The Mail on Sunday

Don’t pretend real football is back. This is a pale imitation, and the game we love may never return

- Oliver Holt oliver.holt@mailonsund­ay.co.uk

HALF an hour before kick-off of the second leg of League One’s play-off semi-final between Oxford United and Portsmouth on Monday evening, a white flat-bed truck pulled up in the car park outside the Kassam Stadium. Twenty blue pallets had been stacked high on the back of it so that they rose six feet or more above the driver’s cab.

There are only three sides to the Kassam. The fourth was never built. So behind one goal, only a low wall separates the pitch from the car park. The truck driver had done his homework. The police moved him on but he circled round and parked a few metres away in the spaces reserved for customers of a cinema multiplex, which is closed. After that, they left him alone.

Just before kick-off, the driver clambered on to the top of the pile of pallets and opened a beer. He was 20 metres away from the pitch but he had an uninterrup­ted view of the empty stadium. Another man climbed up beside him, shook his hand and sat next to him. Others scrambled up as well and, when the game kicked off, they began to sing and cheer.

Soon, there were 10 Portsmouth fans perched precarious­ly atop the pallets, English football’s first spectators for almost four months. They began to chant at the wall of cardboard fans behind the other goal, the fans that football has replaced them with. The real thing confronted the impostors. ‘Where were you at Fratton Park?’ they yelled. The mute army of cut-outs stared back at them.

To people who don’t know English football, who are not steeped in it, maybe that moment might seem insignific­ant. For those of us there, sitting socially distanced in the stand, masks around our faces, it was a moment of joy. It was like a breath of pure oxygen. Banished since the game came back sanitised and bleak last month, it was the first sighting of football’s soul.

They have been saying football is back but it isn’t really. What’s the point of staging a drama if it plays to empty theatres? I’m sorry, but I have been to a few matches behind closed doors and it has been interestin­g to watch the games and see moments of skill and expression but let’s stop pretending football is back. What we have is a pale imitation of football.

WE know these stadiums of ours as cauldrons of emotion and passion and argument and anger and cursing and pleading and laughing and crying and hugging and stamping and shouting and sighing and shrugging and raging and exhorting and conflict and resolution and despair and triumph and pointing and waving and escaping and living. Now they are places that echo and clang and try to fool our minds with their cardboard fans and their fake crowd noise.

All this is necessary, we know, and we accept it because the safety of fans is paramount and the alternativ­e was for the TV companies to ask for their billions back and for English football t o be plunged i nto a terminal meltdown.

In the weeks since restart, it has still provoked moments that make the heart sing. Kevin De Bruyne has played more majestical­ly than ever, it has been thrilling to watch t he continuing emergence of Mason Greenwood at Manchester United, and it was a pleasure to see the joy of Chris Wilder when his Sheffield United side scored a last-minute winner against Wolves o n Wednesday. S o me things transcend the emptiness.

Others do not. Without crowds, too many matches have looked like training games. Without fans, lower-quality sides accept their fate against the big boys far more readily than they did when they had their supporters there roaring them on, refusing to allow them to become dispirited, refusing to allow them to give up.

Newcastle’s FA Cup capitulati­on to Manchester City at St James’ Park at the end of last month was a good example. Many sides have been outplayed by City. There is no shame in that. But Newcastle would not have been quite as supine in front of 50,000 screaming Geordies.

And would Spurs have surrendere­d so meekly to Sheffield United that Jose Mourinho said he was ‘disturbed’ by their lack of desire if thousands of their fans had been packed into the away end at Bramall Lane 10 days ago?

Now that the domestic season is drawing to a close, Jurgen Klopp’s dominant Liverpool side have been confirmed as title winners and relegation and promotion issues are about to be finalised, a wider concern is starting to emerge, too: will we ever get football back as we knew it before the coronaviru­s or is it being changed so fundamenta­lly t hat i t will be unrecognis­able?

It almost feels as if a coup against football has taken place during lockdown. Suddenly, it is a game transforme­d. More breaks, more subs, more interrupti­ons, more protests, less r h y t h m, less momentum. It is starting to look like a different game. So when fans are allowed back, will they like what they see? When they are allowed back, will they want to stay?

I am not sure t hat f ootball recognises quite yet the magnitude of the task it faces to win back the f a ns. The bal a nce o f power between clubs and supporters has shifted during the lockdown.

Fans had been relegated to cash-cows, customers to be fleeced in superstore­s and at the turnstile, commoditie­s taken for granted. But the sight and the sounds of those e mp t y s t a d i u ms has reminded us that they are the game’s life-blood. We already know we can put a price on the importance of supporters to the ‘product’.

Broadcaste­rs forced the Premier League to pay them a £330million rebate for the portion of the season played behind closed doors because the absence of the fans and the atmosphere they create devalued the viewer experience.

Extrapolat­e that figure and apply it to an entire campaign and it tells you fans are worth £1.4 billion a season to our top-flight clubs.

The clubs should be paying them to come to matches rather than the other way round. Season tickets should be free. We can see clearly now that fans make clubs money

Sanitised and bleak, it feels as if a coup against football has taken place during lockdown

and clubs ask them to pay for the privilege. The figures tell us what we already knew and what is being confirmed with every soulless game played behind closed doors: football is nothing without fans.

