Football: A high price for the beautiful game

A high price for the beautiful game

SOCIALIST PARTY member Kevin Miles is the International Co-ordinator
for the Football Supporters Federation – the fans official spokesperson. He is in Germany at the moment,
with the "Fan’s Embassy."
JOHN REID, author of Reclaim the Game, interviewed Kevin for the
socialist.

In England there’s been an outcry about real England fans not being
able to get tickets. What’s your general impression about the price and
method of distribution of tickets?

Sadly it’s as much of a problem now as it has been over the last few
tournaments. FIFA show no sign of getting wise to it. Something like 40%
of all World Cup tickets are given to sponsors, hospitality packages and
non-competing football associations. In other words they’re not
available for fans directly from FIFA at face value.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t end up in the hands of fans. What
it means is that those fans have to pay hundreds of pounds from touts
because those sectors are, in our experience, the biggest source of
tickets on the black market. The asking price for a ticket for the
England-Trinidad game was E600.

The black market is an outrage and it exploits people’s love for the
game. Most of the black market ticket deals aren’t an individual
offloading a ticket but are activities by organised gangs.

But all the measures FIFA have talked about for combating the black
market are aimed at punishing the end user. They’re aimed at preventing
the person who has actually paid out the money for the ticket getting
into the stadium.

By definition, every ticket on the black market is a ticket which has
been originally supplied by FIFA to somebody who is more interested in
making money than watching a football match. That’s the essence of the
black market.

Very few tickets bought by England fans through official channels
find their way onto the black market. Genuine football fans wouldn’t
part with them for love nor money.

Microcosm

There was a microcosm of the whole black market problem at the Togo
Korea game. McDonalds had been running competitions for tickets but no
flights or accommodation, so many people didn’t pick up the tickets
they’d won.

McDonalds realised they’d got hundreds of tickets left. Their
official policy is for the reps to go into town to the McDonalds
restaurant and give the tickets to staff.

But what they actually did was distribute the tickets in the town.
The touts were the first to get their hands on those tickets and walk
100 yards down the road and knock them out for £200.

It’s proof that sponsors get too many tickets, proof that they don’t
really care what happens to them, proof that tickets go to the touts and
proof that the touts make a fortune out of it.

The general impression back here is that there’s a good atmosphere
amongst the fans . Is this true?

The atmosphere is very very very good. In my experience the biggest
single factor in whether a tournament passes off peacefully or not is
the policing. Inevitably with big crowds, you’re going to get all sorts.
And some people drink more than is sensible.

The crucial thing is whether the police deal with the one or two
minor incidents as minor incidents and keep it that way and have a
relaxed approach to everybody else, or whether they escalate things into
confrontations with whole groups. So far the German police have had a
relaxed approach.

There’s a lot of England fans just sick of the reputation that we had
and in particular sick of the consequences – fairly brutal policing and
suspicion and hostility everywhere we went. That was a reputation won by
bad behaviour in the past but the bad behaviour was only ever by a small
minority. Over the last few years we’ve seen a much broader range of
people following the English national team.

It’s not my view but a lot of people think behaviour has improved
because the make up of the fans is more middle class. What’s your view?

There is a broader base of England supporters. But the working-class
support for the team remains. People said of the last World Cup that
Japan was so expensive to get to that you only got nice respectable
middle class people travelling. So that was the reason for the good
behaviour.

But to get a ticket for the World Cup in Japan through the English FA
you had to qualify on their loyalty system. So the people who got the
tickets had been to all the qualifying matches.

There were smaller numbers because a lot of people couldn’t afford to
go. But this is their holiday, this is what they save up for. The World
Cup every four years is the big one.

In England the St George’s flag is flying not just amongst white
working-class people but even small sections of black and Asian people.
What’s your view on that?

The St George’s cross has now been firmly wrested away from the far
right. The idea that English national identity has to be nationalistic,
xenophobic and racist has completely gone now.

I’m standing looking on the square in Nuremberg. While most of the
England fans are still white I can see Asians who are England fans and
there’s a lot of women.

The white working-class men are still here supporting England but the
fan base has definitely moved beyond that. Football fans reflect all the
other trends in society and there will be racists among the white
English fans. But the idea that they’re rallying around the St George’s
flag supporting the far right has gone.

In the years I’ve been doing this the atmosphere has become more
open-minded and friendly. It also develops over the course of the
tournament.

At the first game, people are getting used to the idea of being
abroad and mixing with other fans. That’s when they tend to keep their
national identity. But as the tournament goes on you get more mixing of
the fans and people get more relaxed, particularly when they’re not
encountering hostility all the time.

At the same time you have people’s strongest identification with
their nationality and yet more interaction with other nationalities than
they do at any other stage of their lives.

How is the Fans Embassy going?

Really well, it gets more and more popular support as we go along.
The idea that it’s an independent organisation by fans for fans,
providing advice and information, has become enormously popular.

The reason it’s trusted by supporters is because it’s entirely
independent. They know they can come to talk to us whoever they are.

What’s you opinion on these issues? Write to the socialist: PO Box
24697, London E11 1YD. [email protected]


Reclaim the Game

by John Reid

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