| Why football's lost level playing field matters |
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If the game is all about opinions, one issue can be settled as a matter of fact. The playing field used to be much more level. The top honours of English football used to be much more broadly contested than they are today. Not so long ago, fans of any club in the top division could reasonably believe that - if the manager could put together a great team and get a bit of luck - they could have a decent shot at winning not just the FA Cup but the league title too, according to Sing When You Are Winning: What We Can Learn From the Collapse of Social Mobility in Football. But that is no longer the case. Every fan knows that something has changed - as the same top four teams fill the top four positions for the 4th year in a row and the 5th year in six, as everybody anticipated in August that they would. But there have been few attempts to scrutinise and assess exactly what has changed. There have always been big clubs and teams which defined an era of football. Is the dominance of the biggest clubs today really so different from that of the achievements of Bill Nicolson at Spurs, Matt Busby at Manchester United, or Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley at Liverpool? The evidence in this report shows that football today is very different from those earlier periods of dominance. The last decade has been easily the least competitive and most predictable in English football history. This arises from a collapse of social mobility between clubs over the last thirty years, reaching new levels of uncompetitiveness over the last ten years. There have been four league champions since the Premiership began in 1993. As Manchester United prepare to clinch their 11th league title in those seventeen seasons, who would believe that there were eleven different league champion clubs in just fourteen years from 1959 to 1972, when clubs like Burnley and Ipswich Town were able to compete with the biggest clubs and finish top of the pile? Thirty years after Brian Clough's Nottingham Forest conquered Europe, on the back of winning the league in their first season after promotion, there is little doubt that even the genius of Clough would hit the glass ceiling and fall victim to football's stalled social mobility today. Football has always had a class system with big and small clubs, but we can see that it was a relatively open, fluid and meritocratic one. What has changed even in the last decade is that today's permanent super-elite do not so much form a class system as a caste system, where they are in effect no longer competing in the same league as other teams, say authors Sunder Katwala and Tom Stratton. So England has moved over the last three decades from the very top to near the bottom of the European football mobility league, from having the most competitive and openly contested league football in post-war Europe to among the most predictable. The changes behind this collapse in footballing mobility appear deep and possibly permanent. There is certainly no reason to believe that they could be reversed on the pitch without significant changes off it. Indeed, the evidence suggests that there is every chance of football becoming still less competitive and more stratified than it is now. 'Social mobility in football': what are we looking for? In looking at what we call "social mobility" in football, we are interested in how competitive the game is and how that changes over time, looking at the following three issues: 1. Who can win prizes? If more teams win and compete seriously for the league championship and FA Cup, that is good evidence of a level playing field and a football meritocracy. 2. Is there room at the top? Can newly promoted teams hope to compete for the glittering prizes, or is there a ceiling to their ambitions? 3. Is downward mobility possible? Can the mighty fall and fear relegation, or does past success enable bigger clubs to form a permanent elite? This is an assessment of social mobility at the top of the English club game, in the top league (the old division one and the Premier League since 1992) and the FA Cup. A further concern is to consider how we might explain patterns of competition, mobility and immobility, particularly to see if it is possible to assess the relative weight of two different sets of hypotheses and factors affecting football competitiveness. Individual factors - the rise and fall of great players, managers and teams - will impact on how competitive and contested football is. If these factors dominate, we might well expect fluctuations in competitiveness and mobility as the influence of particular individuals and teams ebbs and flows over time. Structural factors - If there are strong and sustained changes in just one direction, that would suggest the organisation, governance and finance of the game are more important than the impact of individuals. THE COLLAPSE OF SOCIAL MOBILITY IN FOOTBALL: three eras of footballing competition The evidence suggests there were three distinct eras of footballing competition in the post-war era. (1) 1950- 1979: Football's level playing field (2) 1980s and 1990s: Mobility lost: the transition to football's new class system (3) Post-1998: 'Same old top four': locking in the caste system of football's new permanent super-elite. WHO CAN HAVE PRIZES? Footballing eras compared See PDF at end of essay for table (1) The level playing field, 1950-79 There was a level playing field at the top of English football during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The golden age of social mobility in football was a long one. Here are five key indicators of how social mobility has systematically fallen. (i) "We're going to win the league": how every club had a shot at glory There were eleven different league champion clubs in 16 years from 1959-75, compared to four in the 16 years since the Premiership began. The big clubs competed for honours, but they were not the only ones, victories of Burnley, Ipswich