Post by QPR Report on Jan 24, 2010 7:35:20 GMT
Bump - 11 Years ago
The Times/Mick Hume
January 23, 2010
It’s time for the fans to fight back
The banner briefly displayed at Old Trafford last weekend, before it was confiscated and the guilty fans evicted, summed it up: “Love United, Hate the Glazers”. They could easily have shipped it to Anfield and changed the slogan to “Love Liverpool, Hate the Yanks”.
As tensions rise between traditional supporters and the new breed of football proprietor, from Portsmouth to Newcastle, perhaps some enterprising fans might sell a one-size-fits-almost-all version (excluding the likes of Chelsea and Manchester City): “Love the Club, Hate the Owners”.
Whose clubs are they, anyway?
Do they belong to the mass of us fans who claim moral ownership
and invest not just time and money but heart and soul?
Or to the few plutocrats who hold the legal papers?
Do they exist to fulfil our dreams and generate glory?
Or to make money and meet debt repayments?
Even as a Manchester United season ticket-holder, I could share the exasperation of the Liverpool fan ranting about George Gillett Jr and Tom Hicks on a radio phone-in. “They don’t own the club! Well, all right, they do, but . . .”
It would be historically naive to imagine that these problems began with the arrival of a few foreign freeloaders. It has always been Us and Them. Off-pitch tensions between fans — and, originally, players — who wanted to enjoy football, and owners who wanted to enjoy the rewards, are as old as the professional game.
The railway workers’ team of Newton Heath were renamed Manchester United after they were bought by a local brewer, who paid off the club’s debts and sold beer to the crowd. The armaments workers’ team of Woolwich Arsenal were rescued from financial ruin when they were bought up by a consortium of businessmen who moved the South London club north to a more commercial site at Highbury. But at least those old burghers put their money into the clubs.
Over the past 30 years, what originated as a mass working-class sport in Britain’s industrial age has been taken over by new financial capitalism, in which debt-financed buyouts, bond issues, sponsorship, brands and other money-circulating chicanery have become almost more important than “the product”.
The FA opened the door in 1981, altering its rules to allow club directors to be paid for the first time and shareholders to receive fat dividends. This enabled the likes of Martin Edwards, the chief executive who turned United from an FC into a plc, to take millions out of Old Trafford long before the shareholders sold to the grisly Glazers.
Now, with the billions from TV contracts sloshing around the Premier League, we have the new class of socca capitalists, borrowing money to buy and sell clubs to which they have no more attachment than a Kraft executive has to a bar of Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut. Like the overleveraged private-equity players in the City, they have been badly burnt in the financial crisis, leaving clubs in peril.
No doubt some reports of imminent meltdown are scaremongering, but the scale of the problem is clear. United ended last season — having won the Barclays Premier League, the Club World Cup and the Carling Cup, and reached the Champions League final — deeper in debt than ever, the Glazers keeping their charmless heads above water thanks to the £80 million sale of Cristiano Ronaldo.
Faced with mounting debts, rising prices, rumours of ground or player sell-offs, what is the fan in the stand to do? Marches, meetings and protests are being staged and there are even murmurs of solidarity between fans of opposing clubs. Some want the United crowd to start wearing green-and- yellow shirts — the old Newton Heath colours — to show solidarity with the founding spirit of the working men’s football club.
Whether these prove much more than token protests remains to be seen. In practical terms, fans might be desperate to make the bad owners sell, but to whom? There is talk at some clubs of supporters making a bid. That is fantasy football finances. It was possible for 20-odd thousand people paying £35 each to buy Ebbsfleet United, but a big club are out of our league.
Suppose you really could persuade, say, 5,000 fans to pay £5,000 a head — that would give you £25 million, or not quite enough to buy Wayne Rooney’s left leg. So is the best we can hope for really to see another sheikh or oligarch lording it over us, as at City and Chelsea, or a more benevolent-looking billionaire, as at Aston Villa – or maybe a local-boy-made-pornbaron, as at West Ham United?
As an old Red in political as well as football terms, my preference would be for fans to storm the stadium gates and occupy Old Trafford as a sort of supporters’ soviet, but that option seems unlikely, in the short term at least. For now, frustration and impotence grow as fans are reduced to individual “customers”. Worse, the customer in football is not always right. Indeed he has no rights, because the clubs assume that supporters will always keep coming back to be ripped off, even for an inferior product.
The ultimate sanction is to hit the owners where it hurts, with a boycott of matches. But it is hard to stage a strike against your club and one hand will always be tied behind your back in such a civil war. Yet the editors of Red Issue, the United fanzine for which I write, point out that there are already empty seats and executive boxes at many matches, and believe it would be possible to push the Glazers over the edge, even if it meant taking the team down with them.
Their latest issue argues for “an acceptance of short-term pain for long-term gain” because to prosper in the future, “the club has to get rid of these leeches”. The question is, how many fans hate the Glazers — or Gillett and Hicks, or Mike Ashley, or whoever — sufficiently to stop loving their clubs for long enough?
Anybody not entirely blinded by nostalgia would concede that much of the football we watch has been better in the Premier League era — but at a price many now think too high. Short of a people’s revolution, there seems no easy, fan-friendly solution, but at least a debate is starting.
And as football fans are all dreamers, we can at least dream of all those all-seat stadiums standing together and crying with one voice: can we have our football back, please?
