I have set out to explain the opportunities offered to fans by the Football Governance Act by using plain English and everyday examples to provide a starting point. You can read the first two articles in the series on this Substack – they are free to access. This time I’m going to look at corporate governance and why it is important to understand what that means.

I’m going to be honest – this was a bit of a tough one. But don’t worry, you’re not going to be asked to synergise any low-hanging fruit or optimise mission-critical thought leadership in order to paradigm shift disruptive innovation going forward. You might come up against people who use language like that as you get more involved in dealing with your club. Just remember they don’t know what any of that means either.

What corporate governance is about is who is running the show; who is putting the strategic business plan we examined in part two into action, and how. Corporate governance is a dry term often used to hide who is really making the decisions. But the Football Governance Act forces this “behind the scenes” machinery into the light. It defines how a club must behave and who is accountable for its actions.

The FGA defines corporate governance in Schedule 5, paragraph 7(2). This sets out that governance covers;

• The “Organs” of the Club: How the Board and senior management are set up and what their jobs are.

• Conduct: How these leaders behave and the rules they must follow.

• Community & EDI: For the first time, corporate governance legally includes how a club contributes to its local community and its approach to equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI).

There is also another important part of the definition - The “Non-Financial” Test. The Regulator treats governance as a “resource.” So just as a club needs money, it must pass a “non-financial resources threshold requirement” to show it has the right people and systems to stay sustainable.

This is more significant than it sounds. Anyone who has studied the guidance that the regulator has issued to clubs will have noticed that it clearly believes that strong corporate governance underpins everything else a club is required to do. If good finances and effective fan engagement are the visible features of a good club, then corporate governance provides the unseen foundations.

So how is the regulator going to check that this is happening?

Well, there is what’s called a paper trail – in simple terms written statements from the club that set out how it is going to meet its obligations. But these statements are not just words on paper. They are legally binding commitments. The whole thrust of the regime is based upon two related ideas:

1. That the Regulator will allocate its (finite) resources on the basis of a ongoing assessment of risk.

2. Clubs that consistently meet their obligations, and keep promises that they have previously made, are likely to be regarded as a lower risk than those who don’t.

Every licensed club is legally required to submit a Corporate Governance Statement to the Regulator. And under Schedule 5, Paragraph 5(b), the club must publish its latest statement online for fans to see.

This statement must explain how the club is following the Regulator’s Code of Practice and what specific actions it is taking to improve EDI.

This Code of Practice is a document the IFR has to publish about how regulated clubs should be run.

What all this provides is accountability, something fans have long argued for, if it is used properly. Because the Regulator won’t just file these documents away. It will publish a Corporate Governance Report that highlights which clubs are failing to meet the standards and recommends improvements.

These reports will be much more than mere window dressing. The debate about the nature of Regulatory powers has tended to focus on the more punitive and dramatic end of the spectrum. But in reality the Regulator will want to focus the majority of its effort on the softer use of power, for example via identifying and promulgating best practice. Its reporting obligations around corporate governance are one of its most obvious opportunities to do so.

Share The Football Fan

How can fans make use of this?

Ask the right questions: Use the published statements to ask questions such as: “Your statement says you are improving community well-being – where is the evidence of this in our local area?”.

Remember there is a requirement to consult fans. When the IFR sets a club’s “fan consultation condition,” it is legally required to look at that club’s corporate governance arrangements whilst doing so first.

Use the ultimate leverage: If a club ignores its own governance rules or the Code of Practice, it is committing a “relevant infringement”. This gives the Regulator the power to step in with sanctions, including financial penalties or even licence suspension.

To sum up

Good governance ensures that owners can’t just ignore the strategic plan or the fans’ views. It provides the checks and balances needed to protect the club as a community asset.

By understanding governance, fans move from just protesting about results on the pitch to influencing the structures that cause those results.

The next article will look at Heritage Issues, showing how governance and engagement combine to protect the club’s name, colours, and home ground.

Leave a comment

Read Part 1: How to use the Football Governance Act at your club.

Read Part 2: Strategic business plans and your right to influence.

This series of articles could not have been written without the assistance of Robbie Whittaker of the Blackpool Supporters Trust. His knowledge of how legislation is drafted and interpreted has proved invaluable. Some of the basic research has been conducted with the assistance of AI in the form of Gemini Notebook, which cites original sourcing. Those sources have been checked by Robbie and I, but the analysis and conclusions are written by us.

• Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

With the Football Governance Act (FGA) now law, fans of every club in the top five divisions of the English men’s game have a chance to take a seat at the table when the club’s strategic business plan is being written. In this second in a series of articles that aims to explain in plain English the opportunities the FGA offers and how fans can make the most of them, we’ll take a look at what a strategic business plan is, and why it matters that you are part of putting it together. (You can read part one in the series here).

The trouble with strategic business plans are that they sound like the worst kind of corporate jargon, the sort of thing we want to get away from when we go to the game. But these plans are an important part of ensuring that you still have a club to go and watch – not just now, but for years to come. The Independent Football Regulator (IFR) – whose job it is to ensure clubs meet the requirements of the FGA – has the power to withdraw or deny a licence to play from a club that doesn’t have a strategic business plan, or that has a plan that doesn’t meet minimum standards.

So what does a strategic business plan have to tell you?

You’ll need to go to Section 16(5) of the FGA to find the definition. The words in the legislation are in italics, and a short explanation of what they mean follows in ordinary type.

(5) A “strategic business plan” is a document containing –

(a) information, in respect of the relevant period, about –

The “relevant period” means the day from which the club applies for its licence to play up until the end of the next football season following the application date. This is to ensure the club is looking ahead, and not just planning for now.

(i) the proposed operation of the club,

The club board must explain how it intends to run the club day-to-day.

(ii) the estimated costs of that operation,

The club board must explain what it is going to cost to keep the club competitive.

(iii) how those costs are to be funded, and

(iv) the source of such funding, and

The Club board must explain where the money is coming from to stay competitive.

(b) such other information as may be specified by the IFR in rules.

This gives the Regulator wide powers to demand to view any other information it sees fit in order to support or expand on the information provided above. This is intended to ensure clubs aim for maximum standards of compliance, not minimum. It is also designed to assist the Regulator in taking an overall view of the level of risk at any given club.

Share

So why is the regulator asking for this information?

In simple terms, because the Regulator wants to ensure the club has enough money to do what it says it wants to do, and the organisation to achieve that. It’s called ensuring the club is “financially sound”. How the test of financial soundness is identified and judged is set out in Schedule 4, paragraph 2 of the FGA.

This is given extra weight because the Regulator sees football clubs not just as any other business, but as a community asset. So it is important that it can decide if a club has the “appropriate” resources to ensure that community asset is not at risk.

As explained in the first article in this series: “The Act has been carefully designed to be holistic in nature, ensuring that different parts of it reinforce one another. Any club that seeks to view its provisions as a menu it can choose from is likely to quickly find compliance with the Regulator’s expectations is hard to achieve. As fans, remembering this key principle will help you in properly holding your own club to account.”

Financial planning is tied directly to a club’s right to exist, and its long-term sustainability. And if you need to know why that is important, read up on the many cases of clubs that have gone to the wall or faced threats to their very existence. The FGA puts fans at the table while the strategic business plan is being drawn up because fans see our clubs as more than just a business, we understand their value is drawn from their status as a community asset.

Once drawn up, the strategic business plan is effectively a contract between the club and the Regulator, and it cannot be departed from on a whim. This is specified at Schedule 5, paragraph 2. The plan is a “condition” of getting a licence to play; it is a de facto contract between club and Regulator and if a club wishes to depart from it it will need compelling reasons to do so.

Isn’t all this too good to be true?

Football fans have been promised a lot over the years, so it is understandable that many are cynical when told they finally have some power. So what is different this time?

Well, Schedule 4, paragraph 4, says a club cannot meet its Fan Engagement Threshold unless it consults fans on “relevant matters”. And these relevant matters are defined as;

• the club’s strategic direction and objectives;

• the club’s business priorities.

So when a club writes its business plan, it is legally obliged to take the views of fans into account when setting strategic goals. Consultation doesn’t mean an optional chat. It cannot be emphasised enough that proper discussion with fans about the strategic business plan is a condition of the club’s licence. We will say more about the nature of these discussions in a future paper on fan engagement.

What this also means is that fan groups need to up our game. We need to take a more professional and confident approach, knowing when to push to hold clubs to account, and knowing that we need to have a good grasp of the facts needed when we do so.

Fans can no longer be told the business side of the clubs we support is none of our business. Because the FGA makes it our business. So we need to be asking questions such as “How does our feedback on strategic direction match the business plan you submitted to the Regulator?”

In the next article, we’ll look at Corporate Governance – the “behind the scenes” rules that ensure the club actually follows its own plan.

Read Part 1: How to use the Football Governance Act at your club.

This series of articles could not have been written without the assistance of Robbie Whittaker of the Blackpool Supporters Trust. His knowledge of how legislation is drafted and interpreted has proved invaluable. Some of the basic research has been conducted with the assistance of AI in the form of Gemini Notebook, which cites original sourcing. Those sources have been checked by Robbie and I, but the analysis and conclusions are written by us.

Leave a comment

• Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

The Football Governance Act gives fans the best opportunity they have had in many years to genuinely influence what goes on at the clubs they support. But, even among the more organised sections, there is little understanding of what that opportunity is, what fans’ rights are, or what is needed to maximise it.

That’s no great surprise. People aren’t attracted to football by legislative measures or corporate governance codes. But bitter experience has shown time and again that if we don’t take an interest in how our clubs are run, the things we enjoy suffer. What’s encouraging is that, at most professional clubs and a fair number of semi- and non-professional, there is at least some level of supporter organisation. But what’s worrying is that much of it is unprepared for, or even unaware of, the opportunity that has been presented.

That is not intended as a criticism of hard-working volunteers who give up their time and energy to try to provide fans with a voice. But the hard reality is we need to up our game, just as we are asking our clubs and the people who run the game to.

Over the next few weeks I am going to try to set out, in plain language, what the opportunities presented by the Bill are, and what fan organisations need to do to make the most of them. I’m also going to try to look at the challenges facing the regulator in putting the Bill’s principles into practice, and in building awareness of and confidence in the regulatory regime.

I’m not claiming to have all the answers. So this is intended as a conversation as well as information, a space where some of the challenges facing all of us who want football to be better can be worked through. My focus is going to be largely on the fan engagement parts of the Bill, but I am happy to run contributions from readers who want to take a similar approach with other aspects.

The more we can mainstream the understanding of available opportunity and what is needed to make the most of it, the more likely it is that the regulatory regime will be a success.

And the chances of success are improved by the fact that we are currently operating in fertile ground. New Prime Minister Andy Burnham has long advocated the measures set out in the Football Governance Bill. He gets football and its wider meaning, and is a former chair of Supporters Direct, the body set up to promote wider supporter involvement in and ownership of clubs. He has, in recent days, spoken out about where ownership of the game really lies, from the global level down.

Writing in 2021, he also said: “We need to legislate to give supporters more than media power.” The legislation is in place, and it has backing from the highest levels of the UK government. It’s now up to supporters to make the most of it.

In the rest of this series, I will cover points including

• Licensing - what is happening, how it will work .

