Five in Midfield

It’s an exciting couple of weeks for any accountants with an interest in football. First we had the rumour that Cristiano Ronaldo was caught in Sheikh Mansour’s crosshairs, with the billionaire reported to be gathering together enough loose change to mount an astonishing £180 million bid for La LIga’s new record top scorer. Then last night we had the culmination of the Champions League, football’s financial orgy, contested by two expensively assembled squads in a stadium partly funded by the UK taxpayer to the tune of nearly £800 million, before we have the icing on the cake that is the play-off championship final, banded about as “the richest game in sport” and worth anywhere from £40 million upwards to the winning club. There’s no doubt that football is now as built on tradable assets as the stock exchange, but at its core is there not certain things that cannot, or should not, be sold? Things worth fighting for?

Invoking a similar spirit were the protests peaking in January this year against the government’s cuts to library services, which saw a wave of “reads-ins” up and down the country designed to highlight the importance of libraries in developing literacy and in enriching communities. Similarly, in October last year, as the coalition government announced plans to raise much needed funds by selling off the 18% of English forest that remained under public ownership to private investors, a move which prompted widespread opposition, including from inside Westminster, a campaign dubbed “Save Our Forests” sprang up in a bid to overturn the government’s proposition, relying heavily on support from such celebrity names as the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams, the poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy and Oscar-winning actress Dame Judi Dench to spread the message.

Crucial to the success of these campaigns was the evoking of a sense of national entitlement to services or aspects of our cultural heritage that the government were seeking to restrict, an ideal epitomised by the rallying call of the Daily Telegraph, which at the height of the unrest proclaimed that “there are some things that are too precious to be thrown on the mercy of the open market”. Ultimately the “Save Our Forests” campaign at least proved successful and the controversial plans have been shelved. Unfortunately the nations’ libraries, education system and National Health Service have not been so lucky.

Perhaps it was unreasonable to expect the coalition government to protect such valuable institutions, but even the most cursory of glances over the Conservatives much triumphed sports manifesto reveals their promise to “ensure the (Olympic) Games leave a quantifiable and lasting sports legacy for the country”. Yet the much publicised selling off of Olympic assets in order to repay the National Lottery’s funding, most notably the Olympic Stadium to now second-tier West Ham, has led to the 2012 games being branded as nothing more than a “flat-pack” event, criticism which has already tarnished an Olympic Games that is still over a year away. Nobody is going to argue against balancing of the books, particularly as the nation is still fighting to come to terms with recession, but cuts and sales of this nature are almost impossible to justify in a week in which the government announced plans to increase its spending on the much maligned Trident nuclear submarines, already reported to be exceeding the £20 billion mark initially set back in 2006.

Another murky organisation very much in the public eye for their recent attempts to carve apart sport for financial gain are FIFA, who, a fortnight ago, amongst a myriad of accusations and counter accusations over bribery and leadership issues, began an appeal against the European General Court’s decision taken in February that the World Cup and European Championships must remain on free-to-air TV in the UK. The ruling kept the two tournaments on a list of “protected” events, considered to be of national sporting interest, ensuring that tens of millions of people have access to them, for now at least, as FIFA, with the backing of UEFA, will now seek to take their appeal to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) citing the current set-up’s interference with their right to actively seek the best possible price for television rights within a free-market economy. In doing so FIFA and UEFA are directly seeking to challenge the 1996 Broadcasting Act, itself an application of a European Union Directive allowing EU member states to designate certain cultural and sporting events for free-to-air broadcast as being in the national interest.

Such an appeal has naturally attracted criticism on both moral and legal grounds, and FIFA have been forced to clarify to the courts that they do not object to fixtures involving the home nations, as well as finals and semi-finals, being broadcast on free-to-air TV. Rather their issue is with the remaining games, ties which they have dubbed the “non-core”, and whether these should remain on the list of “protected” events. The February hearing declared that “the court holds that the European Commission did not err in finding that the United Kingdom’s categorisation of all World Cup and Euro matches… as ‘events of major importance’ for their societies are compatible with European Union law”. FIFA now plan to challenge this decision, and far from simply cowing tow to FIFA, UEFA has been rather vocal on the issue, going so far as to state the inclusion of “non-core” fixtures on free-to-air TV infringes on its property rights, and that this situation has led to “ a disproportionate and unjustified distortion of competition on the relevant market“. Brave words from an organisation that saw its turnover from Euro 2008 exceed $2 billion, with over half of that coming from the sale of broadcasting rights. FIFA in turn earned in excess of $2 billion from the sale of TV and media deals relating to World Cup 2010 alone.

Of course the issue of whether or not fixtures not involving the home nations at World Cup and European Championships constitutes events that are part of the nation’s cultural heritage is entirely subjective, but given that football is unquestionably Britain’s most popular sport and the game has its roots within the fields of the nation it seems a hard point to argue against, particularly when you consider that access to the Premier League and Scottish Premier League is already so restricted. With FIFA and UEFA already taking similar action against identical legislation in Belgium, and the possibility of further legal proceedings likely, this is an argument that is set to rumble on quietly in the background for some time to come. With TV deals already in place for Euro 2012 and World Cup 2014, and the ECJ currently advising that the processing and hearing of cases is expected to take at least 18 months, it will be even longer until a resolution is reached. But one thing seems clear to FIFA, UEFA and the coalition government; in this day and age everything’s for sale.