On Sunday, thousands of Manchester United fans marched in protest at the club’s ownership. The week before last, there was a (much smaller) march against their club’s owners by fans at Chelsea. A couple of weeks earlier there were protests at Tottenham. Fulham fans are deeply unhappy. There have been grumblings at Manchester City. In total, at roughly three-quarters of the Premier League clubs, there is significant supporter discontent.
In some ways, the protests are distant background noise. Television viewers could quite easily have watched United’s 1-1 draw with Arsenal on Sunday and not known about the march. How big a deal is it, anyway, that around 5,000 people walked about a mile from a pub to a stadium, with most wearing black and chanting?
The demonstrations are often incoherent. The one at Chelsea featured chants for Roman Abramovich, which suggested what they were really angry about is the club’s lack of success since the oligarch was sanctioned. It’s true that dissent would be rapidly quelled by a proper title challenge; nobody wants to disrupt that.
But at the same time, it does feel significant that there is so much anger at so many clubs. The Football Supporters Association (FSA) launched its Stop Exploiting Loyalty campaign at the beginning of the season, highlighting how ticket prices have been raised and discounts for seniors, students and the like reduced or removed at the majority of Premier League clubs.
The FSA is an important voice, but English football has nothing like the solidarity between fans of different clubs as is found in Germany or Scandinavia – in February, for instance, German fans united to force the German football league (DFL), which runs the Bundesliga, to abandon plans to sell an estimated $1 billion stake in its media rights income to a private equity firm.
In England, club rivalries too often intervene. There is rarely consensus even among fans of the same club.
Cut through the frustration about poor results, the vague threats to directors, and the club-specific issues, though, and it becomes apparent that there is a unifying theme. Fans feel their game is being taken away from them. This is a cultural shift that has been ongoing for 30-40 years, but it feels now as though it’s reaching crisis point, and it’s one that reflects wider society.
When the American Soccer League launched in 1921, its purpose was to make money. Its teams were run by entrepreneurs, factories and shipyards. In its very first season, one of the best sides, Bethlehem Steel, took over a club in Philadelphia, 60 miles away, and moved most of their players there in an attempt to target the much larger market in the bigger city.
Franchising was built in from the start; there was no sense of the club as representative of its local community, still less an idea that it might be a social good. By the time the league collapsed in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash, there had been so many takeovers and mergers that working out who was who had become essentially impossible.
While many English clubs had emerged from factory teams, there was, for the most part, never the same profit motive. Until 1981, dividends were capped at 7.5 per cent and no director could draw a salary from their club. Nobody should over-romanticise those days, and there were definitely hard-headed business decisions being taken, but equally it was obvious that the club had to attract fans from its immediate area, and that meant pricing tickets accordingly. Clubs became public representations of their communities and in many cases took that role very seriously.
But the economics of football have changed. In the Premier League, television revenues dwarf gate receipts. For a time, as oligarchs and the investment funds of states began to invest in clubs, money brought in by ticket sales seemed less relevant. But as Financial Fair Play (FFP) and Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR) regulations have begun to bite, owners have sought to increase revenue however they can. Upping ticket prices is a way to do that – and, thanks to global interest in the Premier League, there is a ready market to buy them.
Now, few directors have grown up as fans of the club they run, and as such they feel little responsibility to their communities. For this new breed of owner, it’s far more lucrative to have a fan who comes irregularly, pays a high price and is more likely to splash out on food and merchandise than a loyal regular, who has perhaps been to every home game for decades and has no need to visit the club shop every week.
Those traditional fans have gradually seen the sport their families have perhaps supported for generations change. Kick-off times now suit television. VAR, at least in the way it is now implemented, is designed for the TV audience. Tickets have become less and less affordable. Lip service is paid to fans and their devotion, but increasingly they are exploited and marginalised and their importance to the club is diminished.
Perhaps that is an inevitable consequence of globalisation in a world in which profit has become the only acceptable motivation, but it’s understandable why fans are becoming increasingly resentful. – Guardian
