Hughes On the Brink

A Journey Through English Football's North West
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-909245-60-0
Verlag: deCoubertin Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 290 Seiten

As the days became shorter and the nights darker, Simon Hughes began a journey through the country's most successful football region during the winter of the 2016/17 English season. Starting in Carlisle and heading south, Hughes went through Barrow, Morecambe and towards the Fylde coast. He trekked inland - to Preston, to Burnley, to Accrington. From Southport, he moved into deepest Merseyside and then to Cheshire, Greater Manchester and inner-city Manchester itself. From the Premier League to Sunday League, Hughes met the individuals shaping the game; those able to explain how and why trends and moods are shifting. Featuring interviews with Ju?rgen Klopp, Sean Dyche, Gary Neville and many other managers, players, owners, chairmen, directors and politicians, On the Brink studies the modern state of the North West's professional clubs. Part social examination, part travelogue, Hughes rediscovers and laces together some of the personalities and moments that have helped define football history.

Simon Hughes is a journalist, author and editor. He focuses on Merseyside football in the Independent and travels elsewhere for the Sunday Telegraph. His book Red Machine won the Antonio Ghirelli Prize for Italian Soccer Foreign Book of the Year in 2014. His other titles include Secret Diary of a Liverpool Scout, Men in White Suits and Ring of Fire. He lives in Liverpool.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hughes, Simon

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

‘WHAT HAVE THEY SAID, THEN?’ COMES THE QUESTION FROM THE desk each Saturday evening around five-thirty just after the managers have filtered out of the football ground press room having either probably, a) delivered anodyne observation if a result was a positive one, appreciating their words are scrutinised so inexorably it is sensible to avoid dishing out superlatives for fear of engendering overstatement, or b) bitterly pointed out a referee’s shortcoming for getting a decision wrong, appreciating it will generate the headlines that might masquerade personal failing completely or, at least, bury defining and damning details further down the report.

Outstanding reportage still exists, but it sometimes feels that the coverage of football, sport and world affairs generally has been reduced to 140 characters on Twitter or he said/she said type analysis because the profile of the person saying it somehow makes it more newsworthy, resulting in context, the real stories, the wider shifts – the ones that require digging and, most importantly, time and investigation – being lost amidst the noise.

It is not necessarily the managers’ fault that football in particular has gone this way. Sean Dyche told me during the writing of this book that managers are now really spokesmen for the clubs they represent because they are obliged by rules to talk before and after matches, while players – or the faceless accountants answerable to the interests of American groups, Russian oligarchs or Middle Eastern emirs that actually run many clubs – are not.

This in turn brings enormous pressure and in some way explains why nearly half of the managers across England’s 92 clubs had been sacked by late April during the 2016/17 season. If it seemed like they were on the brink of insanity, answering questions relating to their own future, it was assumed they were.

I had wanted to write this book fundamentally because I figured it would take serious study to understand the depth of the feelings involved in the game, how it has changed – and where it is heading. Some interviewees, like Dyche, told me they were happier to speak truthfully about the challenges they face because a book allowed room for the necessary context.

The reason many of us become journalists or writers is to understand nuances, to build relationships and break them if necessary, to seek truths, and to disclose what would otherwise remain hidden. It is not to sit at a work station for seven hours a day while being watched, trawling through social media platforms, writing clickbait headlines to catch ridiculous online audience targets. Behind the din, I think of this project as a pause button. Hopefully it reflects what football is like in 2017; what it really does to people at the very top, at the very bottom and everywhere in between.

I started my journalistic career covering non-league football and felt it was under-represented in the media then. By the time I left the Crosby Herald the local football team, Marine, had at least three pages of coverage in the paper each week. Regularly, there was eight pages of sport, with cricket, rugby and bowls all given the space they needed to breathe.

The narrative around what happened next usually starts with the readers, who apparently stopped buying newspapers, prompting advertisers to withdraw. This underplays the significance of basic circulation figures, which though reasonably healthy were ultimately determined not to be healthy enough to satisfy the demands of avaricious shareholders at the organisation that printed the papers.

