Football Racism: Why Calling for Blatter's Head is Only the Beginning

screen capture from Blatter's interview, courtesy of BBC

Writing for The Daily Mail last month, Steve Doughty finishes his article about the Patrice Evra and Anton Ferdinand racism incidents by concluding that,

'Mr Evra and Mr Ferdinand, I know you feel insulted. But perhaps in this case you could just put up with it and get on with the game.'

Similarly, FIFA president Sepp Blatter, in an interview yesterday, made comments that may very well finally spell the end of his tenure in charge of football's governing body, suggesting that,

'The one affected by [racism] should say this is a game and shake hands.'

Blatter's quotes will be condemned around the world and, indeed, already have been by Rio (brother of Anton) Ferdinand, amongst other prominent footballing figures.

Doughty's comments, by comparison, were condemned at the time by a handful of commenters on The Mail's website (seventy-one at the final count).

The point is thus: until racism, in all its forms, is stamped out completely, treated with a zero tolerance attitude and singled out wherever it may be, it will continue to prosper and seep into culture.

The world, and, mainly, the press, will string Blatter up from a lamppost because he's a prominent figure who makes good headlines. Doughty, by comparison, seems only to have had to weather a storm that barely reached the level of a gentle breeze.

Society's tolerance of someone suggesting basically the same thing as Blatter, writing for a national newspaper with several thousand readers, allows the idea that racism is merely 'a little bit naughty' to flourish and prosper.

Doughty's article should have been treated with the same level of disdain that Blatter's comments were. We should have, to coin a FIFA phrase which now looks distinctly hypocritical, shown racism the red card. Our continued acceptance of people who fail to do just that informs, breeds and allows a feeling of tolerance towards the intolerant, a problem that is, sadly, not limited to Mr. Blatter and will not be solved merely by demanding his head.

Brief Madrid Moments

Fans in the street market.

Looking out over one of the central parks.

Viva la Vida, vegetarian buffet-style tapas.

Mojitos in Viva la Vida.

Mysterious package...

...may contain lovely pastries.

Inside Vicente Calderon. Atletico 3 - 1 Real Zaragoza.

In one of the gardens in front of the palace.

San Miguel market, one of the best places in Madrid.

Ham stall in the market.

Sushi, olives and fresh juice in San Miguel.

Thick hot chocolate and donuts for dunkin'.

Boating in El Retiro park.

Thai for tea. Crab claws very fiddly.

Looking over the plains at Toledo.

I was obviously doing something hilarious.

Inside the Benabeu.

A Real Madrid/Liverpool 'legend' in the hall of fame.

Real's nine European cups.

The next Mourinho?

One In Vermilion

Much of the weekend was spent at Vermilion Cinnabar in East Manchester. I say 'much of' when actually I mean 'three or four hours' but, when you're drinking £8.50 cocktails, it can feel like a lot longer than that.

Vermilion have one of those annoying websites with a plethora of menu options, music, video and animated text whenever you click through something and so, for the many people this will instantly turn off, let's just say that it could summarise itself easily as 'one of those places you can head to when you want to feel a bit chic and with the 'in crowd'. Case in point: to find the food menu you have to click the 'taste' button, which is only completely logical if you're a hipster who operates purely by labelling things with the sense they're related to.

The location is by no means great - it's out of town and has nothing else within walking distance... unless you fancy a trip to the cash and carry - but a taxi from the Deansgate area cost under £10 each way, which for a car full of people is about equal to your standard Saturday night entrance fee - something which the Vermilion bar doesn't have.

We didn't eat but the restaurant seemed lively and I'd be happy to make a return visit to check it out separately.

