JULIE BURCHILL ON FOOTBALL DEGENERATION - THE FIFTH BEATLE (Part 1)

Football halfway through the Seventies, when David Beckham was born, was a strange beast. It had lost the manly, love-of-the-game purity that we mope over in those old sepia photographs, but it was still far from being the Met Bar millionaires lark it is today.

In 1961 the same Jimmy Hill – the BHS Beelzebub of British TV Sport – had been a professional player (Brentford and Fulham) and leader of the Professional Footballers’ Union when he achieved the abolition of the players’ maximum wage – around £12 a week at the time of Tom Finney and Stanley Matthews – and it immediately shot up to around £500 for the best players. By the late Sixties and the coming of the Western Cultural revolution to the nation’s urban hotspots (which by the time it got to England had basically boiled down to kipper ties and shagging for all), footballers were young, rich and dumb enough to enjoy all the pleasures that came with breaking-down of deference, repression and tradition, and working class enough not to have the safety net that was always there for middle-class hippies when they’d taken one trip to many.

Footballers, previously Men to boy, became Lads. Increased leisure and affluence among the working class meant that, by the late Sixties – after ROSLA but before AIDS – young men didn’t have to grow up as quickly as their fathers had. There could be a period between leaving school and getting married when, once you’d clocked off, you did little more for five years than drink, dance, pull and go to the football.

The Seventies were when every Lad finally got his leg over, and they were everywhere, in all their feather-cut glory. Turn on the TV and there was Richard O’ Sullivan in Man

About the House, with his bra-and-suspenders plastic apron; every boy bar Dennis and the ‘Mummy’s little soldier’ one in Please Sir! Was at it; then there was Adam Faith’s Budgie, too thick to understand that it wasn’t easy to do a runner in clogs.

There were the great Lad pop stars: Rod Stewart, Ian Hunter, Phil Lynott, David Essex. Laugh-a-minute Lads like Jim Davidson. And even Lad lags: Ronnie Biggs, Johnny Bindon.

And there were sporting Lads: Barry Sheene, James Hunt. Malcolm Allison, who actually left his wife for ‘Bunny Serena’, was an Elderly Statesman of Lad. There were Lads wherever you looked. But Lad-dom, basically being about pissing it all the way, only twice produced anything approaching greatness. And they were Tom Jones and George Best.

Both men, though coming to fame in the Sixties, only came into their own (and everybody else’s) in the Seventies. They did all the things that Junior League Lads dreamed of in their wildest, wettest dreams: fathered boy children, knew that they could lick any girl in the room when they walked into Tramp, wore trousers that were truly an offence against theology and geometry. Above all, these Celtic princes drank for Wales and Ireland respectively. For Jones, this wasn’t such a problem; famous for his gravely voice and somewhat overblown physique, drink only made him growlier and jowlier – though even he languished in lush Las Vegas obscurity for a decade or two before knocking himself back into shape and becoming, at last, an icon of cool.  For Best, as an athlete, it was a tragedy – made even more so, and all the more self-perpetuating, by the fact that his beloved, shy mother also became an alcoholic in the process of his fame, and subsequently died of drink. If Best had no good reason to drink himself into oblivion when he began, he certainly does now.

But back then, on the cusp of the Sixties and

Seventies – that brief shimmering moment when, for the young working class, life did literally seem to be a dream – the Best effect was similar to the way that a generation of literary hopefuls had seen their dreams wash up on the rocks in their dirty glasses at the stained tables of Fitzrovia.

Like young would-be poets who noted that Brendan Behan and Dylan Thomas were poets who drank, and who sent on themselves to be drunks who wrote poems, young footballers started to grow their hair long like Best (‘The Fifth Beatle’), date bosomy blondes like Best and worst, drink like Best.

THE SPECIAL ONE

I'll asume that not everyone knows  this intelligent manager. Jose Mourinho is better known by his many admirers as The Special One. This well spoken gentleman is back in the media spotlight again. Here is a brief summary of his life thus far. Jose Mourinho was born on 26 January 1963 in Setubal, Portugal. He is a catholic and is a devoted family man.

In eight full seasons as a manager with FC Porto, Chelsea FC, FC Internazionale and Real Madrid, Jose Mourinho, 48, has won fifteen major trophies, including two UEFA Champions League titles and six domestic league championships.


Furthermore the tactian holds the record of playing one hundred and fifty home league matches without a loss with four different clubs over nine years.

Unlike most managers, Jose Mourinho broke into elite coaching not as a former star player – his brief career as a defender ended at age 24 – but as an interpreter. He translated for English manager Sir Bobby Robson for five seasons, first in Portugal and then in Spain, at FC Barcelona.

When Robson left FC Barcelona in 1997, Mourinho stayed on as an assistant coach under Louis Van Gaal, earning the Dutchman’s trust for his tactical acumen, player relationships and famously detailed scouting reports. Mourinho had started analysing teams as a teenager for his father, Felix, a former player and coach of Portugal.

