Politics and Football

As ever, the people who regard football as an arm of the entertainment industry got it hopelessly wrong in Paris last Wednesday. Even by the lamentably kitsch standards of pre-match hullabaloo at major sporting events, the razzmatazz that preceded Barcelona v Arsenal fizzed like a week-old bottle of pop. There was something comically awful about the primary-school choreography, the long-haired, half-dressed man suspended on a swing above the pitch for no apparent reason, grown men and women charging about like bewildered partygoers in search of a toilet.

Yet, unwittingly, these marketing experts with all the sensitivity of a City shares shark got it right. This is football 2006 - a game in trouble, in the view of Uefa's Lars-Christer Olsson.

We all know it ceased being just a sport long ago, but it is sobering to be reminded that football occasionally falls into the hands of people who couldn't run a decent marbles game, who put their faith in salesmanship and presentation, but ignore disturbing truths staring them in the face. Scandal in Italy (episode 99), Chelsea introducing hyper-inflation to wages, the fat getting fatter, stragglers hanging on for dear life, agents lurking in every bar, the fixture list filling practically every month of the year. Not a pretty picture.

Most clubs operate in the red, while the chairmen, directors, players, managers, agents and television companies grow ever greedier, and those who once were fans are morphed into consumers. Football seems to be freewheeling towards some sort of Roman Empire meltdown.

It will survive, of course. It is the world game. At its best, it transcends even its own muck. Pointedly at odds with the packaging, Arsenal and Barcelona provided the sort of pulsating 90 minutes we all hoped they would. Yet even here, on this showpiece night for the European game, there were a few empty seats; you can be sure they belonged to some corporate party too lazy to turn up or were bought by touts who couldn't shift them - maybe because they were in the back of a police van rather than on the streets.

If the excesses are not arrested, clubs will go out of business. Players will have to get by on less than £50,000 a week. And we will wonder how it came to this.

There is hope, though - and it comes from an unlikely source: politicians. For three months, sports ministers from throughout the European Union have responded to an initiative by Britain's Richard Caborn to put together a review of football. They present their findings to Tony Blair on Tuesday in the expectation of gaining his committed support for changing EU law.

What might appear a dry, self-serving exercise is actually a revolutionary development. If the EU can legally curb the runaway spending of major clubs by introducing a legally sound licensing system, if they can engineer something like a fair distribution of the enormous wealth in football, the game will be much the better for it.

If they cannot, if Chelsea pay players such as Michael Ballack £130,000 a week (and more in years to come), if agents continue to manipulate the market, if those purblind geniuses in charge of football will not stand up to the game's bullies, we will read more horror stories in the seasons ahead.

Already, the globalisation of football has taken a twist, with the best players in the world gravitating, naturally, to where they can make the most money - Europe. That is why it is up to Europe to fix it.

There will be a lot of serious lobbying (or arm-twisting, if you like) as the EU and Uefa try to bring the G-14 (or greediest) clubs to their senses. After presiding over the smoke and hokum of Paris, they have to put things right in the real world.