Sporting mobility

​The first league game of the new English football season took place on Friday, featuring Luton Town and AFC Wimbledon. It was an intriguing fixture featuring a team that had been relegated last season against one that had been promoted. If the League One playing field was level, the game was rather flat. Let’s hope a similar fixture next Friday between promoted Birmingham City and relegated Ipswich Town in the Championship will be a bit more exciting. Naturally, it’s also being televised for an international soccer audience.

This is what we love about football, isn’t it? Your team can reach for the next level or ignore the one below it at its peril. Mobility through the leagues is as important as the opportunity for giant-killing in the FA Cup. Or is it?

My friend is a Wimbledon fan who has followed his local club since it emerged from the ashes of corporate greed in those training sessions on Mitcham Common in South London. I was with him when The Dons got back into the league at Etihad Stadium in 2011 by beating, er, Luton, on penalties in that year’s play-off final to regain their place in the Football League.
The first incarnation of the club had, of course, climbed from the Southern League to the First Division, with the culmination of that feat in 1986, following three promotions in four seasons, and an FA Cup win against mighty Liverpool two years later.

During that same period, a club from the West Midlands (close to where I now live), Wolverhampton Wanderers, slipped all the way down to the fourth tier before recovering again.

Undoubtedly, the team of the 1950s, becoming English champions three times and also runners-up three times in that decade, not to mention that heady European night in December 1954 against Honved from Belgrade – inspired by the mercurial Hungarian legend that was Ferenc Puskás – when Wolves won a friendly match 3.2 and were pronounced by some as ‘world champions.’

Only the seventh match played under lights at Molineux, it was also broadcast live on the BBC, which was an unusual event at the time. It was only just over 70 years ago, but in the context of the media coverage of football around the world today, this sounds like something from the Dark Ages, doesn’t it? Except that it probably hastened the introduction of the European Cup the following year.

A generation later, Wolves fans travelling to Fourth Division grounds around the country must have been wondering what could have happened, before, always hopeful, they commenced the long journey back to the top tier.

Fans of Swansea City and Northampton Town who have also (I’m afraid we don’t mention Dukes of York in polite company) marched to the very top and then marched back down again, must similarly live in hope… and fear.

So, the prospect of shifting sands is why we love football, except that this isn’t how the rich and powerful people who run the game see it. Those who have never had to walk or stand with the little people for hours in the pouring rain, or squeeze into overcrowded trains to travel home again, only to find that, sure enough, they’ll be ‘detrained’ at the next stop. For the big people, it is all about ‘football nobility.’

Just take a look at that word again. It isn’t just that a single letter has changed. The two words are worlds apart. Nobility is all about social class, usually hand in hand with an aristocracy and ranked just below royalty. Mobility – the fear or joy of it – is what keeps ordinary football fans engaged.

If UEFA – and certainly FIFA – see themselves as football royalty, perhaps that is why Chelsea were described by some as ‘football nobility’ when winning the new Club World Cup. Even Donald Trump, presenting the trophy, was relegated to a mere president of a federal republic, where sports franchises have always moved with the money.

For Gianni - the bean counter in charge of the world’s biggest football budget - it determined ‘for the first time in history, which will be, really, the best club in the world.’ In his greedy land grab for the rich hinterlands of club football, he seemed to forget that FIFA - his plaything - had already re-invented the Intercontinental Cup, which confers the title of ‘world champions’ on the winners.

I preferred it when that cup was fought for by the leading clubs from Europe and South America, usually with a massive fight in the final. Who can forget The Battle of Montevideo in 1967 when three Celtic players and two from the Racing Club of Argentina were sent off?

In this year’s beautifully wrapped cake, melting in either the sun or thunderstorms of the USA, Chelsea were always going to be winners, regardless of the result against PSG. $100 million better off, they will doubtless now think they are invincible, as Gianni does, until a lack of a proper pre-season and summer tiredness potentially catches up with them. In 1971, Chelsea won the European Cup Winners’ Cup against Real Madrid. In 1975, they were relegated from the First Division.

They qualified for this competition by winning the 2021 Champions League trophy. It is the closest thing we have seen to an invitation-only, closed Super League by stealth, and far away from the movement up and down the league tables we still enjoy at the local level. Yes, the upper end of the Premier League contains some of the biggest football clubs on the planet; then again, thankfully, money oils the wheels, but it does not guarantee success in football. Two of the original ‘big five’ teams finished 15th and 17th last season.
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The nobility – in this case, the biggest clubs - willingly acts and collaborates to preserve its existence, while paying the cheapest possible lip service to the pyramid. Fortunately, the unpredictable nature of football derives from the game still being based on the trajectory of a ball. The simple mobility of a sphere means that certainty cannot prevail, no matter how much the football royals in authority spend to sponsor such a transition.

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