In a new book on the rise of Manchester United and England footballer Wayne Rooney, investigative journalist John Sweeney lifts the lid on the murky world beneath. Jamie Kenny caught up with him.
Imagine you have shares in Wayne Rooney. After his disappointing World Cup campaign, they would obviously be worth less than when he was effortlessly banging them in for United earlier last season. But should you sell or hold?
Our investment adviser here is John Sweeney, author of Rooney’s Gold, a scintillating exposé of some of the odd characters that have inhabited Wayne’s world over the years, recently published in the teeth of threats of libel action.
“Wayne’s corporate sponsors will be rethinking his value in terms of recent performances,” says Sweeney. “But he’ll bounce back for his club. Rooney scored four goals against Hull City last season, and teams such as Algeria and the US aren’t much better than Hull.”
So that’s a hold. And while Brand Rooney has taken a knock, the book reveals that matters could have been much worse for Rooney. Take the meeting at a London hotel in 2002, to decide who should benefit from the management of the 17- year-old prodigy. It followed accusations that Rooney’s agent Paul Stretford had muscled in on his predecessor’s management contract. Maybe that’s the kind of rough and ready business manners you would expect in football – except that notorious London gangster Tommy Adams was also at the meeting, apparently in the role of mediator.
A few months later a noted Liverpool hardman and a couple of his cage fighters tried to intimidate Stretford into signing over most of his interest in Rooney. The whole event was caught on CCTV, but when it came to trial the blackmail case collapsed because the prosecution decided it couldn’t rely on Stretford’s testimony. Such anecdotes make Rooney’s Gold fascinating. But for Sweeney they illustrate a wider point: what happens when money floods into an under-regulated industry. All sorts of characters come looking for their share, and the money has massively distorting effects.
“What happened with the Murdoch money and all the rest of the cash that suddenly started flowing into the game was that English football became overpriced,” says Sweeney. “It’s a classic bubble effect. English football was marketed as the best in the world when it was simply the most expensive.”
In that context, think of England’s performance in South Africa as a kind of Lehmann Brothers moment, where the real health of the industry was revealed. “The FA is a poor relation in the English game,” he adds. “The real power lies with the Premier League clubs. For them, the FA is a kind of charity to whom they loan players now and again.”
For the FA, their time to make hay is limited to the World Cup and European Championship; an incitement to leverage the patriotism of the fans into a blizzard of hype and extract the highest fees possible from corporate sponsors, setting up a familiar cycle of over-promising and under-delivering.
If things go on as they are, it’s not too hard to imagine agents telling their charges to duck out of the England set-up: ‘Think of your brand’, they’ll say. ‘Think of the downside.’
“I don’t think the fans would stand for that,” says Sweeney. “The real problem is that England doesn’t work as a team. The Spanish, Dutch and Germans all have fewer resources, but the strength of the national team is integral to what they do. That’s what’s missing here.”
Also in: August 2010
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