• What corporate governance means, and why it is important in football.

• Heritage issues - what rights do fans have and how the Act and other legislation protects them.

• What the Regulator’s powers are and how they might be used.

Throughout the series I will, where possible, include specific references to the parts of the legislation that can help you. Here’s an introductory taster explaining why this is not just another set of fine aspirations, but a genuine opportunity to change things for the better.

Underlying everything you need to remember is the following point:

The Act’s Core Purpose Includes Fans.

The Act’s definition of “sustainability” for English football requires that it “continues to serve the interests of fans”. This isn’t just a sentiment; it is a statutory purpose that the Independent Football Regulator (IFR) must advance, and it is set down in the Act’s Part 1, (3) section 1(3)(a) and 1(3)(b). The fact that these key stipulations appear so early in the Act is no accident.

The underlying aim here is to ensure that standards reached by clubs are high across the piece for everyone, regardless of who they support. Another key concept to always bear in mind is addressed via The Fan Engagement Threshold.

What is The Fan Engagement Threshold?

For a club to operate, it must demonstrate it has “adequate and effective means” to consult fans and, crucially, that it “takes the views of its fans into account” when making decisions. (Schedule 4, paragraph 4). This moves engagement from a “nice-to-have” to a mandatory condition of a club’s operating licence. (Part 3, section 18(2) sets out the detail.

Good fan engagement is not uniform and what is needed at different clubs will vary, even if there are some minimum expectations of all. The Act provides for this by allowing the Regulator to set what are called “mandatory” licence conditions for all clubs (section 20) and “discretionary” licence conditions (section 21).

All clubs will have a mandatory fan engagement condition, and meeting it will be an ongoing requirement of a club’s licence. More detail on what it will contain is set out in in Schedule 5 (paragraph 8).

Share The Football Fan

So What Do Fans Get to Influence?

The Act specifies exactly what “relevant matters” clubs must consult fans on (Schedule 4, part 4).

· Strategic direction and objectives.

· Business priorities.

· Operational and match-day issues, specifically including ticket pricing.

· Club heritage, such as the home ground, crest, team colours, and name.

What Does Direct Protection of Heritage Mean?

The Act answers this question through the “heritage objective” (Part 2, section 6).

· Relocation: A club cannot move from its home ground without IFR approval, which is only granted if the club has taken reasonable steps to determine and regard the views of its fans. (Part 5, section 48).

· Crests and Colours: A club cannot make material changes to its emblem or predominant home shirt colours unless it can show the changes are supported by a majority of the club’s fans. (Part 5, section 49).

I will examine what is meant by “strategic direction and objectives” and “business priorities” in later articles.

Studying the legislative provisions described above is undoubtedly fairly dry work for the lay reader.

In drawing your attention to them however, I am seeking to make a crucial point. You will, even if you concentrate only on the fan engagement provisions described above, notice that they make regular reference to other parts of the Act, including finance and corporate governance in particular.

Again, this is no accident. The Act has been carefully designed to be holistic in nature, ensuring that different parts of it reinforce one another. Any club that seeks to view its provisions as a menu it can choose from is likely to quickly find compliance with the Regulator’s expectations is hard to achieve. As fans, remembering this key principle will help you in properly holding your own club to account.

This series of articles could not have been written without the assistance of Robbie Whittaker of the Blackpool Supporters Trust. His knowledge of how legislation is drafted and interpreted has proved invaluable. Some of the basic research has been conducted with the assistance of AI in the form of Gemini Notebook, which cites original sourcing. Those sources have been checked by Robbie and I, but the analysis and conclusions are written by us.

Leave a comment

• Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

The collapse of the FIFA Forward Enterprise, and with it what was left of Gianni Infantino’s reputation, may be looked back on as the end of a period that began when the similarly obscene European Super League fell apart and football finally came to its senses.

There were many similarities between the two ideas; sheer greed, a staggering lack of concern for the effect on national structures, disregard for players and fans, utter lack of concern for the women’s game… and the speed with which it all came tumbling down.

When FIFA’s scheme was first made public – not so much FFE as FFS – the initial fear was, as it was with the ESL, that this time they might get away with it. But what the revolts against both plans reveal is that it is still possible to fight for and retain values that are good and timeless.

It should be an encouragement to all of us who recognise the difference between the price of and the value of football, and while I don’t intend to add too much to the many thousands (millions?) of words already written on this subject, I wanted to write something because it all touches upon a central reason for the existence of The Football Fan. This Substack operates where business meets culture meets sport, and on the premise that the sports business is so valuable because of its cultural heft. The events of the last week have underlined how important that is.

Much was made of the fact that “the Americans” didn’t understand the culture side of football, that they focused on maximising profit and assumed everyone else would follow suit. I saw some commentary professing amazement that simply wanting to max out profits wasn’t everyone’s ultimate ambition – and special mention must go here to a spectacularly bonkers piece in The Times that argued opposition to Infantino’s scheme was rooted in a peculiarly European and particularly British “crimped, crippling, constipating aversion to making money, the sanctimonious desire to sacrifice profit for purity”.

You’ll never sing that, indeed.

Mention of The Times means credit must go to Martyn Ziegler, the sports journalist who broke the story and deserves recognition not only for playing a major part in ensuring the scheme was scuppered, but also for reminding people what proper journalism is. Credit too to the governance people who spoke out. UEFA’s statement was extraordinary considering the restraint with which even the sharpest of disagreements in football governance circles tend to be worded. There was real passion, real anger – and sometimes it is right to deploy those emotions effectively. Because football matters.

Praise also to Lise Klaveness, President of the Norwegian Football Federation, and the Football Association of Wales’s Laura McAllister, a UEFA Vice-President who it seems were at the forefront of efforts to get UEFA to take a hard line, and who continue to lead calls for real change in the way the world game is run. Two former professional footballers, two women – these things matter, as The Athletic points out.

The English FA hasn’t quite grasped the zeitgeist, although of course is now backing everyone else in the view that Infantino must go. Following other associations’ lead, it is withdrawing its support for Infantino’s candidacy as president of FIFA. The FA’s initial statement, expressing “deep concern,” seemed to be classic hedging from an organisation often criticised for not taking a strong enough stance – most recently over ticket pricing at the World Cup where many felt it could have spoken up for fans more.

Of course, the FA is now as enthusiastic as everyone else for full reform of an organisation in which its chair Debbie Hewitt serves as Vice Chair of the Council. The fact that she remained unaware of the plans of the man she spent much of the World Cup sitting next to would, you would think, have made her pretty angry, but the FA doesn’t do anger and anyway there was the bid for the Womens’ World Cup in 2035 to consider.

I’m not advocating thumping the table at every opportunity, but there’s a balance. The Welsh FA is part of the bid for the 2035 Women’s World Cup too but that didn’t stop Laura McAllister speaking up. Her and Klaveness, along with UEFA’s Aleksander Čeferin and the Finnish FA, showed what leadership is when it mattered.

And yes, I know including UEFA in with the goodies may raise some eyebrows, but the organisation did the right thing in this instance.

Share The Football Fan

It has been heartening to see football’s administrators – so often criticised – come together to see off a plan that would have handed football’s direction entirely to venture capitalists – with more games, worse player welfare, and higher ticket prices just the starting points. Bleed it dry and move on to the next project is not sustainable government.

We’re told so often that the drive to extract maximum profit in the shortest possible time is unstoppable that we start to believe it. That in place of our attachment to lofty ideals such as sporting integrity, community, and identity is just the cold hard fact that everything has a price and nothing has a value. But on the two occasions in the last five years when a truly existential threat to football has emerged, the speed and strength of opposition indicates the continued resonance of values we’re told are obsolete.

I was taken back to those 72 hours in 2021 when the European Super League was proposed and then quickly crumbled as I watched Infantino’s scheme unravel. I was happy, as I was in 2021, and I wanted to think that we’d turned a corner. Do I think we’ve seen the last of wizard wheezes that threaten to upend the game? Sadly not. But two substantial defeats for the greed is good lobby in five years is something to be celebrated – and we should take the chance to build on it.

If we do, perhaps this short period will be seen as a turning point in 50 or 100 years.

Leave a comment

While the House of Infantino was falling I was finishing reading a novel called Season by George Harrison. He’s not, as he must be sick of telling people, that George Harrison. This George Harrison is a writer from Norwich and he has managed to pull off a feat that many have tried and failed to do – write an engaging and believable novel about football.

Maybe the reason it succeeds is that it is not just about football, but about the role football plays in our lives. And at its heart, it’s not about football at all, it is about how we relate to each other, and particularly about how men relate to each other.

It is poetic and poignant without ever being pretentious, a difficult balancing act when writing about football. And while it is obviously about Norwich and Norwich City, Harrison deploys a clever device to avoid triggering football’s tribal passions and instead activates our everyfan.

His characters are thoughtfully drawn, his situations lovingly crafted – there are plenty of little details that will have you thinking “I’ve done that”.

A novel about football that isn’t about football – but at the same time could only be a football novel. Highly recommended.

Leave a comment

Photo © Rui Yao/Unsplash

What is a season ticket? Answering that question properly involves considering a lot of emotional and cultural factors, as well as hard legal and financial ones. Not understanding how to answer that question can lead to the current mess at Manchester United, where the club has caused huge damage to a relationship it should value more.

I’m not going to go into that particular case in detail here, but if you want detail along with informed analysis and comment, I’d recommend the website of the Manchester United Supporters Trust and the X account of Cheeses of Nazareth.

What’s clear from that case is that a season ticket is far more than just a commercial transaction. We imbue it with emotional and symbolic significance far beyond that – something which explains why clubs collectively have managed to drive ticket price inflation in the way Nick Harris of Sporting Intelligence and I set out in a series of articles in 2024. Our research revealed prices had risen by up to 587% since the Premier League was formed.

Breaking the bond between supporter and club that a season ticket represents does cause significant distress, far beyond the bonds of almost any other transaction. To explain why, and to show some perspective, we have to roll out the often-used quote about football being the most important of the unimportant things.

But do our traditional attitudes on season tickets stand up to the reality of today’s world? How do they sit with other principles we hold dear? These are questions worth stepping back and considering.

When I started going to football in the late 1970s, season tickets weren’t essential. For most of us, they were a barely attainable expression of support, probably the ultimate demonstration of loyalty to your club. For most, even in those days, committing a season’s worth of money up front was a financial step too far. But those that did so were not exclusively the well-off; people spending more than they really should on football has long been a staple of supporter culture.

Buying a season ticket was seen as an expression of loyalty, and in return for that loyalty and financial commitment, season ticket holders expected something back. This was usually priority for big games or away games, or especially the FA Cup final – at the time the ultimate stage. Maybe it was a discount on the price of entry, a familiar enough commercial device and one still used, for example, by insurance companies who offer their product at a cheaper rate if you pay annually than it would be if you paid monthly. Many paid-for Substacks operate the same device.

But as demand grew and the game became more commercially minded, things began to change. The benefits of having a season ticket began to be reduced, and that happened because of two fundamental changes. One was that demand for tickets began to exceed supply. And the second, that stemmed from this, was that season tickets began to be seen by clubs less as a demonstration of loyalty from their fans, and more as a privilege that clubs allowed fans to have.