Town and Derby County, like that of Nottingham Forest in 1978, show how any club which could make the top division had reason to dream of putting together a league winning side. Could fans today imagine seven different teams winning the league in seven years, as happened from 1959 to 1965 (Wolves, Burnley, Spurs, Ipswich, Everton, Liverpool, Man Utd), and then again from 1967 to 1973 (Man Utd, Man City, Leeds Utd, Everton, Arsenal, Derby, Liverpool)? For contrast the current sequence will end Man Utd, Arsenal, Chelsea, Chelsea, Man Utd, Man Utd, Man Utd, which involves a tiny bit more oligarch-funded competition than the previous sequence of Man Utd, Man Utd, Arsenal, Man Utd, Man Utd, Man Utd, Arsenal. (ii) No more room at the top: why a new Clough is now impossible Football's lost level playing field is best symbolised by Brian Clough's achievement in conquering Europe with Nottingham Forest in 1979. Forest had been third in the second division in 1977, yet were champions of England at the first attempt in 1978, followed by successive European Cups. Yet this was not nearly as unthinkable as the idea of Birmingham City or Wolves conquering Europe in the next two years would seem today. Ipswich Town won the league in their first season in 1962; Liverpool won the title in their second season after promotion in 1964; and Clough himself had taken just three seasons in the top flight to win the league for Derby County in 1972. Across the 'fifties, 'sixties, 'seventies and 'eighties a newly promoted team was more likely to finish in the top six in their first season than go straight back down. In those three decades, the chances of immediate relegation were just 10-15%. In the 1990s and 2000s, the chances of immediate relegation has risen to 40%. No newly promoted side has won the title since Clough did so in 1978. Tiny Watford finished second in their first ever top flight season in 1983, and reached the Cup final the following year. The chances of newly promoted teams finishing in the top six have almost disappeared: they fell below 5% in the last decade and seem likely to fall further. Since Ipswich finished 5th in 2001, no promoted team has finished in the top six. The best perfomance since - Reading's 8th place in 2007 - won plaudits for seeing off the almost universal assumption that they would go straight back down . (Both sides were relegated the following season). Even that seemed as unlikely an achievement as Clough's league championship. A glass ceiling is now in place. Promoted teams now dream of 17th place, not of silverware. (iv) The end of downward mobility Most talk of social mobility is of upward mobility - but football's meritocracy was always based on downward mobility too. How long does it take Champions to get relegated? That now seems a daft question. Nobody can foresee Chelsea, Manchester United or Arsenal being relegated from the Premiership in the near future. Yet, at least one title-winning club was relegated within the next decade in the 1960s, '70s, '80s and '90s. Some of the smaller clubs who won the title found themselves on the roller-coaster back down. Ipswich Town were relegated in 1964 just two years after winning the league; Derby went down in 1980 just five years after being champions; Aston Villa after six years in 1987. But it could happen to giant clubs too. That Manchester United were relegated in 1974 - just seven years after winning the league and six after being champions of Europe - was a shock, but relegation was never an unthinkable prospect even for the biggest teams. That is why fans and commentators suggest there is no such thing as "too good to go down". But there are now clubs that are too big to go down. Two of the 1990s champions have been relegated: that took 11 years for Leeds (1992-2003) and just four for Blackburn. But they could be the last for decades. It is too soon to state definitively as a matter of fact that this can not happen to the champions of the last decade - Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal - but nobody would bet on them even coming close. None of the big four have finished outside the top six for ten years. We have clear evidence of how more strongly entrenched league champions have become: that can be seen clearly from how teams perform the following year, and over the next five to ten years. To take a longer-term perspective, the average position of the champion clubs of the 1950s over the next ten seasons was 10th, while the champions of the 1960s and 1970s finished 8th-9th on average over the next decade. That fell to 5th in the 1980s. By the 1990s, the average position of all champions over the next decade had fallen to 4th. Current projections from the decade just finishing suggest that, if current trends are sustained and the big four do not face new competition, this could even fall as low as 2nd as the average position for the next 10 years after a team wins the league, again suggesting a fairly fundamental change towards stratification and immobility. The removal of the threat of relegation in a bad year is a very recent change. Aston Villa were relegated in 1987 six years after being champions, while Everton dramatically escaped on the final day seven years after their 1987 title. Two 1990s champions have been relegated since - though Leeds were relegated eleven years after their title win; and Blackburn after four years. That previous champions can not leave the top division mirrors the inability of new entrants to make a serious attempt to win it. Downward mobility for champion clubs now means finishing outside the top four - something that is almost always avoided. And the implosion of Leeds United suggests that the main threat of downward mobility is no longer managerial transitions or an ageing squad - but rather the financial implosion of excessively leveraged borrowing, debt servicing and the attempt to keep up with the other elite clubs. (iv) How the magic of the cup was lost We expected to find much higher mobility and openness in the FA Cup - where six matches can win