Like Hong Kong Phooey, I’m a fairly mild mannered sort of chap.
It takes a lot to wind me up.
So I’d like to take this opportunity to thank and congratulate the EFL for managing to do so, almost continuously, for the last year or so.
Bravo.
The EFL, for those people who are blissfully unaware of such things, is the new name that the Football League awarded itself last November.
It came about after, no doubt, many arduous hours spent at meetings and conference calls. After repeated rounds of expensive coffee and Marks & Spencer take-out buffet. After choosing to take a helicopter view of things and agreeing to touch base offline. After an idea shower or two. After they’d picked all the low hanging fruit. And after they’d cascaded the relevant information before taking a ride right up to the very top of the strategic staircase.
And, finally, after a fanfare that would have put Emerson, Lake & Palmer to shame, they decided to rename themselves, at great expense, the ‘English Football League’.
That’s the Football League. The one in England. Yes, England. Because if they were in Germany, for example, it would be the German Football League.
Just so we don’t get confused. Easily done. Let’s hope they’re not thinking along similar lines in Estonia. Else pandemonium will ensue.
Except, of course, it has to have an acronym. Because acronyms are sexy; acronyms are the in thing; they’re contemporary, dangerous and ever so now.
There’s the SAS for example. MI5. And NASA. Exciting worlds, exciting designations, exciting acronyms.
Then there’s the kids. Oh how they want to get down with the kids. Like me and all the other middle-aged men who are first to take to the floor at the wedding reception disco. ‘Look at us, we’re still cool, we’ve still got all the moves’.
The kids with their acronyms, the new language of the 21st century. DURS. FWB. And GYPO.
The Football League didn’t want to feel left out of things; they didn’t want to be the geeky kid at the EPL party anymore. They wanted to be cool and trendy, to have all the cool generation sending each other texts like, ‘Hey, am off to see EFL match, CU L8 for some I&I, ROFL’
Yes, EFL has entered the lexicon. English. Football. League. EFL.
Marvellous. When I heard the news I was so excited I nearly PML.
That whole exercise took the ‘EFL’ two months to decide, agree and implement.
Two months.
It’s nearly fifty years since NASA took eight days to get two men onto the moon, off it again and back to earth.
Yet in 2016, it took two months for what used to be known as the FL to work out that they now want to be known as the EFL.
It’s just as well the EFL don’t run NASA. If they did, then the latter would barely be past the Roman candle stage right now. Plus they’d think the moon was made of cheese. Or the earth was flat.
EFL. It’s ridiculous. Talk about getting your priorities right. And we know what theirs are.
Television.
One of the reasons given for the rebrand was that the EFL was meant to ‘…increase the league’s global competitiveness in global sports markets.’
For ‘global sports markets’ read the USA, China and the Middle East.
Now, in fairness to the ‘EFL’, they’re not the first to put the television watching millions all over the globe before those watching in their own country, or, heaven forfend, the actual match attending fans of the clubs in question.
La Liga has long since sold its soul.
The first league clash of this season between Real Madrid and Barcelona has been re-scheduled to be played at 3:15 pm on Saturday December 3rd.
The current embargo in place in this country on any game being shown live on TV during the same afternoon as a full league programme means that it won’t be shown live in this country. Not even in a pub. So if you have an El Clasico fix, forget it.
The people in power are too afraid that, for example, thousands of Norwich fans who would normally get themselves along to Carrow Road to see their team play Brentford will all think, as one, “…no, sod that, I’m going to watch Real Madrid against Barcelona on the telly instead”.
As if. But that, in a nutshell, is the reason for the embargo. They genuinely think that club attendances will plummet to catastrophically low levels if there is a live game of football on somewhere.
Anyway. When the President of La Liga, one Javier Tebas, was asked about the decision to reschedule El Clasico to that, for Spain, unusual kick off time, his reply was;
“We had three windows we had considered, at 13:00, 16:15 and 18:30. We analysed those with our audiovisual team and to play at 18:00 is too late in Asia while to play at 13:00 is too early for the American market”.
This is, in case you’d forgotten, not the CEO of a multinational finance group talking about multinational finance bulls**t. But the man who heads up an organisation whose remit is football. The playing of. Period.
I hope the Real fans have their white hankies ready for him. That is, of course, if they are allowed to take them into the ground.
The waving of white hankies at any La Liga ground is probably forbidden unless, of course, said article has the Santander logo on it. Or Nike. They are amongst La Liga’s main sponsors. And for as long as they put the money in, they will expect prominence and priority above anyone and anything else.
