DISENCHANTMENT
By J. P. W. MALLALIEU, M.P. THE most exciting moment at a theatre is when loose folds in the curtain tighten just before the first act. So, too, with football. The first glimpse of colour as players come through the tunnel under the grandstand stirs pulses and brightens eyes, more even than the game itself can do. To a soccer fan that is the moment when life begins again, the moment for which he has waited all week, the moment which will glow in his memory when the rest of the match has cooled. He does not care that that moment is not really the beginning. He does not know how much has been done behind the scenes to make that moment possible. That is as well. If he did know he might not care any more for his beloved game.
After watching soccer, from the outside, for nearly a quarter of a century, I have had the chance to see something of it from the inside during the past three years. What I have seen has driven the sun- light from Saturday afternoon. There are traces of disenchant- ment in the book Leslie Knighton has just written on his thirty- five years in Big Football.* Certainly reading his book has deepened my own dismay. Some of the evils which today are rotting football were present in the days before the war about which Mr. Knighton writes. But they had not their present stranglehold ; and they were more than counterbalanced by great virtues.
Nearly all clubs, thirty-five years ago, were poor. This is how Mr. Knighton describes one experience of Darwen, then a Football League club. " They left home on a morning of terrible weather for Birmingham. They arrived shortly before the match, starving (for they had had no lunch) and wet through.. It was still raining as it can rain in Birmingham. They played; like heroes and I believe managed to pull off a draw. Weary, soaked, hopeless, they trotted off the field at the end. The club officials could not even afford to buy them a fea. Three of the players pooled what they had. It amounted to tenpence. They got a supper of fried fish and chips and then doggedly turned back to Darwen."
That, indeed, is an example of the bad old days of professional football to which no one would return. Yet out of bad conditions such as these great goodness could and did come. Just after the First World War the Huddersfield Town club was on the rocks. Gate receipts had dropped to £50 a match ; and though this was big money compared with the receipts from one game when not a single paying spectator went into the ground, it was nothing like sufficient to meet wages and other charges. So the club went into liquidation and a report got round that it would be transferred to Leeds. At this, local patriotism stirred. Supporters ran meetings in pubs and halls up and down the valleys which drain into Hudders- field. Letters poured into the local paper. A fund was launched to save the club. The club was saved, mainly thanks to a large dona- tion by one family, the Crowthers. But because thousands of small people had made their contribution, had made a personal effort which staved off failure, they began to look on the club as their very own and to follow it with passionate devotion. There followed a story such as one reads in schoolboy books but which is rare in real life. The enthusiasm of the town fired the players. In the very season when Their club had actually been put into liquidation, these players won promotion to the First Division and reached the Cup Final. Two years later they won the Cup. Two years later still they began their record-breaking streak in which they won the First Division championship three times running. Of course, new players, such as Clem Stephenson, were bought from other clubs to strengthen the
* Behind the Scenes in Big Football. By Leslie Knighton. (Stanley Paul, 16s.) team. They played a great part in its success. But other players, such as the great Tantovy Smith, stayed with the team for twenty years. New and old alike, they were welded into a great side by the fire of their supporters' enthusiasm and maintained as one by the knowledge that together they had superbly overcome difficulty.
But it was not only the players from whom the struggles of those days brought out the best. Managers really had to be managers. Few of them could get a player just by signing a fat cheque or keep him by finding him a well-paid job on the side. Managers in those days needed skill to spot the promise of a young player. In a fiercely competitive atmosphere they needed guile to win the player for their club. It was nothing for a manager to wear a disguise lest the knowledge of his presence in a town might put another and richer club on the scent of his player. Leslie Knighton himself even went so far as to engineer the " disappearance " of a player belonging to another club in a successful effort to bring down the transfer fee to the figure which Knighton's club could afford.
Above all, to keep a player, a manager needed human under- standing. Today, if a player is troublesome or doesn't fit in to a team, you sell him at a fat profit. But in those days most managers used patience and experience to get the most out of the players they. had. The majority of players, then as now, were good, steady boys who could look after themselves. But some of them a manager had to wet-nurse, keeping their money for them, buying their suits, settling their matrimonial troubles, cursing, cajoling, jollying them along. Those days produced the great managers, the Herbert Chap- mans, the Macfarlanes, the Jack Tinns ; and the players responded. Pre-war circumstances, too, brought out the best in the directors. Over and over again directors had to take real risks with their own money in order to keep a soccer club alive in their town. Despite the fact that they were risking, and often losing, their money, they were usually prepared to let the manager do his job without interference.
It is in the quality and activities of directors that the game in recent years has seen the biggest change ; and it is from that change that the game's chief evils are mainly sprung. Men are getting on to the boards of soccer clubs today who have no real roots in the game, who have made money easily during the war, who see in soccer the chance to attain a social position which has previously been denied them, and who think that a soccer club can be run by the same black-market methods which have been successful in business. With the huge post-war attendances, soccer clubs make money easily. So directors spend it easily, buying up with cheques the talent they have neither the skill to spot nor the patience to develop. Is a star player dissatisfied ? Pay him under the counter and to blazes with the League's maximum-wages rules. Offer him a special house or a contract to write for the newspapers and to blazes with the ordinary club players who resent such favouritism. The manager ? Tell him to do as we say—or else I We pay him. If he doesn't like my missus asking the club's international to a party before a game he can lump it. And those old club servants with their free seats in the directors' box ? Kick 'em out. I need those seats for business friends. One good turn will produce another.
No team can grow in such an atmosphere. Cash and the power of cash dominates the directors. At once it begins to dominate the players and who can blame them ? No wonder that in a world of grab so many players now grab—moving on from club to club, never taking root, just grasping at the highest bid. Indeed, it is stagger- ing that even today the majority of players still remain loyal to their team mates and to clubs which do not deserve their loyalty.
And the spectator ? Years ago a boy of seven met the manager of his home-town club. The manager made a fuss of him and told him he must come to see a match whenever he was home. Thereafter, for years, though he had gone to live elsewhere, this boy idolised the club, visited it whenever he could and was welcomed by successive managers. After all, he was a real fan—and it is from real fans that football clubs derive their being. Last year, this fan, now an elderly man, went home again on his week's holiday just to see his beloved club play again. But when the new secretary saw him he said, "There's nothing here for you," and the new chairman kept his glad-handing for some more influential patron. That is the way of the black market. And that is the way,: soccer is going.
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