Ken Jones: Let's not forget: football is meant to be a game, not a business

It must be 20 years or more since Keith Burkinshaw paused on his way out of White Hart Lane to take one last look at the football club he had served with distinction. Catching the wistful look in Burkinshaw's eyes, and knowing that his decision to move on was directly related to the growth of corporate influence at Tottenham Hotspur, I mentioned to him a plaintive lyric written about Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers until the moguls of baseball decided that the future was Los Angeles. Wrecking balls brought down the walls of an ancient, much-loved structure, and Frank Sinatra captured the mood as only he could. "There used to be a ball club over there," he sang.

Burkinshaw nodded. White Hart Lane was not about to become a pile of rubble but the sentiment was similar. There used to be a football club over there. Since it sounded better in his words than mine, I gladly blessed Burkinshaw with a phrase that is embedded in the lore of English football.

I do not know whether Burkinshaw was the first to sense that football was moving away from the people, but he was the first to make me see clearly the dangers that lay ahead, dangers that now have once powerful clubs facing unmanageable debts and in some cases bankruptcy. "Where the team was all, the centre of everything that went on at a football club, it has become just a part of a marketing formula," I remember him saying.

By now we are almost inured to the disturbing facts that keep crawling out of football's woodwork. Salaries out of all sensible proportion to revenue, financial indiscretions on a grand scale, profligate management, malodorous leaks that pay little or no account to the feelings of supporters. "Probably, only one in a hundred fans understands the way football is now being run," a friend recently said. "What do they know about plcs, share dealings, the profit motive as set against the team's performance? We have two entirely different trains of thought. Supporters dream of progress on the field; management concerns itself with avoiding losses and, if possible, some form of financial stability."

It is wholly appropriate then that the sports pages in daily newspapers are juxtaposed with the financial sections. From whichever end you start it is a seamless, doom-laden process. On average, 60 per cent of sports stories are now about money, salaries, transfer fees, the pending downturn in television revenue, the need for every Premiership club, even Manchester United, to operate prudently.

None of this happened overnight. However, the calamitous events that have seen Leeds United pile up debts in excess of £78m have brought into sharp focus the perils of forgetting that football, even at its highest professional level, is meant to be a game, not merely a corporate enterprise. From the evidence of some performances, there are guys who wanted to take over other sports before they had begun to master their own.

The other evening we were talking – some grizzled veterans of this dubious trade – about football in an era when the League imposed a maximum dividend of seven per cent on club directors, who were, of course the principal shareholders.

One thing we remembered from that time, an imperfect time in many ways, was that the chairmen of football clubs were anonymous figures unless they held high administrative office or got caught up in events that were considered scandalous at the time but would barely raise an eyebrow in today's climate.

I guess most people knew that the stage and television comic Tommy Trinder was chairman of Fulham and that families held controlling interests at a number of First Division clubs, but hardly anyone gave them a second thought. Today, people who have bought into football have as much to say as managers and appear as frequently on the sports pages as the players themselves.

Admittedly, the circumstances are exceptional but over the past two weeks there have been more published photographs of Peter Ridsdale than David Beckham and the England manager, Sven Goran Eriksson.

From what I have seen there is nothing refreshingly original in the views of Chelsea's chairman, Ken Bates, or of Alan Sugar, who retained a financial interest in Tottenham Hotspur after selling out to the Enic group of companies. That they both from time to time express views about football in newspaper columns is not only beyond my comprehension but proof of what an idle rumour can do.