much tighter government restrictions or even a ban on the marketing of alcohol during televised football matches, arguing that the messages are seen by and affect millions of children. Their research suggests football fans see around two references to alcoholic brands every minute when they watch a match on TV – in addition to the formal advertising during commercial breaks.

And, as a result of this avalanche of booze advertising we have seen massive increases in children getting drunk?

In 2011, 12% of pupils had drunk alcohol in the last week. This continues a decline from 26% in 2001, and is at a similar level to 2010, when 13% of pupils reported drinking in the last week.

Seems the ads aren't working!

The reported frequency of drinking continues to decline. In 2011, 7% of pupils said they usually drank at least once a week, compared with 20% in 2001.

So about one in ten secondary school children are drinking - half the number that were in 2001 - and around half that number again are drinking regularly (if once a week is 'regular'). So why do we hear this:

"Children who don't drink, who are exposed to alcohol marketing, are more likely to start drinking earlier in their lives," she said. "And children who are already drinking are more likely to drink more after exposure to alcohol marketing."

Especially since the Guardian - in the usual manner of its health reporting presents no actual evidence to support this "scientist's" contention. What we know is that there is a link between awareness of alcohol advertising and drinking but the direction of causality isn't clear. It is quite plausible for people who are drinkers to be more aware of advertising for drink than people who are non-drinkers (indeed this is what the advertising is doing). And even in these cases the effect is small:

Taken as a whole then findings reported in the available studies indicate that alcohol advertising may have small but significant effects on the beliefs, intentions and possibly behaviours of young people.

Hardly a damning description of the bleak effect of booze ads on children. And this is the problem. Just as the advertising bans for smoking haven't massively affected consumption (there was no accelerated decline in use following ad ban introduction), the call for bans on alcohol brands sponsoring football is simply a gesture - the appearance of doing something.

But given that we really don't have a problem - certainly not a whole population problem - with children drinking, this is simply "drinking is evil" translated into public policy.

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Gareth Bale - is this proof for tournament theory?

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First I'm assured that young Gareth hasn't yet signed on the dotted line at Real Madrid but still:

Real Madrid have agreed to pay £105million in a part-exchange deal for Gareth Bale.

The Spanish giants were claiming on Thursday night that a staggering, world-record accord had been sealed with Spurs chairman Daniel Levy.

And yes, there is a theory to explain why so much money is paid for and to these top footballers:

However, there is an alternative explanation that says that in many cases relative differences in performance, not absolute differences, determine earnings. This explanation of wage differences in terms of relative performance is often called tournament theory. One place where this explanation should work is in contests with winners and losers. For example, consider two almost equally able gladiators fighting in the arena of ancient Rome. Small differences in ability (or luck) could result in a huge difference in reward--one could die and the other live.

Given the levels of reward to the club of remaining at the European table, it is imperative that they invest in players who are (they hope) ever so slightly better than the players in the team that doesn't quite make it into the Champions' League (e.g. Tottenham Hotspur).

However, such a system would seem, over time, to reduce the chances of new teams breaking into Europe unless - as we've seen with Chelsea, Manchester City and PSG - there is a sugar daddy in the form of Russian or Arab billionaires.

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Why fans shouldn't be worried about Manchester United future income...

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...except that it's not really about Manchester:

Manchester United has signed a partnership with the first mobile phone firm to operate in Azerbaijan.

The three-year deal with Bakcell will give the telecommunications company the right to screen the club's MUTV in the eastern European country.

Bakcell will also offer United-themed phone packages, which will give subscribers access to club news, video highlights, ringtones and other features.

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So how much do you trust the police now?

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Especially when they did this:

The officers' statements, presented as official police accounts to the subsequent inquiry by Lord Justice Taylor, were changed to delete criticism of the police themselves on the day, and, largely, emphasise misbehaviour by supporters. The panel found that the operation went as deep and extensive as 116 of 164 statements being amended "to remove or alter comments unfavourable to South Yorkshire police".

The next time you hear the police saying they are accountable remind them of this appalling action. And that it took 23 years for the truth to be revealed. For those police officers responsible to face any form of accountability.

If having elected police commissioners takes us closer to an accountable police force that is welcome. I hope it will be so and we won't simply get the same old friendly placemen. For me, having been brought up to like and respect the police, I'll struggle to take future police statements on trust. And I know I'm not the only one.

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Has the BBC given up on reporting news??

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Yesterday evening, the main BBC News chose to spend the first ten minutes of a half-hour programme talking about racism at the European Football Championships. Now I happen to think that racism is a serious issue but still question whether a few idiot Poles making monkey noises at non-white Dutch footballers really constitutes the main news item.

