Football is less equal than ever – now we need the spirit of those great Socialists of the game

By Sunder Katwala

It is a curious fact that so many of the all-time great British football managers have tended to be Labour.

The great Bill Shankly’s footballing philosophy was “The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It’s the way I see football, the way I see life”.

Alex Ferguson is New Labour: his claim to have held true to traditional football values while dealing with the dizzying money-dominated world of the modern game might well stand up to scrutiny better than the government’s.

And perhaps the most famous footballing socialist of them all was Brian Clough – who was apparently twice asked by Harold Wilson to stand as a Labour parliamentary candidate. Clough believed in “a bloody slice of cake for all” though he was more of a top-down than a participatory democrat.

Thirty years ago this month, Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest won the first of two successive European Cups. It was an astonishing achievement. Forest had won the league as a newly promoted club in 1978, having finished third in the second division the year before.

Even Alastair Campbell, as the most partisan of Burnley supporters, would not dare to hope that a play-off victory on Monday week could be the springboard to a Premiership title next season, before turning the Champions League claret and blue too. That is what Clough did.

New Fabian research by myself and Tom Stratton, published today on the Fabian website, shows why Clough’s European triumph was the last gasp of the football era of the “level playing field” of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.

That this came three weeks after the 1979 general election may be a matter of chance, or a political allegory.

The data offers the first detailed study of how ‘football mobility’ fell and it demonstrates how the dominance of the big four today is very different from that of the top clubs in previous eras. Football always had big and small clubs – a class system, if you like. But it was open, fluid and meritocratic. Today, we have a caste system where social mobility has collapsed.

English club football was astonishingly competitive and meritocratic across the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s: we had the most competitive and widely contested football in Europe.

As Manchester United prepare to clinch their 11th league championship, what a contrast that is with the eleven different clubs who won the league in fourteen years. There were seven champions in seven years twice, between 1959-65 and again from 1967-73. How excited could SkySports have got about hyping that?

Would younger fans believe that any team in the top division could believe it had a real shot at glory? Burnley could indeed win the title and did so, as did Ipswich Town and Derby County. We show that promoted teams had more chance of finishing in the top six than of going straight back down. Being the richest club in the country was no guarantee of success: Manchester United could be relegated just six years after winning the European Cup, and went twenty-five years between league titles until the age of the Premiership.

Money began to matter more in the 1980s and 1990s. But not nearly so much as it has in the last ten years. On every indicator, the last decade has been the most predictable and least competitive in English football history. The big four form not so much a class system as a caste system. Promoted clubs dream not of winning silverware, but of 17th place. Even the FA Cup – which had nine different winners in the 1970s – has become almost as predictable as the league, so that a top six club like Everton is seen as a shock Cup finallist.

I am not, on every count, a footballing traditionalist. Many different things changed in the 1990s. Italia ’90. Gazza’s tears. Fever Pitch. All-seater stadia. Cantona and a wave of football immigration. The Premiership. Beckham. The Champions League, and all the rest. We can all debate what got better and what got worse. Few of us will find ourselves entirely on one side of the question.

But nobody can deny the fact that football is now much more stratified and less broadly contested than it was in the recent past. This is not a “jumpers and goalposts” argument that you have to take all of the money out of the game and return to the 1950s. There was a lot more money in football in the 1970s – but it was distributed in a way that maintained competitive balance. So our evidence offers powerful support for calls from UEFA President Michel Platini and British Culture Secretary Andy Burnham that more needs to be done to distribute the Champions League money and level the playing field to give more fans a chance. If nothing changes off the field, it is difficult to see anything significant changing on it.

That might sound like socialism – but the principle is well understood in the United States of America, where salary caps and draft systems help to level the playing field.

You can tell there are many genuine football fans at the top of the Labour Party when you look at the teams which Cabinet members support. There aren’t too many glory hunters there, with fans of Raith Rovers, Blackburn, Everton, Norwich City and Southampton are all represented at the top table.

While LabourList has now escaped the clutches of Derek Draper, I hear rumours that the editorship has now fallen, under Alex Smith, into the hands of the Red Devils of Old Trafford. So let us congratulate Manchester United and their fans on (yet) another great season. That there were only ever three other clubs in with a shout last August does not undermine Alex Ferguson’s claim to be among the all-time greats. And Fergie has not just turned United into the dominant club of the age – but he was among the last to come closest to doing a Cloughie in taking Aberdeen to a European Cup Winners Cup triumph over mighty Real Madrid.

Yet the next Clough – Martin O’Neill or David Moyes perhaps – now risks hitting the glass ceiling and not able to win the glittering prizes except by auditioning for Ferguson’s job at Old Trafford.

Equality of opportunity requires more than everyone starting next season with no points. It must be time to level football’s playing field again.

* ‘Sing When You’re Winning: What we can learn from the collapse of social mobility in football‘ by Sunder Katwala and Tom Stratton can be read online at fabians.org.uk.