The Daily: 4th July 2023

The summer football drought continues, but so does the tapping up.

First of all, and before I say anything else, apologies for yesterday morning’s weekend review being so brief. There’s a football drought going on, an actual summer break, so all there is at the moment is the European Under-21 Championships—and they’re not even on the television, though that could change at any moment—new kit releases and transfer gossip.

I’d say something about the cricket. That was, after all, what I watched most of over the weekend. But even this only really amounted to a couple of hours, and even though I’ve half-watched cricket since I was a kid—in the summertime in the mid-1980s, it might be more or less the only thing on the television during those endless summer holidays—and even played it for a while in my mid-20s, there remains something about the game that I fundamentally do not understand, and while this is a state of affairs with which I am comfortable—I know enough to be able to follow what’s going on while understanding precisely none of the game’s many intricacies, and that’s enough, for me—it hardly qualifies me to say anything about it whatsoever, still less expect anyone to read it, and still less to pay to do so.

So before your daily this morning, a quick outline of how things are moving forward here, as it’s the start of a new month. First of all, thank you to those of you who’ve already subscribed, and a special thank you to those of you who’ve taken out paid subscriptions. The three of us made it—just about—to the end of June, and now the cycle begins again. If you haven’t been able to yet, please do give it consideration to setting up a paying contribution; the more people I can persuade to do so here, the more time I can justify giving to it.

There is something else coming for paid subscribers. Starting this coming weekend, I’m going to go through the 200% archives to pull out two articles to re-publish here on Saturday and Sunday mornings. These will be tidied up—hopefully my writing standard has improved over time—annotated and perhaps completed with what happened next, where relevant. A director’s cut, if you want to be slightly pretentious about it, which I do. On the podcast front, this week’s podcast for subscribers will be on The Manageress, and the next one for all will be out on the 14th July, on Ted Lasso.

Thank you for your consideration, now on with the show.

A brief treatise on “tapping up”

“Tapping up” players is one of those subjects that exposes the rank hypocrisy of the football supporter. We all hate it when other clubs do it to us, and we all expect our clubs to do it to others. Indeed, we might even understate how much different things would be if tapping up didn’t take place in our own heads because it’s such a part and parcel of the game and has been for so long that we don’t even realise its full extent.

This was the basic thrust of an article on the matter published on The Athletic (£) and written by the always excellent Carl Anka yesterday morning. It was what you’d expect from such a piece, some clear-headed cutting through the bull-crap of “gentlemen’s agreements” and “seven day approaches” that we are somehow expected to believe still exist in a world in which the sale of one’s own grandmother for a sniff of a chance at success has been something close to obligatory for decades.

But when we’re all hypocrites about it, perhaps just turning a blind eye to it all isn’t just the pragmatic way of dealing with it; it’s the only way of dealing with it. If the Premier League chose to enforce their own rules under the strictest possible terms, just about every club’s fanbase would be crying conspiracy by the end of the first transfer window as transfer embargoes and fines started flying around. The noise would be deafening.

But what is curious is that there is still some semblance of a feeling that there is still a line that shouldn’t be crossed. Todd Boehly should not be allowed to walk on to the pitch during a match with a sack of used fifties and start trying to encourage your best young players into his gingerbread van. And if that line exists, then that does offer some degree of control over where it’s placed.

At present, that line seems only ever to be considered in terms of who speaks to whom, and when. Perhaps it’s time to reimagine where that line is drawn. “Tapping up” has always been there, and “always” does not have to lift very hard, there. The circumstances under which professionalism was first permitted in 1885 were the FA bowing to the inevitable because a failure to do so would likely have resulted in a cleaving into two parts, as later happened in rugby football.

So, if tapping up players has always been there, then what has changed? The answer is obvious. It’s the power relations between clubs. Thirty, forty, fifty or sixty years ago, expectations on all sides were very different. In a world in which the European Cup was an interesting add-on to a season but never a be-all-and-end-all (apart from to those who won it), players of quality were more widely distributed across clubs and there were routes to having a “successful” career were many and varied.

The “elite” level of the game already only belongs to a handful of clubs per country, and even between those clubs an explosion of money into the game has reduced options still further. If you are a professional footballer and want to reach the top of your profession, the number of clubs at which this can be achieved has already withered away to a tiny and still diminishing number.

Tapping up wouldn’t be a problem if the playing field was level enough to allow those under pressure to sell the opportunity to make a persuasive case to players to stay, or to realistically rebuild based on their smarts rather than the size of their wallets. But even in this case, those who have become prey have to become predators themselves. Football has a food chain, and everybody has to be constantly punching down.

What can be done about this? Not a lot. After all, players and agents benefit from it, and even clubs on the receiving end will ultimately be expected to do the same to others, while even those on the losing side will persuade themselves that they have won. You can bet a pound for a penny that, for example, should Daniel Levy have made the decision to sell Harry Kane over the course of this summer, he will convince himself that the players that he buys with the money will be an improvement, even though everyone else already knows that they won’t.

But there is something galling about seeing the supporters of the biggest clubs, who’ve benefitted the most from the industrialisation of professional football, caterwauling when a smaller club puts up some resistance to their club’s low-balled offer. Suddenly it all becomes about “freedom”, with the smaller club literally “imprisoning” this poor multi-millionaire who’s already earned multiple times in his last three-year contract what any of us will earn in fifty years of nine-to-five. The contortions that people will pull to convince themselves that they are morally in the right never cease to amaze.

As with just about everything else, it all comes down to what football wants to be. If people want football to be “I want my team to win and to hell with the consequences for anybody else”, then continue down this same path. Congregate the great and the good in one hermetically-sealed universe and play it out there in perpetuity. But there’s little to suggest that this is the case. Everybody seems to want jeopardy, excitement and competition. It’s just that nowadays, they increasingly seem to demand to be on the right side of it, always.

Meanwhile, inequality between football clubs has been allowed to grow unchecked, and this has already had a vast impact upon European club football. Few who don’t support those clubs see the dominance of Bayern Munich in Germany, Celtic & Rangers in England, Manchester City in England, PSG in France, Real Madrid & Barcelona in Spain, and previously Juventus in Italy as being good for ‘the game’.

This is the biggest ill that the game faces. Clubs losing individual players to other clubs in ethically murky ways is as old as the game itself. Such a wide spread of leagues that can only be won by one or two clubs across the entire continent absolutely is not. Deal with that, and the tapping up will probably start to matter quite a bit less.

Smaller clubs resent losing their best players because it tips scales back against them by taking away their best chance of doing so further and giving them to direct competition, and they particularly particularly hate it when it feels as though the bigger club has done so in an underhand way, deliberately unsettling them using whatever tools are at their disposal.

And the outsized importance of the transfer market doesn’t only matter on the pitch. It matters away from it, too. For at least the last 35 years, possibly longer, professional football in England has felt like a drawbridge that is starting to slowly close. Nobody knows when it will snap shut and everybody wants to be on the right side of it when it does, so everybody ends up spending like crazy.

This reaches something approaching its (il)logical conclusion in Championship clubs spending more than their entire revenue on player wages alone in the pursuit of one of just three promotion places come the end of the season, one of which is determined through play-offs which were specifically introduced to bring more jeopardy into the end of the season and with a number of clubs with the significant financial advantage of parachute payments which last for three years. Clubs are having to run increasingly quickly to stand any chance of staying in touch with those just above them, and in particular those with the deepest pockets of all. Fix all of that, and tapping up will become a non-issue again. It already is, when compared to the professional game’s other grotesque inequalities.