Including the fans. After all, it’s not a game anymore. It’s a product. And that product no longer belongs to the fans.
We’ve become peripheral; a sideshow. Even, I suspect in the eyes of some within the game, an inconvenience.
Inconvenience?
That would be rescheduling our game at Brentford for 5:30pm on New Year’s Eve then?
Good luck if you’re thinking of taking the train for that one. The only chance you’ll have of getting home to Norwich from London Liverpool Street is if you catch the 22:28. And that’s a bus service. A restricted one. That may, or may not, run.
There is another, departing at 23:58. But that’s scheduled to take a little over ten hours to get you back to Norwich. Still, you can always see 2017 in whilst gazing at the Nat West Tower, or whatever it’s called now, from the grimy window at grimy seat in your grimy rail replacement bus. Good luck with that.
And to everyone who will be getting down to Brentford for that game. A decision made with the travelling fans last in line.
And a match that will, I suspect, have one of Sky’s lowest audiences for any Championship game this season. After all, it is New Years Eve. So I can’t imagine that many neutrals will be watching anyway.
The EFL’s greedy tendrils reached out a little bit further earlier this week.
Their latest target being the proliferation of fan TV stations that have caught on and proliferated at just about every club in the country.
We’ve all had a good laugh at the moaning Arsenal fans on one of theirs. As well as the increasingly angry Hammers fans on West Ham Fan TV. As for the lager swilling Geordie? Well, there are no words. Why? Because he’s said them all. There are no words left.
Fan TV stations are the fanzines of the 21st century. Remember Liverpool Are On The Tele Again? These are their modern day successors.
You may like them. You may not. But they are here and they are increasingly popular. TalkNorwichCity has over 8,500 subscribers, with one recent show – the post-match verdict on our defeat at Newcastle – drawing over 10,000 views to date.
The sort of figures some of the more famous brands on You Tube would love to call their own.
Impressive enough for the Football League, sorry, the EFL, to have taken note. And decided enough is enough.
Fan led and produced material that’s made by the fans, involves the fans and is watched by the fans?
That’s not acceptable at all to the EFL. For them it’s all about the product (Note that, in modern day football speak the word ‘game’ has been replaced by ‘product’) and their stakeholders, which, for the EFL includes SkyBET, Checkatrade, Ginsters (laughably referred to on the EFL website as the ‘official savoury pastry partner of the EFL’) and Wickes, aka ‘the official home improvement and trade partner of the EFL’.
Let’s hope Wickes never get to design or build any new stadiums in the coming seasons, else you’ll be hedging your bets on whether it falls down or blows away first. With SkyBET, naturally.
Henceforth therefore, the EFL have clamped down on the likes of our Jack Reeve and all the other people who have started up fan led channels over the last year or so.
That means they can’t film in the ground any more. Now, at a push, and a mighty bloody big one at that, I can see, although never accept, their reasoning, for their not wanting people to film short little clips of the match action itself.
After all, my 30 second long footage of Robert Snodgrass taking a corner, taken from halfway up the River End, is of course going to lead to thousands of Sky Sports subscribers abandoning the station as they all come to me for their weekly football fix.
The EFL have also advised clubs that fans are now no longer permitted to film themselves or their fellow supporters in grounds either, which means that, whilst it’s in the EFL’s interests to promote gambling and drinking, woe betide you if you switch on your camera to film you and your mates celebrating a goal, or else your and their reactions to an incident in the match itself.
It won’t be so long, I suspect, before they ban people filming or taking photographs in and around football grounds in the moments leading up to and after a match as well. The battle lines seem a little blurry at the moment and I am sure that clubs will all adopt varying views on camera wielding fans and their attitude towards them.
So expect some even more overzealous stewarding at places like Leeds, Newcastle and QPR in the seasons ahead.
This is nothing to do with the clubs. They haven’t made this decision. It has been made and put into place by the EFL with the clubs given strict guidelines to follow with regard to the matter. It means, therefore, that anything and everything that takes place at Carrow Road, and all 91 of the other , from now on is, and remains, as far as the EFL is concerned, THEIR property, intellectual or otherwise.
And you’ll either enjoy it in the way they prescribe. Or you can take a hike.
But this is the sort of thing that happens when a game becomes a product.
And the views and interests of the fans are surpassed by stakeholders, sponsors and markets. Which is what Real Madrid and Barcelona fans are learning right now.