Once the BBC had finished with interviewing itself and expressing shock and horror at the racist chants, the next important news item was that we had some pretty bad weather. This featured some pretty spectacular waves (not the surfing kind) at a place in Cornwall.

Only then did the BBC mention the appalling events in Syria where a government is beating, raping and murdering its citizens while giving the finger to the civilized world. The imminent collapse of the Euro (perhaps) barely merits a mention. Before we return again to sport, to racism and the preening of presenters.

Where is the real news?

It seems to me - and the Leveson enquiry defines this perfectly - that the media classes determine the news agenda by what they talk about at the dinner table or over fancy coffee in some trendy cafe. What matters to real folk out there is the real world is as nothing besides the endless obsession with political gossip, perceptions of racism and having a good laugh at the stupid people who don't live in North London.

All this is compounded by filling in hours of supposed news programming with stagey interviews of BBC journalists - turning these people from news reporters into the news itself. The result is that we are given the tiniest glimpse of the wider world followed by tendentious opinionating from the BBC-appointed (and employed) expert.

It seems to me that the BBC has given up on reporting news.

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So does Ed Miliband really like morris dancing?

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Today Ed Miliband, for reasons known only to those who advise him, has come over all English:

We in the Labour Party have been too reluctant to talk about England in recent years. We’ve concentrated on shaping a new politics for Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. But some people in England felt Labour’s attention had turned away.

That something was holding us back from celebrating England too. That we were too nervous to talk of English pride and English character. Connecting it to the kind of nationalism that left us ill at ease.

I am pleased for Mr Miliband. Outside the Labour Party people have never stopped talking about England, have never been "too nervous" to talk of English pride and English character. We smile - with an element of rueful nostalgia - at the old Cecil Rhodes quote:

Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life.

It's true, of course, but no longer in the manner that Rhodes meant it. After all, England is unsurpassingly gorgeous in both its scenery, its heritage and, on a good day, its people.  To live here is a prize worth grasping and to protect the idea of Englishness is a fight worth fighting.

I fear that Ed Miliband's Englishness is somewhat wafer thin but hope it isn't. I wonder whether we're seeing a theme - first raised in Ed's slightly worrying and protectionist, 'Blue Labour' period - of invoking nationalist sentiments, of seeking to capture the idea of English nationhood without changing the substance of English grievance.

No doubt this Englishness won't run to liking morris dancing, folk music or free speech. It will be a card played once or twice - ahead of a major football tournament in which England are competing, for example - to snaffle a little of that working class nationalism that, in truth, Ed Miliband and all around him despise.

So no Ed Miliband doesn't really like morris dancing. His Englishness is worn too lightly for that.

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Fabrice Muamba: a reminder of why we grant asylum...

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Quite rightly the airwaves, blogs, newspapers and twittersphere is filled with the terrible news of Fabrice Muamba's on-pitch heart attack. Like everyone else I hope he pulls through, just as Mervyn Davies - who died yesterday - did after his on-pitch brain haemorrhage in 1976 playing for Swansea against Pontypridd.

Reading Muamba's story brought out another aspect of his life, something other than that he was a successful premier league football player living in Cheshire and playing for Bolton Wanderers. Muamba was only here and playing football because Britain gave his parents political asylum.

...the only reason Muamba was in England is because his father, Marcel, was a political refugee, granted indefinite leave on the basis that his life would be in danger if he were made to return to Africa. Muamba talked of going to sleep at night amid the backdrop of gunfire. His uncle, Ilunga, was murdered. Friends and neighbours died, too. When it was safe, he and his friends would play football but, very often, they would be called back inside.

We give asylum because it is the right thing to do - forget about the fiddles and abuse, the false claims, the political football. We give asylum so youngsters like Fabrice Muamba can play football without being kidnapped or shot because their Dad's on the wrong side in politics or a civil war.  There are thousands of other stories - less high profile - that tell us the same thing, that we give sanctuary to those fleeing threats without fear or favour and give them the same chance we give our own people, our own children.

It's one of the things that make us a great nation and a great people.

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Fixing markets for failure never works...

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The manager of former world cup winning side, West Ham United, Sam Allardyce has this to say about the Football League's incoming "fair finance" rules:

"The rules are going to cause absolute chaos and are going to destroy football as we know it unless we are very careful," he says.

"It's making finance more important. I am not saying that we want to put clubs into jeopardy – the Portsmouth scenario – but this is the entertainment industry, not a financial institution whose only aim is to balance the books."

The point Big Sam makes here is that the current rules aren't making lower league football in England less competitive - he comments in the same article about how the league is more "ferocious and volatile" than when he last managed in the Championship. Whenever the word "fair" crops up alarm bells should ring - indeed these new rules won't stop clubs failing but will make it ever more difficult for smaller clubs to build a successful run. And it won't stop clubs getting into financial trouble either.