Little by little the extras were whittled away. Tickets now didn’t apply to all games, just league games – fuelling the price inflation I mentioned above – and headline prices rose too as the season ticket changed from an expression of support to a required guarantee that you could show your support inside the ground. And without a season ticket for home games, any chance of attending away games became virtually impossible.

Share

Some will say this is a perfect example of how the ‘natural law’ of supply and demand works. But there is always a subjective caveat to any supposedly objective economic ‘law’, and this is no different. Because as demand increased through football becoming more popular after dipping from the extraordinary highs of the seasons following the end of the Second World War, demand was deliberately reduced.

Remember what measure football was quickest to introduce after the turning point of Hillsborough in 1989? All-seater stadiums. Other measures were brought in in response to the events of that April afternoon in 1989, including better crowd management techniques and stewarding, and the removal of fences. But it is worth noting the speed with which the game’s authorities embraced the measure that would swing the weight of supply and demand more heavily in their favour.

It is very important to say at this point that a significant number of the families of those who were unlawfully killed at Hillsborough and of those who survived backed the introduction of all-seater stadiums, for entirely understandable reasons. The criticism of how the football authorities embraced all-seater stadiums is not a criticism of their view.

David Conn’s detailing of how football tweaked supply and demand in his book The Beautiful Game remains, in my opinion, one of the finest and starkest tellings of the tale. In a 2012 article for The London Review of Books, he reprised it, placing Taylor in the context of events instigated by first Tottenham Hotspur and then Manchester City to allow the richest clubs to consolidate their wealth and to change the character of football clubs from community endeavour to capitalist commodity. He recalls that Taylor had called for “the fullest reassessment of policy for the game,” but observes that “The reassessment never took place, at least not in the form of a coherent plan in the interests of the game and its grass roots.”

A letter to the LRB in response to Conn’s article revealed another significant fact. Iain Mackintosh wrote that: “Ten years ago I gave a lecture whose main thesis was that when the density of a theatre or stadium is reduced the motive is not safety, but profit.” He said he’d asked (the now late) Roy Hattersley, shadow home secretary at the time of Hillsborough, to recall what Taylor told him and said that Hattersley put in writing that ‘[Taylor] actually told me that the obligation to all-seater stadia had been included in his report after pressure from both the government and the Football Association.’”

One motive for this pressure was almost certainly a wish to avoid making entry to all football grounds members only, but money would not have been far from minds. As Conn, again, pointed out in a number of articles, including this one for Play The Game, a number of senior football figures and people connected with them made significant sums from the establishment of a company that installed seating.

Subscribe now

As clubs were changed from sporting bodies rooted in community and collective identity, so the season ticket changed from the ultimate expression of those things into a commodity in its own right; a badge of privilege available to anyone who could pay for it, for whatever reason. But for many fans, the season ticket remained what it always had been, an expression of that collective identity. Despite the erosion of the benefits associated with it, it retained its status. Despite the clubs’ efforts to frame the season ticket as something they allowed us to have as a result of a transaction, many of us still think of it as something we have earned, something that defines who we are.

The clubs still play on this, often insisting that a season ticket bestows certain responsibilities on the holders. But if a season ticket is simply a commercial product, how can it be a social contract at the same time? Are the clubs, not for the first time, trying to have it both ways?

This is important because you often hear fans say: “I’ve paid for my season ticket so I can do what I like with it.” That isn’t actually true for reasons I’ll come on to, but if clubs have promoted the idea that a season ticket is just a commodity, they can’t be that surprised when people want to treat it like one.

But paying for your season ticket doesn’t mean you can do what you like with it. For a start, and despite what most of us initially think, a season ticket isn’t a seat, or a physical piece of property. It is a licence to enter someone’s premises, and while you are on those premises you are required to observe the rules and standards it sets. That is important because the individual who holds the ticket is not the only person on the premises, so what they do has an impact on other people. Which is why you need common standards.

That concept is increasingly challenged in our increasingly atomised world, where the phrase ‘don’t tell me what to do’ crops up with irritating regularity as some kind of cipher for personal freedom. I tell you what, when I’m driving on the motorway, I’m perfectly happy to be told to drive on the same side as everyone else. So let’s leave the primary school libertarianism aside.

Share The Football Fan

If clubs are to become, as Alex Timperley argued in the book I reviewed in the last edition “a trinity of team, place and people” in a journey towards the rediscovery of their roots and therefore their true value as expressions of community, they need to understand the part the season ticket plays in that and reassess how they view it.

But supporters need to do the same. So much of our football culture is seeped in folklore, and tales of season tickets passed down from generation to generation are a part of that. I know fan reps spend a lot of time dealing with enquiries about whether a ticket can be passed from parent to child, but can we be in favour of this while we argue for accessibility? It’s a tough one because community plays such an important part in football culture, but how does support for hereditary privilege sit with our notions of community?

It’s a similar story with the passing on of tickets, a practice commonplace when grounds weren’t full and there weren’t demands from fans on waiting lists to access tickets when those further up the list can’t use them. Now, while not being able to “help a mate out” – as it used to be called – doesn’t feel right, it feels even less right to restrict the circulation of tickets within the hands of a privileged few. Our own attitudes sometimes don’t add up – I’ve heard people arguing simultaneously for people to be allowed to pass tickets on to mates while bemoaning the fact they can’t get a ticket.

Passing on is more commonly a problem with away tickets, and any discussion of ticketing has to be clear about whether it is discussing home or away tickets, as a different set of considerations apply to each. There are a maximum of 3,000 away tickets available for a Premier League game. At Bournemouth, with the fewest season ticket holders in the division at just 6,000, that is still double the number of available away tickets. At clubs such as Spurs and Manchester United, season ticket holders number over 40,000 and 50,000 respectively.

That is huge demand, and it means that passing on an away ticket is viewed very differently to passing on a home ticket. There are a good number of fans who hold on to season tickets mainly to preserve their place near the top of the points lists on which loyalty schemes allocate away tickets. And in my experience the view that loyalty – defined as attending matches – should be the primary factor in allocating away tickets is the most strongly held.

So there’s less tolerance of passing on an away ticket than there is of what is still seen as the relatively informal nature of passing on home tickets. Many clubs have stringent penalties for the former, and that stance is generally backed by fans. It’s the handling of home tickets that causes the most controversy, with clubs often taking an unnecessarily heavy-handed approach. With demand less intense in most instances at most clubs, passing on a home ticket is still seen by many as something that preserves a key part of football culture – the ability to introduce someone new to the game. And if every seat is not being filled, is anybody being forced to miss out if a ticket is passed on?

Subscribe now

Set against this is the need for clubs to know who is in the ground due to security considerations, plus the need to crack down on tickets being touted. A well-designed membership and ticket exchange scheme should resolve matters. But clubs often try to add onerous attendance requirements that take little account of late-changing dates and kick-off times, of changed life circumstances, or simply of the fact that sometimes life gets in the way of going to the game. It is these requirements, coupled with a rise in corporate hospitality offers and commercial partnerships with third-party ticket resale sites, that cause friction.

Fixing our thinking on ticketing requires treading carefully. Take one example. Schemes that allocate away tickets on the basis of loyalty points awarded for attending games are frequently described as a self-perpetuating closed shop. So ballots are proposed as a “fairer” solution. But issuing via ballot doesn’t reward loyalty – still a potent word for fans. Besides that, at clubs that do ballot for aways, it has just replaced one set of problems with another. And hearing you’ve got a ticket in the ballot not long before an away game 300 miles away on a work night may not give you the access you think, so how early can ballot results be announced and tickets allocated? It’s questions such as these that need to be carefully considered in advance of any decisions.

Club ticket offices have a tough task, and there is a real need to crack down on organised touting in the lucrative arena of football. But cracking down on touting involves working with supporters to identify and understand patterns of distribution. The culture around ticketing at one club is different to that at another, so one size fits all solutions don’t work – although there will need to be some common standards.

Manchester United have made such a mess of things because of the cackhanded way they have approached their fan base, because they didn’t work with them and, it seems, because of an over reliance on automated processes rather than human empathy and common sense. It seems the club has now, at least in part, understood it needs to work better with supporter groups, but the conversation on ticketing requires some hard thinking all round.

Leave a comment

Main photo by Michael Richardson on Unsplash

No, I don’t fancy a pint

On principle, I don’t like laws that only apply to football fans. One of those laws is the Sporting Events (Control of Alcohol etc) Act 1985. It was introduced in response to the hooliganism of the early 1980s, and it means that alone among all sports fans, football fans can’t have an alcoholic drink while watching their sport.

Singling out football fans in this way doesn’t seem right, especially in view of improvements in crowd behaviour and control at football, and of the fact that drunken violence is not unheard of at other sports. So you’d think I’d be pleased to hear that consideration is being given to removing the ban. But, while I still don’t agree with treating football fans differently in this case, I’m not filled with joy.

Why? Because I don’t want to be covered in beer thrown by someone who thinks chucking their overpriced pint up in the air is great fun. Because I don’t want to get interrupted every five minutes by Big John getting ‘em in for him and his mates. And because I believe it’s possible to go 45 minutes without a beer.

Share The Football Fan

I’d go as far as to say that my view is shared by most matchgoing fans. It’s one of those moves that seems populist, but wouldn’t be. In fact, quite a lot of people are quite alarmed by it. Maybe the way around it is to lift the legal ban on the understanding that clubs will introduce membership rules forbidding drinking in view of the pitch. Maybe extending the ban to other sports where there has been evidence of drunken violence spoiling the experience would address the unfairness issue.

But giving football fans the right to drink in view of the pitch is not, despite the unfairness of it, top of the list of reforms football fans would like to see enacted. We do, however, have plenty of other ideas for anyone who wants to implement a populist gesture.

Leave a comment

Coming soon

In the next few weeks, The Football Fan’s practical guide to how fans and supporter groups can make the most of the opportunities the Football Governance Bill offers will begin to roll out. I hope you’ll find it useful.

One of the central themes of this Substack is that football is the focus, the centre of our universe, the reason we do what we do as football fans. America 2026 is what happens when football becomes secondary. And the final demonstrated so much that is wrong with the game.

The final should have been the focus, 90 minutes of football to decide the world champions, the climax of a festival of football. Instead, the football match was an incidental detail, wrapped in an event that tried to be far bigger but which instead diminished itself.

It began six minutes late because singer Jennifer Hudson wasn’t ready to deliver the awful showbizzed-into-oblivion version of the national anthem of a country that wasn’t playing in the final that kicked proceedings off. The game of two halves became, as it it had been all tournament, a game of four quarters, but this time with a rule-breaking 30-minute half-time break to allow for a Super Bowl-style show. The fundamental structure of the game changed for, well, for what? More advertising time, a chance for FIFA to indulge its already enormous ego, an attempt to Americanise the game already loved by the world?

And that half-time show – an off-its-own head smorgasbord of celebrity, self-importance and saccharine sanctimoniousness. Justin Bieber’s truly awful ‘song’ was unfortunately not the low point - that achievement going to the closing sequence. As the children of the world sang about love and togetherness we were left to reflect on the fate of Somali referee Omar Artan, the treatment of the Iranian national team, the US’s disregard for Canada and Mexico - apparently co-hosts - the Presidential interference…

I’ve got nothing against a bit of entertainment around a football match, but the match itself should be the focus, and here it felt it was secondary, something that was getting in the way of the important stuff. I also love the spectacle around the Super Bowl, but that is a different sport with different traditions and these things matter. Otherwise, why not let the players drive cars when playing a match to bring in the motorsport fans?

