by Peter Beresford, professor of social work at Brunel University and chair of service
user organisation Shaping Our LivesThe media response to England footballers coming home was grimly predictable. We've had all the obvious words: terrible, disaster and worst ever. Now we can expect unending post mortems into the team and the manager.
But to see this dismal story as a problem of players or even managers, is probably the first big mistake. Given how ready our political leaders, including Tony Blair, have been to attack the liberatory sixties, it seems deeply significant that it was then, when struggles for women's, gay and black people's rights were breaking barriers, that England won the World Cup. Those were days when our leaders refused to commit troops to American wars; when social mobility and steps to equality were on the up, rather than as now on the down. Those were the days - dare I say it - when social work and welfare rights were in the ascendancy rather than facing political and media battering.
Deep rooted malaise
And now as England's professional football faces its most visible defeat for a generation, a strong case can be made that this is the outcome of a much more deeply rooted malaise. Here are the same problems that we have been seeing overlaying social work, social care, welfare reform and public policy more generally. These are the problems that seem to follow from the current unqualified and unevidenced near religious belief in the merits of an untrammeled, deregulated market, bureaucratizing managerialism and increasing inequality.
We have seen this writ large in banking, the cause of the our current economic crisis, but professional football seems to offer no less powerful a case study. Let's start with the Football Association, which has been gifted huge unwarranted riches courtesy of pay TV. This is a body whose whose former CEO Adam Crozier has gone on to create mayhem in other public services (the post office) and where the Lord Triesman debacle is only the most recent in a series of sad and sleazy media stories.
Found wanting
Hardly surprising that the nominee of such a hopeless body, Fabio Capello, might be found wanting. Fabio has been described by a former boss, Silvio Berlusconi, hardly one of life's obvious democrats, as someone 'who does not do dialogue' - not perhaps the best predictor for success in a team game. With no experience as an international manager, he was nonetheless paid double any other 2010 World Cup manager. Doubtless this was to accord with the desperate market dictum that to get the best talent you must pay the best. Sadly in this life only mugs believe you get the best if you pay the most. But this market mantra does tend to be associated with paying as little as possible to most other people.
Overdraft meltdown
Meanwhile footballers at the top end, like those who made up the England team, are paid inconceivably high wages, which are not only part of the market-led financial structuring which is driving the premiership into overdraft meltdown. They are also a key reason why football in the lower leagues and at amateur and school children level is grossly underfunded and with rising debts.
Yet significantly, these same professional footballers when given impossible directions to play out of position seem to lack the capacity to ignore the manager's unhelpful edicts once they have the freedom of the pitch.
Perhaps saddest of all and revealer of one of the starkest truths, is the situation of England football's many thousands of enthusiastic fans. With no say or control in what happens, they are merely there to make up the crowds and bring in the product and advertising revenue. This is true for their local clubs as it is for the national game. Football was once one of the most paternalistic of institutions. Democracy and accountability barely had a look in as it made its massive move to the market. But if England is to have an international footballing future, no question but those positive values of mutuality, public service and grassroots involvement that were alive and well in the 1960s need to be rapidly reinstated.
Deep rooted malaise
And now as England's professional football faces its most visible defeat for a generation, a strong case can be made that this is the outcome of a much more deeply rooted malaise. Here are the same problems that we have been seeing overlaying social work, social care, welfare reform and public policy more generally. These are the problems that seem to follow from the current unqualified and unevidenced near religious belief in the merits of an untrammeled, deregulated market, bureaucratizing managerialism and increasing inequality.
We have seen this writ large in banking, the cause of the our current economic crisis, but professional football seems to offer no less powerful a case study. Let's start with the Football Association, which has been gifted huge unwarranted riches courtesy of pay TV. This is a body whose whose former CEO Adam Crozier has gone on to create mayhem in other public services (the post office) and where the Lord Triesman debacle is only the most recent in a series of sad and sleazy media stories.
Found wanting
Hardly surprising that the nominee of such a hopeless body, Fabio Capello, might be found wanting. Fabio has been described by a former boss, Silvio Berlusconi, hardly one of life's obvious democrats, as someone 'who does not do dialogue' - not perhaps the best predictor for success in a team game. With no experience as an international manager, he was nonetheless paid double any other 2010 World Cup manager. Doubtless this was to accord with the desperate market dictum that to get the best talent you must pay the best. Sadly in this life only mugs believe you get the best if you pay the most. But this market mantra does tend to be associated with paying as little as possible to most other people.
Overdraft meltdown
Meanwhile footballers at the top end, like those who made up the England team, are paid inconceivably high wages, which are not only part of the market-led financial structuring which is driving the premiership into overdraft meltdown. They are also a key reason why football in the lower leagues and at amateur and school children level is grossly underfunded and with rising debts.
Yet significantly, these same professional footballers when given impossible directions to play out of position seem to lack the capacity to ignore the manager's unhelpful edicts once they have the freedom of the pitch.
Perhaps saddest of all and revealer of one of the starkest truths, is the situation of England football's many thousands of enthusiastic fans. With no say or control in what happens, they are merely there to make up the crowds and bring in the product and advertising revenue. This is true for their local clubs as it is for the national game. Football was once one of the most paternalistic of institutions. Democracy and accountability barely had a look in as it made its massive move to the market. But if England is to have an international footballing future, no question but those positive values of mutuality, public service and grassroots involvement that were alive and well in the 1960s need to be rapidly reinstated.
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