But then no-one's listening. Always and everywhere fixing markets to favour failure doesn't work.

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The end of civilization as we know it...

...or something like that as the European Court of Justice sticks it to Sky and the Premier League by allowing us to ship in those foreign decoders and watch the football as broadcast by Greeks, Finns and Luxembourgois. The sound of pub pontification echoes across the world (or would if more pubs were open) and many predict that the great football bubble will burst. In just a few short years will we see Wayne Rooney supplementing his meagre income by shining shoes at Piccadilly station and Arsene Wenger sat with a batter paper cup outside Highbury Station?

Somehow, people seem to miss the point. Quite rightly there is no copyright protection on a football match – after all, what’s involved? We point a camera at the pitch and, hey presto, a football match is broadcast. Not much human creativity there! So the issue never was copyright – the issue was the licence. And the ECJ has reminded us that we live in a ‘single market’ and that broadcasters cannot make arbitrary boundaries for their own purposes within than market that are enforceable. This is what Sky and the Premier League tried to do.

However, the idea that this will end the football bubble is misplaced. The licence agreements are time limited and subject to renegotiation. Up to that point the licensees (including Sky) are obliged to comply with the contracts – including, I assume, paying the fees. So in the short-term there is no effect on the Premier Leagues revenues. The problem comes when the licences are renegotiated.

The Premier League will – I’m prepared to bet – simply issue one set of licences for the whole EU. The losers won’t be Sky (unless some upstart Slovakian broadcaster outbids them) but the various local licence-holders. There won’t be a licence for Greece, a licence for Spain and a licence for Sweden – just one EU licence.

The publican in Portsmouth may be grinning broadly right now but her action, it seems to me, has caused little more than an irritation to the Premier League – but possibly a bigger bill for Sky (or that upstart Slovakian broadcaster).

It probably isn’t the end of the Premier League gravy train. Civilization will be saved!

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Should we 'denormalise' sport?

We’re told – rightly so I believe – that taking part in sport and exercise is good for us. However, in the spirit of understanding and, with a wry couch potato smile, I thought I’d have a look at the problems with exercise.

Back in 2005 a survey was done for “Spaces for Sports” looking at the incidence of sports injury.

New research by Barclays Spaces for Sports has revealed that just under a third (30 per cent) of the nation pick up 22 million sporting injuries per year.  The major causes of these injuries are over-exertion, lack of preparation and general clumsiness, with third party involvement and slippery surfaces also blamed. On average a person regularly participating in sport will pick up 1.65 injuries every year and will take up to five days off work or college due to incapacity and/or treatment.

Stop for a second and calculate the cost to business of all those sprained ankles, broken collar bones and ruptured Achilles tendons. Consider, if you will, the burden these selfish people are placing on our National Health Service – over a quarter of a million emergency admissions every year. Our accident and emergency departments are, quite literally, clogged with sports men and women and their injuries.

Yet we never read of the dreadful burden all this indulgence brings upon society, there are no campaigns to ban rugby or football, to stop people doing lasting damage to knees and hips by running on hard roads. Indeed we praise those super-fit individuals for their dedication, their healthy lifestyle and their sporting prowess.

Contrast this with the new assault on the couch potato – following on from attacking smoking, drinking and the humble burger, we must now condemn TV:

Dr Lennert Veerman, from the School of Population Health at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, and colleagues report their findings today in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

"If our estimates are correct, then TV viewing is in the same league as smoking and obesity," he said.

Last year, another Australian study by Professor David Dunstan and colleagues from the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne found an hour of TV viewing a day led to an 8 per cent increase in the risk of premature death.

Oh dear. Not that I believe a word of this – seems like an exercise in conflating all sorts of behavioural traits and then adding a cute bit of arithmetic to get an ace headline.  TV is bad – is killing us.

The point here is that the argument – or one of them – for introducing bans, pricing controls and other nannying nudges is that these sinful behaviours cost society loads of money. We’re forever being regaled with the cost of drinking or smoking or obesity. Yet it seems to me that, for all its goodness, sport and exercise is a huge cost to society in lost work time, in treating injury and in caring for the long-term consequence of sporting injury and strain.

Maybe, for the sake of consistency, we should tax, ban or nudge sport as well – starting with the really dangerous sports such as riding horses or playing rugby and then moving to protect people playing football. More padding, less physical contact, short game time, a smaller pitch and a softer ball – these things will protect those playing and will reduce the cost to society of sports injury.

Just a thought!

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Let's hope the lad's value holds up....

