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Ivan Toney was playing in his first match since his England call-up and may this week become the first Brentford player to play for the country since Les Smith in 1939, an honour celebrated by his club during the half-time break. But there was little to suggest Toney can be the next-best thing to Harry Kane as he struggled to find any loose change from a central defensive partnership of Gabriel Magalhães and William Saliba.
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What made football’s decision appear stranger, as the writer Patrick Kidd pointed out, was that in 1952 it was just about the only sport not called off on the death of George VI, with matches continuing, prefaced by the anthem and Abide With Me. It was, said the FA, “a simple and sincere tribute”.
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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.
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Unionization in the big US leagues emerged at a time when all the big issues of modern sport – player mobility, revenue generation and TV rights, wage sustainability, and talent distribution – were up for grabs simultaneously. In the years that followed the war, television rights were seen – as they are still seen today – as key to the long-term financial viability of professional sports. American TV in the 1950s and 1960s was heavily regulated but dominated by three independent private operators (CBS, NBC and ABC) – another point of distinction from the UK, where ITV was the only commercial network until the early 1980s.
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Reagan’s America witnessed its own neoliberal conversion toward the end of the last century, of course, but by the time it was in full swing the basic terms of sports professionalization had been set, and the factors that give American sport its unique character – player power, collective bargaining, and a welfarist attention to the common good, all of them relics of the postwar New Deal order – were no longer negotiable. English football got all the icky commercialism of American sport but none of its comfort with redistribution.
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A match-day squad containing a 15-year-old in Ethan Nwaneri and Lino Souza, himself just 17, did not reflect heavy squad depth, even if it did allow Nwaneri, born a year after the Emirates Stadium was opened, three years after Wenger’s Invincibles season, to become the Premier League’s youngest ever player when coming on in injury time.
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Though overall union membership across American society fell in the decades after 1980, the power and influence of unions in sport did not – and America professional sport’s foundational organizational constitution, as a shared business venture that took shape through negotiation between players and owners, remained intact. The introduction of salary caps in both the NBA (in 1983) and the NFL (in 1993) was the result of direct negotiation between owners and unions; collective bargaining remains a core feature of all the big sports in America today, and the relationship is just as antagonistic now as it was at its inception. Unionization played an important historical role in English football – the PFA, led by Jimmy Hill, famously secured the abolition of the wage cap in 1961 – but in general, player unions in Europe and England enjoy nothing like the institutional centrality of their American peers.
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Beyond rewriting that in the record books, Arteta could do with having both Oleksandr Zinchenko and Kieran Tierney around, rather than in rotation. The Scot showed that, when fit, he is one of the best attacking full-backs in the game. Zinchenko and Martin Ødegaard’s absence gave Fábio Vieira the chance to make a first Premier League start in midfield, which he crowned with a special goal, Arsenal’s third, whipped in, all disguise and fade, to leave David Raya sprawling in the Brentford goal.
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“Nice kick about with the boys” was what Toney wrote on social media after Brentford’s 2-0 home win in the opening game of last season, revealing Arteta as an unlikely Twitter user in an enraged reaction caught in the All Or Nothing documentary. Late on this time around, Toney’s chance of imposing himself long lost, the away fans threw those words back at him. Here was more evidence of that growing bond with Arsenal’s manager and his team.
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But football should have possessed more of a backbone. There will always be idiots that follow the game, because there will always be idiots in society. In a hundred years’ time, some Celtic fans may still raise banners critical of the royals. A pocket of Liverpool fans may still boo the national anthem. And the next day some publications will froth and splutter. So it goes.
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uring the middle ages, flagellants would remove their white robes adorned with a red cross, kneel on the ground, and then vigorously whip themselves in public displays of fervour. Some sports appear to have been taking notes. Since the Queen’s death, we have seen the FA stop grassroots football, the Premier League ask for applause at 70 minutes to celebrate the length of Elizabeth II’s reign, and British Cycling bizarrely tell people not to ride during the state funeral, before performing a rapid U-turn. These are some of the biggest beasts in British sport. And they have looked frit.
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Arsenal were more than capable of living with a Brentford energy and application that was decidedly under-amped, and the home fans, even though an early kick-off offered reasonable excuse for their stillness, were given little to work with.
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There you are quietly deciphering the Cruyff-based iconography of Erling Haaland’s flying volley, and someone keeps tugging at your sleeve saying, you really need to concentrate on the imminent hostile collapse of the established world order. They’re opening “warmth-hubs” in the north of England for when the gas runs out this winter. But hey, Todd Boehly’s all-star game has DIVIDED football. Can you just keep it down for a bit? We’re trying to die blissfully on acid in here.
