‘Football holds a mirror to ourselves,’ Michael Calvin asserts in State of Play. Modern football is angrier, more brutal, more unequal and simply more relentless than ever before.
The sense of a football club being rooted to its locality has been shattered. Globalisation, and hyper-commercialisation, means that local owners have been replaced by ‘speculators and savants’ from abroad. Locally reared players, victims of football’s global free market in talent, have become rare. To receive the TV bounty that teams in the Premier League enjoy, ‘You have to create the most competitive team, which doesn’t necessarily include young Johnny from the academy,’ explains Scott Duxbury, the chairman and chief executive of Watford — a club once renowned for developing academy graduates.
Yet Calvin’s rounded portrayal of the modern game — raw vignettes garnered from the rarefied elite of the sport to non-league matches which, like the game itself, are by turns surprising, uplifting and dispiriting — shows that yesterday was not always better.
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