Trickledown reality

October 23, 2009 in General
Tags: culture, economy, football, media, Sky

LoI people often debate the level at which the Irish game matches the English one. Most often, the assessment is wildly chauvinistic, with claims that we would tank anyone in the lower Championship (or second division in plain English). Yeah, right.

Relevant here is this insight from Twohundredpercent into the vexed question of whether to go (or stay) professional, written in the context of Blue Square Premier club Gateshead FC — average gate 650 — planning to turn pro and build a 9,000-seat stadium:

Twenty years ago, the Football Conference was largely semi-professional. Football’s trickledown effect has not, however, worked as we might have thought that it would. The fundamental principle of trickledown theory is that as the get richer, the benefits of their economic activity will benefit worse off people. It’s a fundamentally flawed theory, and it has applied itself in an extraordinary way in football. Football has chosen to follow the path which says that you have to speculate to accumulate. Clubs have spent much of the last twenty years trying to keep up with the Joneses, which has turned out to be a thoroughly fruitless path for most that have followed it.

Sound familiar?

The wisdom or otherwise of the Gateshead plan is directly relevant to LoI, where full-time professionalism has, in the main, brought about the near ruin of clubs, with Derry City, its players soon to have gone unpaid in eight weeks, the latest to emit distress signals. Problems at Bohs, Cork, Drogheda and Galway also have been well aired.

The reality is that, where apparent prosperity has remained the preserve of those at the top with deep pockets or access to new and ever more exotic investors, it is profligacy and misguided ambition that has trickled down, and that has affected Irish clubs too.

The top-heavy Sky model, heavily bought-into  here as in Britain, has been shown not to work.  Real clubs operating in the real world know it is time to stop pumping in money in the vain hope that fickle fans and media will respond with support.

‘If we build it, they will come,’ was the trite slogan of the boom years. Irish clubs poured huge resources into building their teams, but the supporters, and the media goodwill, scarcely have come.

Those sofa supporters and media also habitually compare Irish football, not with lower or non-league clubs in England, but with EPL.  And by their simplistic yardstick,  up against the eye candy of Sky soccer brands, it’s just ‘crap’ and always will be until there is a sea change in the culture of the sport here.