Is Football Becoming Too Much Of A Money Oriented Sport?

Football, a sport that has revolutionised over the last 50 years or so. In the last 3-12 years, we have been seeing clubs with truck loads of money dominating the footballing scene. Teams like Chelsea and Manchester City. We want to ask one question, Is football becoming too much of a money oriented sport?

The main thing we people have to look back at is the money spending and money oriented clubs like Chelsea and Manchester City. For Chelsea Football Club a russian businessman by the name of Roman Abramovich bought the club back in 2003, now Chelsea have won 4 league titles in the last 11 seasons and 1 UEFA Champions League.

This clearly indicates that money can make a huge difference to a team's success. Chelsea were not known to be a footballing superpower but after the russian takeover everything changed and since they are dominating, other fans are hating them even more because of the success overnight. Aayush, a student at UWCSEA East and a proud Chelsea fan does claim that money buys trophies but says that money doesn't buy happiness. All he cares is that the club wins trophies whether the fans are happy or not so because success only matters. He also only cares about the team and if they win. Look, football nowadays have fans like this but are we losing the joy of feeling the game. Chelsea fans are probably the first set of fans to be like they are.

Plus, they are known to play boring football. If you want the sport to be interesting you have to make the game more intense. How do you do that you ask? Well the team has to create more chances and score more goals because at the end of the day whichever team that has more goals wins. According to myfootballfacts.com, during Chelsea’s 4 league winning seasons, the average goals per game ratio in the league is 2.59 goals. Compare that ratio to other seasons, it is actually low. not only that but the whole average GPG ratio for all of the Premier League seasons are 2.64 goals. This offers evidence that defence wins titles though all of the fans may have not enjoyed it with less goals being scored.

Fast Forward to 2008 when another mid table English team Manchester City Football Club was bought buy Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the head of the Abu Dhabi United Group and was also Deputy Prime Minister of the UAE. What followed for the club were 2 league titles in the last 4 seasons.

As exciting as football is, these clubs that used to finish mid table are dominating their respective leagues and rose to fame for the reason of money. Manchester City had not won the league title in 44 years until the 2011-2012 season where they won it in their 4th season after the arab takeover. Not to mention they also have had the same impact as Chelsea by winning because of money.

Though a huge difference Manchester City has compared to Chelsea is that Manchester City City do not fill up their stadium. The Daily Mail, a British news company had reported in October, Manchester City had matches against AFC Bournemouth and Sevilla FC. In those matches in their 60,000 capacity stadium, the fans filled 54,502 seats which included a large section with no seats but when the team played against Sevilla FC in a Champions League match mid week, the attendance for the match was 45,595 people with parts of the stadium patched with no people. For a club that is growing quickly into a successful club, they should be filling up almost every seat. Like no offence to Bournemouth but only a 45,595 attendance for a Champions League match against the defending back to back Europa League winners? Surely that is a disgrace and also this portrays the fact that these fans do not care about the team so much and instead think their team will win all of the time.

The next steps for these clubs are first should be to fill up the stadium because first, one key factor that comes in are attendance because the ticket money supporters pay to see their clubs go to the clubs themselves. That money can also be used to buy players in the transfer windows. Also on the fact according to UEFA during the transfer window, a club can only spend on players using the money they earned that season. So as the moral, even if your club is facing an easy team or whatever, the money you spend on tickets when you go to a match is transferred to the club on which they can spend on to make your team better by buying new player and so on!

Two, teams would have more exciting tactics when playing other teams because in football at the end of the day, whatever team scores the most goals win. Even if a team cannot score goals, they should make the game more interesting and intense by creating many chances to score, plus it makes them have more of a change to get a goal. Like for example Manchester City though they do not fill up the stadium, they score goals. In their 2 league winning seasons. The whole league averaged 2.79 goals which means the football could have possibly been more exciting season season. Chelsea on the other hand have been a very defencive team. Last season Chelsea had a tactic which was very effective and brought them the league title and the tactic was called “Park the Bus”. What happens is that Chelsea would score an early goal or just one goal in the whole match but, they would have everyone playing defending behind the ball so the other team have no chance of scoring. It made the results come but fans all across the league were against it as games felt more boring for them.

In conclusion, teams that are money oriented are making the sport money oriented and if they change some things they are doing wrong for the community, then everyone can enjoy the beautiful game whether it is filling up stadiums or changing general mentality or making games exciting by tactics change, we people can help make the sport how it should be.