And, on an even more fundamental level, the entertainment was – as Wayne Rooney succinctly put it – “crap”. A subjective judgment but one I feel will stand the test of time. Our new UK Prime Minister, more of whom later, is telling us we need to rediscover hope, and the hope is that FIFA will learn some lessons from this World Cup. Sadly, while there may be hope there is not much expectation.

That’s largely because FIFA is reporting record attendances and huge revenues. While anything FIFA says needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, these are the only figures we have so far, and stadiums looked pretty full to those of us watching on TV. FIFA’s figures say stadiums operated at 99.7% capacity across the tournament, while media outlets were calculating a record 6.81 million fans attended across the 104 matches.

Before the tournament there was much speculation, including by The Football Fan, that the high ticket prices would have a serious impact on attendance. I know personally of a lot of die-hard England regulars who simply couldn’t afford to go this time. So who were the fans who did go?

I spoke to the FSA’s Thomas Concannon, who co-ordinated work at the England fan embassies throughout the tournament. He said: “The demographic felt relatively normal when thinking about the absolute hardcore that follow England. Those who got lucky with the $60 tickets, they went to the exact people you knew they would, to the ones that go everywhere. And while some who would have had those tickets definitely didn’t go, and some appeared towards the end, you had what you would consider a regular England fan base there.

“However, when you stray outside of those cheaper tickets, and even the category 3 (the next cheapest), we started to see a lot of new faces. New people who we spoke to asking what we did, many saying they followed us on social media and really appreciated our help. There was no doubt that those in attendance had a bit of money behind them who had tickets outside of the cheap ones.

“Having conversations with some fans towards the end, particularly for Norway and Argentina, I was shocked at how some fans were willing to pay over £1,000 as if that was a decent price in comparison to the ridiculous fees on the ticket resale site. I spoke to one hardcore England fan who just missed out on a $60 ticket and didn’t bother buying a Cat 3 at the time of sale, who ended up paying $2,500 for the semi-final simply because he felt he had to.

“Earlier in the tournament, we had a lot of young faces present, young lads and some lasses who had taken time off and could afford that stage of the tournament. That didn’t last long.

“I felt as time went on, the average age of fan in attendance went up, and that didn’t surprise me.”

Subscribe now

Of course, there are large numbers of England fans living in the US, Canada and – to a lesser extent - Mexico who will have bought tickets and gone to matches for whom travel wouldn’t have been quite as expensive. But there’s no getting away from the fact that following your team at a World Cup is an expensive business, even before the organisers implement schemes to ramp prices up still further.

You can’t be poor and follow your team, but many of those who do are not as well off as those arguing the game has become gentrified would have us believe - most of us who go regularly even just to domestic games know of people who spend more than they should to follow their team. That’s why the FSA ticketing campaign slogan Stop Exploiting Loyalty hit home.

The Guardian’s Jonathan Wilson said earlier in the tournament that: “Decades of supporter culture have been overturned in the lust for quick profit. There is now no reward for loyalty, no acknowledgment that regular fans who create atmosphere are part of the experience being sold and that tickets should be priced accordingly. The cost of not just tickets but also transport and necessities such as water in stadiums is exploitative. Logic says there must at some point come a reckoning, but it does not seem likely to come any time soon.”

There is, however, a recognition that the ticket pricing situation is getting out of hand. As Thomas Concannon says: “We had some fans thanking us for putting pressure on and making noise about the ticket prices, they felt all of the noise helped make the $60 tickets possible, which meant they could come, otherwise they would have had to have sacked it off.

“I think we had a solid few who did the entire seven weeks, most travelled back and forth or stayed for one stint. In terms of actual demographic, again, mostly male, mostly over 30.”

Share The Football Fan

One of those fans was Andy Payne, West Ham United stalwart, chair of the club’s Hammers United supporter group and of the club’s Fan Advisory Board and one of the hard-core top cappers who follow England. (He’s pictured above with other England regulars, including the legendary Billy the Bee from Brentford, and his blog about following England, The Great Escapers, is well worth a read.). I spoke to him as he waited at JFK airport to complete a trip home that had begun over five weeks before.

“We had enough points to get tickets for all the games. We did luck out on some cheaper ones, but including the final we spent £8,000 each for eight games. I reckon that was at least double what we would normally spend if we did eight games,” he says.

“A few of my mates got $60 tickets and they are those with over 50 caps. When I look back to my early days (82 and 86) it was all young men. And tickets were buttons and easy to get. It’s got worse and worse now. This time there was a lot of what looked like father and son action. We were lucky to be able to do five weeks as we both work for ourselves so there’s no worries about holiday allowances.

“I reckon by the time we have totted everything up we would have spent another £8,000 each on travel and hotels. We have a refund for the final tickets to come, sadly, so we reckon all up we have shelled out £13,000 each doing this.

“Loads of my mates who would normally come have swerved it because they just didn’t have the money to stay for the whole five weeks - which is what we have done to see all the England games bar the third and fourthth as I hate those games. This time it would have been a classic but we would have had to fly back to Miami from Atlanta and had at least two nights in a hotel. Tickets for the game were cheaper though.

“My fear is it is now becoming the right of those who can afford it not those who make the effort to travel.

“Having said all of that I have mates who don’t think twice about spending £10k on a trip to Dubai with their families. I don’t think there were many out there who had done 82 and 86 (as well as all the World Cups after those). England fans have changed , and their behaviour too. For the better on that front. I saw no trouble at all. And that’s a real relief.”

Subscribe now

The point about fan behaviour was one I spoke to Thomas Concannon about too, and he echoed Andy’s sentiments. “The support in general was superb – England fan’s behaviour was brilliant, still some issues, but nothing major like before.”

The next World Cup is in Morocco, Portugal and Spain. That will be a very different proposition. What can be learnt by then, and what will have changed in four years? It’s one of the stories The Football Fan will be covering. Part of the reason why it will is because of something Andy Payne said as an aside when we were wrapping up our chat.

“A mate of mine out here had huge alcohol problems and decided to go clean three years ago specifically to save the money towards a complete trip. He did that. Boyhood dreams and all that. And some of the older contingent which I now am included in just go no matter what, because we always have and always will until we die.”

Leave a comment

Alex Timperley’s book For the Love is a recommended read. Subtitled How Football Supporters Can Change The World it is part potted history of the supporter movement in England, part polemic urging fans to assert themselves. Unlike many polemics, it is written with wit and an understanding that hectoring rarely gets results.

I should come clean and say I am one of the people interviewed (as is Andy Payne) but what I found really interesting was that this is the perspective of one of a younger generation of fans who are now getting involved and trying to build on what us longer-in-the tooth types did before. I was involved in a lot of the episodes Alex writes about, so inevitably found myself thinking about other people who could or should have been spoken to, and details that were missed. But what’s important is what Alex takes from it all.

His central contention is that a football club should be defined by using an updated version of Bill Shankly’s famous Holy Trinity of players, manager and supporters. Alex argues that we should view our clubs as a trinity of team, place and people – and the fact that a Manchester City fan is happy to take inspiration from a Liverpool legend encapsulates the spirit of the book.

Share The Football Fan

The chapters look at what defines a football club, how big money has skewed the balance away from people and place, the failure of trickle-down economics, and the effects of commercialisation on supporter culture, before moving on to cite examples of how fans have organised against things like the European Super League and rising ticket prices. There’s also a detailed look at the growth of Fans Supporting Foodbanks, drawing on Alex’s experiences as a founder of Manchester City Fans Footbank Support.

One quote really stands out in the opening chapter, and it gives you a flavour of the book. “Football is an in-person activity for me. It’s not a television programme or a video game. Everything I love about the game exists in front of me, in the physical realm.”

I’ll always back people who try to do the right thing, so I have no hesitation in recommending this. If you’re going to buy it, do so direct from the publisher at the link above.

Leave a comment

If you like a more academic angle to your supporter culture observation, look no further than Martha Newson’s The Belonging. She’s an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Greenwich and Leader of the Changing Lives Lab Group at the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion, University of Oxford, no less, and she writes regularly about “what it means to be ‘we’: why we bond, chant, dance, follow, defend, exclude, forgive, transform, commit, and belong”.

She writes about why we come together and what it means not only at football but at music festivals and other gatherings. Her recent series on the World Cup provides an original perspective, and often a joyous one - check out Why football fans help strangers, for example.

Leave a comment

I can’t finish this edition without making reference to the Hillsborough Law, which at long last has been passed by the House of Commons and will come into effect by the autumn. Formerly known as the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, it creates a legal duty for public officials to tell the truth to inquiries and investigations.

Hillsborough was a defining event for many in the fan movement, spurring a determination to ensure fans’ voices were heard and considered properly. Over the years we’ve seen the detail of the cover-up emerge, and the fight the families of those who were there have put up to ensure some semblance of justice is delivered. As the years went by, as details of the Post Office sub-postmasters’ scandal, the NHS infected blood scandal, Grenfell, and the nuclear test veterans scandal among others also emerged, the push to ensure there was a legal duty of candour gathered pace.

As a government spokesperson said: “The Hillsborough Law will fundamentally change the balance of power so the state can never hide from the people it is supposed to serve, and so victims can always get justice.” Let’s hope that is true, and that this really is the start of a new era.

It is worth listening to the speech Ian Byrne MP made in the Commons.

The Football Fan will be back before the new season starts in England with some thoughts on how fans can make the most of the opportunities the Football Governance Bill provides, and much more.

Subscribe now

(Photo © Andy and Kirsty Payne)

It’s all about the World Cup at the moment, so trying to compete for attention is, as Amy Winehouse once said of love, a losing game. But I’m mindful of the need to keep a degree of regularity here, so what follows is a few snippets to keep you occupied.

I suspect I wasn’t alone in failing to conjure up much excitement in the run up to the tournament. Trump’s America is an unattractive prospect, FIFA continues to be generally appalling, the tournament was too sprawling to get to grips with and the pricing – which I wrote about in a post last December called Who wants the world (Cup)? – topped it all off.

I probably also wasn’t alone in suspecting I’d get drawn in once things started. Perhaps not getting too excited, or accepting that I wouldn’t be able to see many games, lowered expectations to reasonable levels. I still think that, like the Olympics, the format is too sprawling to really enable getting hold of it all but I’ve found dipping in and out and keeping a general eye on things is working. I think once the knockout stages start, levels of engagement will rise.

But for all I don’t like the 48-team format, and for all I know the reason for it is to generate yet more money rather than the official reason of giving smaller nations a chance in the sun, I can’t begrudge the players and fans of Cape Verde their joy at securing their first ever finals point. Moments like that prompt grand statements about what football can do - and in this case it was hard to argue.

There have been some disgraceful reminders of the current climate created by the US government, the denial of entry to Somali referee Omar Artan, the aggressive security checks on the teams from Ecuador and Uzbekistan, the shunting of the Iranian team out of the country within hours of the final whistles and these cannot go unremarked upon. These events, and the fear there may be worse to come, certainly don’t project the message of football for all that FIFA promotes.

