Football means nothing without
continuity of support. Unless the same people go regularly over a number of years, then
football has become just another business, and we can be loyal to clubs as we are to
supermarkets.
The main problem that football faces, currently unaddressed during this
temporary boom, is that both old and potential supporters are being excluded from the
game. It is hard for the people who really care about football to get to games. Football
has been gentrified, with a hard core of routinely attending working class people becoming
replaced by a softer middle class group, more volatile, less likely to prove loyal in a
crisis, more likely to watch the occasional game as a treat. At the top level, regular
attendance requires a season ticket and an annual lump commitment of several hundred
pounds, and if you don’t have it then someone else will. Even at our level, regular
match-goers whose means do not stretch to a season ticket are put off by the insane move
towards all seater grounds. Groups of friends are split up to sit in different seats, and
no ground can be called home if you sit in a different place next to different people
every time you go, or if groups are separated to sit in isolation. In an all seater ground
you’re likely to be sat next to someone who finds your behaviour objectionable.
People who want to sing and shout sit next to those who applaud both sides. Going to the
game might not be affordable, and when it is, it might not be enjoyable.
Football is a tribal game that is suffering from the privatisation of
leisure. People now attend in isolation, open minded and detached. These are admirable
qualities in normal life, but not the ingredients required to raise an atmosphere.
As a first step, given that the seats are there, clubs should make some of
them non-reserved and affordable. The Taylor report is commonly misunderstood. It did not
call simply for seats to replace terraces; it prescribed that the seats should be no more
expensive than the terraces. This hasn’t happened. Clubs might lose a few quid by
doing this, but they might not lose supporters who, by the time the slump comes,
won’t think you only watch football on tv.
Where are the next generation of supporters going to come from? Kids used
to be brought to games by relatives, then attend in groups. Now that costs, and when they
can afford to go it might not be together. This generation is being lost to football. They
think football is something that only happens on tv. They think support is watching tv.
They think of support as consumption, think that football is about buying magazines and
shirts. Youngsters growing up in this whirlwind of hype while simultaneously being denied
true access to the game will have horribly skewed priorities. I notice more non-Burnley
shirts each time I go back to Nelson, and there is no point fooling ourselves that this
isn’t happening.
No-one seems particularly bothered about this, for this is a time of boom.
This is a terribly short sighted approach to take. Clubs must know that this boom cannot
last. Once the wealthy have had their fill of event games they will drift away. Only then
will football clubs realise they have neglected to include the people who might take their
place. The sensible thing for a business is of course to make the most of it while it
lasts, but even in the middle of a boom an intelligent business will make fall back plans
for when the market contracts. When it does, clubs that haven’t planned for it might
go under. It will take a shock like some major club facing liquidation before people
realise the curve isn’t going to go forever up. Clubs rushed onto the market with
indecent haste, but already we see the hype unravel in the fact that share prices have
fallen, and in the way that Newcastle are hamstrung by the money men. Once clubs have
forced us to accept that they are businesses, they can be taken over, sold off and closed
down like any other, and if they then try to tell us they are something different and
shouldn’t be treated like this, that will only look like special pleading.
Clubs must do everything they can to enable children to get to games.
Small clubs like ours must always work against the accumulation of premier league hype.
(By the way, we are a small club, albeit one with potential. It was the only bit of
Waddle’s tantrum with which I agreed; it is time to stop hiding behind the past.) To
follow the fortunes of a bigger, non-local club, should be to become an object of ridicule
in the playground. Children must be made to feel proprietorial towards their local team.
Supporters must be given a sense of ownership of their club. As the big tv
clubs become ever huger and correspondingly less approachable, so the smaller clubs are
handed an advantage they must seize. Their lack of size, which is usually seen as a
weakness, can become a strength. Smaller clubs can provide a friendlier service. They are
closer to the grassroots, and can be more tuned into the needs of the community, quicker
to spot trends. Larger clubs lack the ability to respond to supporters and anticipate
wants. That is how it should be. Why is it so often the other way round, and smaller clubs
appear more conservative and less willing to try new things than the larger clubs?
Smaller clubs go wrong when they try to copy the things big clubs do, with
expensive seats, fussy ticket systems, glossy magazines and the like. This is wrong, for
they can never do this as successfully as the big clubs do. It builds barriers between
club and supporters, which is what has to stop. There is no formula that has simply to be
copied to achieve big club success. We can hope to match them on the field, and aspire to
do a Wimbledon, as all clubs should, but we shouldn’t imitate them out of context.
Nor should we sit back and wait for a sugar daddy who may never come, and even if he does
will come with strings attached.
To survive the coming slump, those clubs who are hardly flourishing under
the current boom need to include people as partners. They need to listen to what
supporters want, and then do it. In an age when everyone is suggesting that the problem
with football clubs is that they are insufficiently businesslike, I would suggest that
they need to become precisely less like businesses to survive. They need to become more
like clubs. Salvation for football may lie in going back to what it was in the first
place, with clubs run by and for local people. The experience of Bournemouth may provide
some lessons. This is not to confuse 'businesslike' with 'efficient'. Of course clubs must become more efficient. They must become better at doing the things
their supporters want to do. This means we might have to see smaller clubs run
administratively more like non-league clubs, sometimes having to rely on goodwill and
volunteerism. The premier league means the rest of us are all non-league clubs now.
Unfortunately, we cannot expect much imagination from Blair’s
football taskforce. The makeup of the taskforce indicates nothing will come of it. Mellor
is in charge. Supporters' representatives are in a minority. Also appointed is the
chairman of Man Utd, for heaven’s sake. Decisions will be made by people who have
never been locked into an away end, who have never struggled to get a ticket for a game,
who have never been treated with utter disdain by the authorities simply for who they are.
Their task comes pre doomed to fail.
They may well subscribe to the prevailing school of thought, which has it
that everything is fine, if only ticket prices were a little lower and smaller clubs were
not so poor. Attached comes the idea that the only 'sensible' way forward is for
small clubs to forge closer links with big clubs, and turn into nursery clubs. It is easy
to see that this is exactly what smaller clubs should not be doing, for then they will
lose identity when they need to be building it up and become more distant from their
supporters when they should be getting closer. At a time when small clubs should be
stressing their distinctiveness from the big clubs, we are told the only hope is to become
subsumed by them.
Sadly, football doesn’t have many chances of restoring sanity left.
Perhaps what we need now to save our game is a Campaign For Real Football. It’s our
game, and we could take it back. Only then could football truly be said to have come home.
