Thu 21 Dec 06
Can the Tarnish be Taken off the Beautiful Game?
Leo McKinstry of the Telegraph doubts Lord Stevens can do it with his report:
Contrary to what socialists often claim, the wealth is now trickling down to all levels of the game. Non-league football, especially the Conference, has infinitely more resources than in the past. As the writer Ian Ridley showed in his excellent book Floodlit Dreams, about his time as chairman of non-league Weymouth, even a small club such as that can be the subject of bitter boardroom struggles because of its potential earnings. The idea that the fans are worried about bungs is equally absurd. All they care about is whether their team wins. Indeed, they would probably applaud a manager who used a bit of cash to ensure the right player was bought.
Only utopian idealists cling to the belief that soccer can ever be cleaned up. For well over a century, it has been a hard-nosed, professional pursuit, run largely by cynical business figures and performed by tough, working-class men. There has never been a Corinthian ideal in soccer, a belief that style or ethics mattered more than the result. To expect to find morality in soccer is akin to looking for virginity in a brothel.
And Jonathan Legard of the Beeb’s Five Live is equally unimpressed:
As with the battle against drugs in sport, nothing succeeds like a whistleblower, and so far Lord Stevens has been whistling in the wind.
Or maybe, just maybe, we need to believe what his Lordship admitted during his presentation: “The game, in relation to the majority of what we have seen, is clean.”
Those words will never convince the cynics nor silence the whisperers but his damning criticism of the football authorities reveal precisely why the rumour and innuendo about a so-called bung culture have persisted for so long.
Paul Canniff
