As all eyes look to South Africa for the start of the World Cup, it might seem an exercise in futility to write about the domestic club scene. But international football is comfortable with a fact that the club game in England shows an increasing inability to recognise. Football—on the pitch, at least—is about glory, not money. In the World Cup, there’s no talk of a game carrying the greatest financial prize in the world, or a must-win match in which the victor takes the spoils and the loser liquidation. Britain may be owned by the bond markets, but no-one can own our national football team.
When the domestic season chugs back into life, though, with the familiar catalogue of financial, sexual and ethical misdemeanours, those of us with allegiance to a club will feel a dissonance. For although we give the players our loyalty and commitment, the clubs themselves are run for profit by private owners. They proclaim the importance of fans, but the actions of many reveal this sentiment to be false.
Our football clubs have become an ego trip, a pension fund, an asset strip, a hedge fund income stream, or perhaps a political tool—even, in one case, a birthday present for a bored millionaire husband. Too many of them demonstrate an approach to business that is cavalier at best and grossly incompetent at worst. Nearly two thirds of the 92 professional clubs in England have been insolvent in the 18 years since the formation of the Premier League created the modern football financial system.
All this helps explain a surge of activism among fans intent on exploring alternative models of club ownership, most visibly played out in high-profile campaigns at the likes of Liverpool, Manchester United, Newcastle and Portsmouth. These fans understand that clubs have an inherent community value that should be protected, yet the fact that they are owned privately means that the people who run them are unaccountable for their actions.
This week, 170,000 members of FC Barcelona will cast their vote for the new club president. Contrast this with the supporters co-op at Manchester United, the Red Knights, who have tried—and failed—to pay £1.5bn to get rid of owners who add nothing to the club and have turned it from the world’s richest into its most indebted. Barcelona’s governance model, a co-operative, recognises that for institutions with a role to play in the community, the mechanisms of democracy are far more suitable than the joint stock companies the English have been saddled with.
The impact of co-operatives is best seen in Germany, where by dint of German FA regulation, 51 per cent of a club must be owned its supporters. They elect their own officials, ensuring German clubs have the cheapest ticket prices of the big European leagues, with the best atmosphere in some of the best stadiums in the world. Their fans don’t want anything else.
German clubs are streets ahead in their community engagement work too. In the early 1980s, English football’s ruling elite famously told Mrs Thatcher to “get your hooligans out of our game.” In Germany, clubs responded to the same issue by hiring social workers. They saw it as their responsibility to help tackle a problem whose impact was felt beyond the club.
None of this seems to dent their bottom line. This week, Deloitte’s Sports Business Group’s annual report revealed that the German Bundesliga had overtaken the Premiership as the most profitable league in the world. While the Premiership remained the world’s richest league with combined club revenues of £2bn, the report warned it to curb its current rate of spending, most significantly on players’ wages, transfer deals and debt. While the financial input into community programmes by many top-level English clubs is impressive, cynics could argue these are too often treated as an attempt to bridge, not close, the growing chasm between club and community. A record 67 per cent of revenue from the Premiership was spent on players’ wages alone.
Supporters Direct, the group I work for, commissioned Substance, a research consultancy with experience in evaluating football social programmes, to investigate the social impact of clubs—not just on people they deliberately targeted with community programmes, but also as a result of their day-to-day operations. They asked senior officials for their views on issues like favouring local suppliers, or having an employment policy that tried to provide jobs to people in the surrounding community. We found that the greater the community’s stake in the club, the greater the club’s commitment was to the community.
Since 2000, 14 such clubs have been assisted in being set up as co-operatives by Supporters Direct, with more than 140 other supporters’ co-ops in place wanting to play a greater role. Supporting these groups is a pragmatic response to the increasingly urgent problem of poor governance and financial management in our national sport, but football is also a great place to start building communities.
Clubs can bring individuals and families together into groups that transcend many of the deep cleavages that ghettoise and alienate modern urban and suburban life. Most were formed before the turn of the 20th century, and for many, the story of the town and the club is also one in which they can locate their family story. The desire of those people to become more involved in some of the touted “big society” initiatives remains to be seen; the resonance that clubs have, the passion they inspire, and the activism that they can promote is undoubted.
The Social and Community Value of Football report will be launched at their conference in London this Saturday. Speakers include film director Ken Loach and Co-operatives UK CEO Ed Mayo. For more details see www.supporters-direct.org
Follow Prospect's World Cup blog at http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/worldcup2010/
Reclaiming football
Football clubs have a unique power to build communities, but their owners are only interested in money. Let's put the national sport back in the hands of its supporters
June 9, 2010
