Is football a dying game? (Football in General)

Member Name: cs11462

Product:	Football in General
Date:	07/09/09 (27 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Passion

Disadvantages: Money

When I think back to the very first memory I have what do you think it was? Well, no it wasn't football, it was being on a ferry in Greece with my mum holding me, I must have been nearly two years old. Why is this relevant you ask? Well, its not but it leads me to my next point, which is that my second earliest memory was kicking a football against my Nan's wall in her back garden, I must have been two or three years old at this point.

What I am trying to get at is most British males first or early memories involve football in one way or another. Whether it is kicking a ball, watching a match or even being lucky enough to visit a football ground to view a live game with a father or uncle. I apologise for being very gender specific there but this tends to be the case. Or maybe not, certainly not for me, as my love of the game stems from my Nana and her insistence on listening to every game on the wireless (radio for anyone under 18, not WiFi) whilst swooning over Neil Webb and Bryan Robson in her Manchester United calendar. So football isn't in fact gender specific, it isn't age specific, not race specific, it is beyond all of this and is much more, you might say an institution in British life, global life in fact. An institution which families are built upon, a common interest that allows areas to thrive and prosper whilst others are left behind, a reason for 10's of thousands of people to come together to share opinion, where no person is right or wrong as long as the team they support matches up with the person listening. So think hard and try to answer 'Yes' to the following question, 'Is football just a game?' The answer is you cannot, because to do so would be to fight against the hundred years of tradition and evidence that would suggest otherwise.

As earlier established, I was playing football from the tender age of three kicking the ball against a wall or playing with friends in the garden or in the park, using the now clichéd jumpers for goalposts, or even better one tree and one jumper for goal posts. Now and again labourers would be working nearby and on their day of rest, a Sunday, we would have two builders cones to use. Perfect. No better way to spend four hours running around getting absolutely filthy and working up the appetite for the burger and chips tea Mum would scramble together after a 12 hour shift. Fork down, plate clean, and BOOM, I was back playing again until the last light where inevitably my Mother would shout me in just as I reached the final of Wembley singles. My glorious moment ripped from me at the very last moment, the heartache. I prey for tomorrow where I vow I will finish what I had started, I would be the champion for that five minutes whilst we were setting up the next game. Who would be in net? Not me because I am the greatest player ever (for that five minutes on that small field). If I wasn't in the park I would spend hours on the front garden trying to learn a trick I had seen my hero do on TV, or I would simply run up and down with a ball over a distance of ten yards and keep shooting at the bushes whilst imagining an entirely fictitious league going in my head. I always won in case you were wondering.

The world cups would come by, the nation would hype England's chances, surely this year is our year, we have the best squad we have ever had, if god could choose a squad himself, it would surely be this one. Yet every time England would fall just short of expectation, the nation would grind to a halt for several hours, and then start up again. As a youngster watching though I would see a great save by David Seaman and for the next year whilst playing Wembley singles when I was unfortunate enough to be in the goal, in my head I would be him so it didn't matter that I hated it because I was the invincible David Seaman, I even drew my own tash (no I didn't, that would be too strange).

I have hopefully got you thinking back to your days in the park, counting 200 kick ups and the excitement the first time you managed 201 and with the overwhelming exhilaration you messed the 202nd one up so you'd start again, 1,2,3,4... The point so far is that since the invention of the game this childhood has been the same, albeit with slight variation, for millions of children the world over, no matter of wealth, education, colour of skin, religion, parents political views or other life circumstances. Football unites us as people.

Everything that I have wrote above is the very core of the game, it is the getting up on a cold Sunday morning, running around an icy field, going home to a hot bath, lying on the sofa on a Sunday night telling your family about how great the goal you scored was, whilst at the same time fighting with all your might against cramp in your calf. Till this day, this is a common part of my week, although I'm sorry too say the talk of goals have dried up and the talk of cramp has become more serious talk of not being able to move. I find myself wondering at this stage however, will my children or my grandchildren have the same feelings about football when they think back to their childhood. I am upset to say that I imagine they probably will not.

One silver lining to the current global financial climate I guess is that the fields that would surely be swallowed up by property developers have been given an extra few years. Once these go there will be nowhere to actually enjoy the bag of air we like to kick around, and the joy that has been known by millions the world over, will never be known to the generation living in a century's time. I walk past parks now though and it seems they are always empty, village greens are full of green grass where once a bold patch would feature where the goals would normally be placed, evidence that no joy has been had there for at least a summer gone by. Where is everyone? Maybe the government is right, maybe video games, computers, magazines, TV is creating a lazy nation. I for one refuse to believe this as for at least the past 25 years there have been other things we could be doing, but still we chose football.

At every level of football, in every game there lies one vital member of the game, perhaps more important than any individual player, a job that surely only the noblest, strongest of mind could do; this job is of course the referee. With the recent RESPECT campaign, the terrible treatment of these noblemen is under intense inspection and no player can now get away with saying anything other than words of agreement to them, for fear of reprisal from the powers that be. Although I somewhat agree with this campaign, no man should have to deal with the amount of abuse these men do. But I also believe this should work both ways, the referee can sometimes be wrong and as a player this can be the most frustrating thing in the world, so obviously tempers are going to rise. This is truer at grass routes football where some referees that turn up might as well be refereeing a golf game for the amount of football knowledge they have. These are the true heroes though, as these get the most amount of stick with the least amount of protection even at under-8 games where the can face horrible vicious insults from the children playing as well as the parents. Its no wonder that grass roots teams are folding left right and centre when they cant get referees, the parents cant coach for fear of being accused of something or without being police checked. So maybe the reason for the demise of football will be societal reasons, maybe the human race simply cant handle something so powerful. The old, 'its my ball so if I cant play I'm taking it in' scenario.

I see more and more every year that the foundations and morals of the game are being overstretched and torn, with money and not fun being the name of the game. We have foreign investors pumping money into the game with very little return, how long before these get bored and pull out to leave the once powerful football club in the middle of the investment to fall and collapse without so much as a glance back . Players that lived the childhood described above and have the same core memories of football that we do, are demanding 10's of thousands of pounds extra to extend a contract that still has 4 years to run, but who can blame them right? They are only doing the same as every other player in the game, the career is really short I and they can be put out of work with one bad challenge, but surely no man can justify even £10,000 a week no matter how short the career or risk of it ending short is. But then, if the money didn't go to the players it would go to the fat cats above, the ones that wear the suits and set the prices. That might be true but when ticket and merchandise prices are skyrocketing and pricing the normal working man whom the game actually belongs to out, it doesn't matter what is true, all that matters is that WE WANT OUR GAME BACK.

Summary: ?