They tell us, too, that the game ought to pay more attention to fans’ concerns because, apart from wider issues about whether we will ever be comfortabl­e in crowds of 50,000 people again, t here is growing alarm at t he game’s direction of travel and the new rules it has adopted during the coronaviru­s crisis.

In the course of one season, English football has accelerate­d quickly towards a model of sport that has increasing similariti­es with the NFL with its staccato rhythm, its constant interrupti­ons, its made- for- television- adverts time-outs and its video replays. You can love the NFL and still deplore the way that our game appears to be trying to imitate it.

VAR is one part of the problem. Its introducti­on at the start of the season was a victory for logic and technology. Its implementa­tion has been shambolic. Luddites have never given it a chance but nor has it helped itself. The failure to include match-going fans in the decision-making process and to communicat­e with them about why there is a delay has been unforgivab­le. Even last week, the length of the time it took to decide on Eddie Nketiah’s red card for Arsenal against Leicester and then to adjudicate on whether there was an offside in the build-up to Jamie Vardy’s equaliser in the same game felt unacceptab­le. Decision-making should be getting quicker. It feels as if it is getting slower. There is understand­able disquiet, too, about the news that the rule that allowed teams to use five substitute­s this season is to be extended to next season, too. It was supposed to be introduced to aid player welfare in a time of accentuate­d fixture congestion and its perpetuati­on feels like a sop to the richer clubs that has been smuggled in under the cover of darkness.

Nobody signed up for this. There has been no consultati­on with fans. And it really does not take the brains of Lloyd George to work out that it is a rule which will favour richer clubs who have squads packed with larger numbers of higher-quality players. There are enough rules that favour the rich already. We do not need another.

That is before we consider the damage that the five- substitute rule does to the rhythm of the game. Yes, each club still only has t hree o pportuniti e s t o make changes but the reality of wholesale changes is that momentum in a game is lost. A side introducin­g three substitute­s at once is not uncommon now. It is like the game starting again.

The drinks breaks that have appeared since the restart have increased the sense of disruption, too. Wilder has already pointed out that managers like Arsenal’s Mikel Arteta have been using the breaks as auxiliary half-time intervals, seizing them as opportunit­ies for extra coaching. Often, any advantage an opponent may have gained is negated by the drinks break.

The NFL is calibrated around interrupti­ons like that. Our game is not. Our game is at its best when it builds around surges of momentum and periods of pressure and periods of heroic resistance.

EVEN when the fans are back, perhaps especially when the fans are back, the prevalence of these new interrupti­ons will ruin those rhythms and how they rise and fall. If all this were being done in the name of crisis management, we could stomach it. But what was supposed t o be t emporary is already becoming permanent. It does not feel right. It feels surreptiti­ous and wrong. Changes are bleeding into the game that are altering its nature fundamenta­lly and a l l wi t h o u t fans being given the chance to make their feelings known.

The Premier League are playing a dangerous game. They seem to be in denial. They used to hold all the cards but they don’t any more. It needs to understand that even though some supporters will rush back as soon as they can, others will be more cautious. Maybe that will be because they will no longer feel comfortabl­e in stadiums with tens of thousands of people. Maybe that will be because they have grown used to spending less money during lockdown. Maybe that will be because they have lost their jobs and they no longer have the disposable income the Premier League demands of their supporters and their families.

Maybe that will be because they have reassessed their priorities during the crisis and they have decided they are bored of being taken for granted by clubs and kit manufactur­ers who have been abusing their loyalty and that they would rather spend their money elsewhere.

Football must realise now more than ever that it has to make a priority of getting fans back into grounds as soon as it is safe. The longer their absence, the quicker the game will wither and the harder it will be to revive it.

West Ham vice- chair Karren Brady said yesterday that the plan is to have supporters back in full stadiums by September, which would be a fillip for the league. If the Government can get audiences back into cinemas and theatres, the Premier League has to convince them it can get football fans back into grounds. If they have not been readmitted by early next season, the game will be in even more serious trouble.

Even then, the danger for English football is that the public will come back t o a game i t no l onger recognises and no longer loves, a game of changed rhythms and alien interrupti­ons and manufactur­ed breaks and innovation­s weighted towards the most powerful clubs that make it even harder for t he Premier League to maintain the illusion of unpredicta­bility on which much of its appeal is predicated.

It may want football back the way it used to be but it is as if the Premier League and the football authoritie­s think they still exist in a world where they can treat fans with disdain.

They may find that their world has changed. They may f i nd that power has shifted away from them. They may be in for a rude awakening.

Getting fans back must be a priority. The more they’re absent, the harder it will be to revive the game The five-sub rule feels like a sop to the richer clubs smuggled in to the game under cover of darkness

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 ??  ?? Arteta gives a team talk during a drinks break TAKING THE MIK:
Football is here but not as we know it SOULLESS:
Arteta gives a team talk during a drinks break TAKING THE MIK: Football is here but not as we know it SOULLESS:

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