So no-one is safe. And, whilst we discuss and obsess about matters relating to the club, the game and our match with Rotherham tomorrow, little by little and ever so insidiously, our game is being taken away from us.
With the clampdown on football fan led TV just another example of how it’s being done.
I’ll leave the last word to Shaun Harvey, the Chief Executive of the Football League who, when asked about the rebranding of the Football League in 2015, did his very best David Brent impression with his response thus;
“In an increasingly-challenging global sports market, it is absolutely essential that sports properties can project a modern identity that not only resonates with their regular audience but is also easily recognisable to a broader audience of potential fans, viewers and commercial partners”.
There’s going to be a lot of anticipointment Shaun.
So go and take another thought shower.
And start thinking about the fans for once.
Has the EFL lost its marbles?
Does the lunacy of those running football these days have no limits?
Fans interact with fellow fans, during game time, is okay provided that no one is filming it. Is that really the level of Big Brother control that the EFL wants?
And, just how exactly does this take anything, from a pure commercial revenue perspective, from the EFL?
Fans just want choice and an alternative perspective that’s different from the sanitised main stream media outlets. If the EFL wants to take that away from the fans they should at least come up with some decent reasoning behind their thought process so there can be a reasoned debate, rather than just imposing this in such a draconian way.
Hi Ed
The Brentford game kicks off at 17:30 (5:30 pm) so hopefully the yellow hordes will turn out in force and be able to get back home again. I hope to be among them (though I’ll be staying at my sister’s place in Crouch End).
Brilliant piece. LMAO, I wish the EFL would STFU
Great piece, and totally agree.
I don’t live in Norfolk now, so am heavily reliant on the internet to keep me up to date.
One of my bugbears is football radio commentary.
I can listen to the pre-match build-up and Canary Call on Radio Norfolk, but the bit in between I am not allowed to listen to, as its not allowed in my area. I am in the UK and pay the licence fee but suspect this is not the BBC but the EFL imposing restrictions, so the only live football I can listen to are the local team on the local station, or normally an EPL commentary on Radio 5, neither of which are particularly of interest.
I cannot see how the EFL benefit from this arrangement, as surely their main competitor for their “product” is the EPL who are being handed the opportunity.
I imagine most of us would agree with a great deal of this. But I do think it’s wrong to believe that the football authorities ever took the needs of fans into consideration, and certainly not their issues with travel.
50 years ago we played Coventry home and away on successive days over Christmas. I doubt if there was a direct train. By road it was about 4 hours from where I was in South Norfolk, and you went through the middle of places such as Thetford, Newmarket, Cambridge and Northampton. No dual-carriageway A14, no bypasses.
Grounds were very basic, terrible loos, uncovered stands, slippery outside steps to clamber up just to get in. Fan comfort and safety was a very low priority, and those running the game did nothing to force clubs to improve it, until disaster struck.
In truth there never was a golden age when the FA or any other authority looked after fans. What’s happening now is merely a modern variation on an old theme.
Great piece.
With regard to use of cameras/phones in ground – how would this ever be policed? If stewards ever tried to come down on an individual, it just needs all others in the vicinity get theirs out as well. Policing can only happen with the consent of the majority involved.
Why doesn’t MFW invite the EFL to submit a point by point response?
Nah – wouldn’t happen.
Masterpiece!! I read 99% of MFW columns and normally nod sagely in agreement in all the correct places, or growl like Marge Simpson when I disagree with points made.
But rarely do I laugh hysterically at full volume like I just did three times at various stages reading this.
And that’s the irony – it’s not actually a laughing matter! Real, all-weather fans are being driven away from the game they’ve loved for generations by firstly prices, bizarre and unreasonable kick-off times and now the total sanitisation of the “product” as Ed sadly – but correctly calls it.
How long before top games are played in empty stadia, with crowd noise being supplied over the tannoy, because all those horrid supporters standing up at the first sign of goal-mouth action are interfering with the TV pictures being beamed back to Malaysia!? God help us!! 🙁
I thoroughly agree every word as well.
I can understand the 1p5wich switches through Police concerns but anybody prepared – or able – to go to Brentford has my very best wishes for a safe journey. I doubt the k/o time oversuits their fans either.
BTW re La Liga – it’s not just white hankies! I was lucky enough to live on Mallorca for a few weeks a year for many years and the Son Moix stadium could be something else. At one match against Atletico Madrid, RCD Mallorca (who had Samuel Eto’o, the ironically named 38-y-o Nino and the Beast of Barcelona – Nadal – in their line-up that day) contrived to lose 4-0, including missing a penalty.
