Robin Hood in
Reverse
Why nursery clubs are wrong
I have a big problem with modern football. At the core of my
problem lie two conflicting ideas, each often expressed in the game today, which, try as I
might, I cannot reconcile. Perhaps it will help if I summarise them below:
1) If lower division clubs are to survive, they will have to consider going part
time or becoming nursery clubs for the elite;
2) There has never been so much money in the game as at the moment.
Odd, isn’t it, that those two ideas can apply at the same time, in the same
country, about the same game?
Just like in politics in the 1980’s, so now in football we are all
encouraged to think the unthinkable. I’ve heard a lot about the nursery clubs concept
recently; it’s an idea, we’re told, whose time has come. In a sense, that’s
right, because in football now greed is good and the only thing that matters is the colour
of your money. As the next step in the polarisation of football into super rich and super
poor, the idea of nursery clubs fits in exactly with these sad times.
I’m always a bit wary of the offer of what appears charity from the big
premier league clubs. After all, many of these are now publicly quoted companies, whose
aim has to be to maximise returns for their shareholders. The premier league is itself, of
course, founded on pure greed; the sole motivation for its creation was to tilt the
distribution of income away from the small clubs towards the big. That’s why I’m
a little uncomfortable with the notion that now they’re to provide a lifeline to the
rapidly sinking smaller clubs, to bail them out and ensure their "survival" by
taking them under their wing. This assumes that these clubs are in such a precarious
position because of some kind of natural disaster.
But this isn’t something that has just happened. This is a situation purely
of the big clubs’ making. They have brought this about. That so many clubs are now so
poor is not some by product of the wealth of the few. It is at the very heart of it; it is
essential to it. How could a few clubs be so wealthy without people to buy their
merchandise and subscribe to Sky? Where would these people come from if not from the ranks
that might before have grown up supporting their local club? How would the big clubs get
to keep all these pots of money if they had not first made it their business to remove
mechanisms for ensuring a more equitable distribution of tv cash?
Nursery clubs do not represent some benevolent resettlement nor even a mutually
beneficial arrangement. They are not an alternative to the extinction of many smaller
clubs. They are extinction, simply by another means. Has anyone considered what
supporters of the would be nursery club are supposed to do? Simply transfer their
allegiance? Who wants to support a nursery club anyway? What kind of fun is that?
It’s unlikely that Burnley would ever go this way, but if it did, it would not mean
that we were carrying on under new ownership. It would mean that our history had ended.
There would be nothing left to hope for, and what is the point of football without hopes
and dreams?
All this new idea represents is the next phase of the premier league plan. This
is not some random sequence of events. This is the logical next step in the process that
created the premier league, took football onto Sky and now into pay per view so you
don’t have to see your local team on a Saturday when you can watch your favourite big
team with your digital season ticket at home.
We live under the cult of the market. For me, the market will only ever be a
place where I buy fruit and veg, but in football, it’s king. Suddenly there are
simply too many football clubs to support. That wasn’t the case before, but
apparently it is now. It makes sense for the big to take over the small. We are to treat
football clubs as merely businesses, and in business it is commonplace for small local
businesses to be subsumed by huge corporations. It’s a European market now, and if we
want to compete with the best..., etc. The logic of the market points to bigger, fewer
clubs able to compete in lucrative European competitions. It makes sense to have nursery
sides, because that’s what they do in other European countries.
I’m always a little sceptical about arguments that suggest we copy things
they do in other countries. I’m a European alright, but European habits only crop up
in British arguments to justify something you want to do anyway. There are lots of things
they have in Europe we don’t copy, such as decent public transport and good food; on
the other hand, we could give them pop music lessons. They might be wrong on this one;
just because something’s done abroad doesn’t make it right.
All that made football special is being eroded. The whole notion that football
clubs might play an important part as focal points of their community seems to have gone.
Just the other day I had a profoundly humbling vision of the future. I visited
Bournemouth. This was the game we couldn’t be sure was going to be played until a
couple of days beforehand. Even then it was hard to keep one's concentration on the game
knowing that whatever result might be reached could be wiped out any time before the end
of the season. (As if to pre-empt this uncertainty, Burnley very sensibly went for the
draw.) We saw a community mobilising itself to fight for the very survival of its football
team. I’d guess I wasn’t the only Claret shedding my small change at every
opportunity. After all, that was us ten years ago.
The nature of the problem now is different. When we were on our uppers we were
suffering from a contraction of the audience for football in general, accompanied by a
severe recession in the manufacturing heartlands, which left those clubs most vulnerable
or worst prepared in desperate trouble. Today’s problems, though, come at the height
of a football boom. That’s what makes it all so sickening. Those clubs at the top
would only have to stick their hands in their pockets a little to alleviate the problems
they have caused, without needing to attach conditions. How typical instead to suggest a
solution that removes this irritant forever, by issuing an ultimatum that, in effect
reads: join us or die. But to join is just a different kind of death.
Football clubs should be protected. Legislation is the only way. Many a
politician has boarded the football bandwagon of late. I wonder how many would be prepared
to do something for the game, perhaps by seeking some kind of levy on transfer fees or tv
cash, a humble percent to pass on to those clubs that need it. I know redistribution is a
terribly out of favour idea these days, but I would look upon it as a kind of windfall
tax.
I rather suspect, though, that there will be many more Brightons and
Bournemouths to come, and not all will pull off the survival trick. Can it be that the
only alternative is to be like Crewe, and sign agreements like theirs with Liverpool,
which effectively acknowledge that they will never do much. How do Crewe fans feel at such
a public admission of limited ambition? And what if these ideas had been in vogue twenty
years ago? What would Wimbledon be now? And what will happen when, as many feel it must,
slump follows boom and the football market crashes? Won’t the nursery clubs be the
first things to get trimmed from the budget?
One can only be gloomy. Sadly for all us non-premier supporters, English
football has just entered the 1980’s.
Firmo
March 1997
