This Is The Modern World

Amid all the strangely new-found concern about indebtedness and clubs being used as cash-cows by overseas investors, who should be there popping up in the background but Premiership Chief Executive Richard Scudamore. As well as denying that indebtedness was a problem (his bizarre argument was that as long as the level of your debt didn’t exceed your income all was well), he went on to suggest that last year’s Big Stupid Idea, Game 39, was inevitable in some form or other, on the basis that the fans – the fans! – demanded it. By the fans, of course, he meant the growing hordes of TV viewers in (mainly) South-East Asia and the US, who choose their team by who knows what method and whose connection with the club is limited to an annual purchase of a replica shirt and for the lucky ones a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Emirates, the Bridge or Anfield, rather than the poor benighted supporters who actually turn up at the ground, pay the money, and create the atmosphere.

Scudamore’s argument is of course disingenuous: what he means is, how can the clubs fail to turn down such a lucrative marketing opportunity. And in one sense, of course, he is right: the rich, largely untapped overseas markets are full of potential customers, newly turned on to the glories of Premiership football. And there lies the rub. What Scudmore and the 20 PL chairmen are after are not, in any recognisable form, “fans” or “supporters” but customers. And there is a massive, massive difference: in fact, they are polar opposites. A customer’s relationship with a business is hard-nosed, based solely on (however crude) a cost-benefit analysis and as soon as the costs outweigh the benefits, the customer moves on, either to another business or to keeping his money in his pocket. A fan’s relationship with his club is based on anything but cost/benefit: it is based on passion, identity, community, history. Being a fan has to do with who you are, where you are from, your past as well as your future. The relationship you have with your club is burned into your psyche in intangible and hard-to-define ways, and the notion of walking away because you don’t like the current product or of supporting another team because they are more successful or more glamourous is as unthinkable as changing who you are and where you come from. And moreover, I submit it is impossible to be a fan based exclusively on TV/internet/mobile phone contact. The fan experience mediated through Sky Sports or ESPN is inevitably going to be weaker, simply because someone else is in control of what you see, hear and sense. You see what the TV director wants you to see, hear only those (bowdlerised) chants the director wants you to hear. And when the goal goes in, the experience of jumping around your living room is a cruel pastiche and entirely unsatisfactory shadow of leaping up with all those around you at the ground.

This is important because it strikes at the heart of the modern mantra driving all sorts of initiatives, Game 39 included: that football is a business and needs to behave as such. This is the Big Lie: the central theme which has dominated football administration since 1989, the year the Super League, as it was then known, was first mooted. Football is a business and if it is to survive must become more businesslike. Rubbish. Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish, rubbish, RUBBISH! Football is not now, never has been, never will be, a business. It is a game, played for entertainment, for fun. It is an expression of community, in perhaps its messiest form. It is not a business. Businessmen are involved with it, but it is not a business. And the reason it is not a business is because it has fans, not customers. Because it deals with loyalties, relationships and communities beyond the crude cost-benefit. And it has been the failure to understand, to acknowledge this fairly basic fact that has got football in the mess it currently is in. Fans are being ignored in favour of customers, because, it is argued, without more customers success is elusive. Scudamore cannot open his mouth without offering hymns of praise to the modern god, Brand. History, culture, community, all subverted into this city-worker’s wet dream.

Already one set of fans have had their club stolen from them. Ask Wimbledon fans how they feel about MK Dons’ branding. Wrexham, Rotherham, Bournemouth, Luton – all right, even Leeds – victims of the pursuit of customers at the expense of fans. But it will not be until a major Premiership club or two go the same way that the game will really sit up and start to re-evaluate its relationship with the people that keep the chairmen in cigars, the agents in bling and the players in gas-guzzlers. West Ham and Portsmouth are current favourites: what happens when the credit crunch really bites is anyone’s guess. One thing you can be sure of, though: it will be the fans that stay and the customers that go. Along with the Americans, Russians, Norwegians, Saudis…..

Category: Team News

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