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/premier_league/article6999047.ece
The Times/Mick Hume
January 23, 2010
It’s time for the fans to fight back
The banner briefly displayed at Old Trafford last weekend, before it was confiscated and the guilty fans evicted, summed it up: “Love United, Hate the Glazers”. They could easily have shipped it to Anfield and changed the slogan to “Love Liverpool, Hate the Yanks”.
As tensions rise between traditional supporters and the new breed of football proprietor, from Portsmouth to Newcastle, perhaps some enterprising fans might sell a one-size-fits-almost-all version (excluding the likes of Chelsea and Manchester City): “Love the Club, Hate the Owners”.
Whose clubs are they, anyway?
Do they belong to the mass of us fans who claim moral ownership
and invest not just time and money but heart and soul?
Or to the few plutocrats who hold the legal papers?
Do they exist to fulfil our dreams and generate glory?
Or to make money and meet debt repayments?
Even as a Manchester United season ticket-holder, I could share the exasperation of the Liverpool fan ranting about George Gillett Jr and Tom Hicks on a radio phone-in. “They don’t own the club! Well, all right, they do, but . . .”
It would be historically naive to imagine that these problems began with the arrival of a few foreign freeloaders. It has always been Us and Them. Off-pitch tensions between fans — and, originally, players — who wanted to enjoy football, and owners who wanted to enjoy the rewards, are as old as the professional game.
The railway workers’ team of Newton Heath were renamed Manchester United after they were bought by a local brewer, who paid off the club’s debts and sold beer to the crowd. The armaments workers’ team of Woolwich Arsenal were rescued from financial ruin when they were bought up by a consortium of businessmen who moved the South London club north to a more commercial site at Highbury. But at least those old burghers put their money into the clubs.
Over the past 30 years, what originated as a mass working-class sport in Britain’s industrial age has been taken over by new financial capitalism, in which debt-financed buyouts, bond issues, sponsorship, brands and other money-circulating chicanery have become almost more important than “the product”.
The FA opened the door in 1981, altering its rules to allow club directors to be paid for the first time and shareholders to receive fat dividends. This enabled the likes of Martin Edwards, the chief executive who turned United from an FC into a plc, to take millions out of Old Trafford long before the shareholders sold to the grisly Glazers.
Now, with the billions from TV contracts sloshing around the Premier League, we have the new class of socca capitalists, borrowing money to buy and sell clubs to which they have no more attachment than a Kraft executive has to a bar of Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut. Like the overleveraged private-equity players in the City, they have been badly burnt in the financial crisis, leaving clubs in peril.
No doubt some reports of imminent meltdown are scaremongering, but the scale of the problem is clear. United ended last season — having won the Barclays Premier League, the Club World Cup and the Carling Cup, and reached the Champions League final — deeper in debt than ever, the Glazers keeping their charmless heads above water thanks to the £80 million sale of Cristiano Ronaldo.
Faced with mounting debts, rising prices, rumours of ground or player sell-offs, what is the fan in the stand to do? Marches, meetings and protests are being staged and there are even murmurs of solidarity between fans of opposing clubs. Some want the United crowd to start wearing green-and- yellow shirts — the old Newton Heath colours — to show solidarity with the founding spirit of the working men’s football club.
Whether these prove much more than token protests remains to be seen. In practical terms, fans might be desperate to make the bad owners sell, but to whom? There is talk at some clubs of supporters making a bid. That is fantasy football finances. It was possible for 20-odd thousand people paying £35 each to buy Ebbsfleet United, but a big club are out of our league.
Suppose you really could persuade, say, 5,000 fans to pay £5,000 a head — that would give you £25 million, or not quite enough to buy Wayne Rooney’s left leg. So is the best we can hope for really to see another sheikh or oligarch lording it over us, as at City and Chelsea, or a more benevolent-looking billionaire, as at Aston Villa – or maybe a local-boy-made-pornbaron, as at West Ham United?
As an old Red in political as well as football terms, my preference would be for fans to storm the stadium gates and occupy Old Trafford as a sort of supporters’ soviet, but that option seems unlikely, in the short term at least. For now, frustration and impotence grow as fans are reduced to individual “customers”. Worse, the customer in football is not always right. Indeed he has no rights, because the clubs assume that supporters will always keep coming back to be ripped off, even for an inferior product.
The ultimate sanction is to hit the owners where it hurts, with a boycott of matches. But it is hard to stage a strike against your club and one hand will always be tied behind your back in such a civil war. Yet the editors of Red Issue, the United fanzine for which I write, point out that there are already empty seats and executive boxes at many matches, and believe it would be possible to push the Glazers over the edge, even if it meant taking the team down with them.
Their latest issue argues for “an acceptance of short-term pain for long-term gain” because to prosper in the future, “the club has to get rid of these leeches”. The question is, how many fans hate the Glazers — or Gillett and Hicks, or Mike Ashley, or whoever — sufficiently to stop loving their clubs for long enough?
Anybody not entirely blinded by nostalgia would concede that much of the football we watch has been better in the Premier League era — but at a price many now think too high. Short of a people’s revolution, there seems no easy, fan-friendly solution, but at least a debate is starting.
And as football fans are all dreamers, we can at least dream of all those all-seat stadiums standing together and crying with one voice: can we have our football back, please?
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/premier_league/article6999047.ece