The upstairs bar area has a couple of regular tables dotted around the place and then several bed-like 'pods', which fit perhaps ten people at a push and are presumably favoured by those who don't like these things we all call 'chairs'. Harumphing aside, they looked quite comfortable and are probably a pretty good idea for birthday parties and larger social gatherings. Cocktails are as expensive as everywhere else and the 'standard' beer is Singha, which at £3.50 a bottle is hardly cheap but hey, it's possible to pay more without looking too far. The constantly-colour-changing 'globe' lighting was a particularly nice touch to the decor and made people look up at the ceiling on a regular basis, normally with this sort of expression on their face...

The service was good and the addition of table service when there was a wait on for drinks to be made was really welcome. Points lost slightly for only offering Vodka Martinis in the 'stirred' variety. What would Bond say. Not that it put me off drinking twelve.

Why Low Priced Cup Football is Pointless

Gresty Road - home of Crewe Alexandra - on a particularly 'busy' night. Picture from Soccerway.

At the start of the season the BBC revealed the findings of their Price Of Football survey. There was nothing particularly surprising in it. The Premier League table, for example, showed that at some of the London clubs in particular (Chelsea, Arsenal, Fulham, Tottenham), vast fees (£100-£80 in some cases) were exchanged for tickets to watch ninety-minutes of entertainment and have the privilege of paying £4 for a pie (Arsenal) in the 15-minute half time break.

My local league team - Crewe Alexandra, League 2 - were neither the worst offenders nor the best practitioners in their division. At £19.50 for most games they're hardly bargain basement but considering Gillingham fans have to stump up £26 to watch their team its not quite the rip-off it could be.

Whether North or South, the unifying factor that most league clubs (outside of the Premiership) have is that they struggle to fill their stadiums. Crewe, for example, will get an average attendance of something like 3,000 fans into their 10,000-seater stadium during the course of the season. It's not hard to see why.

I'm off to Crewe twice this week. Tonight, the mighty Alex take on Macclesfield in the Johnstone's Paint Trophy (JPT) Second Round, whilst at the weekend its Southend in the league. The JPT is generally used by league clubs to encourage new fans and provide bargain cup football for loyal supporters who go to the league games every week. Tonight I'll pay £8 for my ticket. If I had a child (under-11), their admission would be included free. The club bar pre-match is fairly cheap and family-friendly; assuming I wanted a couple of pints and my metaphorical child wanted a couple of J20s it'd be around £4 per round. A pie at half time is £2.90 and a drink is about £1.50. Total cost of the evening for parent and non-existent (in this case) child: £24.80. Not bad.

Kids cinema tickets can cost as little as £1

Until you compare it to the other attractions available. Crewe's local cinema (Reel Crewe) doesn't have anything 11-year old friendly this Wednesday, but from Friday it's showing The Lion King 3D. Adult ticket for next Wednesday night: £5.80. Kid's ticket for a Wednesday night: £5.80. There's no pricing for food and drink on Reel's website but I know they do 'meal deal' style popcorn and drink combos for about £6. Two of them plus the ticket prices: £23.60.

The prices then are comparable and if you assume that actually I wouldn't have the couple of alcoholic drinks budgeted in the first example then the football becomes very attractive.

But wait, this is a cup game, priced low to attract new fans, isn't it? So lets say Crewe play fantastic, my metaphorical kid loves it, 'can we go back next Saturday please, Dad?'

Cost of an adult league ticket to the Southend game: £19.50. Children's (under-11) regular ticket: £5. Pies and drinks at the same price as the other night: £16.80. Cost of Saturday at the football: £41.30. Not far off double.

I'd compare that to the price of the cinema on a Saturday but there's no point. Prices may generally be higher at the weekend (or actually, when you consider the kid's club at £1 a ticket, sometimes lower) but never in a million years will two tickets, two drinks and two popcorns set you back over forty-quid. The cinema reduces its prices on a Wednesday because no-one used to go to the cinema on a Wednesday and they don't need to encourage loyalty to their medium of entertainment. Their Wednesday prices stay that price for the entire year. The football reduces prices to get fans in to unattractive games (maybe one or two a year, before Crewe go out of the cup) but provide no incentive to carry on attending the games after that.