From what I’ve seem of the TV coverage so far, ITV are winning the battle. Their pundits and presenters have more zip and genuine insight, and the BBC’s decision to anchor coverage from a virtual set in Salford looks to have sucked the life out of it. It’s true the BBC can’t win – taking everyone to the US would have prompted accusations of being profligate with licence-payers’ money – but it’s a basic principle that covering an event requires an actual presence at the event if it’s to be done properly. All that said, who on earth came up with the idea of Emma Hayes in what looked like a kitchen with a blackboard on ITV? Crass stupidity and Hayes – a genuine person and accomplished coach - deserved better.

The narratives of the opening round of games have centred on how the nations making their Finals debut have fared, and how the established giants have fared against them; on how hydration breaks change the way the game is played; on how heavily the big nations rely on individual superstars; and on how those superstars measure up against each other and the legends of the past.

At the end of the 1948 noir classic The Naked City, the narrator intoned that “there are eight million stories in the naked city”. There are five weeks to go in this current America drama, and plenty more stories to come.

Leave a comment

Back in the UK, there’s more trouble in court. Burnley won a landmark legal case against Everton which requires the Merseyside club to pay The Clarets £40m in compensation. The argument was that Everton should have been deducted six points for breaching financial rules in 2021-22 rather than in 2023, and that this would have kept Burnley up at Everton’s expense.

Burnley claimed Everton gained a sporting advantage by breaching PSR, Everton claim they were PSR-compliant at the time Burnley were relegated, and point out they have already suffered a financial penalty resulting from the points deduction. The club said: “This ruling sets a dangerous and unworkable precedent for English football, given it is constructed on a principle that a club can be in breach of financial rules at any point in a financial year.”

It certainly raises some pretty fundamental issues, not least about the Premier League’s handling of its members and its competition – remember this is the Premier League that argued no regulator was required as it was doing a perfectly good job. For detail and informed analysis, I highly recommend the writing of Paul Quinn, was has covered possible grounds for appeal, a systemic risk assessment, and possible implications of the case.

Share The Football Fan

On top of this, Leeds are considering seeing Leicester City, and possibly a number of other clubs, over PSR breaches they assert led to them being relegated in 2022/23. There are more details on sports lawyer Stefan Borson’s Substack. Borson asserts that “The 2022/23 relegation battle has now been shown to be a sham,” but arguments about how and if sporting advantage is or isn’t gained look to have some way to go, and lawyers will already be planning where to spend the proceeds of conducting the argument.

All of which raises serious issues for club directors, over questions of potential liability; the game’s authorities, over questions of governance; and for fans, over questions of sporting integrity. As I argued in a recent post, “the feeling that there is something very wrong is building slowly but surely”.

The game is appearing increasingly ungovernable, and it all presents a real challenge to the new regulator, which will have to plot a way forward out of the current mess. The good news is that an independent regulator is more likely to do so than either the individual clubs or the Premier League (which is the clubs collectively). For too long ‘anything goes as long as the money comes in’ has been the mantra, but it is clear that more clarity and consistency is required in applying the rules and preserving the sporting integrity that is central to the game’s appeal.

How do we draw a line under what has happened and move forward to a framework that 1) works and 2) has people’s confidence? That is not an easy question for the regulator to answer, but it’s one that must be taken on.

Leave a comment

Some unpaid for advertising I am happy to carry to conclude this edition, with, and both are timely. Shadow Play is an excellent and important read from the Human Rights Foundation which “examines how some authoritarian states are increasingly using football ownership and sponsorship to reshape their global image, and distract from violations elsewhere.” I’ll be writing more on this.

Bread and football is a project put together by Iranian visual artist Behnam Raeesian that he describes as “a visual critique of the World Cup as spectacle, distraction, sportswashing, and the political use of football.”

It’s a series of seven posters. The poster shown here is The Beautiful Trap, which Raeesian says sees the pitch “reimagined as a mousetrap, exposing the game as an elegant device for capturing attention.”

Which brings us full circle for this edition.

Lead photo by My Profit Tutor on Unsplash

Subscribe now

The significance of Liverpool fans forcing their club to back down from imposing year-on-year ticket price rises for the next three seasons has not been fully appreciated. The lessons to be learned are about how to organise and apply fan power, about the economics of modern football, and about why the national #stopexploitingloyalty (SEL) campaign could prove to be a turning point.

Just a few years ago, any challenge to the level of ticket pricing was invariably dismissed with one of a number of arguments;

• the game is more popular than ever so this is market forces;

• prices aren’t that expensive when compared to other events;

• fans are to blame for agreeing to pay the prices.

Those dismissals were always simplistic and largely inaccurate, and with discontent over rising prices growing, fans decided to link unrest at local level into a national campaign that aimed to change the conversation on ticketing – I wrote about this in depth last year. Stop exploiting loyalty resonated because, as I argued then, “It’s turned the finger pointing away from the supposedly stupid fans who ‘allow’ ourselves to be exploited to the clubs which venerate market economics on the one hand while knowingly exploiting the unique customer loyalty of their unique businesses on the other.”

It was an argument Liverpool’s well-organised supporter groups took hold of and ran with, and it is perhaps easy to understand why. The presence of the fans, and of The Kop especially, is a powerful part of that club’s identity. That’s not to say fans don’t form an important part of every club’s character, but few clubs project and market the stadium, the fans, the home end as powerfully and effectively as Liverpool. And that makes it easier for those fans to understand that they are being used as part of the product, that they are not just passive observers.

That’s why this battle always seemed an odd one for Liverpool to pick with its fans. The financial gains from the year-on-year rises were relatively marginal, but the damage done to that idea of a collective Liverpoolism that binds the club and fans far greater. Arguably it was the sight of a flagless Kop brandishing yellow cards that had an even greater impact on thinking in the boardroom than the well-observed Not A Pound In The Ground campaign that saw fans boycott food and drink sales at Anfield. Liverpool’s board make mistakes, but they understand the power of their brand and what it is made of.

There is a significant line in the Club’s announcement that has gone largely unnoticed. Liverpool FC says it will work with fans “to seek longer-term alternative solutions across the game and explore commercial ideas with the Supporters Board”. One of the arguments put forward by fans was to ‘stop the arms race’ of ticket price rises by freezing prices across the board and looking at alternative methods of generating money. But any ‘across the game’ approach was resisted by the Premier League and the clubs, which of course are ultimately the same thing.

The argument was that clubs must be allowed to decide and set their own home prices. Ever since the clubs collectively agreed an away price cap – something pushed for by the unlikely figure of Richard Scudamore who realised the Premier League was being labelled The Greed Is Good League and needed to do something to counter that – the clubs have been fiercely holding the line that no ‘contagion’ should spread to the issue of home ticket pricing. But trying to hold that line is almost impossible when 1) clubs were arguing that they had to put prices up because everyone else was and 2) the away price agreement showed the clubs could act as a collective body to do something for the good of fans and the game.

Liverpool’s pledge to start a discussion on ticket pricing and income “across the game” suggests the club will seek to engage its peers in finding solutions, and waves goodbye to the line that clubs must be free to set their own prices. The pledge also opens up the opportunity to examine the balance between various income streams, and to have serious discussion about whether constantly increasing ticket prices is effective financially or culturally.

There’s an interesting article on the Fulhamish Substack in which writer Matt Littlejohn shows that, according to the latest Fulham FC accounts “Fulham sold more tickets, but made less money, despite charging more.” There are potential caveats, but the article is worth a read, as it also talks about how price policies have changed the demographic of the crowd and had a negative impact on atmosphere.

Share

We need to start developing A New Economics of Football, an economics that is more rounded, more long-term and more sustainable than the current narrow free-market model.

Of course, fans will have to work to ensure this happens. At Liverpool the commitment to work with supporters means the fan reps will be in the room when it counts. Those groups have shown they mean business, but there are lessons to be learned about how we organise too.

In some respects, Liverpool’s organised supporter groups are victims of their own success, because there is a view, fuelled by a stereotype of collective Scouse identity, that it is pretty easy to apply fan power in such militantly fertile ground.

The truth is that there is plenty of disagreement among Liverpool fans, and marshalling support can be as hard as it is at any club. Those organising protest have always known they are taking a chance that the wider fanbase doesn’t respond to the call and they end up discredited. Because it only takes one misjudgement to undo years of work. But time has been put in to making the arguments and in to maintaining day-to-day connection with the fan base, and this means not only that Liverpool’s fan groups can deliver, but that they know when they can deliver and when they can’t.

They talk with fans, not at them. And although Liverpool’s support has its fair share of internet experts who are willing to spend considerably more time on telling everyone else what they are getting wrong rather than on putting any work in to get it right, they don’t seem to be in the ascendancy.

The argument that fans are used as part of the product so should not be exploited for the role we play has cut through. The idea that there may just be a problem with taking fans for granted and continuously coming back for more, particularly when there is rising discontent with other issues such as minimum use policies and late kick-off changes, is beginning to take hold in some of the more intelligent boardrooms.

We need to seize the moment.

Leave a comment

I want to recommend two other Substacks for those of you who like the subjects covered here. The first is David Skilling’s Original Football, which describes its focus as “the intersection between business and football” and which does a good line in “cultural nuance”.

There’s also a new arrival, Geoff Richards’ The Halfway Line, which describes itself as “a working notebook on football ownership where structure meets technology.” There is a really interesting concept of “fan-engaged ownership” put forward in the first piece.

Share The Football Fan

Photos: © Gareth Roberts

Football – bloody hell. The game is still a phenomenal success, commanding attention and generating money on a scale the early pioneers cannot have comprehended. The breadth of its influence is reflected by the writer David Goldblatt in his excellent social history of English football, The Game of Our Lives, when he recalls the British governor of Aden, Sir Richard Turnbull , telling then Foreign Secretary Denis Healey in the mid-1960s that association football would be one of only two monuments the fast-dissolving British Empire would leave behind (the other was the phrase ‘Fuck off”). As Goldblatt says: “Cricket, the game of gentlemen, would leave its mark in much of the Empire, but football, the game of the people, would be everywhere.”

And yet. The slow drip drip of concern and doubt does not go away. Football may well be everywhere, all-consuming, an unstoppable force, but the feeling that there is something very wrong is building slowly but surely.

Let’s start with the Premier League. The richest and most high-profile in the world, and arguably the most successful. Of its 32 titles contested, five have been won by Chelsea and eight by Manchester City. That’s just over 40% of the titles contested, and 13 of the previous 21, or about 63%, since Chelsea first won in 2004/05.

Chelsea changed the game when Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich bought the club in 2003. He immediately went on a £100m spending spree, which helped secure a Premier League and League Cup double in 2004/05. While the numbers were bigger, it can be argued there wasn’t much difference between Abramovich ‘buying’ the title and Jack Walker doing the same at Blackburn Rovers 10 years earlier in 1994/95. But the numbers are important. Walker spent £100m over the course of his nine-year tenure at Blackburn, a figure that included redeveloping the club’s Ewood Park stadium. Abramovich matched that figure in his first transfer window just on players.

