The beginning of the new, expanded UEFA Champions League recently has brought the footballing world back to the discussion of its ever-worsening calendar.
Of course, the increasing of games is not a recent issue; it has been happening over decades. The European Cup at one point used to feature only the winners of the domestic leagues before it was revamped to its current Champions League guise in 1992, featuring more teams from each league and thus boosting its brand, attracting more sponsors, more broadcasters, more revenue.
It’s money. It’s always been about the money, and as long as you can cloak it with a cape mirroring sporting integrity and call it a game of prestige you can get away with it.
“Don’t ask questions. Just shut up and play.”
We are, however, reaching a breaking point. In fact, we reached the breaking point a while ago, but it’s only now we have the active participants of the trade coming out and trying to make a point about how we have gone too far, and hinting at the need for drastic action.
But then, footballers are scarcely thought of as human beings governed by the same laws the common folk follow. After all, they are mere actors on the stage that is football, which makes them subject to our widespread love, ire, and envy. Social media discourse further tells us that being sensible about anything is a fool’s errand, so just as easily a footballer’s poor performance earns them incessant abuse, even a hint of complaint regarding the increasing number of games earns them a good-old reminder of “look at the figures in your paycheck, and shut up.”
The elite players should rejoice, rather, for more green’s coming their way. FIFA has revamped the Club World Cup to get a bigger slice of that sweet club football pie, and top European leagues are already trying to come up with inventive ways to match the commercial might of the English Premier League. The Super Cups of Italy and Spain have been expanded and moved to Saudi Arabia, who are more than keen to grow their ever-expanding sports portfolio for reasons much bigger than sports. The English Premier League itself continues toying around with the idea of the infamous 39th game.
“Don’t ask questions. Just shut up and play.”
Taking a tangent here, but it needs to be mentioned that football is not the first industry where worker exploitation for entertainment has been flagged up. WWE, case in point, has been awash of late with allegations against its ex-CEO, Vince McMahon, under whom the company indulged in exploitation of its wrestlers—most considered ”independent contractors” to exploit more legal loopholes—throughout the year, with no paid leaves, no healthcare support, and no respite, leaving dozens dead before hitting 65 due to either suicide or drug overdose.
Ask yourself this: how happy would you be in an ecosystem where, despite being paid more than most you had no room to voice your opinions if said opinions threatened even a sliver of the establishment? Where your work could just triple and quadruple overnight without your input, your welfare given not an iota of thought?
Would you enjoy a prison if it were made of gold?
Sports have been used as entertainment since time began. Football’s accessibility makes it the most popular sport of all, and thus the most lucrative commercial vehicle for its stakeholders to milk it for as much entertainment as possible. After all, it’s everyone’s game, and everyone ought to get a share of the pie.
But let’s not forget here that the high-paid footballers of the top echelons of European football are but a fraction of the whole set of players. The exploitation of the sport affects them all; if the affluent are finding it hard to contend with it and make their voices heard, what chance does the average player have?
Few days ago, English-born Greek defender George Baldock was found tragically dead in his home in Athens, just a day before Greece played England in the UEFA Nations League. Greece, for reasons that should be obvious, did not want to play, but UEFA could not allow a postponement. Care to guess why?
“It is like this, rules are rules, UEFA don’t have another opportunity to play this game, so we played today.
“We give this win to him [Baldock]. When these things happen in life, football is the second part. The most important thing is that our friend George passed away.”
Dimitrios Pelkas speaking after the game. Quoted by Guardian.
Grief, fatigue, distress—these are motions too human to be ascribed to the celebrity footballers, who in the limelight of the football stage can only meekly glance at their gilded strings.
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Let’s be clear here: footballers are not the worst victims of worker exploitation, but they are a high-profile case watched on by the whole world, and how they manoeuvre through this period has the power to set a very dangerous precedent going forward, that the wealthy stakeholders of any industry can shut their workers up and put their voices in a vacuum, sealed away from any and all ears, as long as they can pay a handful of them eye-watering amounts of money.
And the fans’ voices must not be discounted here either. Ours is just as important as the players’—if not more—for the entertainment value of the game, as the empty stadiums of COVID football and the English protests to the Super League taught us. The least we ought to do is not tell the players to “shut up and keep playing.”
What has also been taught to us by instances both historical and contemporary is that worker exploitation almost always requires drastic measures being taken by the workers to bring things to a halt. An imminent breaking point in football has only been accelerated toward since the COVID pause, which instead of bringing about a restructure towards the game’s sustainability crunched the schedule even further to get the postponed events out of the way.
We are way past the point of the footballing calendar being sustainable in the long run. All it remains to be seen is at what point the players can find it in and among themselves to make a concentrated effort and bring the organisers to the negotiation table.
“Ask questions. If they tell you to shut up, don’t play.”