the Cup - than in the marathon of a league title over 38 or 42 games. This proves partially true, but it is a much weaker effect than we expected. The golden era of the unpredictability of the FA Cup was the 1970s. Nine different teams won the cup in that decade - and their average league position was 11th, ranging from champions Arsenal completing the Double to the famous shock victories of second division Sunderland and Southampton. The 1980s also began with second division West Ham winning the Cup, and included famous victories for Coventry City and Wimbledon, but marked the beginning of an era when only the biggest clubs won the Cup. It is striking firstly that the Football League was often almost as open as the FA Cup in the era of high mobility - with more league champions than cup winners in the 1960s. But most notable is just how concentrated among the elite the chances of winning the FA Cup have also now become - making the Cup almost as predictable than the league. Since 1995, only Portsmouth in 2008 (8th) have won the FA Cup from outside the top six. The vintage Cup tournament of 2008 stands out as exceptional in a highly predictable last two decades entirely dominated by the biggest clubs. Even Everton (6th in the table) are seen as shock Cup finalists and unlikely winners (and where their place in the final partly reflects the lack of priority the biggest clubs give to the tournament). The concentration of the top domestic honours has made the once highly elusive league and cup double an almost commonplace occurrence. prior to Bill Nicolson's Tottenham famously winning the 20th century's first Double in 1961 it was thought to demand an almost impossible combination of skill, stamina and luck. Every football fan could cite 1961, 1971 and 1986 as years when the famous Double was achieved, and probably cite several heroic near misses too. Yet having been achieved just three times in over ninety years, the double was then completed five times in nine years (three times by Manchester United and twice by Arsenal) after 1994 ---- (v) How the transition years of the 1980s and 1990s were much more competitive than today The 1980s and 1990s were the years when football's new class structure began to take place. Yet, with hindsight, it is striking just how much more open and competitive football was than it has become, even in the early years of the Premiership. There were just four league champions in the 1980s. Liverpool's 1980s dominance perhaps surpassed that of any previous top club. And the brief Merseyside duopoly, as Everton won two league titles (1985, 1987) and reached three successive FA Cup finals (1984-86), before fading back into the pack saw concerns about predictability and a lack of competitiveness. Yet Everton's achievements were achieved on means available to several rival clubs. Not just Man Utd, Spurs and Arsenal but Aston Villa, Newcastle, Sheffield Wednesday, Leeds United, Manchester City and others, could all believe that success was not beyond their grasp. Being biggest or richest was no guarantee of silverware. Manchester United still staked a claim to be the biggest club in the land, but went 25 years without winning the league title between 1967 and 1992. Downward mobility was falling: the biggest clubs were less likely to be relegated, as Spurs and United had been in the 'seventies. Nevertheless some upward mobility remained possible. The FA Cup victories of Coventry City (1987) and Wimbledon (1988) were famous and unlikely shocks. Nor were unlikely dreams of league glory out of reach. Tiny Watford were runners-up to Liverpool in their first ever season in the top flight (1983). Even in the first two years of the Premiership, unfashionable Norwich City (1993) and newly promoted Newcastle United (1994) finished third, having attempted a title challenge for much of the season. Across the 1990s, twice as many clubs made it to the top four of the league as they have in the last decade. Leeds United finished fourth as a newly promoted club in 1991 and won the league in their second season in 1992: the last pre-Premiership season of the old football league. Blackburn Rovers, lavishly funded by Jack Walker, finished 4th in their first season before winning the Premiership at the third attempt in 1995. These were the last times that any club won the league within a decade of joining the elite. They look likely to be the last to do so for quite some time. A newly promoted club hoping to compete seriously for the championship even in their first five or ten years in the top flight can no longer rely on a great manager putting together a formidable team. There appears to be only one route of competitiveness available for those outside the elite: 'upward mobility by oligarch'. Why did football's mobility collapse? Why did mobility collapse? The causes are not especially complicated. As more money came into the game, it was distributed more unequally than ever before. To those that had, more was given. First, the game's traditions of relatively egalitarian redistribution were ditched. Until 1983 gate receipts were shared between the home and away team. That redistribution ended. Secondly, the decision was taken to change the structure of the game. The mid-1980s TV deal meant more money for the biggest clubs and ended threats of a breakaway 'super league'. But in the early '90s, the Premiership would form its own gated community, segregating itself from the broader football society. Thirdly, English football was part of a broader restructuring of European competition which would create an entrenched global elite. At first, turning the European Cup into the Champions League did not make a great deal of difference, beyond making European football more lucrative. But the introduction of group stages and restructuring of the tournament after 1997 to admit runners-up, and then third and fourth placed teams has had a very significant impact. Every fan knows it is the rewards associated with the four places in the Champions League which underpin the new caste system