By the time the Herald closed in 2015, sport had frequently been reduced to just two pages in total. When the cuts began newsrooms shrank, cover prices increased, wages were frozen, offices shut, editorial teams merged. Seasoned journalists with years of experience and bulging contacts books were replaced by keen but inexperienced university graduates – or not at all. Meanwhile, council meetings, court hearings and matters of genuine public interest were not scrutinised as they used to be. It now feels as though social media has replaced the unappreciated art of chatting to the shopper as the primary form of news gathering; the shopper who pops into the office willing to tell you what you need to hear to do your job because the said office is located conveniently and they trust the reporter due to face to face access.

This is not a story exclusive to Crosby and it is one repeated across the country and elsewhere in the world. It has not only meant non-league and lower-league clubs from sizeable towns are not receiving the coverage they need for supporters to be informed nor floating fans to feel urged to get involved and enrich the sport themselves, it explains why people in these areas felt as though they had no one fighting their corner in the media. It felt like to become a story, your team had to be either at the top or the bottom, ignoring the idea there might be much to be told about the clubs, the people, whose struggle is the same season after season – to stay afloat. They manage this through a lot of hard work – but for how long? These clubs and people represent a majority rather than a minority.

Of the twelve teams that contested the first season of the Football League, which ran from autumn 1888 to spring 1889, six of them were from the northwest. Jack Gordon of Preston North End is regarded as scoring the first goal of the new competition – although this is disputed in some quarters due to claims that Preston’s game kicked off 45 minutes later than others that day. What is not disputed is the fact that Preston went on to lift the first Football League Championship without losing a game, and won the FA Cup without conceding a goal.

Though southern sides gradually began to find a foothold in the previously northern-dominated league, from its formation until the end of the 2016/17 season, accounting for war years, 119 football seasons had been played in England and in 58 of those seasons a team from the north-west had finished as top-flight champions.

The north-west is a region that has pushed boundaries in football. The first English club to embarked on an overseas tour came from the north-west. When the first purpose-built football stadium was constructed, it was located in the north-west. A north-west club issued the first programme to supporters at a football match. The first shirt numbers were worn by a north-west club; the same club first installed dugouts and, later, undersoil heating. When a footballer was transferred between English clubs for the first time for more than £100,000, that footballer was from the north-west and he transferred between two north-west clubs – reflecting the economic strength of a region where many owners were local industrialists who had grown rich from the land. The footballer on this occasion was Alan Ball and the club responsible for all of these ‘firsts’ was a single one, Everton.

In this book Everton feature in a section called Independent Land, a title which reflects how Merseyside is almost a separate place from the rest of the north-west, with geography and industry shaping political beliefs. Liverpool as a city has more in common with Naples and Marseille than, say, Blackpool and Burnley and yet is not quite so different from Manchester as it would like to claim. Manchester, though, is considered here as the core of the region, with an orbit of clubs circling around it almost like satellites. The parts of the book looking at the margins of the very north and, to some extent, the valley, the hills and the marshes of Southport analyse how location can impact upon existence, while the coast looks at how an area once so synonymous with Englishness (because it was the place where many used to holiday if they could afford it) survives and in some parts actually appears to be flourishing even though so much around it has failed.

I hope that On the Brink reflects the modern football landscape of the north-west which remains England’s most successful football region, though in the last five years it has lost four Premier League clubs, three of whom were well-established with the other, Blackpool, falling briefly to the bottom tier of English professional football. This had happened at a time where the threat from the south of the country has gathered because of the wealth it now accumulates and the willingness of foreign owners to invest there because of transport links.

There are other books that detail precisely how football became a financial machine but I hope this one helps explain how geography, industry and, indeed, politics detail why certain things are the way they are in certain places; why, wherever you go, this football era is viewed as being either the very best or the very worst of times. I wanted to find out how money has affected the game – or at least how it is perceived by those operating at the coal face: the managers, the owners, the players, the directors, the politicians and the fans. In a season where Real Madrid earned £80million for winning the Champions League, Sunderland received £93.5million for finishing bottom of the Premier League. What happens when rank failure at the top is rewarded so handsomely while success further down is worth so very little economically by comparison?

By June 2017, Kyle Walker was on the brink of signing for Manchester City for £50million, a world record deal for a right-back. While there was no sign of austerity in the Premier League’s transfer spending spree, League Two’s Morecambe were on the brink of being bought by new owners who claimed the darkest...