The Americanisation of football? Godspeed it

The day after the European Super League all but folded, Real Madrid went down to the ancient port of Cádiz and disposed of the local team 3-0. All the goals came in the first half. Karim Benzema is the languid-eyed type, but even so, there was an air of interrupted sleep about the French striker as he was brought off with 15 minutes to go, a brace of goals long since in his account.

“You see,” Florentino Pérez, Real’s president and the League’s Frankenstein, might have said, “my point.”

Short of having as its trophy a Fabergé egg on a nest of Alba truffles, the League was unimprovable in its power to annoy. The admission for life of 12 of Europe’s wealthiest clubs conveyed a kind of feudal rigidity. The lack of a PR plan revealed the sort of incompetence that only billionaires can afford.

But the ESL did at least spell the end of mismatches as sadistic as Real vs Cádiz. It did fix the aesthetic crime (the economic one wounds me less) by which the best teams in the biggest sport in an easily traversable continent play each other so seldom.

Most of all, it was one in the eye for that eternal reactionary and tireless bore: the critic of “Americanisation”.

Which fans were better-off before the game’s US-inspired modernisation: those in the crumbling stands or those watching the scarce broadcasts?

Let’s not be coy here: football was rescued from a terminal mess by ideas and sometimes people that emerged at least in part from the US. The deathtrap stadiums became all-seater. The rare live broadcasts multiplied: “terrestrial football”, now missed, was once as self-cancelling a phrase as “Radio 4 humour”. In England, the first half of the 1985/86 season did not exist at all on TV.

Football is nothing without the fans, goes the unenlightening bromide. (What is it without the players?) The question is which fans were better-off before the game’s US-inspired modernisation: those in the crumbling stands or those watching the scarce broadcasts? And — asking for a friend here — how at ease were the non-white ones in that lost Eden? If Americanisation means NFL or Major League Baseball levels of on-field race hate, godspeed it.

Even America’s less existential contributions to the sport have enhanced it. A generation ago, talk of “assists” was enough to mark out a fan or commentator for special treatment as a robotic dweeb. The game is now so infused with data that expected goals, completed-pass percentages and GPS-enabled heat maps constitute the entry-level stuff. Punditry is unrecognisably more sophisticated for the change, and so is the recruitment of players. The debt to the US — a country that could bring statistical methods to the study of epic verse — is transparent.

No doubt, US owners are dead-eyed bottom-line merchants. It is the Gulf Arabs and post-Soviet oligarchs who buy clubs for the glory, and whom I would alert to a doer-upper in the Islington area. But the conflation of US influence with a debasement of taste and ethics flows too easily in too many fields of life.

Americanisation has become a sour phrase for the reform of almost anything in a vaguely consumer-focused direction. Its corollary, an instinct that still lives in Britain, is that no experience is truly authentic unless it’s a bit crap. From this comes the simpering tweeness about a misremembered 1980s over the past week. From this comes a wider resistance to newness, from Sunday trading to an unconventional royal bride. It is the foible of conservatism — “paradox” is too grand — that the present it defends is the accumulation of once-reviled changes.

In the end, the ESL, or something like it, will form in stages. Perhaps national leagues will merge: Spain and Italy make for a plausible fit, as do the Low Countries and France. Or the Champions League (itself a mutant) will pit the super-clubs against each other ever more often. The mistake of Perez and his peers was to codify in one go the scattered work of several years.

If such a league does take shape, I hope as much as the next fan that it will be porous to meritocratic entry and exit. The closedness of the ESL really was unconscionable and unmistakably American. The defence of competition and sporting integrity falls to Europe’s finest, such as Bayern Munich, those strangers to entrenched power, who this weekend can clinch just their ninth Bundesliga title in a row.

Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com

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