Who owns your club?

Nostalgia these days, it’s not what it used to be.


It’s quite possible no one under 30 can remember a time without computer games, mobile phones or the Premier League. So, here’s a short history lesson in football:


In the old days your local club was your club, ‘part of the community’; if your community was a council estate. Your neighbourhood was an extension of your home and your birthright (or albatross) was your local club. No choice, mate. Family, innit. In fact, you were a ‘ponce’ to follow anyone else (or worse, Man Utd). On match days, you weren’t driven to the ground to sit in a ‘poncey’ stand, you strolled across the terraces as you would your estate (Lords of your manor), into fights and out again and even if you’d paid to get in, you’d still have change for the chippy on the way home. In the old days a manager was for life not just for Christmas; with only a basic squad of home grown players, he could turn a mediocre ‘second division’ club into European champions in a handful of years.  So old were these old days, Chelsea were just such a club (Mourinho has obviously been trying to revive nostalgia in the Shed this year).


In the old days, my club, Charlton Athletic were a genuine, rank-and-file football club. Now they are a business, not however dealing at Chelsea’s Tiffany end, more a Ratners market stall, with a range of short-term managers (3 this season alone), a policy of selling home grown players as soon as they’ve learned to drive, an owner who has visited the ground on only three occasions and a CEO (Belgian, female and a lawyer) happily ignorant of football, tradition and nostalgia. To this regime, football is just ‘another business’ and the fans are ‘customers’. ‘What do these weird people think’ asks the CEO ‘that they own the club?’ At Charlton, yes, they probably do.


Charlton Athletic. Probably the only English club genuinely created (salvaged and recreated) by the fans for the fans. Fans who remember the homeless, wilderness years of the Eighties, suffering the dire, egotistical business decisions of another whimsical ‘CEO’ (his failing company actually called FADS); the home games at Selhurst Park, Upton Park (when Charlton Park and jumpers for goalposts seemed the next inevitable destination); fans who defied bankruptcy, campaigning week after week, year after year for a return ‘home’ to the Valley; in the midst of which, Lennie Lawrence’s heroic, annual battle to remain in the top division was the Homeric tale spanning four seasons.  ‘Charlton survive again’ ran the trailer for the club video at the end of the decade ‘and this time do it in style’ (a 3-0 defeat of Derby in the final home game allowing the delirious luxury of losing to Forest the following week!). 


This painful, joyful history: the bankrupt notice, the exodus from the Valley (midway through a promotion winning season), the fight for the return, the defeat of Greenwich council, volunteers clearing the intervening years of weeds, weather and wreckage, rebuilding the stadium, making it happen; this is serious nostalgia, serious passion. The roar greeting Colin Walsh’s clinical strike against Portsmouth, Charlton’s first goal in the first game back at the Valley, echoing his namesake’s 1947 Cup Final winner, was the vocal essence of what it means to be a fan. Yes, these fans, more than most, have a right to feel they own ‘their’ club and will fight again when they feel (as they do now) it is being taken out of their hands.


However, Is this CEO really so wrong? Isn’t she just stating a hard fact to face? Are the old days in the past? Football has, of course, been little more than a business for some time (ask FIFA); a ruthless business, where, despite the embarrassing flood of money from TV you can still charge £77 (‘cheap for opera tickets’) for ninety possibly mediocre minutes at Anfield. Has this business just moved on into a new dimension since Walsh’s goal? Has the day of the fan just disappeared?


If so, what does it mean to be a customer in football today? I’m a customer with Eon but only because they’ve offered me the best deal on my gas and electric for the current year. I may well be with someone else next year. Could football operate a price comparison site? For a century clubs have depended on fan loyalty, the sort of loyalty that lasts a lifetime, they budget for it every year in the sale of season tickets; but when does this dependence become complacent abuse?


What have these customers gained since the inception of the Premier League? Shelter (the popular end at Charlton was actually called The Covered End), seats out of the rain and real toilets replacing the old converted cattle troughs. Yes, clubs no longer treat fans like the working class animals of old, they are now middle class customers of a corporate enterprise. What, however, do they offer them; what is the real cost of this comfort, safety and dignity? Exclusion; the glass wall through which we are permitted to watch the millionaires at play.


Football’s a serious business and we live in the capitalist world. They might wear the shirt, but fans don’t own the means of production (there isn’t even a John Lewis Partnership club). The greatest losers in this scenario, however, must be the new generation being formed within this clinical environment; priced out of the market, kids without wealthy connections can’t wander into games when they feel like it (unless on occasional schemes sounding like pedo bargain hunts: ‘Kids for a quid’). So their ‘local’ team is now the team in their front room at the weekend (alongside Strictly and the X Factor) and it’s a meagre ponce choice of the usual suspects: Chelsea, Man City or United, etc. Unless they somehow end up playing for a club, how will these young viewers ever develop a sense of connection of any real depth? Where then is football’s future fan base? 


Football will, of course, follow its Darwinian evolution. Those who can afford it will buy the Championship; it’s written into their budget and anything less will require an explanation to their shareholders. For the rest, despite the billionaire bubble of television money, survival is at the top of the agenda. In this future struggle they will need their fans.


It’s a cliche from the old days but no less a truth: the fans rather than the game itself have made football what it is today. Without them it is nothing. 


Will I be the only fan in the country desperate to see Leicester and its passionate local support take the Premiership this year? I don’t think so. For the sake of football, we can only hope.

DG