Forgotten fans Supporters now turning on club owners after years of being ignored
‘Everywhere you look there is a growing dislocation between supporters and their team’
It is going to be rocking at the Sir Charles Napier pub in Blackburn on the evening of September 2. Local band Static will be playing live, so will Honour Roots from nearby Preston. The turnout is expected to be substantial. Not just because admission is free. But because this is a Rock Against the Venkys night, a musical protest against the continued ownership of Blackburn Rovers by the VH Group, the Indian food-processing conglomerate that has been in control at Ewood Park since November 2010. “Protesting at matches can have a demoralising effect on the players,” the concert organiser Peter Ridehalgh explains. “We are hoping that Rock Against Venkys could provide an outlet that all fans can get behind.”
For a generation, Rovers were a solid fixture in the Premier League. Now, as they adapt to life in League One, the diminishing band of match-going supporters remain convinced as to where the blame for the club’s precipitous demise lies: it is all the Venkys’ fault. But it is not just the hapless failure on the pitch that concerns the protesters. Everything appears to have shrunk in scale since the glory days of 1995, when, under the generous stewardship of local boy-made-good Jack Walker, Rovers won the title.
“The results are just one aspect of the current situation,” suggests Ridehalgh. “Local businesses are suffering and even closing due to the fall in attendances. Families no longer meet up every two weeks as many people no longer see Rovers as the club they once loved. The status of the club, and with it the town itself, has been run into the ground.”
It will come as no consolation, but at Blackburn they are not alone. Last season saw protests at Orient, Charlton, Coventry, Nottingham Forest and Blackpool. Here, too, the complaints were not simply about points lost and demotions suffered. This was not an airing of the traditional “sack the board” response to a bad run of form. For those marching, leafleting, boycotting and throwing plastic pigs on to the pitch, there was a wider concern, a growing sense that a once-vibrant community asset was being systematically shredded of focus and meaning.
And according to Kevin Rye, who was involved in the founding of the fan-owned AFC Wimbledon and now works as a consultant in supporter communications, the gap between fans and the object of their affection is not an issue confined to those labouring in crisis. This sense of being ignored, forgotten and left behind stretches throughout football.
“Blackburn, Charlton, Coventry, Blackpool and the others are terrible situations that need to be resolved,” Rye says. “But it would be a huge mistake to suggest they are mad outliers. There is a general problem in the game. Everywhere you look there is a growing dislocation between the fans and their club.”
There was a hint of how widespread the feeling is in a survey conducted by the Football Supporters Federation (FSF) this summer. Of the 8,495 fans who were polled, only 32 per cent felt their club cared about them or their views. 90 per cent said they wanted greater fan representation at board level.
“Fans understand that many clubs are now global brands. However, these results show that the majority of supporters think this can be to the detriment of local support,” explains Malcolm Clarke of the FSF. “Supporters want their clubs to listen on other issues, too, be that ticket prices, financial matters and safe standing. Clubs must commit to genuine engagement both online and in the real world.” The Premier League’s response to the poll is to point to the fact that 96.5 per cent of its fixtures play out in front of full houses. There cannot be too much wrong with a product that consistently attracts huge numbers, they assert.
But while observers such as Rye would not wish to argue with English football’s robust international appeal (the Premier League is now available on television in every nation on earth, apart from North Korea) his fear is about the deteriorating relationship between the game and the match-going fan.
Through everything from changing of kick-off times to suit television schedules to the price of season tickets, he says the hardcore supporter is being presented with continual evidence that, in the drive to seek out new markets, they have been forgotten. “Football has always had concentric circles of interest,” Rye explains. “At its edges are people who are only interested when a team wins something. Next come some who engage more regularly and so on until you arrive at the very centre where you find this fan who’ll keep going, out all weathers, whose life revolves round the club. It’s that fan who provides the match-day atmosphere that the television viewer in China admires. Without that central cog, the wheel won’t go round. But those in the middle are feeling increasingly ostracised. The problem is football is saying to them: the fan in Singapore is as valid as fan in Salford.”
Take a glance at any Premier League club’s marketing drive and it would suggest the focus is on the outer rings of Rye’s concentric circles of support. Manchester City’s website, for instance, available in five different languages, this week announced a series of personalised fan engagement platforms.”
With the help of user data, City will run targeted activations with tailored experiences and rewards
to users both at home and around the world,” runs the spiel. “This will include trips to Manchester for international fans.” Meanwhile, perhaps unnoticed in the urge to address the overseas market, there has been a fundamental change in the way fans consume the game. Kevin Day, the comedian and a long-term season ticket holder at Crystal Palace, was astonished when he started work on a new television show about football to discover that of the dozen or so enthusiastic, knowledgeable, youthful members of the production team, none were regular match attendees.
“They love the game, know way more about it than I do, but they have grown up consuming it in a very different way to me,” he says of his twentysomething coworkers. “They go to the pub to watch, or tune in to illegal streaming services on their tablet. These are people who have known nothing other than the Premier League in their life and their way of showing commitment is nothing like mine. It means when I go to Palace I see the same old faces I’ve seen for the past 20 years. I think we’re in real danger in two generations’ time of just having consumers, not fans. I’m not sure football has woken up to what this change in habits means, let alone how to address it.”
For Rye, the answer lies in communication. Not just digital marketing, but face-to-face engagement, ideally with the fans represented on the board.
“And clubs can’t just address the fans,” he says. “If they want to bridge this growing gap they have to listen to and act on concerns.” At Cardiff City, they would insist they have done just that. And the results might provide solace to those elsewhere who fear nothing can change. This is a club which five years ago would have been listed