A Manifesto For The Beautiful Game
As much as we tell football that we “love it just the way it is”, we see room for improvement: 20 suggestions for making the beautiful game absolutely bloody gorgeous.
After three months of footie-drought (no, the Confederations Cup does not count), the start of the season is finally upon us. And you know what? As much as we tell football that we “love it just the way it is”, we see room for improvement. Here are our suggestions for making the beautiful game absolutely bloody gorgeous…
1. TREAT THE AWAY FANS RIGHT
Football is not a garden tea party; passions and rivalries run high and deep. That’s not to say there isn’t a right way to treat opposition fans. Just look at Brighton & Hove Albion: visitors to the Falmer Stadium are actually made to feel welcome. “We light up the concourse at the away end in the colours of the visiting team,” enthuses one club representative. “And we always serve at least one local ale from that region.” Why stop there though? Stadiums should prepare their guests’ regional food too. Unless Fulham are coming to town. No one likes quiche.
2. INTRODUCE AUGMENTED REALITY
You know in FIFA, where you press a button and see a player’s condition and stamina bars pop up next to them? Imagine that in real life. It’s called augmented reality and will be one use of Google Glass, the tech giant’s forthcoming mind-bending product. “How cool would it be to have real-time player stats like ‘pass completion rate’ appearing in front of your eyes from your seat?” says Google’s Stephen Rosenthal. “That is absolutely in the realms of possibility.”
3. ULTRA POWER
Ever sat through a Sunday midday kick-off at Arsenal? The atmosphere’s as flat as Nemanja Vidic’s nose. We need more of the European ultra culture. Those hardcore flare-flinging fans live by one rule – no matter what the score, you never stop singing. The Premier League could get a taste of this soon with Crystal Palace’s promotion back to the top flight. The Holmesdale Fanatics, founded in 2005, are a non-violent group with the aim of “creating a strong unit, with visual and vocal dominance”. Their relentless (and we mean relentless) singing should be part of every ground.
4. HUMILIATE DIVERS
How do you solve a problem like diving? Simple. Shame those that tarnish football’s pure qualities by awarding players that go to ground too easily (cough, Gareth Bale, cough) a pink card. The player with the highest number of pink cards at the end of the season gets presented with a ceremonial girls’ blouse.
5. PUT TVS IN THE BACK OF SEATS
Social media, smartphones and tablets have altered the way in which fans consume football both at home and down the pub. It’s time to take this immersive experience into the grounds. Having a TV in the back of seats would allow fans to catch up with the action in other games or see parts of the match obscured by that annoying pillar. “The technology is definitely there to do this,” confirms Samsung’s Lali Parikh. “It’s really up to the stadium designers to invest in the experience of their visitors.”
6. GO GREEN
The sleepy Gloucestershire town of Nailsworth might seem an unlikely outpost to be at the vanguard of a football revolution, but thanks to local club Forest Green Rovers, it’s become just that. “We want to be the first club with a zero carbon footprint,” says its chairman Dale Vince. They’ve installed solar panels on the stands, which supply 20% of the club’s electricity, and laid the world’s first organic pitch, cut by a solar-powered robot. Players, meanwhile, eat a meat-free diet, and share a fleet of electric cars.
7. HOLOGRAPHIC REPLAYS
So you’re sitting in the pub with your mates, having just watched your club’s luxury winger curl in a perfect free-kick. You all lose your shit like a bunch of gibbons at a warehouse rave. What could make it better? How about watching a miniaturised, holographic replay, right there on the middle of your table? “You could bring footballers to life in your local pub,” says Ismail Hanif, chairman of award-winning hologram design firm SquareZero. “It would basically look like they were playing in front of you. At the moment it’s too expensive to set up in most places, but the price of tech falls faster than Luis Suárez when he’s got sight of the goal.”
8. LIVE MASCOTS
Forget Swansea City’s Cyril – a man standing 7ft tall in a slightly creepy swan costume. Nobody who’s seen Portuguese giants Benfica at home will ever forget Vitória – a real, live eagle – flying from high in the stands, swooping around the stadium and eventually landing on a podium on the halfway line before each match. Hopefully, Alan Pardew has spent his summer training flocks of magpies to do his bidding.
9. MIC UP THE REFS
In American football, the refs are all mic'd up. This serves a dual purpose. Firstly, you wouldn’t have situations where the crowd are having to guess why a free kick has been awarded. Secondly, it might prevent refs from having abuse screamed into their faces (because any spicy language picked up by the mic is probably not going to amuse the offending player’s multi-national sponsors). And admit it – you’re sort of curious to hear what Mark Clattenburg actually sounds like.
10. LESS MEDIA TRAINING FOR PLAYERS
Is it unreasonable to want our football heroes to express a bit of personality when engaging with the wider world? Let’s have more players using Instagram to provide us with the sort of eloquent insight that clubs’ official channels fail to. So more photos of Southampton’s Dejan Lovren larking about with a humongous Hello Kitty doll, the bookshelf of QPR's Esteban Granero and Real Madrid’s Xabi Alonso enjoying a beach sunset, please.
