European Envy

Yesterday the European Football Championships started in the two host countries, Switzerland and Austria. The opening ceremony was as exciting and entertaining as watching wood warp or paint dry. Whoever thought that either of these countries could either play soccer or do an opening? They do clocks, cheese, prompt trains and some snow sports, they do top rate boring.

Of course, like every other Englishman, I am mourning the fact that England didn’t qualify to appear in this tournament. Surely, you will say, there must have been some mistake in the computation in the qualification games. Yes, there was, we didn’t win enough of them. We missed out by one point, but that one point might as well be as big as the Grand Canyon.

This would be bad enough in itself, but Michel Platini, the boss of the European Football Federation, decided to rub it in. He made a statement in which he said that no one would miss the English team or its supporters. This, from a Frenchman, is too much to bear. But he wasn’t happy yet. One of the journalists pointed out that English club teams currently dominate the European Champions League. In fact, as I have written previously, four of the quarter finalists and three of the semi finalists and the two finalists in that championship were English clubs. My own magnificent club, Manchester United, won the competition, beating Chelsea. Mister Platini’s response was to state that the English clubs were cheating, by both the finalists being in debt. They had, in his view, simply run up debts to achieve their dominance.

Of course this is just French jealousy because our teams are better than their teams. Can you name the last French club team to get anywhere in the European club championships? Well of course there is Arsenal, the club purportedly from London’s Highbury, who in reality could, more properly be re-named, Paris United. There are many more Frenchmen in that team, and only one Englishman.

Running up debt to achieve your commercial goals is called Capitalism. We might not like it, but last time I looked, it wasn’t illegal, or even improper. Do the European football bosses really believe that if say, Microsoft were to buy Google, they just reached into their back pocket and pay over the cash for the purchase. Grow up Mister Platini. You’re just green with envy of our well run, dynamic and ultra successful football clubs. Our league generates more money from television and from gate receipts because our football is exciting to watch and people everywhere want to see it.

We all agree that the English fans are both the best and worst to be found anywhere. We have bigger crowds watching our Premier league teams than anyone else in Europe, and they follow our clubs and national team wherever they go, all over the world. These fans do have a tendency to explore every pub and bar on route, but it would be simple to overcome the problem of their drunk and disorderly behavior. Close the local drinking establishments for a half-day before the matches. It’s not nuclear science.

There is another mainland European scheme to marginalize the dominance of English club teams. The method being employed is that the pesky Europeans, led by Sepp Blatter, have demanded a change to the laws governing the national make up of the competing teams. This is the infamous 6-5 rule, in which there would be a requirement for six natives from each club’s home country to appear in the team. There are two fundamental flaws in this argument. The first is that the European employment laws do not allow employers to differentiate between potential employees based on which European nation they originated from. The second problem with this plan is that Manchester United actually did have six English players in their championship winning team. The simplistic wish of a parochial xenophobe does not outweigh the employment laws of the European Union.

Lest we forget, in this article praising the success of our clubs, we should remember that our national team is not in the European national championships. Of course, as a patriot, and a football fan, this does perturb my equanimity. I can only struggle on with the knowledge that my club has the best team in the world and remembering that England will soon be trying to qualify for the World Cup, and we’ll all have something new to moan about. I’m convinced that if we won that competition the people who run it would try and disqualify us anyhow. Just because we're paranoid doesn't mean people aren't against us.