The exchange of private text messages between then Cardiff City manager Malky Mackay and his assistant is, on the face of it, testament to the enduring and everyday sexism and racism of the inner sanctums of professional football.
These are not trivial matters. The fact that black players make up around a quarter of the professional playing force but less than 2% of league managers suggests an ingrained institutional racism is at work. The private communications of Richard Scudamore, Premier League chief executive, suggest that an ugly and aggressive sexism is widespread among powerful men.
However, privacy, even among bigots, is a precious thing. For private communications to become the subject of wider public debate, possibly even legal proceedings, a case needs to be made that the public interest is being served and that these texts, after all, are not merely the ignorant and spiteful jibes of a football coach and a scout. That case rests, at least in part, on the fact that football has become an essential element of the nation’s public sphere.
Alongside the explosive economic ascent of English football, its place in British culture has been transformed. Once merely popular, it has become ubiquitous. Once disdained by our cultural and political elites, it has become the subject of every serious art form and an essential component of many politicians’ demotic hinterland. Once confined to the sports pages, it is now the subject of political and economic debate. No other cultural practice receives so much space in print, digital and social media. In a profoundly fragmented cultural landscape, this is no mean feat.
Football is no religion, but it possesses its own expressive and deeply rooted rituals around which national, regional and urban identities have been crafted. Few theatre productions give as central a role to the crowd in shaping the drama as football does.
Football, its pleasures and its meanings, are not only a central element of British common culture and public conversation, but they are collectively produced. Football clubs are imagined communities, not businesses. Football crowds are a chorus, not simply an audience.
But it’s also a game awash with debt and, not surprisingly, plagued by insolvencies and administrations. These particularly affect the divisions below the Premier League, which carry the costs of turbulence and disruption widening structural inequalities in income distribution that encourage reckless financial gambling by clubs.
Mackay, Scudamore and their like must certainly expect that the kind of closed shop that allowed their antediluvian attitudes to endure is over. Beyond that, everybody should start thinking more imaginatively about how the dominance of the private over the public might be corrected. How financial imperatives could be constrained by social concerns, how we could mobilise around common rather than individual purposes.
As in mainstream politics, this is partly a matter of policy tools new legislation regulating ownership and debt, reform and democratisation of the game’s governance, the introduction of wage caps and social levies to sustain youth football.
But it is also a matter of our political imagination and will, recognition that we can and should reclaim the public realm. We are lucky that in the football nation the consequences of our failure to do so are as a trifling as England’s lamentable performance at the 2014 World Cup. In the rest of the nation they are altogether harsher and more unjust.
