Something rotten at the heart of football
WHAT makes a community? It is the pub? Not lately. The post office? Maybe, if you’re still lucky to have one. Or is it some shared sense of identity from a sporting club or team?
For many places, their sporting clubs are the heart of their community, the place where everyone, regardless of age, background or political views, can come and cheer (or cry) together within a singular identity.
In small places there is an intense sense of pride and togetherness about their club, while larger places can be pulled together, or divided, by a sporting identity. Think of the red and blue halves of Liverpool, or the fierce rivalries in North London.
For those who have been to more than a token sporting event, and stood on the terraces or sat in the stands, there is a certain sort of tribalism that sets sport – and particularly football – apart from anything else in modern life.
You wear your team’s colours, sing songs that are often unique to your club (and its players or manager), and wait for that glorious moment of release when your team scores, and you instinctively celebrate together.
I’ve been hugged by complete strangers (not recently, in case you are concerned) after my team has scored a goal, and sung the same song as thousands of others to urge them on.
It’s not even about results, overall. Being a football fan is a ritual, a feeling of waking up on a Saturday morning and knowing exactly where you will be at 3pm that day, but not knowing exactly what will unfold.
Even if you lose that afternoon, or evening perhaps, there is always that hope that things will be better next week, or if not then next season.
Yet for fans of Macclesfield Town FC, there is no next Saturday, no next season, as they were recently wound up over debts of around £500,000.
The Silkmen, as they were known, are the latest club to disappear from football over financial trouble.
While I don’t want to get into the exact whys and whats, it is worth making a comparison between the amount of debt that sealed their fate, and another transfer which has taken place. That was over a loan move for Gareth Bale, the superstar player who has returned to Tottenham from Real Madrid for the rest of this season.
Bale’s weekly wages are said to be in the region of £500,000. That is the same amount that Macclesfield Town FC owed their creditors.
The point is obvious: For the sake of one week of a superstar’s salary, one community has lost their club, their sense of shared identity and shared history.
Something is clearly rotten at the heart of the beautiful game when the authorities are so powerless to be unable to prevent clubs going to the wall.
It is not just fans in Macclesfield who have lost their club. Other clubs have faded, while Bury FC, the former employer of Plymouth Argyle manager Ryan Lowe as well as a number of the Pilgrims’ current squad, also went under last season.
For the record, I don’t have any problem with Gareth Bale – he is the product of the system, and not the source of it.
But I do have a problem with the corporate mentality which seeks to use football as a giant cash machine.
TV revenues, once shared equally between every club in the Football League, are now mostly kept by the all-powerful Premier League, with only a small percentage trickling down to other divisions.
This has meant that clubs outside of the top division are reliant on fans coming through the turnstiles in order to survive, which currently cannot happen.
So something has to change, or other communities are destined to lose their football clubs.
Something has to change, or other communities are destined to lose their clubs