It was a significant turning point. Walker was arguably the last of the traditional owner benefactors in British football to turbocharge his club’s success – Leicester City under Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha could be argued as a similar case, but it was the new economic reality that Abramovich imposed on the game that had attracted Leicester’s owners, themselves the billionaire bosses of a global retail business. Vichai drew on a fortune estimated to be £1.9 billion, although The Guardian estimated it took just £60m of spending to secure the title in 2015/16.

Abramovich’s success in building a respectable profile out of the chaos of post-Communist Russia was noticed by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family and ruler of the United Arab Emirates. And so in 2008, he acquired a majority stake in Manchester City, helped by a family fortune of around £300 billion. Such is the nature of the economies of the Gulf states, the UAE’s nominal GDP of $569.1 billion cannot be ruled out as a contributary factor. And while discussions about whether or not City are effectively owned by a nation state prompt what we can best call lively discussion, the benefits to it of the country being so closely associated with success in The World’s Most Successful Football Competition are clear.

Share

So the scale of the economics has changed, with even the traditional powerhouses of Liverpool and Manchester United – still the only truly global brands in English football – finding it hard to keep up. As for the other Premier League winners, Arsenal, while the club remains the closest to retaining a traditional ownership model, that owner is US sports tycoon Stan Kroenke (estimated wealth around $22 billion) and oligarch money from Alisher Usmanov has flowed into the club’s coffers.

With a scale of economic change such as this, the stakes become even higher. Which brings us to the very significant current problems facing The World’s Most Successful Football Competition. Because it seems that for Chelsea, a little more had to be done to attain success. It is now clear that, between 2011 and 2018, the club made £47m in secret payments to unregistered agents and third parties, payments that helped secure the services of Samuel Eto’o, Eden Hazard, David Luiz, Nemanja Matic, Ramires, André Schürrle and Willian. Four more players are named in the Premier League’s report, but they have been redacted with no explanation as to why.

These offences weren’t uncovered by the Premier League, which had also failed to ask too many questions about the source of Abramovich’s wealth when he bought the club. Chelsea’s new owners had reported them. There can be no doubt that Chelsea gained a sporting advantage from signing those players. But astonishingly, the Premier League has ruled that no sporting sanction should be applied. Instead, there’s a £10m fine – small change in today’s football finance world – and a suspended transfer ban.

The uncomfortable truth for the Premier League is that the integrity of Chelsea’s three title wins in 2009/10, 2014/15 and 2016/17 is in question. There is no easy solution, because it cannot simply be argued that the title should be awarded to the runners up. Who knows how each game would have gone had all teams been competing on a level playing field? But the campaigns are tainted.

Manchester City, as I’m sure I don’t need to remind you, currently face 115 charges for an alleged range of offences including disguising payments from ownership as sponsorship, and providing undeclared salary or bonuses to players and managers. The case has run on interminably, and what little faith observers had in the Premier League dealing with it properly was further eroded by the Chelsea verdict. Even if City are found guilty, will the Premier League conclude that no sporting advantage was gained? Again?

City have won six of the last eight titles. It’s a great story, the club that worked its way up through the leagues and back to the top after years in the wilderness, who challenged the big guns and upset the established order, who proved that anything was still possible. But that picture is blurred by the possibility that City also skewed the playing field. We’re not really here, you might say.

Subscribe now

What is indisputable is that there are question marks over the sporting integrity of a competition when two of its most successful teams may have achieved that success by gaining an unfair advantage. For sport to work properly, for it to capture the imagination and inspire devotion and loyalty, people have to believe that what they are seeing is real. Chelsea and City cast a long shadow of doubt.

Belief in what we see has also been put to the test by the introduction of VAR - a move packaged as one that would eliminate mistakes but which was really introduced to give the TV companies that put so much money into the game even more content and even more power. I’ve made it clear that I’d love to see the back of it, and I’m not alone.

In a survey of 8,000 fans, the FSA found that 75% wanted rid of VAR, and 86% had concerns about expanding its remit. Uppermost among the complaints was the fact that VAR was reducing those spontaneous moments of joy, as fans increasingly waited – or were forced to wait – to see if what they thought they’d seen was actually what they had seen. The very experience of being at the match was being damaged and fans were concerned.

The Premier League’s response? Well, it called into question the veracity of the survey as respondents were self selecting – an attack line subsequently recycled by at least one journalist who should have known better – and then claimed its own survey work showed “fans are largely in favour of keeping VAR.” Not for the first time, the Premier League didn’t share details of how its research was gathered.

Given the growing disquiet about the state of the product, few companies would choose to contemptuously dismiss criticism of a measure by customers who’d had that measure imposed on them, but this is the Premier League we are talking about.

Add in unrest about ever-rising ticket prices, fans being moved from long-held seats to make way for corporate areas, the erosion of concessionary pricing, late kick-off changes, anti-social kick-off times. And sprinkle with a general feeling that the fans the game is happy to use as marketing fodder when selling passion and loyalty to commercial partners are seen as an inconvenience at best. It’s a picture that should trouble anyone who cares about the long-term good of football.

Share The Football Fan

But there’s more. So many conversations about the state of the game feel the need to start with the caveat that it is a great economic success. But a recent BBC examination of the finances of clubs in the second-tier Championship showed clubs in the division had lost a total of £3 billion in the last 10 years. In the supposed economic miracle of the Premier League, three clubs – Chelsea, West Ham and Spurs, all from the capital city – have posted combined losses of just under half a billion pounds for the year. Clubs at this elite level are selling themselves their own stadiums, hotels, and women’s teams to balance the books, and Brighton and Hove Albion, a club that has benefitted from over £400 million in interest-free loans from its owner, is regularly held up as an example of a sustainably run club.

The riches on offer in the Premier League incentivise clubs outside the competition to gamble everything on getting there. But once there, as we’ve seen from the examples above, the financial challenges do not end.

What worries me is not the football bubble bursting – to use a phrase often toyed with – any time soon, but decline over the longer-term. Many of those running clubs or the game more widely are not in it for the long-term. Their approach is a relatively new addition to a game that existed for generations before they came along, and I suspect not too many of them care too much what happens for generations to come.

You’d be unduly alarmist to predict disaster, but you’d be a fool not to worry.

Leave a comment

Photo by Mwandwe Chileshe on Unsplash

The question of what makes a real football fan is a perennial one. Back in the day, the view that “hooligans” were “not real fans” was often aired. But the uncomfortable truth was that the blokes – I never heard of any female hooligans, which is a story in itself – who used to try to knock seven bells out of each other were as dedicated and knowledgeable about their clubs as fans who chose to express their support in other ways.

Labelling someone ‘not a real fan’ continues to be the ultimate expression of disapproval. Fans don’t make it easy for ourselves at times by engaging in divisive debates about whether fans who don’t go to matches, or fans who don’t go away, or fans who don’t live near the team they support are ‘real’.

Those conversations are present in every subculture, because a sense of belonging, of being part of a group, necessarily has an exclusive as well as an inclusive edge. Think of the dividing lines in music subculture, for example – “I saw them live before the first album came out”; “I saw the original line-up” and so on.

Subscribe now

Lately, the accusation that selected groups of fans are not ‘real’ fans seems to be used with increasing frequency to push a view that real fandom is indistinguishable from passive consumption. Fans are criticised by managers and players for not supporting them sufficiently uncritically. It’s a fairly crude attempt at deflection, but it takes hold. The view that ‘real’ fans are more likely to be critical when they see insufficient application to the cause rarely gets an airing. But it is an obvious point to make.

Empty seats at games has also been cited as evidence of an absence of real fans, or of a shortcoming in a club’s support. Of course, the nature of fan rivalry means we’ll seize on pretty much anything to put one over on the other lot. But more and more fans are uneasy at using empty seats in the opposition sections as a bit of one-upmanship at a time when price increases and discriminatory concession policies are pushing more and more fans out of the game.

Add late changes to kick-off times, anti-social kick-off times, a transport infrastructure that is not fit for purpose, and it is difficult to really justify using non-attendance as a reason to question fans commitment. It is useful, however, in deflecting attention from some of the game’s deeper-seated problems, such as avaricious pricing policies.

Few things fuel the idea that fans must be grateful for whatever they get more than the deployment of the criticism that those who complain or criticise are “entitled”. Of course there are examples of arrogance, overbearing behaviour, and even a touch of entitlement. But, to take the unhappy example of my own club, Tottenham Hotspur, fans who pay some of the highest ticket prices in Europe have been labelled entitled because they want to see more than 8 wins in the last 31 home games, consider having barely enough players to field a team as a failure, and would like to see some basic evidence of competence on the pitch during games.

It seems that anything beyond paying up and consuming the product unquestionably is not only frowned upon, but prompts plenty of opinion about what fans should and shouldn’t be doing. And, as has so often been the case, the conclusion seems to be that any problems are the fans’ fault. It’s a pity that fans are not quite so central to thinking in other areas.

Share

Extraordinary developments in the ongoing story of how fans are treated in European competition this week from the Atalanta v Borussia Dortmund game.

When the game was announced, the Italian club said that it would only allow Dortmund to sell tickets to buyers with German passports and home addresses. This was apparently due to suspected connections between Dortmund’s ultras and those from Atalanta’s rivals Napoli. This prompted protests from a number of Dortmund’s fan groups, who are some of the largest and most organised in Europe.

But matters were ramped up when German police began visiting German-based fans with tickets to prevent them from travelling, and other fans were detained and turned back at airports. Even more extraordinarily, according to one of my contacts in Germany, some of the small number of Dortmund fans who had arrived in Bergamo were visited by police and had their tickets confiscated.

Dortmund’s Sudtribune group announced before the game that the organised groups would be boycotting the game, and a statement said: “Such measures, in this form and intensity, have never before been implemented in connection with Borussia Dortmund’s international away matches.” The group added it was seeking information on the “background and legal basis of these measures”.

Leave a comment

Someone used the phrase “the sanctification of fandom” in an online discussion with me recently. It got me thinking about the role and profile of fans in football, because there is a lot of discussion about this right now.

In particular, the question of what fans have a “right” to say and feel crops up a lot. Is it OK to boo, to express displeasure with what you are seeing? Is there a right or a wrong time to do this? The word “entitled” comes up a lot. As does the concept of a “true” or “real” supporter.

The relationship between fans and players, and fans and their clubs, gets far more attention now, and it is heavily mined for material to feed the enormous content machine that has been built around football. That tends to mean interactions often get blown up to have far more significance than they would do without the always on content cycle.

I remember hearing about Spurs legend Steve Perryman years ago flicking a V sign to fans of his club after scoring a goal. He’d been on the end of some stick from the crowd and gave some back after proving his point. The incident passed with the game. These days it would be all over the media for at least the following week, groaning under the weight of elaborately over-constructed moral and ethical frameworks.

Fans, in general, want to see those playing for their team make some effort, show some pride, and display basic professional competence. Some entertainment and a few victories are also appreciated. If they aren’t seeing that, it should be no surprise when they express their displeasure. Should that descend into personal abuse and harassment? Of course not, but I don’t think shouting “You’re rubbish” or booing someone off is abuse.

Should players respond? Well, in life generally you shouldn’t dish out what you’re not prepared to receive, so the same applies in football. That’s basic manners. But does expressing criticism make fans any less fans, or not “true supporters” as one under-pressure manager insisted recently? I don’t believe it’s ever wise to question the legitimacy or quality of any fan’s support – it’s a no-win game because support can be expressed in so many forms.