When faced with the option of a football game or a cinema visit (or swimming pool trip, or kick about in the local park and a burger afterwards), the cost-conscious parent only has one option. Crewe's stadium, and many others like it, will stay over half-empty for most of the year. There are many reasons for this but not least of them is the fact that football fails to accept that it needs to compete on price with other leisure activities vying for punter's attention on a consistent basis. The odd inexpensive cup game, as a token gesture to parents who have bigger worries, isn't going to change season-average attendances, or magically create thousands of hungry fans, desperate to spend twice the amount of money they could elsewhere.

Stretching the City Limits

'City break' means different things to different people. To me it normally means walking round a city, pausing to stop in every bar that sells beer along the way, as evidenced here in Prague (March '11) and Porto (October '10)...

... note to self: buy a new hooded-jumper.

If you do your research properly though, 'city break' can actually mean 'regional break', which often results in the thing that every traveller secretly wants to find, the near-mystical 'place off the beaten track', alternatively described as 'the place where all the annoying bastard tourists aren't'.

In Barcelona we went to Montserrat, which is quite a way out of the city but still fairly popular with tourists and therefore well-served by transport links. It still felt very much felt like the 'place off the beaten track', especially when it emerged that it was actually located in a cloud.

Drawing a very rough radius line with Barcelona as the centre and Montserrat as the edge shows that you can actually get quite far 'out of the way' on this principle...

...all the way to Google's copyright symbol, in fact. Doing the same with Madrid - which we're visiting at the end of next month - results in the following...

...which includes the very-interesting looking Segovia (NNW, or top left for the non-map readers amongst you) and the incredible Toledo (SS... oh, for God's sake - AT THE BOTTOM), which has some stunningly picturesque views.

Visits to one or both are looking likely.

Tevez, the Punchline in an Experimental Saga?

Photo from eplreport

Perhaps inevitably it is football that finally forced my hand to start the personal blog I had till now managed to (just) avoid investing significant time in. Last night, Carlos Tevez crossed the line from being the type of whinging modern-day footballer who people love to hate and journalists love to write stories about and entered the strange zone reserved for workers who strike without union permission and, seemingly, without provocation. In any other job Carlos would most likely be sacked and, maybe, that's what will happen to him in the end.

The Carlos Tevez Saga - now with more chapters than The Twilight Saga and significantly more controversial - is really the by-product of The Manchester City Saga, which in itself is top-flight football in microcosm: sport as business pushed to its absolute limits.

Other than the obvious sour taste of experiencing a player so out of touch with reality that he apparently fails to recognise the worldly truth that literally thousands of people would have done for free what he declined to do last night for a reported £150,000 a week, the latest Saga entry left me with two thoughts;

1 - I'm currently reading the outstanding Moneyball for a second time. The book (now a film, due in the UK in November) often takes business theory and applies it to the game of baseball. What it never does is consider 'boom and bust' economics. If it did it would probably conclude that teams experience boom and bust (just look at Leeds United) but not whole sports. The Tevez Saga is endemic of the fact that the only people guaranteed to make money in football are now players and agents - employees of the businesses involved in the footballing economy. In an economy where turning a profit collectively is becoming increasingly difficult and individuals continue to drain money from it, how long before it hits a bust?

2 - The Manchester City Experiment (as they themselves loved to call it under Garry Cook's stewardship) now looks to have its first high profile failure. Sure, Jerome Boatang (who, incidentally, played for Bayern in their 2-0 victory against City) left after a season where he only made sixteen appearances, Mario Balotelli has (and will continue to have) his problems, Emmanuel Adebayor voiced his concerns and now occupies the weird hinterland reserved for the expensive loanee, but these are mere shadows of the man so hailed when he first arrived that he may as well have been dubbed 'Brian' on the spot. Now it seems (and well done everyone who spotted this punchline), he's just a very naughty boy and one that threatens to derail The Experimental Saga Of Manchester City Football Club.