BY RORY SMITH

At first glance, the problem is clear, and the problem is money.

Football, at its rarefied heights, is awash with it: broadcasting deals, sponsorship agreements and corporate entertainment, all of it swilling through leagues and clubs, into the hands of players and executives and agents.

Particularly in the English Premier League, everyone has grown fat on it, and now that the supply has been cut off, nobody wants to go hungry.

Three weeks after the season was suspended due to the coronavirus pandemic, long after Barcelona’s squad agreed to give up 70 per cent of their salaries, long after Juventus players delayed their payment for months, players in the English top flight still have not agreed to defer or forfeit their salaries.

At the same time, hundreds of thousands of people in Britain were filing for unemployment benefits, as the first wave of the economic shock caused by the Covid-19 saw the shuttering of towns and cities across the world.

Five Premier League clubs have moved to place many of their non-playing staff on furlough: Norwich, Newcastle, Bournemouth, leaders Liverpool and Tottenham.

Others will follow, and they could include some of the richest in the game, teams that are planning to spend millions of pounds in the summer transfer market now taking advantage of government support programmes to pay their employees.

It is not yet a month since the Premier League was business as normal, not yet a month since these teams, many backed by billionaires, played a game. English football’s broadcasters have not yet – as two networks have in France – refused to pay the latest portion of their rights agreements.

Those acting on behalf of the players are surprised, it has been suggested, that the richest league in the world should plead poverty quite so quickly.

From the outside, it is a faintly obscene situation. Football, of course, makes a convenient punching bag at times like this, a portrait in the attic for a society unwilling to confront its inequalities.

Politicians, never slow to issue moral judgment on players, have raged at how out of touch they are, how spoilt, how greedy, how abominably obsessed by money.

But the root of the problem is not the surfeit of money; that is merely a function of the real issue, which is the dearth of trust. The players do not trust that the clubs are not trying to make them shoulder the burden. The clubs do not trust that the players’ agents – and by extension the players – will act honourably, in the common good. And, just as important, the clubs do not trust one another. Hence the Premier League’s edict that, whatever action is taken, it should be across the board.

Even in normal times, these institutions eye one another with suspicion. They believe that their rivals will, in some way, attempt to use any situation to gain a competitive edge. They are not well-suited to collective action. That lack of trust permeates the game.

Fifa has plans to use some of its vast cash reserves as an emergency fund for clubs to dip into in their hour of need. Privately, officials worry that much of that money will simply vanish, lost as it percolates through national associations or is siphoned off by agents.

This is the ultimate consequence of the undiluted neo-liberal thinking that has permeated professional football: The idea that all are out for themselves.

That belief is so ingrained in the sport – especially in England – that it cannot easily be set aside, even now, even at a time like this.

Few clubs, even elite ones, are enormously profitable. (It has been striking how fragile such a lucrative ecosystem can be.) The loss of match-day revenue – much less having to pay back a portion of TV income – will be enough to tip quite a few of them into the red. A few steps down from the game’s aristocrats, the effects will be much more severe.

That means a contraction of the market: Not just for transfer fees, but for player salaries and agents’ commissions, too. Clubs will be able to spend less, and will be inclined to sell more, driving down prices. Players will not command the sort of salaries they might have done. At some clubs, it is possible that players will need to take pay cuts, just to help the team absorb the blow.

But this is a world, remember, where everyone believes everyone else is out for himself, and so they must be, too. Players will be unwilling to suffer if they feel the clubs are passing the buck onto them. Clubs will be tempted to pay beyond their means in order to keep up with their rivals. For football, there is a second crisis, waiting just behind this one.

The thought has occurred that perhaps March 2020 marked the end of football’s golden era, the 25-year period when it was the biggest show on earth, a cultural phenomenon of unparalleled scale, an apparently bottomless pit of money and glamour. There was no trust, no unity, no collective spirit in times of plenty. We may be about to find out what happens in times of want.

New York TIMES