It’s convenient to blame the fans for not giving the right kind of support. But, as Perryman told me when I was working with him on The Boys from White Hart Lane, the professional’s focus should be on the pitch, on their own performance – you put the crowd in the background. His teammate Micky Hazard told a matchday interviewer much the same more recently – it’s the player’s job to lift the crowd, and you do that by keeping your focus on the pitch.

Subscribe now

That’s maybe not a popular line to take. The idea of the crowd as the 12^th man has really caught on, and of course we love to buy into it. But is it any more than a comforting conceit? It’s easy to understand how a really passionate support can lift a group of players, just as a really negative atmosphere could knock them off balance. But between these extremes is the crowd really any more than background noise?

If you buy into the view that the crowd is always the 12^th man, then ironically it lets the players and managers off the hook for bad performances – and more than one manager recently has sought to blame poor support for poor performance. This, in turn, prompts another round of the old media favourite routine about how unreasonable and stupid fans are.

It is hard to argue that some sections of fandom are less patient, more vitriolic, less understanding than maybe they were – that’s partly a product of the social media age. But increased discontent is also rooted in other factors of the game’s own making. High ticket prices, late changes to kick-offs, anti-social kick-off times leading to more time off work and more expense, VAR, the constant efforts to reduce the element of uncertainty – all these things contribute to general discontent with where the game is going that manifests itself in negative expressions from supporters. Why shouldn’t fans complain when they are short changed? And when did we start needing permission to express discontent?

The game has made a rod for its own back, undermining the cohesiveness that made football the people’s game, and its culture of never explain, never apologise doesn’t help.

Liverpool fan Gareth Roberts wrote eloquently about the trade-off between fans and the game recently. Yes, maybe at times too much is made of the significance of fan culture – and I hold my hand up as one of the fanzine generation that contributed to that – but there also needs to be more recognition of why fans feel as they do by those who are quick to criticise fan negativity. Dismissing or belittling fans who don’t fall into a set way of expressing their support helps to obscure the many underlying problems football should be confronting. Which might be the point.

Leave a comment

There has rightfully been a lot of criticism about FIFA’s ticketing policy for the World Cup finals this summer. But while some outlets, notably the Morning Star and The Athletic, have covered the issues around the allocation of tickets for fans with disabilities, the situation created by FIFA has not attracted the attention it should.

FIFA has restricted disabled access tickets to the three most expensive categories, is charging the companions many fans with disabilities need with them, and is not restricting the resale of disabled access tickets, which are now appearing on resale sites for many times their face value.

Share

FIFA has so far refused to engage with supporter organisations, despite its policy clearly being in contravention of its own statutes and international human rights standards. And across the whole range of its policies at what is shaping up to be a festival of unprecedented greed even by football’s standards, it is rolling out the line that all money generated goes back into the game. Answers to what “back into the game really means on a postcard please.

Football Supporters Europe is trying to get the approach changed, and reminds us that FIFA’s Gianni Infantino infamously declared in November 2022 that “Today, I feel disabled.” The more you hear about this summer’s Worl;d cup, the less attractive it sounds.

Leave a comment

Brighton and Hove Albion published end of year accounts for 2024-25 recently, and the always excellent Swiss Ramble provided some analysis (subscription required). I’ve got huge admiration for how the club’s current ownership have brought the club back from the brink of extinction to the force it is today. But I have an issue with how so many hold the club up as a great example of a financially well-run club.

There is a lot the club does well, although some of its ticketing policies could do with looking at and its banning of The Guardian for reporting on allegations about its owner doesn’t reflect well on it. I can’t imagine the club’s likeable and generally excellent head of media being too pleased with the censorship either. But the idea that it provides a financial model for others to follow is for the birds – seagulls included.

Subscribe now

The club made a £56m loss, a performance described by Swiss Ramble as: “One of the worst results in England’s top flight last season”. The underlying loss is reported as £111m. And this despite a £107m loan from the owner, who is widely reported to have put about £400m into the club since he bought it in 2009.

Now if Tony Bloom wants to pump vast sums into the club he supports, that is absolutely fine. But let’s not hold Brighton’s funding model up as one for others to follow. A point the new regulator, whose establishment was opposed by Brighton’s ownership, will surely have in mind.

Leave a comment

Photo by Anders Krøgh Jørgensen on Unsplash

We drove south for the start of the 1998 World Cup, stopping off to watch the opening games in small town bars along the route. Football wasn’t quite all-consuming in France at that stage. We had tickets for England v Tunisia in Marseille, and for a mouthwatering clash in Toulouse between Roberto Baggio’s Italy and Marcelo Salas’s Chile. After avoiding most of the nonsense in Marseille, we drove along the coast and, breaking the journey, pulled up one evening by a beach somewhere near Beziers, if I remember correctly, where we spotted some huge Chilean flags on poles planted on the sand, several coaches and what looked like a beach party.

We parked and went down to the beach to investigate, where we were welcomed in the gathering dusk by a large group of Chile fans who had come off the coaches. There were barbecues, beer and games of beach football, and the fans urged us to join them. Their warmth and generosity restored some faith after the ugliness of Marseille, and we stayed with them for a few hours swapping tales of following our teams. They told us they saved for four years, putting money away every month so they could follow their country at the World Cup. In Toulouse the next day, Chile’s fans outnumbered those of Italy by four to one.

I thought of those people as FIFA announced ticket prices for the World Cup in the USA next summer. You’d have to put a lot aside every month to afford to follow your team at this tournament.

Football Supporters Europe estimate it will cost a supporter a minimum of $6,900 to follow their team from the opening game to the final. That is nearly five times what it cost during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. And remember, that is just the ticket prices. I wanted to post the link to the prices, but go to FIFA’s website and try to find it. World football’s governing body is unusually coy about providing these details, preferring, as FSE says, to issue price tables “gradually and confidentially”.

The English FA has released a table of prices – between $265 and $700 dollars for England’s opening game against Croatia in Dallas. England’s Free Lions supporter group called the pricing “a slap in the face to supporters who support their team outside of the flagship tournament that appears every four years” and added that “supporters of the participating nations have been completely let down”.

Worse still, as FSE points out, “the lowest price category will not be available to the most dedicated supporters through their National Associations, as FIFA chose to reserve the scarce number of category 4 tickets to the general sales, subject to dynamic ticket pricing.” This, it says, is “a monumental betrayal of the tradition of the World Cup, ignoring the contribution of supporters to the spectacle it is”.

Subscribe now

Football writer Henry Winter, who has consistently spoken up for fans, got it right when he said: “As well as greed, it’s also naivety by FIFA. Pricing out real fans risks problems with segregation. Plus the atmosphere will be diluted if many of the usual noise-bringers are priced out. TV will hate that. It pays FIFA fortunes for atmosphere generated by supporters.”

FSE has called for an immediate halt to ticket sales to enable discussion with fan associations and national football bodies to find a solution that “respects the tradition, universality, and cultural significance of the World Cup”. Few expect that to happen, but it is the right call to make. Fewer still expect FIFA’s success in securing leading contender status for the World Fleece Prize (hat tip to England’s Football Supporters Association for that one) not to be closely observed by clubs elsewhere, and especially not those in the Premier League.

But the uproar over ticket prices at the World Cup is itself a product of the success of supporter campaigning over pricing. Not too long ago any complaints about football prices would have been met by the reaction “well, don’t go then” and trite arguments about supply and demand. But the economics of football do not work in the same way as economics elsewhere, and the recognition that the game is too often guilty of exploiting the unique customer relationship and squeezing the fans whose contribution to the spectacle helps boost its economic value has led to some searching questions and some sustained campaigning.

It’s a campaign that has been covered frequently by The Football Fan, and recently over 100 fan organisations signed up to a call for a halt in price increases in order to make room for a conversation on how, as the campaign slogan puts it, to stop exploiting loyalty. That campaign was backed by UK MPs in an Early Day Motion in Parliament.

Share

There’s some way to go. The Premier League says pricing is down to the clubs, but some clubs are now saying they can’t discuss pricing because the Premier League is in discussion with the FSA. And I know of at least one club that is insisting the new Football Governance act does not cover discussions over ticket prices. It explicitly does (Schedule 4, s4 (2) since you ask), so getting club executives to actually read and be aware of the legislation is going to be one of the new regulator’s initial tasks. Fan organisations need to use the leverage the Act gives them, too.

And the Premier League also continues to insist the average price of a ticket in the PL is £38. Fan groups have long asked to see the working, because it just doesn’t ring true. It’s possible that some convoluted creative accounting can bring an average to that figure, but the devil is in the detail. The PL has used the figure to give the impression that most people can get a ticket for £38 at most games. That’s simply not true, and to imply so is disingenuous – a word too many in football see as an aspiration rather a criticism.

The rows over football ticket pricing feed off a deeper discomfort about the failure to recognise the difference between price and value, and about how much that we hold dear and have contributed so much to is being carelessly swept away by a relentless tide of monetisation. Overstating the case? Be honest and ask yourself if you care as much about the World Cup as you used to, if you’re starting to question how much longer you can keep doing this?

For the New Year, wouldn’t it be good if football made a resolution to be enlightened rather than simply enriched? We can but dream. In the meantime, thanks for following The Football Fan in growing numbers – and see you on the other side.

Leave a comment

Photo by Fauzan Saari on Unsplash

It’s been a long time coming but the reselling of event tickets for above face value is to be outlawed in the UK. Widespread press reports came ahead of an official announcement on 19 November confirming government plans to ban the resale of tickets above their original cost.

There’s some confusion over how, or if, this will affect football. And I understand that the football industry wasn’t consulted by those pulling together the latest proposals. That’s partly because the problem of ticket resale inflation and industrial-scale ticket farming by agencies is far worse and more prevalent in the music business than in football, where there are more complex membership schemes and varying classes of ticket access to deal with.

Football tickets, however, are sold on for profit and at some scale, as a BBC investigation revealed in September. These ‘tickets’ often do not exist, so that issue would be dealt with under legislation on fraud. And the problem is difficult to tackle because the companies doing the selling are often based outside the UK, and so beyond the reach of UK law.

It is also already illegal in the UK for anyone other than a seller authorised by the event organiser to sell a football ticket. So reports that the new rules ‘do not apply to football’ are slightly misleading, giving the impression that the practice of reselling football tickets for more than face value is being ignored. It’s not in the new rules because existing legislation covers resale of football tickets.

The 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act made it illegal to sell a ticket for a football match unless authorised to do so by the organiser. The legislation was rooted in the events at the Hillsborough FA Cup semi-final in 1989 and the recommendations of the Taylor Report into them. The report recommended outlawing the selling on of tickets on the basis that it could lead to a breakdown in segregation, and to the possibility of people without tickets travelling to games and attempting to buy from touts or otherwise gain entry to the ground.

Subscribe now

It’s worth pausing for a moment to remember that neither of those things caused what happened at Hillsborough. And also that proposals to outlaw the selling on of tickets and to introduce seating were considerably more enthusiastically adopted by football than some other major recommendations Taylor made – that fans should not be priced out and that a fair price for a ticket at the time (1994) would be £6.