11. BETTER FOOD ON MATCH DAYS
The stodgy pie and pint of weak lager combo needs a makeover more urgently than Paolo Di Canio needs a thorough psychiatric evaluation. We turned to Masterchef regular and executive chef at Salt Yard Group, Ben Tish to rethink the standard match-day meal. Here’s what he cooked up… (a) Spicy chorizo sour dough sandwich with alioli, watercress and manchego cheese (b) Chips cooked in olive oil with smoked paprika salt and chorizo ketchup (c) Empanada with braised salt marsh lamb, peas, broad beans and mint in puff pastry (d) Iberico pork burger with red onion marmalade, lettuce, alioli and Gorgonzola.
12. MORE KICK-ASS APPS
Most of us can’t get through a game on TV without texting mates or boasting about our team on Twitter, so we want to see more creative apps to help us feel involved. Check out the recently launched Picklive, in which you select five players from the match and compete against other players in a game room who have done the same. Whoever scores the most points via goals and assists takes the pot.
13. FANS RUN THE CLUB
Sick of complaining about your club’s clueless board? Why not do like League Two's AFC Wimbledon and install the supporters as directors? “Most fans would love to be involved with their clubs, but about 400 of ours actually are,” says AFCW’s chief executive Erik Samuelson, a retired accountant. “There are 60-70 volunteers involved every match day and the rest of us have an extraordinary range of important roles behind the scenes.” Don’t get any ideas about voting for a million dollar bank loan to buy Lionel Messi, though. “My main job is to ensure that we don’t take risks with the club’s finances,” Samuelson says.
14. REWARD TEAMS THAT KEEP ATTACKING
Football fans might dry heave at the idea that their sport could learn anything from rugby union. But it could. “Football could do well to follow rugby, which has begun to crack down on the dark art of slowing down play,” says sports writer Mike Pattenden. “As in rugby, free-kicks could be awarded against teams who try to run down time by noodling around in the corner while grimly holding on to a one-goal lead.” The league could also reward exciting football by, as in rugby union, awarding extra points for a large number of goals – say six – scored by a team in a match.
15. DO IT LIKE THE GERMANS
Back in the day, German fans used to travel to the UK to sample the unique vibe at our grounds. These days it’s the other way round, with more and more Brits flying to Dortmund, Hamburg and Munich to catch fussball, Bundesliga style. “Ticket prices, terracing, the banners and flags, big well-built stadiums – it all creates a special ambiance,” says German football pundit Raphael Honigstein. “We have the highest attendance and the lowest ticket prices in Europe. German clubs are real clubs. Supporters feel enfranchised, thanks to things like the 50+1 rule, which means club members retain at least 51% ownership, rather than an outside oligarch.”
16. HAVE RETRO THIRD KITS
Football was not better “back in the day”. The pitches in the ’50s and ’60s resembled battlefields and the violence dished out on a regular basis was equally brutal. One exception: the kits. The tops sported back in the day were lessons in simple, understated elegance. Check out the Internazionale or Liverpool strips from the 1960s for proof. So why not make every club’s third kit an old-school throwback? Just look at the positive reaction to the retro kits the Manchester clubs sported in their 2008 clash, marking the 50th anniversary of the Munich air disaster.
17. FUTURE FOOTBALLS
In medieval times, football – or an early variant of it – would involve anything that could be kicked: leather wine bottles and pig bladders were popular. These days balls are getting clever. Adidas tells us it’s developing one that senses the weather conditions and adapts, using air pressure, accordingly. So no more whining about the “weird bouncing” when your team plays in some frozen-over Europa League Baltic hell-hole.
18. OWNERS SHOULD LOVE THE CLUB… NOT JUST THE CASH
If money was no object, which football club would you buy? Arsenal? Real Madrid? For Fawaz Al- Hasawi, a man with the aforementioned riches, there was but one option: Nottingham Forest. “I was offered other clubs to buy. But Nottingham Forest was the one I wanted,” he said at the time. Fawaz came of age when Forest were a European powerhouse, and he’s stuck with them ever since. “I don’t think of myself as a sugar daddy. I’m just a football-mad man who’s lucky enough to be able to help.”
19. BETTER NICKNAMES
American sport is saturated with cool nicknames – basketball player Karl Malone was The Mailman because he always delivered; American football star Joe Namath was Broadway Joe because of his flashy style. Over here, Steven Gerrard is known as (drumroll) Stevie G. Frank Lampard? Lamps. Ryan Giggs? Giggsy. We – as a culture – can do better than this. Proof? Watford defender “One Size” Fitz Hall. More of the same, please.
20. PAY TO PLAY
Macclesfield Town FC recently announced the idea of allowing members of the public to turn out for their first team for 10 minutes (in exchange for a cool 20 grand). Screw the haters: this would be an awesome way to make friendlies interesting. From some fanciful sheikh who reckons he can keep up with Robin van Persie for 600 seconds, to Richard Branson shelling out a million quid to temporarily fill in for Joe Hart, pay-to-play would make pre-season matches, at the very least, bizarrely fascinating.
From the October 2013 issue of FHM India.
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