Managers shouldn’t accept film-star salaries and then moan about their soulless, hard-to-please consumers

Klopp and Mourinho are actually part of the problem

I WATCHED a new film this week, which attempts to find the soul of British football.

Shankly: Nature’s Fire, tells the story of an iconic manager who drummed into players that their prime responsibilty in life was to make the people on the terraces happy.

It is financed by BBC Scotland, so takes in Bill Shankly’s great friend Matt Busby, who built the modern Manchester United on similar principles shaped in tight-knit mining communities.

Watching footage of crowds in the 60s and 70s reminded me that, for most fans, going to the match back then was a completely different concept to today.

It used to be about mainly working-class men passing on the faith of their fathers to their kids.

Now, it’s about being a consumer of a lucrative product, the aim of which is to keep investors, merchandisers and global TV audiences happy.

In the pre-Premier League era, the soul of British football was to be found on those terraces. The expensive seats and boxes, which replaced them, have buried that soul.

Apart from pockets of singing areas and the away end, for most games at Anfield and Old Trafford the atmosphere is dead. Put it down to too many Thomas Cook tourists, huge swathes of the ground handed to corporate clients and a pricing structure that keeps out kids, teenagers and the low-paid.

Games now attract comfortable, middle-aged season-ticket holders, plenty of whom feel they have every right to moan if they’re not getting their £40 worth of entertainment.

In other words, put it down to money.

Which is why some might say that Jurgen Klopp and Jose Mourinho criticising their fans’ negativity at the weekend did football a favour.

But they’re part of the problem. Between them, they earn £20million a year in wages alone and are massive beneficiaries of corporate greed that has turned most Premier League stadiums into virtual voyeur parlours.

Klopp, frustrated at the tension around Anfield, is often seen urging the fans to make more noise.

Maybe he thought it would be as raucous as Dortmund’s Westfalenstadion.

Maybe it still would be if Liverpool season-ticket holders paid what fans on the Yellow Wall pay (£12 a game for adults, £6 for under-15s) and the club made it as accessible to the local community as Dortmund’s fan-based ownership do.

Mourinho’s double blast at United fans’ negativity this week follows his complaint after the Leicester game, in August, that Old Trafford was “very quiet”.

That was a regular observation at Stamford Bridge where he once made a sleeping gesture to his own Chelsea fans. But it’s a bit rich coming from someone who only wants to manage wealthy clubs, who’ll give him fortunes to buy the world’s best players and make him the world’s best-paid manager, not caring how such money is generated.

Mourinho, Klopp and Arsene Wenger (who’s often attacked the Emirates crowd for its lack of atmosphere) can’t have it both ways.

They can’t accept film-star salaries, guaranteeing them eight-figure pay-offs for failure, without accepting there’s a trade-off with the type of hard-to-please customer the wealthobsessed Premier League feels it needs to attract.

They bought into it and benefit massively from it. And if they really want the soul returned to English football, maybe they should Skype their bosses in America and demand measures to make their grounds the noisy, passionate cauldrons of old.

Perhaps, as a Shanklyesque gesture, they could even offer a chunk of their wages to help make tickets affordable to local working-class under-25s, who are most likely to get the place jumping again. What do you say, chaps? Sorry. Speak up. You’ve gone a bit quiet.