By the time The Special One took over at FC Porto in the Portuguese first division 2002/03, he’d formed a guiding philosophy. "The decisive moments in most games are the transitions, the instants when teams spring from defense to attack (and vice versa) after a change of possession, when opponents can be off-balance". He argues that’s the reason why he desires to have players with the “tactical culture to analyse a game.”

My most memorable press conference of his was his first as Chelsea FC manager in 2004, when he grew exasperated by the skepticism over his arrival from his native Portugal. “The English Press was talking to me like I was coming from the moon”, he says. “Who are you? Do you have the quality to work in England? For God’s sake, give me a chance. I won the Champions League with FC Porto. I’m a special one. Don’t kill me on my first day! “But they got it as if I was saying” – here he adopts the voice of the Almighty – “I am The Special One”, Jose Mourinho explains.

Mourinho's worst defeat came during his "first clásico" encounter against FC Barcelona. The match, held in Nou Camp which ended 5-0 to the hosts, Real Madrid director Florentino Pérez regarded it as the worst game in the history of Real Madrid. The brilliant Jose Mourinho however made amends for the defeat when he won his first trophy in Spanish football as Real Madrid defeated FC Barcelona 1–0 in the Copa del Rey final held at the Mestalla in Valencia ending Real Madrid's eighteen-month-long cup drought.


He speaks five different languages fluently including: Portuguese, English, Italian, Spanish and French. Mourinho has a rule: when he addresses his teams, he does so in the language of the team’s country, the better to integrate the players into the club and the culture. At FC Internazionale he spoke Italian even though four out of his twenty-four man squad were Italian.

The Special One reminisces on his career: “I had the luck of making history in those three clubs,” he says. “At Porto it was winning the Champions League without any money. We played Manchester United and Real Madrid where the salary of one player was enough to pay the whole FC Porto team. Chelsesa was very special because it was the first time Chelsea was English champions in 50 years. In the Champions League with Inter we were far from being the most powerful team. We had to play four times in the competition against the best team in the world last season, which was Barcelona”.

In conclusion I think that the combination of Jose Mourinho and Real Madrid is very good for football.

CHELSEA FC THE BUSINESS OF FOOTBALL

Chelsea FC has an annual turnover is £210 million.  That is a drop in the ocean compared to that of their rivals, Real Madrid FC (£359 million), FC Barcelona (£326 million), Manchester United (£286 million) and Bayern Munich FC (£265million), although we are within striking distance of Arsenal FC 
(£224 million).

Many loyal Chelsea FC supporters would like the club to spend during the summer transfer window. Considering that this is Chelsea, this may be a blessing and a curse? 
I would call it a blessing because I believe that this ageing squad could do with a minor facelift.


And a curse because the UEFA Financial Fair Play rules, 2010/11 season accounting figures is the last 

year where the figures are excluded from UEFA break-even calculations.

Two years ago in the Chelsea FC Financial Report of 2009 our club reported a £27 millon loss. And in the latest Chelsea FC Financial Report 2010 the club reported a £71 million loss. This could have been a lot higher, considering the fact that Mr Abramovich clamped down on expenditure by (a) reducing the size of the squad by offloading what the Russian believes to be experienced, but yet expensive players and (b) cutting back on support staff.

So, why did the loss increase? And especially in a season when Chelsea FC secured their historic first FAPL and FA Cup double?

It’s mainly due to costs, as revenue is virtually unchanged, with wages being the main culprit, increasing by £20 million, though this was partially off-set by costs including £13 million severance payments to Luiz Felipe Scolari and his assistants. 







Last year Chelsea FC made a £29 million profit on player sales, ironically mainly due to the delayed payments for the transfers of Wayne Bridge and Tal Ben Haim to Manchester City (the “new Chelsea”) and Steve Sidwell to Aston Villa amongst other players and by taking these players off the books helped to reduce the wage bill by £11 million.

The players salaries has now reached an enormous £173 million, the highest ever reported by a FAPL club, which is £40 million more than Manchester United and Manchester City and £60 million more than Arsenal FC.

If it makes you feel any better there are two clubs with a higher payroll than our club which are the Spanish giants, Real Madrid and FC Barcelona, but their revenue is also considerably higher.

The 13% increase in wages, which includes a mysterious £8 million rise in pension costs, does not exactly seem to support Ronald Gourlay’s previous assertion that “we are reducing our costs by controlling expenses, including salaries and wages.”

Nor does the important wages to turnover ratio, which has worsened from 70% to 82% in the previous two years.


This is considerably higher than all but one of our rival UEFA Champions League rivals, the exception being Manchester City with a staggering 107%. It is nearly double the ratio of Manchester United and Arsenal FC.

To get back to UEFA’s recommended maximum limit of 70%, Chelsea FC would have to cut the wage bill by £26 million – or grow revenue by £37 million.


That might seem a hard task, given that there have been very little signs of revenue growth in the last couple of seasons.

In conclusion our club's turnover has fallen by £4 million since 2008, which should be addressed as this is a major weakness in our current business model if we are to compete against our UEFA rivals.