Football's Hearts & Minds: Bringing Colour to Humdrum Lives

The plans by twelve of the big European football clubs to form a breakaway “super league” have, it seems, gone down the proverbial pan – for now! In my opinion, however, and despite the criticism from fans, players, clubs and politicians, it is only a matter of time until something of that format becomes a reality. Whatever the rights and wrongs (and there were few rights and many wrongs!) of the proposal that Manchester United, Real Madrid and 10 other top clubs were trying to get away with this week at the expense of lesser footballing mortals in the shape of smaller clubs and millions of fans, the fact is that it is now just as easy for a club like Manchester City or Juventus to fly across Europe for a fixture as it is to play in their own country.

Times have changed. Manchester United will be aware of that probably more than any other English club. Sixty three years ago I remember as a child watching in distress as the tragedy of the Munich air disaster unfolded on our little black and white TV screen and my childhood heroes in the Busby Babes – Edwards, Charlton, Colman, Taylor and the rest lay on the snow covered tarmac of Munich airport. United were one of the first English clubs to take tentative steps into European football (against the wishes of the English FA and Football League) in the 50s but today, of course, big clubs fly off on a regular basis to far flung places. It’s all part of the day to day life of the modern club and player but in those far off times it was a rare and special event – and for United a tragic one.

I was thinking of this as I followed the many reports this week about the ill fated and ill thought through European Super League. Today, players live in mansions and behind security walls set apart from the world of paying fans and living a life that players of the Busby Babes era could never have imagined. I often wonder what the “value” and the life style of the late Duncan Edwards would be today had he survived Munich – in my view and the view of many of my generation, Edwards was, and by a long way, the finest English player ever and possibly the finest player ever. Today he would live in a huge mansion and live a life so far removed from that of the fans that it truly would be difficult for us lesser mortals to comprehend.

And as I wonder about all this I remember the story often told by Sir Bobby Charlton which is perhaps worthy of retelling this week when these giant financial enterprises that are the modern football club are accused of greed and forgetting the interests, needs and dreams of their fans.

Sir Matt Busby

Charlton tells the tale of when he joined Manchester United as a young player soon after his seventeenth birthday and arrived at Old Trafford, young, raw, excited and anxious that he could “make it”. Young players like Charlton would be taken onto the car park outside the ground by United Manager Sir Matt Busby and there given a homily on “the duties” of a professional footballer and his expectations for players at Manchester United. Busby would point to the surrounding area of Trafford Park - in those days one of England and indeed Europe’s great industrial landscapes filled with tall factory chimneys belching smoke, heavy engineering factories, cotton mills and warehouses, and a thousand other industrial concerns, and rows of grimy terraced houses where United's fans lived in walking distance from the stadium. Busby would kindly but sternly tell the young player how lucky he was to be starting a career playing football where day in day out he would be doing what he had always dreamed of, and doing what the fans who came to watch on Saturday afternoon would give their right arm to be able to do – to pull on a United shirt and play on the turf of Old Trafford. But, Busby would add, that opportunity that Charlton and his peers were being given came with responsibilities. Players and Manchester United Football Club must, Busby stressed to the young Charlton,  always give something back – that was the price of playing for United. They must provide what he called “the spark”, bring what he called “colour” into the lives of the thousands of men and women who came at the end of each working week to Old Trafford and spent their hard earned wages at the Saturday afternoon turnstiles. It was the players’ and the club’s duty to lighten their humdrum, hard working lives. “People”, Busby would say, “want something to carry them through the next drab and backbreaking week of daily grind and get them away from the dark days of winter”. They wanted, said Busby, “excitement and thrills that would send them home smiling and full of hope and expectation” and it was, the manager went on, “every Manchester United footballer’s duty to always produce as much of that as he could”. Busby knew that a football club is nothing if it does not serve and remember its fans. In short, it’s just a bunch of blokes in their underwear kicking a bag of wind around a field for 90 minutes no more, no less.

