Ideas@TheCentre
World Cup of Capitalism
Last Sunday, England’s football team once more crashed out of a World Cup at the hands of the ‘old enemy,’ Germany (who had thrashed Australia just a week earlier).
There’s nothing new about the English national team failing at the top level. The Germans have out-performed England at every World Cup tournament since 1966. But the disappointment was particularly bitter this time, for Germany fielded a young and inexperienced team while England’s ‘golden generation’ was expected to fulfil its destiny. In the event, they didn’t just lose – they were humiliated.
There were excuses and mitigating factors, but all the pundits afterwards agreed that something is profoundly wrong at the heart of the English game. Which is where the debate becomes interesting for those of us who believe in free markets.
The English game is awash with cash, mostly from the sale of television rights. In the Premier League, player salaries in excess of A$200,000 per week are common, and top players change clubs for fees of £50 million upwards. Crude, immature but rich football stars lacking any charm or grace provide the nation’s youth with its ugly role models.
To win the Premier League, a club needs a plutocrat chairman with bottomless pockets. Chelsea broke into the charmed circle after a Russian multi-millionaire bought the club as his London plaything. Manchester City followed the same route – it is now owned by a Middle Eastern sheik. Smaller clubs like Portsmouth bankrupt themselves in a desperate attempt to stay in this company, their proud histories counting for nothing.
Emulating the top clubs, the FA tried at this World Cup to buy success for the England national team by recruiting the world’s top coach, Fabio Capello, on a salary of $10 million per year (double what the next-best-paid coach at the World Cup gets). But Capello failed, just as all his predecessors failed, for the squad performed worse than ever.
In Germany, they do things differently. Instead of clubs harvesting the most talented players from around the world, the German FA invested in a network of regional nurseries to nurture their own. There are rules to stop clubs being taken over by carpetbaggers, and (unlike England) all games involving the national team must be broadcast on free-to-air TV. The national team is coached by a German, to encourage other local coaches.
These two contrasting footballing cultures reflect two different models of capitalism. On the one hand, the swashbuckling Anglo-American model of light regulation, global openness, and razzle-dazzle; on the other, the much more conservative Rhine-Japanese model emphasising long-term planning and national consensus. Personally, I’ve always been drawn more to the former. But on the football field at least, the evidence seems to suggest that the latter brings consistently better results.
Professor Peter Saunders is a Senior Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
