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Home>Hot News
| 02/10/2009 | Empty seats and dwindling ratings? It.s time to launch the global McLeague |
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| Not even one score years ago, the Premier League.s founding fathers declared their independence from the repressive, lesser English clubs....By Guardian Not even one score years ago, the Premier League.s founding fathers declared their independence from the repressive, lesser English clubs, and enshrined this declaration in a historic document called the Founder Members. Agreement. I looked at a facsimile of it yesterday - it.s a gruff, quaint, hopeful piece of work, with the quills of football chairmen from Notts County to Wimbledon scratched beneath its tenets. It would be nice to think they might carve it in stone and mount it in the Nike-KFC ShariaBowl somewhere in Saudi Arabia, which will probably be hosting the 2011 north London derby . Unfortunately, it was the supporters as opposed to our founders who held certain truths to be self-evident, one of which might have been - to concoct a reasonable example - that at no point would a Liverpool fan among their number have to see their side play a league tie in Dubai or some other non-democracy (minus a player like Yossi Benayoun, because he holds an Israeli passport), and pay more for the privilege of watching it on television than any other fan on earth. So in light of this week.s plan for Premier League clubs to play an extra 39th game overseas from 2010, is it OK to start accusing the Founder Members of mission creep? Premier League chairman Peter Scudamore claims intolerant regimes will be excluded from hosting games should the proposal go ahead, but then again, he considers the Amnesty-condemned former Thai prime minister a "fit and proper" owner of Manchester City, and has never hinted he might nurse the slightest objections to the investment arm of the Dubai government taking over Liverpool. (That said, if Mr Scudamore is in need of an audacious defensive spin, he could always point out that this country.s civil rights lawyers are up in arms, or that people are being detained for ages without charge, and ask: isn.t the real question whether we should we even be playing Premier League games in England?) As for the "proposal" classification, though, let.s not be naive twice. You can and must bet your bottom dollar this will go ahead. After all, as the enchanting SkyBet slogan runs: it matters more when there.s money on it. We are witnessing the birth of the McLeague. It.s fashionable to tack the McDonald.s prefix on to things, but it feels particularly apposite here. Let.s get one thing clear, because it.s easy to be fooled by the noise and fury that attends our national game: we may consume more of it, but blanket coverage has diluted what we might call the sacredness of football. More football has not turned us into more passionate consumers of the game. For all they chow down of it, people talk in more disillusioned and dissatisfied ways about football these days. To many, it is perfectly obvious why. It is not difficult to see the link between agribusiness, supersized junk food and obesity, which has found a notable expression via McDonald.s. So it shouldn.t be much of a stretch to believe there is a link between the Premier League cartel, the volume of their often poor quality product on offer 24/7, and the unhealthy amounts of empty seats at grounds picked up by cameras, and the dwindling ratings for televised games. Historically, McDonald.s had a solution to the onset of this type of ennui, and it wasn.t the Wi-Fi salad makeover they.re embracing now. Their answer was expansionism: take the product to new consumers without attachment to traditions, and offer them cheap deals. This appears to be the route the Premier League is going down, casting Scudamore in the role of Ronald McDonald, the clown who for so long trusting naifs were asked to believe helmed the corporation. I.ll leave you to surmise Ronald.s actual clout at board meetings. For over two decades now, the Economist has featured something called the Big Mac Index. It compares the price of the ubiquitous Big Mac in different countries with the actual exchange rates between those countries, and uses it to see whether those currencies are overvalued or not. It.s a simplified version of purchasing power parity - the notion that your buck should get you the same bang, wherever you are in the world. Say you pay £2 for a Big Mac here, and $2.50 for one in the US, the PPP rate is 80p to the dollar. If the exchange rate is $2 to the pound then the dollar is undervalued by 38%. So as the Premier League.s increasingly ubiquitous "product" moves into this exciting new global phase, perhaps there ought to be a McLeague index. How much is a Liverpool fan in this country paying to see their league match on Sky Sports, and how much is a TV viewer in the US or wherever paying to see it? We won.t get bogged down in figures - the answers are respectively "a lot more" and "a lot less". Now let.s make a forecast. How much will a Liverpool fan be paying to see their league match, played in the States, at a kick-off time to suit that market? And how much will an American fan be paying for the same? Having looked into their crystal football, English supporters will become increasingly unhappy with what their pound is getting them. That we can truly hold self-evident. |
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