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How have these two sporting cultures diverged so sharply over the past few decades? The answer has its roots in timing and the very particular development, in each country, of the relationship between labor and capital. The three biggest professional sports in America are all subject to equalizing restraints: the NBA and the NFL both have salary caps, baseball disciplines spending via a luxury tax, and all three hold a draft to ensure the even league-wide distribution of young talent. It’s one of American sportswriting’s laziest cliches to refer to this as a form of “socialism”. In fact, these structures emerged through the second half of the 20th century as the expression of a distinctly American form of capitalism. Professional American sport as we know it today owes as much to strikes, lockouts, and collective bargaining as it does to sponsorship, merchandising, naming rights, or any of the other dealmaking machinations that are usually thought to symbolize the corrupting influence of money in sport.
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That, though, has been the blueprint for every major royal funeral since. In one breath, cover your arse. With the next, bow your head. The silent majority be damned, and British Cycling bizarrely tell people not to ride during the state funeral, before performing a rapid U-turn. These are some of the biggest beasts in British sport. And they have looked frit.
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ew 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.”
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Employee unions in professional sports began to emerge after World War II: the National Basketball Players Association was originally formed in 1954, and football and baseball saw the foundation of similar bodies in 1956 and 1966 respectively. Sports unionism emerged in America during the heyday of the postwar compact between organized labor and the business establishment, when union representation was high and it was widely accepted that the economy would function best when the rights of workers and the interests of owners were reconciled. The relationship between player bodies and team owners was unapologetically antagonistic from the beginning: “This is going to be an adversarial relationship,” Marvin Miller, the first head of the Major League Baseball Players Association, announced to players in 1966. “A union is not a social club. A union is a restraint on what an employer can otherwise do. If you expect the owners to like me, to praise me, to compliment me, you’ll be disappointed.”
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Strong unions, the omnibus nature of player-owner negotiations in the postwar years, and the unusually collectivist tradition of American competition law: together, these three factors explain how America evolved to have far more egalitarian structures in professional sports than England. The contrast between the two countries is not between US-style socialism and British laissez-faire, as is sometimes claimed: it is a clash of capitalisms. The transformation of English football in the 1990s was part of the collapse of the Keynesian postwar settlement and the broader turn toward the market initiated under the Thatcher government.
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Seventeen years on from the departure of a bona fide club legend in Patrick Vieira, Arsenal fans have a namesake to hail, though he is a rather different player. The 22-year-old Portuguese playmaker is small, adroit, all left foot, very much modern Arsenal rather than an alpha male of the past, but Arteta has another creative talent to call upon.
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In 2010, the Supreme Court noted that restraints in the NFL might be justifiable when they are motivated by the need to ensure the league’s overall success or “competitive balance”. Competition law has also been deployed in English football, most notably in 1963, to abolish the “retain and transfer” system that inhibited players’ freedom of movement. But it’s unclear how much protection British law, especially post-Brexit, would offer mechanisms for ensuring even competition in the modern game. The salary cap introduced in Leagues 1 and 2 at the start of the 2020-21 season failed a legal challenge, though this mostly seemed to reflect sloppiness in the scheme’s design.
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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.
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The American experience was different; all these issues were sorted out at once, not in a piecemeal fashion as in the UK. In 1983, NBA players agreed to a salary cap in exchange for a majority share of TV revenue. In 1993, after a series of debilitating work stoppages and lockouts, the NFL introduced a salary cap while granting players the freedom of inter-club movement that they had long been denied. These landmark deals, along with the commitment to league-wide parity that Rozelle’s CBS sale ensured, have set the tone for the administration of professional sports in America in the decades since. As Los Angeles Lakers president Jeanie Buss said in 2011, commenting on a new NBA-wide revenue sharing agreement, “We want a league with teams that are economically viable so that every team has the opportunity to compete. It makes for a healthier league.”
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Almost three years into the job, Arteta is no longer a rookie manager but the location of his ceiling is still undetermined. Having worked under Arsène Wenger and alongside Pep Guardiola, the hope was for a combination of both, though he is working at a club far less rich in resources than those mentors enjoyed. If Arsenal’s £79m summer transfer net spend looks meaty, then it is still dwarfed by the £200m-plus lashed out for Todd Boehly’s Chelsea all-stars, and by United’s attempt to graft themselves into becoming Ajax.
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As the Rugby Football Union explained in a statement, which also stressed that the overwhelming majority of supporters wanted to play on: “Rugby, at its heart, is about community and bringing people together, in good times and in sad … With families and friends congregating, it will help us to unite at this time of national mourning.” They, and others, were proved right.