Someone called Fernando Torres tortured the Mallorca CBs (combined age nearly 80) all evening and the afficionados progressively escalated their ill-feeling against the jugadores.
Plastic glasses half full of Cruzcampo were slung around like confetti, loose cushions were taken off seats and aimed at the pitch, some people jumped on their seats until they broke and a couple of idiots threw those as well.
As for the language, well I certainly learned a few new words that night.
Back to the main topic, yes I agree the game and our perceived right to enjoy it as we should is indeed being slowly eradicated. A great read.
Whilst none of us like football becoming a ‘product’, it is not particularly new. The big clubs were doing it back in the 70’s to the disadvantage of smaller clubs, eventually leading to the PL.
As for the media input, those of us who remember following results back then on ceefax scores or occasional score updates on the BBC match coverage (if your team happened to be one of the 6 teams chosen for updates) now we can at least listen to the matches and possibly even see them on Sky, BT or an internet stream. Like Paul, I’m an exile, so I pay £35 to the club for Canaries Player to get something like 50 match commentaries, plus interviews and highlights this season. That seems good value to me.
Football is an international game these days and the change to EFL reflects that. For those of us in this country, it seems silly, but internationally it makes sense.
Well said Ed. FWIW and IMHO spot on, although the point with the 3pm Saturday embargo on TV football was, I thought, aimed at protecting the gate receipts of (forgive me) non EFL/EPL clubs.
We, the fans that attend, are mere fodder to the media machine to be used, abused and scorned in equal measure.
Having taken just the two days off work for the Newcastle trip, although having got home at 2am on the Thursday I could have gone in, I’m planning how long I need for Fulham. Just the half day off Tuesday then, and back home about the same time as Newcastle?
I think I know who’s the mug, so maybe they’re right?
Great passion in the piece.
Ironically, the acronym EFL has always been used primarily for the term ‘English as a foreign language’ – its adoption in a football context is increasingly ironic with regard to the make up of English clubs’ boardrooms and dressing rooms.
Much of the rage/passion must be directed at the clammy hands of SKY/SKYSports who largely pull the strings of the EFL with their enormous sponsorship and coverage.
All football grounds must be registered with the EFL and so the new directive for not filming inside them presumably helps protect TV company image rights?
Of course they can’t impose it just when the cameras are in town and not other times, hence the blanket ban.
Great rant, Ed, and right on the nail, but for the benefit of those like me who aren’t into acronyms, what do DURS, FWB, GYPO, ROFL, LMAO, FWIW, and IMHO mean? (I did manage to work ou STFU!
Don’t worry if they do ban white hankies, we can always wave two fingers at them.
Unless of course…. no, surely not, not even they would do that, would they?
Ed: a rant, but of the highest order. Quality stuff.
Brilliant article Ed. The worry is I can’t see things changing.
Excellent, and once again I’ve no chance of ticking off one of the few remaining grounds on the list
Very entertaining piece. Can’t argue with most of it BUT I suggest ” you ain’t seen nothing yet ” if you follow about 90 % of what is professional football in England. Think it’s only a matter of time before the Big Boys sell not only what’s left of their souls but shaft everyone but themselves by firstly ditching across the board TV rights , instead having their own individual contracts or even their own TV station to transmit their games globally wherever & whenever they choose. As these clubs become richer & even more powerful , a European League with similar clubs from Spain Germany etc providingwall to wall televised football for those who can afford the subscription. They will simply cast off what has been an institution & way of life for many in this country for over a century . GREAT then we can have our game back for the real fans & the clubs they have followed through thick & thin. Football on a Saturday afternoon , played by players who don’t earn more in a week than we do in 10 years & who have names we can pronounce, with ticket prices that are affordable to all. Might not be made to sit down either , that would real football again.
I’ve been hoping that might happen for some time Victor (17).
I don’t doubt that free collective bargaining as regards TV fees will be gone the next time the Premier League contract is up for renewal and that a European ‘Super League’ featuring the most wealthy and historically famous clubs will result.
IMHO Leicester were lucky to be let into the CL this season. If a smaller club ever finishes in the top 4 again the big clubs will find a way to prevent them entering the now laughably called ‘Champions League’.
You’re absolutely right-all the present developments within the game are the tip of the iceberg. I do have faith however, that, when the elite pack themselves off somewhere new, the domestic game in this country will thrive and prosper.