The world has come a long way since then – and perhaps not always for the better. It seems in this modern world rather twee and old fashioned to talk as Busby did of things like “duty” – especially with regard to the multi-billion pound world of professional football. The world of “duty” and “responsibility” and of Matt Busby and the young Bobby Charlton  (and me!)  is a long way from today’s billion dollar SKY contracts or the hospitality boxes of our big stadiums. It’s a long way from the mansions of Cheshire wherein reside the star players of the big north western clubs. And it’s a very, very long way from the ill considered and devious plan for a “super league”, seemingly cobbled together on the back of a fag packet by financial whiz kids and absent owners with little or no interest in football – men who live in places far removed from the communities that surround our great stadiums and who see a club like United or City or Chelsea or Spurs or Arsenal, or Liverpool as just an investment that must be maximised and milked. I cannot help adding that in my view, and given their long and proud (and with the Munich tragic) history, Manchester United above all clubs should have understood this. It is to their shame they did not; Busby would have appalled.

I do not believe that any of these far flung owners and merchant bankers, venture capitalists, hedge fund managers and the like could begin to comprehend the sentiments that Sir Matt Busby passed on to all his young charges those many years ago. Maybe we have lost something along the way – I certainly think so.

Now, well into my eighth decade I can look back and thrill, as I did all those years ago at the heroics and great deeds of players and clubs – Charlton’s thunderbolt goals, Edwards’ powerful drives into to the opposition penalty box, Jimmy Greaves and the great Spurs teams of the 1960s, the glories of Arsenal’s illustrious footballing past and the magnificence of the marbled halls of Highbury, Shankley’s great Liverpool sides or, most of all, week after week being privileged to watch the supreme footballer and sportsman the great Tom Finney play at Deepdale for my beloved Preston North End and after the game standing outside the players’ entrance for him and his team mates to come out and sign my autograph book and then as he did so often pat me on the head and ask if I’d enjoyed the game. Those are the things that make football what it is – the “contract” between the club, the players and the fans; Busby understood that well when he gave his little homily to young players, but it seems that today’s club hierarchy at United, City, Spurs, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool did not – it was pound notes that filled their dead, glazed eyes. That was their only criterion for action.

But I wonder, is all lost? Maybe not. I’m sure that my football mad Grandson, Sam, will when he is my age, remember the great footballers of his generation - Kane, Messi, Salah, Rashford, de Bruyne....... – and the great teams of today: Guardiola’s Manchester City, Klopp’s Liverpool, Solskaer’s United and the rest. That is how it should be. And I’m sure that he will remember, as I do now and when he is, like me, a grumpy old man he will recall the “buzz” he felt as he went through the turnstile at his club Reading. He will remember what it felt like and the dreams that one has before each game – and of course the dejection when the result is not what he hoped for. He will remember all this for that is the very essence of the club/fan relationship that Busby spoke of to the young Charlton. And what I also know with absolute certainty is that while names like Kane, Rashford, Klopp, Messi, Guardiola and the rest will stay with my grandson he will, too, fondly look back upon to remember their great footballing deeds.

But there is something else which I am equally sure of.  When my grandson looks back on his lifetime love of football he will not remember the authors of the plan for the “European Super League”. Manchester United’s Ed Woodward and the American owners the Glazer family, Liverpool’s owner American billionaire  John Henry, Spur’s absentee owner Joe Lewis sitting on his Caribbean island, Arsenal’s mysterious and dubious owner the American Stan Kroenke, Real Madrid’s President Florentino Perez Rodriguez, Juventus’ Andrea Agnelli and the rest will all be yesterday’s men – forgotten both in the mind of the football fan and indeed by the world as a whole for they have no claim to our affections; their only claim is to their own wealth not our hearts. And that of course, was at the root of the gross folly that was the European Super League and is something that Matt Busby when he spoke to the young Charlton, Edwards, Best and the rest all those years ago would have  understood very well.