Last week TFT editor Gary Andrews wrote about his disillusionment with football, especially the Premier League. But what of football fans in other countries, the ones that the Premier League is targeting. We asked Jason Davis from Match Fit USA to give us his thoughts of the advance of the Premier League from an American perspective. Jason, over to you…
The terrible and terrifying thing about Progress is that it’s nearly impossible to stop. Progress, once it becomes the overarching goal of the people who decide whether Progress should in fact be the goal, overwhelms everything else, becomes the ends that justify all means, and steers all decisions. Worse, Progress doesn’t care who it leaves behind, who it alienates, what traditions are left shattered and irrecoverable in its wake, or whether it will so fundamentally change the thing it is progressing that that which is being progressed becomes something else entirely in spirit or otherwise. Progress is a cold-blooded killer devoid of conscience or concern, its devastating capabilities shrouded by the positive connotations of the word itself.
Progress will forsake your children. Progress will always favour the new over the old, the blooming frontier to the established territory. Progress takes your existence for granted, feels no urge to do more than patronize to your concerns. Progress is in the eye of the beholder.
Progress brought us to where we are now, with the hum of technology so persistent we have perfectly tuned it out, allowing me to transmit these words to you and the purveyors of the game to transmit images of English football to me. Progress gave us football in the first place, when monied factory owners sponsored teams of men to play a boy’s game, enticing communities from Sheffield to São Paulo to start their own clubs to compete with their neighbours, all in the interest of civic pride. But because Progress does not stop, Progress will wrench our beloved institutions right from under without regard for history or passion.
Progress can’t be bothered with quaint notions of anything, much less those tied geographic happenstance. For me, Progress is a beatific apparition delivering copious amounts of English football — largely accepted as the best kind of football — to my door. Progress lets me partake in the best league in the world(TM) without having to move a muscle. Progress feeds my addiction, and in turn, feeds the coffers of the clubs that have the wherewithal to fill their rosters with great players from all over the world. Progress bends football to make it more palatable to my tastes and point of view, which by virtue of my own geographical happenstance, has no room for nostalgia except in pre-packaged spoonfuls.
From the other side, I can only imagine that Progress is the all-consuming demon, chewing up the basic tenets of what English football is supposed to be, and more importantly, who it is supposed to serve. It becomes more clear by the season that English football is English only in that the games are staged in England; the sacrifices to Progress will not cease as long as the Premier League views faraway lands as “markets” to be conquered and revenue streams to be tapped. The growing profile of the Premier League in places like North America and Asia - being the populous and prosperous places that they are - means the 39th game, the rumours of a cabal of foreigners looking to end promotion and relegation, the elimination of vicinity rules regarding the development of players, and the control of foreign television rights are merely the beginning, nearly 20 years on from the creation of a zygote. Ultimately, it’s about money because everything is, but there’s also a base human instinct at play. Genghis Khan drove his hordes across the steppes of Asia viciously expanding his empire for no other reason than something in his DNA bade him to. Men like Richard Scudamore and Ian Ayre are the modern incarnation of Khan; less civilized, and with the sporting legacy of a nation on the end of their sword.
I am the Premier League’s target demographic. My ties to the cities and towns from where English football emanates is tenuous and abstract. Theoretically, it doesn’t matter to me if Arsenal or Chelsea or United or Liverpool or whichever big club (because it’s assumed I’ll pick a big club, being the removed, and presumably new, American fan) poach talent from every club in the Football League. Theoretically, I’m anxious to be marketed to, ready to spend my greenbacks on shirts and swag and tickets to meaningless games in July staged in my own backyard in stadiums built for another sport. Theoretically, it doesn’t matter if the players playing on my television for whichever big club I choose are English or Polish or Mauritanian. England itself is but a stage on which the drama unfolds; whether football’s beating heart is in ancient grounds built before all-seaters were a thing or is relocated to a safe somewhere in a bunker built and paid for by Rupert Murdoch isn’t really my concern. As long as there is football — meaning, of course, the only football of which I’m expected to be aware, the Premier League itself — I should be expected to remain enraptured.
The NFL sold its soul to the promise of new frontiers a long time ago, but unlike English football, finds its appeal limited and the nut much tougher to crack. As an American fan of American football, I’ve long ago reconciled the slavish devotion the NFL has to the almighty dollar with my personal idea of NFL fandom.
The league’s annual tryst with English gridiron fans in London is only marginally more callous and transparent a money grab than so much the NFL has done before. Because Progress will have a harder time making headway in a world already in love with a different football code, my only worry is that my team will one day pull up stakes and leave the city they represent now for another with a sexier stadium deal. The NFL isn’t going global anytime soon. America won’t matter less to that league in the same way England has come to matter less to the Premier League.
As the Premier League takes a longer view, closer objects, like the very heart and home of their game, England, move into the periphery of its vision. Progress is farsighted. Progress sees Asia, America, and the potential benefits those places can bring to the clubs counting tens of millions of Asians and Americans as their fans, and forgets that they’re part of a greater, interconnected system of clubs that don’t. Progress makes them forget their obligation to history. Progress wants them to conquer, conquer, conquer. Progress sees me and wants to sell me things, even if that means destroying a century of tradition in the process.
We’re all being globalized. For English football fans who care about football, real football, football that comes from England and isn’t merely a “product” trading on the past, the process is the same as the forcible removal of the extremities. For Americans who have fallen in love with English football, any English football, even the kind that isn’t exactly English football as it was and should still be, it’s a glorious explosion of flavourful culture and sport in one convenient package.
Such is Progress.
Jason Davis is the editor of Match Fit USA. You can follow him on Twitter @MFUSA.
Tags: English football fans, English Premier League, football in America, Premier League, Progress, US Soccer