Cod Almighty | Diary

Money may make the world go round, but sometimes it stops football in its tracks

14 January 2025

21st century capitalism offers so little, in fact is so harmful, that it survives only if we don't question it.

What has that to do with football?

Well, why is it more important for Tottenham Hotspur to play yet another game in a bloated European competition, each individual fixture so insignificant that it will have been forgotten within a week, rather than to give the Tamworth team a replay which they will remember for the rest of their lives? We are getting all the ill-effects of a Super League: the gross distortion of wealth and the effective hiving-off of the sport's most illustrious names. What we don't get is the compensation that once we are rid of them, the other 99 per cent of clubs are able to organise on more sporting lines.

Those lines would put players and the paying spectators first. For why is it better to postpone a game to some unknown date in the future, rather than an hour or two to give the pitch a chance to thaw? Newbegin Diary was among the people who had set off on Saturday, but don't waste any sympathy on me; I had a fruitful hour in Grimsby Library instead.

It is our love of the game which is being exploited and abused. If you have never looked at it before, find £5 to spend a day browsing the English National Football Archive. You want to check our league position when Brian Laws and Ivano Bonetti fell out? Or where Tufnell Park played when we met them in an FA Cup replay in 1921? It is all there. Even the terms and conditions page is an expression of the fair-mindedness and the devotion with which this treasure house has been carefully curated. The two people who set it up and maintain it are retiring this year and are taking careful steps to ensure that their work is not lost.

One of the proudest moments of my researches over the last few years was when after reading newspaper reports from the early 1930s, I was able to use the ENFA's feedback facility to offer a few corrections to their database. They came back to me with a friendly acknowledgement. There is no ego there, just determination to present the information as accurately as sometimes conflicting records allow. The ENFA is a silent rebuke to billionaires who see fact-checking as a suppression of free speech, or who think that that the value of the internet lies in its power to spread lies.

At moments like this, I always fall back on the thoughts of manager Buckley. It was one of the happier days of his third spell. We were easily beating Barnet and someone suggested that Danny North, who had scored a hat-trick, should be subbed off to receive a personal round of applause. Alan Buckley was aghast at the idea: surely North wanted to stay on to see if he could get a fourth or even a fifth goal.

It is football first, second and third for Alan Buckley and all its other greats. Sure, you need money to make that happen, but as a servant of the sport, not its master.