European football’s great and good, together with a supporting cast of agents, hustlers and several other dodgy characters, assembled in Nice last Sunday, ostensibly to watch the draw for the 2016 European Championships, but also, no doubt, to enjoy the continent’s largest carnival, currently taking place in the same city.
People have been heading for this Mediterranean jewel for more than 160,000 years as ongoing excavations at the foot of Mont Boron, on the city’s eastern flank, have revealed.
The clarity afforded by Nice’s daylight, particularly evident when walking past the magnificent, sea-facing opera house along the Quai des Etats-Unis, is quite stunning. No wonder Henri Matisse lived for 17 years in the imposing yellow building on Cours Saleya, a busy marketplace running parallel to the Quai, today bordered with restaurants and bars.
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Across the city, grand neo-classical statues and delicate sculptures mix comfortably with colourful design and unexpected dollops of avant-garde art. The centrepiece is Place Massena where the constantly-changing colours of the large figures seated atop 60’ tall plinths overlooking the huge square are continually fascinating, invariably prompting the question, why?
The same question was posed following Sunday’s draw for a tournament completely undermined by an almost wilful dilution of quality, the direct consequence of a raw pursuit of power. The financial repercussions of expanding the Euro 2016 finals to 24 teams will be felt immediately by the English FA, amongst others.
It’s not often football fans moan about an easy draw, but England’s route to France in two years’ time couldn’t be more straightforward. How many England supporters will make the arduous journey to Wembley and pay good money to watch qualifying fixtures against San Marino (world ranking 207) and Lithuania, ranked 102, will be interesting.
The qualifying competition’s structure and its bloated target has effectively removed any sense of jeopardy. With 24 finals places to fill, the top two in each of the nine groups qualify automatically, together with five third-placed teams. One bookmaker immediately installed England at 1/100 to qualify.
Perhaps it was expecting too much for UEFA to recognise that ever since the World Cup finals were enlarged from 16 to 24 nations in 1982, and again to 32 countries in 1998, the tournament’s overall quality has plummeted; there are far too many matches of little meaning.
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It’s the same with the Champions League, perhaps sport’s most contrived competition; only when the knock-out phase arrives and the danger of elimination exists does the pulse quicken.
While the World Cup and Champions League were being diluted and sullied, all in the name of broadcast receipts for FIFA and UEFA respectively, the European Championships stood as a celebration of footballing elitism. It might be politically incorrect to declare, but for more than two decades, the European finals outshone the World Cup in terms of overall quality of play.
Political and financial considerations provided sufficient motivation for FIFA to double the size of the World Cup finals, from 16 teams to 32 between 1970 and 1998. Last October, UEFA president Michel Platini, a man, apparently, with one eye firmly on FIFA’s top job, suggested that if elected as FIFA president, he would expand the tournament to 40 teams while acknowledging that such a move was not one designed to enhance quality.
By increasing the number of finalists participating in Euro 2016, Platini has added a clutch of valuable voting allies prior to the ballot in which he will go head-to-head with Sepp Blatter to secure the FIFA presidency, possibly later this year. In the meantime, the Euro 2016 qualifying draw has proved the dampest of commercial squibs for the FA.
According to its latest set of published accounts, the FA’s turnover fell during 2012 by almost three per cent, from £327.1 million, to £317.5 million. The immediate knock-on effect was a 17 per cent reduction in the FA’s contribution to the Football Foundation, the body charged with administering grassroots football. This is hardly encouraging news given the difficulty English youngsters already experience when trying to break into the nation’s top-flight league.
Falling levels of income are a worry for any business, but the FA’s accounts show that the financial burden of building – and many would say over-paying for – Wembley Stadium is still a staggering £272 million. This loan must, of course, be serviced and the FA, which is contractually obliged to stage all England internationals at Wembley, must generate as much cash as possible from every available source in order to pay down the outstanding amount.
The FA had hoped that sales of debentures for the stadium’s 17,500 ‘Club Wembley’ seats – the ones usually embarrassingly empty during most cup finals – would make a major contribution towards its gross income.
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With the mouth-watering prospect (prior to last Sunday) of a European Championship qualifying tournament on the horizon, such hope was induced by a palpable sense of urgency as almost all of the debentures are up for renewal in 2017.
The FA’s marketing department no doubt expected that, even at prices “starting from” £167 per person per event, assuming an average of 12 events per season, selling the seats would be made easier if during the run-up to the 2017 expiry date, Wembley could stage a compelling series of sporting events.
After all, the FA’s advertising material speaks highly of Club Wembley, “a membership,” it declares, “that enables you to experience supreme sport, electrifying entertainment and unparalleled customer service.”
At present, the most compelling fixtures are the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy final between Chesterfield and Peterborough and the NFL’s ‘International Series’ game between Miami Dolphins and Oakland Raiders.
On reflection, even the forthcoming, substitute-heavy friendlies against Denmark next week and Peru in May offer a greater prospect of ‘electrifying entertainment’ than October’s Euro qualifier against San Marino.
For several years, this column argued against building a new national football stadium in one of the most inaccessible parts of the country for average fans. Indeed, based upon historic (and the likelihood of future) club appearances, it should have been built somewhere along the M62 to make it easier for supporters to visit.
Logically, the Midlands offered the best location in which to base a truly national stadium and even once the decision had been taken to spend £757 million on building Wembley, demand from fans to play international matches at different club grounds across the land soared. Their wishes were ignored.
Ironically, thanks to a single, politically-motivated UEFA decision, the folly of building an unloved, hugely expensive arena in London has finally been exposed. Though laden with debt, the FA will be forced to dramatically reduce ticket prices to attract supporters to the Euro 2016 qualifiers.
Meanwhile, successfully selling 10-year ‘Club Wembley’ debentures promises to be a significantly more difficult task than beating San Marino, Lithuania and Estonia and qualifying for the finals from Group E.