in English football. Finally, future attempts to question what had changed could be rebuffed by noting that we could not handicap our best teams who now competed in the global football marketplace, and very successfully too. Any attempt to reverse football's stalled mobility may well have to be a continent-wide project. The level playing field? Lessons from football It is striking just how closely the collapse of football's social mobility reflects changes in British society. It is apt that Brian Clough took the European Cup back to Nottingham in May 1979, three weeks after Margaret Thatcher had entered Downing Street. The big changes in British football came at the end of the Thatcher era, and were inspired by her social philosophy. If the big clubs had once believed in a broader football community - through a mixture of enlightened self-interest, paternalism and solidarity - they no longer did so. The much cited LSE study published in 2002 on how social mobility fell in post-war Britain found that those born in 1958 experienced greater mobility than those born in 1970, while the early evidence is that this fall in mobility has stabilised (but not been reversed) for more recent cohorts. So the cohort born in 1958 could reasonably expect better jobs than their parents. They expected football to be exciting and competitive too - growing up during the age of football super-meritocracy with different champions almost every season, turning 18 as Southampton won the FA Cup and QPR fell just short of the league title, as they entered the labour market in the mid-1970s. But their experiences in the labour market or in the final years of the football terraces were not repeated by the 1970 cohort - Thatcher's children who left education from 1986 to 1988. They turned eighteen as Wimbledon won their unlikely FA Cup victory, yet could see Liverpool's dominance being taken over by Arsenal and Manchester United. If the collapse in football's social mobility in the 1980s and 1990s mirrored that in society, there has been a difference in the last decade. New Labour has not managed to reverse inequality - but it has checked and held back the tide of rising inequality. Football has been different. Football's inequality has been allowed to accelerate and let rip in the last decade. The Football Association have offered us equality of opportunity from the FA Hayek textbook of libertarian economics which so influenced Margaret Thatcher. After all, every team starts the season level-pegging on no points. Every team plays 38 matches, playing everybody else home and away. The rule of law is in place: nobody can bribe the referee. Each team can only play eleven players at a time. This is the equality of opportunity that asserts that the Premiership title could just as much end up in the hands of Hull City or Sunderland as at Old Trafford again. It just never happens. What can be done? There are two separate debates: one about sport, and one about society. The problem with football is not that there is money in the game. There was a lot more money in 1970s football than 1950s football. Brian Clough broke the £1 million transfer record. The real question is how that money is distributed. Restoring mobility to football is not a question of returning to the 1950s or earlier on a traditionalist 'jumpers for goalposts' agenda. It is a question of governance in the interests of the game. There has been a failure of governance. This is well understood in the United States of America - where a strongly capitalist society practices sporting socialism - salary caps, the draft system - because of a belief that this is the only way to protect competitiveness (and, indeed, the profitability of franchises). And it is increasingly understood in Europe - as Michel Platini makes modest proposals to counter the trend of stratification in football. These are being presented as a threat to the competitiveness of the Premier League - but many English fans will think they are in our long-term interests too. There is also a link between the debate about football and about broader inequalities. Because one - perhaps the most common - response to current levels of inequality and immobility is fatalism.It is too easy to say 'this is the way of the world' and that nothing can be done. So football's collapsed social mobilty could be used to promote fatalism about how inequality is inevitable because talents are unequal. Yet this is a question of governance and of choice: we have powerful evidence of just how much more open and competitive football once was in the recent past, just as we can see how other liberal democratic societies like those in Scandinavia prosper while choosing to be more equal. Football's collapsed social mobility should be used as one of the most powerful examples used to show why equality of opportunity can not happen by chance. A lot of people express concern about social mobility and will do so in the run-up to the next General Election. The real test is whether they talk about inequality too - and recognise how strongly today's unequal outcomes will become tomorrow's unequal opportunities unless there is an effort made to level the playing field. The authors are Sunder Katwala, Fabian Society general secretary and an Evertonian, and Tom Stratton, who carried out the historical research for this project and who supports Arsenal.  Click here for a graph on football mobility 1950s-2009 (*2000-09 could end as 6 winning clubs and Cup winners if Everton, not Chelsea, win FA Cup in 2009)
Other graphs and data, click on PDFs below: |
Nostalgia in football can be a dangerous thing. Many different debates get mixed up: the terraces against all-seater stadia; the impact of foreign talent on the domestic game; whether today's players require skills and athleticism in a different league from their forebears, or whether the achievements of a Moore, Best, or Cantona will ever be surpassed. Debates about the greatest teams, players and goals will never be resolved, according to a new Fabian report on football mobility.