In what must be one of the more bizarre twists in the story of the banking crisis Christiano Ronaldo is being used as collateral. Or so Süddeutsche Zeitung reports:

The daily reports that the Bankia group of savings banks, which financed Real Madrid’s acquisition of the Portuguese player, is now seeking to borrow funds from the European Central Bank. In response to the ECB’s demand for guarantees, Bankio are putting up… Ronaldo and the Brazilian Kaka, who also plays for the Madrid football club. In 2009, Real borrowed 76.5 million euros to pay transfer fees of 100 millions euros to Manchester United, and 60 million to Milan AC.

Which (and those who make comparisons between Manchester United's financial position and that of the two big Spanish clubs should note this) is a pretty sound bet since:

Bankia would first have to become insolvent. Thereafter, Real would have to default on its loans, which are secured by advertising and television revenues. It goes without saying that Real Madrid is in debt to the tune of several million euros. However, in Spain football clubs have a history of obtaining publicly funded bailouts — just like the country’s banks.”

Real Madrid are, just like those big banks, 'too big to fail' so Ronnie's as safe an asset as you can get (so long as he keeps playing).

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Why the FA should leave FIFA

Much debate has followed from the latest round of corruption allegations directed at senior board members of football's governing body, FIFA. The boss, Sepp Blatter is blustering his way through the ensuing media furore:

Asked if bribery allegations against two of his most senior former allies, Mohamed Bin Hammam and Jack Warner, and continued questions over the probity of the Qatar 2022 bid constituted a crisis, Mr Blatter said: “What is a crisis? Football is not in a crisis. When you see the final of the Champions League then you must applaud. So we are not in a crisis, we are only in some difficulties.” 

Let's be clear about this - FIFA's owners (the various national football associations) are unwilling to act, to prevent bribery, to throw out corrupt officials and to deals with the games financial problems. This is because none of those national FA's are prepared to risk being outside the sty, away from the trough. And, of course, FIFA controls the World Cup.

However, there comes a time when tolerating corruption, bribery and malpractice simply to get the right to enter a competition ceases to be acceptable. And offering soft challenges, threatening to abstain and calling for delays doesn't cut the mustard - the fat cats running FIFA will simply ignore the FA. The only lever is for the FA (ideally along with a couple of like-minded associations) to inform Blatter that they will be withdrawing from FIFA until such a time as the organisation addresses corruption and reforms its governance.

What I do know is that we will not get a reform of FIFA so long as the criticisms of the FA and others can be ignored by FIFA's executives. Pulling out might be painful in the short run but may prove the only way to force FIFA's hand. Right now Sepp Blatter can ride out the criticism because it can't really damage FIFA sufficiently to require substantive governance changes. And in a few weeks time all the press will have wandered off to the next story leaving FIFA to wallow happily in its sty once again.

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Were Iceland’s banks run by elves? And have we upset them?

Jeremy Clarke in his ‘Low Life’ Spectator column writes about elves. More specifically Icelandic elves. This is what he was told:

“Even today, she said, when a road is built in Iceland the contractors take great care not to route it through an elves’ village. There was a celebrated case not so long ago, in fact, where road builders were unable to start their heavy plant one morning. The machines just refused to start. The contractors came out to the site to investigate and their first suspicions were quickly confirmed when they realised the next day’s levelling work would have flattened some elves’ dwelling places. The road was accordingly rerouted at considerable expense.”

The other thing we know about Iceland is that they suddenly – almost overnight and without anyone actually noticing – became a banking powerhouse.

“An entire nation without immediate experience or even distant memory of high finance had gazed upon the example of Wall Street and said, “We can do that.” For a brief moment it appeared that they could. In 2003, Iceland’s three biggest banks had assets of only a few billion dollars, about 100 percent of its gross domestic product. Over the next three and a half years they grew to over $140 billion and were so much greater than Iceland’s G.D.P. that it made no sense to calculate the percentage of it they accounted for. It was, as one economist put it to me, “the most rapid expansion of a banking system in the history of mankind.”

And this powerhouse, equally dramatically, collapsed leaving debt, misery and a load of very grumpy Icelanders. Some feel – or appear to suggest – that the problem wasn’t the worldwide credit crunch, sovereign debt, banker corruption or indeed any mundane economic reasons. The problem was that the elves (or possibly gnomes and trolls working for the elves) called in their debts. As a Vanity Fair article (quoted above pointed out):

Alcoa, the biggest aluminium company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called "hidden people" -- or, to put it more plainly, elves -- in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free but, as he put it, "we couldn’t as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people."

The second problem is that all Icelandic males consider themselves heroes from the sagas. But the main problem seems to be that the investment bankers – behaving like heroes (that is rashly and without though of course) – didn’t pay enough attention to the elves. As is suggested here:

Possibly the Icelandic banks should have made sure there were no hidden people lurking in their balance sheets, waiting to take revenge on anyone who disturbed them.

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Afterthought: I understand elves are rubbish at football too. Which explains a lot!

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