The Great Secret: Marcelo Bielsa and a Plan to Save Football That Nobody Dares Carry Out
Everyone working in football knows that everyone working in football — at and near the top, at least — is paid too much money, and that the game would be better in almost every way if they were paid less money. The inflation of football, in Bielsa's phrase, needs to pause.
There are Twitter accounts devoted to publicising the timings of Premier League press conferences to help Fantasy League managers decide their transfers, and each one I checked for details of when Marcelo Bielsa might speak before the Liverpool game was giving a different answer this morning. This was not helping anyone decide whether or not to captain Raphinha this weekend. Neither, when the press conference took place, was Bielsa's mini-lecture on the world game's economic suicide.
"To ignore the preparation and rest that is needed for the spectacle of the players is absurd," said Bielsa, when asked a second time about the impact of the international 'break' over the last two weeks. "To ignore the effect that has on the players, the accumulation of the games and the long hours of flying — that will end up injuring any player, so clearly. There's no way [i.e. plan] to resolve this by protecting football. They are protecting the commercial part of football, but the game goes unprotected, and football is going to waste in such a way [that] it's going to become less attractive."
Of course with a Bielsa press conference (video on LUTV here, Leeds Live transcript here) that was only one part of a much longer and more detailed soliloquy on The State of Football in September 2021. But by summarising, we get neat encapsulations of both the commercial bind football has got itself into, and the solution, that Bielsa recognises is almost unspeakable. "The great secret is that we [should] all earn less." You're not supposed to say that out loud, Marcelo!
We've heard from Bielsa before about the main problem football has, of which the international break is only an example: there are too many games. "When I worked in the national teams," he said today, "we would play one game in every international break. Then we started playing two, and now three." The reason is that more games means more money. Here's where the catch-22 comes in. Why does football need more money? To pay the players. "Who are they supposed to give what [money] football brings [to], if not to the players?" But it's the players, and the quality of their playing, being put at risk by playing more games in pursuit of more money to pay them.
If the solution is for everyone to earn less, then, is that same as asking players to be less greedy? Not exactly. Modern footballers and their wages are an interesting branch sticking in the cogs of football's confused business. It wasn't the players bringing about the Premier League breakaway in 1992, but satellite broadcasters and 'big club' executives, who saw an opportunity to market the sport to richer audiences, so profiting enormously from television advertising and subscriptions at the same time. And their plan worked, leading to huge revenues, but with one vital flaw: their model still depended on footballers, not executives. Footballers and their agents, seeing boardrooms newly awash with money, had a simple task pointing out to clubs that without the players' services, all that money would disappear, so they'd better start paying the players more of it, or they'd all go play in Italy. And so a self-defeating inter-league arms race blew up, and now leagues frantically compete for the most lucrative broadcasting deals, so that they can give all that revenue and more to the best players, to keep them away from the other leagues and prevent them getting the bigger broadcasting deals.
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