Five ways in which football has changed in the 2010s

The end of the dynasty manager
The start of the decade began with Arsene Wenger and Alex Ferguson still in their pomp. Ferguson had built another new team after suggestions he may leave, winning a third straight league title in 2009 and taking Manchester United to the Champions League final. Arsenal had dropped out of the title reckoning but were still perennial top-four finishers and had been defeated by United in the Champions League semi-finals.

That is a bygone era. No current manager in Europe’s top five leagues has been in their position for more than nine years (and only one for more than eight), with clubs across the board unable to avoid the temptation of short-termism in a bid to stave off crisis or clamber after success. In the Premier League, this decade saw the rise of the short-term firefighter manager. One of them became so successful that he landed the England job. Briefly.

But this is not just the work of impatient owners. The rise in media scrutiny and pressure and the demand for coaches to leave no stone unturned in pursuit of perfection has made management at the highest level a draining and exhausting task. It is no coincidence that none of the three most successful managers of the decade (Jose Mourinho, Pep Guardiola and Zinedine Zidane) have lasted longer than four years in any of their jobs.

There are two notable exceptions in Jurgen Klopp and Diego Simeone, but neither of them have yet managed clubs where the immediate expectation was to win the league. The conclusion still holds: Managers can only carry on for so long under pressurised conditions without cracking up or tailing off. The dynastical manager, as we once knew it, is dead.

The rise in broadcasting revenues…
In February 2009 a new domestic Premier League broadcasting deal (Sky Sports and Setanta) was announced, worth £1.8bn. ESPN would eventually buy Setanta’s proportion of the deal, paying £90m for 46 live matches. A decade later, the overseas broadcasting rights alone for 2019-2022 were sold for £4.35bn, a rise of 35% from the previous deal. The Premier League has become awash with money.

Some of the direct impacts of that rapid financial success are obvious. At the turn of the last decade, the most expensive player bought by a Premier League club was Robinho at £32m, but there have since been 17 players signed for £50m or more. Each of the Big Six, a term that refers to financial might as well as sporting excellence, account for at least one of those 17.

But the most interesting aspect of the rise in broadcasting revenues is how much it emboldened the non-elite clubs. According to Deloitte, 12 of the top 25 clubs in Europe according to their revenue are now based in England. The notion of Manchester United and Liverpool spending heavily on players would not have been surprising in 2010, but Bournemouth spending more than £20m on a player twice, Leicester City doing it seven times and Everton a whopping 16 times really would. We live in a world where a Premier League struggler can legitimately target the most promising young players in other European leagues.

Financial strength should always be something for clubs to celebrate, but another trend this decade is how the biggest clubs in the country have been punished for their misplaced arrogance and complacency. Their historic success and rush of revenue hoodwinked them into believing that they were insured against poor decision-making and ineffective management structures.

Liverpool were the first to trip up (they failed to finish in the top four between 2010 and 2013), but Arsenal and Manchester United soon followed. There is an irony to the Premier League becoming a meritocracy and rewarding well-run clubs and well-coached teams at precisely the time that the biggest clubs became richer than ever.

…but please mind the gap
This decade has not been defined by the financial implosion of EFL clubs, but the next one might well be and the seeds have been sown in the recent past. The gap between rich and poor in the English professional game has never been greater, and may never stop increasing. That makes economic disaster an inevitability.

The establishment of the Premier League as a financial promised land has tempted EFL club owners to partake in a Hunger Games-style pursuit of the rewards. Championship clubs registered a record £307m in pre-tax losses in 2017-18, and that will have increased in 2018/19. Multiple clubs are spending more than their entire annual revenue on wages.

One theme of the decade is the dark decline of several high-profile clubs under errant or absent owners – Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, Hull City and Portsmouth all began the 2010s in the Premier League – but this is merely a symptom of the disease. Good owners do not grow on trees and sensible business owners do not expect to make a profit out of running a football club. That inevitably attracts the naively ambitious, incompetent or malevolent.

Plenty of EFL clubs have experienced at least one of those three in the last decade. Those owners who do live within their means, and run their clubs sustainably, struggle to fight the tide and still come under pressure to be more speculative from supporters who have become obsessed with transfer culture and consider themselves entitled to success.

The only way to dodge the meteor is for Premier League clubs to agree to increase the drip-down effect from their own spiralling revenues as a gesture to preserve the historic depth of English professional football, an attempt at prevention over cure. But don’t hold your breath; the greed is real. The richest clubs are more likely to break away in a grab for a bigger slice of the pie than agree to share their current portion for the good of the game.

An era of social media fandom
2009 was the year that social media began to grow exponentially and truly landed in the public consciousness. Twitter saw quadruple digit growth over the course of 12 months. Facebook went from 150m worldwide users to 350m and finally surpassed MySpace as the biggest social media platform on the planet.

As the most popular global pastime, football was always likely to be affected. Rather than public football discussion being limited to forums or message boards, it now had two ideal platforms on which to argue, debate and call each other nonces. The notion that social media allowed supporters to get closer to their heroes was soon disproven. Instead we were given PR-manicured updates and adverts. It has become a bin fire, and I am one of the moths.

But the dawn of social media didn’t just change how and where we discussed football; it altered the behaviour of football fans entirely. Supporters became split into two camps – matchgoing and online – with the two groups expressing their love in entirely different ways. Ten years ago you proved your loyalty by watching your team home and away. Now you can do it by being abusive to a football writer or rival supporter who has a different opinion to you or dares criticise your club. The Age of Paranoia is as tiring and demoralising as it sounds.

Sportswashing and football as a geo-political tool
Sportswashing is a relatively new term, used to describe the use of involvement in sport by a particular country or government in order to project a PR-managed image of that country and place a facade over questionable practices or human rights records.

The behaviour itself isn’t new, of course. In the 1930s Mussolini’s Italy hosted the World Cup and Hitler’s Berlin hosted the Olympic Games; both were used as machines for propaganda. And it’s hardly true to say that before this decade our football clubs were owned exclusively by local business owners made good.

But sportswashing has become impossible to ignore over the last decade. Manchester City’s ownership by the UAE has come in for heavy criticism from Amnesty International, while Qatar Sports Investments owns Paris Saint-Germain and Qatar Airways sponsors Bayern Munich and Roma and previously sponsored Barcelona. Schalke are sponsored by Gazprom, who are also a flagship sponsor of the Champions League. Gazprom is owned by the Russian government. Look at the list of confirmed and potential World Cup hosts between 2018 and 2030: Russia, Qatar, China.

Football’s dance with geopolitics was inevitable from the moment it welcomed rampant capitalism. This is the most marketable and popular pastime in the world, and that makes it ripe for exploitation. Football cannot demand the spoils, sell itself to the highest bidder and then fret about moral purity.

But for those of us – and isn’t this all of us? – who were captivated by football as pursuit and spectacle, the geopolitical slow dance leaves a sour taste in the mouth. The Qatar World Cup, and associated human rights issues, marks a literal line in the sand. It’s no longer our game; it’s theirs.

Daniel Storey