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Football’s defence, officially at least, was that other sports had paused events on the Friday to allow mourning, while it had had no such opportunity. But three sources at a Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport meeting insist that Prince William’s role as the FA president was brought up as a factor too. Another consideration, less publicly voiced, was the potential reaction from the rightwing media if football messed up.
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Of course there will always be differing interpretations of how a nation should mourn. Yet to these eyes, the England and Wales Cricket Board, European Tour golf and both rugby codes got it right by bringing crowds together over that first weekend by not postponing its fixtures.
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One father told me he went for a kickabout with his son and daughter, only to find all the goalposts had been locked together so they couldn’t be used. When two teams in the Sheffield & District Fair Play League posted pictures of a friendly they played on the same day, they were accused of “disrespectful and despicable behaviour” by their league chairman for ignoring the grassroots ban. Yet at the very same time matches in local cricket, hockey and rugby clubs carried on.
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But there was surely a silent majority for a modest and unshowy response – a minute’s silence, along with a few well-chosen words in tribute – before cracking on. The day after the Queen’s death, when I asked on Twitter whether sport should continue, over 90% of respondents said yes. While such polls are not always indicative of the public’s mood – a sportswriter will tend to have a lot of followers who like sport, after all – the general attitude across social media was that sport should continue.
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Frit because such decisions were not based on logic, public sentiment, or government advice – which stressed that there was no obligation to cancel or postpone events during the period of national mourning – but a nebulous and ill-defined sense of wanting to do “the right thing”.
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Brentford probably represent a different test to that of a year ago, Thomas Frank having sought to add dimensions to a squad hardened by 12 months in the Premier League, even if the basic plan of swarming the opposition and picking up the pieces has not greatly altered. Though perhaps the novelty of a latter-day Crazy Gang chasing down every last throw-in has lost some of its shock value, even among those asked to carry it out.
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Can this team challenge City for the title? With Chelsea under a new manager in Graham Potter, United amid an umpteenth rebuilding process and Liverpool frazzled after sailing too close to the sun last season, it may come down to the north London set of Tottenham and Arsenal to add any sense of intrigue at the top.
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In the early 1960s NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle negotiated an exclusive two-year, $9.3 million deal with CBS to televise regular and post-season games. This was an extraordinary amount of money for its time, but the true genius of the deal was in its collectivity: where previously teams had negotiated their own rights deals individually, with richly uneven results (prior to the CBS deal the New York Giants received $350,000 a year for their TV rights, while the Green Bay Packers received just a tenth of that sum), Rozelle convinced everyone to secure a single network deal and distribute the windfall evenly across all the teams in the NFL. This, more than any other, was the deal that launched professional sports in America into the modern age, enshrining the collective good as a paramount objective of US sports administration.
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Brentford was where last season began with a 2-0 defeat that demoralised, even allowing for a Covid outbreak in the camp as mitigation. It signposted a campaign where the promise of progress would be dashed by eventual disappointment. To win in such easy style at the same ground suggested more profound progress. Gabriel Jesus’s goal, Arsenal’s second, set up by Granit Xhaka, flourishing in a free role, was a beauty, the Brazilian heading home in a fashion reminiscent of Haaland himself.
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Yet no one was telling the sport to stop. In fact, when I spoke to senior officials on the night of the Queen’s death, their expectation was that most of them, including the Premier League, would carry on. Twelve hours later, the fear of getting it wrong had persuaded football, boxing and cycling to pull the plug.
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But money – serious money, the kind that was only possible in a big, comparatively competitive TV market like postwar America’s – also brought a security to American sports that catalyzed negotiation over other chips on the bargaining table. The carrot of TV money sweetened the stick of salary caps and drafts, giving owner-player negotiations a kind of simultaneity – the character of a contest over everything at once – that has been less evident in English and European football. By the time negotiations with ITV and BSkyB began in the early 1990s over the formation of the eventual Premier League, for example, issues like transfer mobility and wage limitation had already been largely settled in the players’ favor, and there was no robust American-style history of player-owner bargaining to draw on.
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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.
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There are, of course, important differences between American and English sport that complicate an exact transposition of models: promotion and relegation are alien concepts in the US, and none of the big American sports has anything like the multiple tiers of professional competition that Europe’s big football nations boast. Football is also genuinely international, which makes implementation of equalizing mechanisms like the draft and the salary cap far trickier than it is in the US’s smaller sports. England won’t be able to emulate all the institutional restraints of American competition. But that’s no reason not to try.
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