But to return to the subject at hand, football clubs signed deals in which they gave so-called secondary agencies permission to resell tickets to their games in return for a payment. So the criminalisation of selling on tickets, alongside the rise of the ticketing agencies and their deals with clubs, has led to the absurd situation in which a fan can be arrested for selling a ticket at face value to another fan, while a secondary ticket agency that has signed a deal as an official club ticketing partner can resell a ticket for 10 times face value perfectly legally.

Most people saw what the secondary agencies were doing for what it was – legalised touting. One of the things that prompted me to get involved with the Supporters’ Trust at Spurs about a decade ago was the club’s deal with Stubhub. As a rule, fans don’t like touting because it has a negative impact on us and goes against many of the values built up over years of supporter culture, but the move sparked particular ire at Spurs because the club, with its then characteristic lack of awareness and penchant for shoving a foot up the barrel of the nearest shotgun, had just been running an “Out the tout” campaign.

The message seemed to be “Out the tout unless they have paid us a lot of money”. Research the Trust carried out showed that 91% of tickets being sold on Stubhub were being sold well above face value. So the Stop Stubhub coalition was born, a campaign that took us into meetings at the House of Commons with MPs such as Sharon Hodgson who have helped bring the current proposals forward, into conversation with ethical ticket exchanges such as Twickets, and finally to Spurs deciding to axe the deal – while saying they’d always intended to do that anyway.

A flavour of the debate, and the club’s attempts to defend the indefensible, can be found in this report from the local Tottenham Independent, which gave the campaign a lot of support.

Share

The proposed new law may not apply to football, but there is an opportunity here. If the resale of tickets above face value is to be made illegal, that should logically mean it is illegal whether it is authorised or not. So the legislation should address this.

This week’s announcement does not, in itself, constitute a new law. It is an expression of intent to bring forward legislation in next year’s King’s Speech. What happens next is the process of haggling over wording and detail. Which is where some of the issues I’ve raised need to be tackled.

There’s also the issue of how UK law can be applied to a transaction that occurs overseas. The simple answer is that it can’t, and that’s why so many of the secondary ticketing agencies are registered outside the UK. But what if the law was written in such a way that it applied at the point of using the ticket at the event location?

Secondary ticketing is big business, which is why the industry put so much time and effort into trying to stop these proposals seeing daylight. Efforts to defenestrate the proposed legislation will continue apace, so fan organisations would do well to push for the detail that’s needed to make the new Bill work as it should.

As part of the process of making the improved fan engagement the new Independent Football Regulator will be looking for work, fan groups should be pushing clubs to recognise the direction of travel over the resale of tickets above face value. We need to finish the job of getting the secondary ticketing agencies out of football.

At the same time, we need to get rid of the poorly thought out legislation that criminalises fans for selling on tickets at face value. Such a transaction may well contravene club allocation schemes, in which case the instigator of the transaction would lose some or all of their privileges as a ticket holder under the rules of the scheme. There is no need for this transaction to be a criminal offence.

Share The Football Fan

In a related move, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced a major drive targeting what it sees as unfair online pricing practices. Practices in the spotlight include drip pricing, where additional fees are added at various stages in the transaction process, and pressure selling, where techniques such as limited time offers are used to force customers into making quick purchase decisions without considering alternatives.

Eight companies have been targeted, and they include two of our secondary ticketing agency friends – Stubhub and Viagogo, the latter the target of action by supporters of Manchester City, one club which has a commercial deal with the agency.

Put these moves together with the #stopexploitingloyalty campaign that has been coordinated by the Football Supporters Association over the last 18 months and there’s evidence of a potential sea change in the way ticket sales are viewed. No one is arguing that businesses should not be able to charge prices that reflect demand, but what we’ve seen too often across music and football is the naked exploitation of the fan loyalty that helps fuel that demand. The passion and atmosphere dedicated fans provide is an integral part of a valuable product, not something to be squeezed until it is crushed.

To make sure that potential becomes something more substantial and lasting, fans are going to have to keep pushing their case.

Leave a comment

The ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans travelling to Birmingham for their team’s Europa League game against Aston Villa poses challenges for those who, like me, have always been against blanket bans on fans and collective punishment. It also brings the role of Safety Advisory Groups into perspective, and underlines the importance of sharing information as fully and accurately as possible.

I reacted to the original decision as someone who has observed many attempts to ban fans over the years, and who knows “we have received intelligence” is frequently used as a trump card by those who want to do so. This, coupled with the framing of the original decision as being made because of an inability to guarantee the safety of visiting fans, worried me.

My view has always been that if a venue thinks it cannot guarantee the safety and wellbeing of those within and around it, the venue should not be permitted to host events. When it seemed that, in this case, the decision was made because the safety and wellbeing of a group of fans could not be guaranteed because they were highly likely to be Jewish, I was even more troubled. Surely we could not be saying our football grounds are not safe for Jewish people?

It turns out we weren’t.

I’m aware that an attempt to strip this back to some basic facts and draw general conclusions about the treatment of fans risks either getting lost in or embroiled by the noise around a number of other agendas that can’t be fully separated from this specific incident. But I think it’s worth a try.

Share The Football Fan

The original decision originated with Birmingham City Council’s Safety Advisory Group (SAG). Every local authority has a SAG, and members of the local emergency services as well as venue officials sit on it. The SAG advises – the clue is in the name – the local authority on whether or not the safety certificate enabling the event to go ahead should be issued. The terms of reference of Birmingham’s SAG are set out online.

SAGs tend to be quite secretive in the way they operate, and SAGS that advise on football matches tend not to have any representation from football fans. That is something a number of fan reps in London, working with then-FSA caseworker Amanda Jacks, managed to push back successfully on, gaining places on SAGs including Haringey, Islington, and Hammersmith and Fulham. Interestingly, Brent – which is responsible for Wembley Stadium – refuses to communicate with anyone. Advances were also made in Liverpool and Manchester.

The trouble with being secretive and not communicating properly is that other people can define your message for you in the space you leave. Birmingham’s SAG appears to have said nothing in public. Instead, Birmingham City Council put out a statement saying what the SAG had advised. That statement said that “advice’ was provided by the SAG “based on a risk assessment provided by West Midlands police”. Aston Villa FC also put out a statement saying “no away fans may attend the match” due to “an instruction from the Safety Advisory Group”.

You’ll have noticed a pattern that those of us who have dealt with football supporter issues for years are familiar with. Institutions and organisations issuing as little information as possible and when they do, being careful to make sure that people understand any decisions were really taken by other people. The key is not to be responsible for anything.

This was the information upon which the subsequent furore was based. And that information rapidly became ‘the safety of a predominantly Jewish group of fans can’t be guaranteed’. At which point lots of people decided to jump in without a full grasp of the facts in order to prove views they had always held had been right all along. That applies to all shades of opinion about an issue much wider and more complex than football and supporter rights.

I’ve said I was initially worried about the ban and what seemed to be the reason for it. And that’s why I initially had sympathy for Prime Minister Kier Starmer when he questioned the decision. If a group of people’s safety could not be guaranteed because they would be identified as Jewish, that would be giving in to antisemitism.

But I was also aware of the reputation of Maccabi Tel Aviv’s fans, and the cultural significance of the Maccabbees, whose name the club’s name is drawn from. A significant section of the club’s support has a long-established reputation for being racist and violent, and last November were involved in serious clashes in Amsterdam before and after a game against Ajax.

I’ve linked to a Wikipedia page above in order to give access to a wide range of reports on the events. And it’s probably important to say here that while I don’t believe antisemitism was absent from the events surrounding that game, the vast majority of the problems look to have been caused by the Maccabi fans and their offensive behaviour.

Share

It transpires that the decision to ban fans was not taken because the safety of a predominantly Jewish group of fans could not be guaranteed, but because that same group of fans were deemed a serious threat to public order. There is an important difference.

I’ve said that I have heard catch-all assessments of groups of individuals used to justify harsh measures before, and that I am suspicious of them. But I’m also not someone who believes you can ignore hard evidence. So I had to ask myself, if I had been a fan rep in that SAG meeting, would I really have been able to argue that any problems could be dealt with without serious risk to those at and around the match? Much as my gut tells me that generalisation is dangerous, I haven’t seen much evidence of travelling Maccabi Tel Aviv fans just going along for the game and some sightseeing.

After days of controversy, in which most of the people you can usually guarantee to be wrong about pretty much everything had had their tuppenyworth, it turned out that police did have hard evidence that the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans posed a serious and credible risk. That information seems extremely likely to have been leaked from one of the bodies unhappy about being thrown under a bus by people trying to prove a point. And it’s more substantial than some of the as yet unseen evidence allegedly compiled by people shouting on social media.

My initial worries about blanket bans loosely applied and about possible antisemitism were proved unfounded. But they had been fuelled by how the issue was presented, not least by a Prime Minister who I expected to have been better briefed than he evidently was. What appears to have been a knee-jerk reaction by him put a lot of people under pressure that shouldn’t have been, and framed a debate that did little to promote rational response.

I will, however, look forward to him speaking up for fans the next time a blanket ban is imposed when there is no good reason. Because the issue of blanket bans is still a concerning one, and one that pan-European group Football Supporters Europe (FSE) has been grappling with for some time. And as it happens, the organisation acheived some success that may help in situations such as this in future.

I’ve said above that one of the problems often faced when decisions to ban supporters are made is lack of transparency and accountability over the process. And it’s rooted in the St Denis Convention, which I’ve written about before. On October 6, the Committee on Safety and Security at Sports Events, of the Saint-Denis Convention, adopted “a Recommendation on the use of collective bans against away football supporters”. The UK ratified the Convention in 2023 and approved the recommendation.

The recommendation calls on states “to prioritise individual accountability over collective restrictions, and to apply collective bans only in exceptional circumstances, where such a measure is necessary to maintain public order and safety.”

What that does is establish a process for proportion and transparency to be used, without removing the ability to take action in the face of hard evidence. I spoke to Stuart Dykes, who is Director of European and Institutional Affairs at FSE, and an experienced fan campaigner I’ve known for years.

Asked about the decision to prevent Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from attending the match at Villa Park, he said: “It’s not something we could easily support. Our approach and that of the Council of Europe is to encourage proportional responses targeted at individual perpetrators rather than entire fan bases and to ensure that any restrictions on fans are applied only in cases where there is a documented extreme risk to public order.”

He noted that FSE has, on occasion, challenged similar decisions in court, with most cases ending successfully.

Subscribe now

The recommendation from the European Committee helps because it requires the public authorities, among other things, to be transparent about the reasoning behind a ban and to provide documentary evidence of the perceived risk or threat to public order. It also makes clear that such bans should only be imposed as a last result. Countries such as Italy and France regularly impose bans on away fans. This could be a tacit admission that they aren’t capable of dealing with them, or simply because they can’t be bothered to.

So in the Birmingham case the onus would have been on the police to provide details of their risk assessment evidencing a specific threat to the public order.

The explanation of the Birmingham decision under the obligations of this recommendation would have taken the sting out of much of the nonsense and grandstanding that ensued, reinforced rather than undermined faith in the authorities and the political process, and avoided another damaging chapter in the increasingly toxic culture war currently being stoked.

Of course, adopting the approach outlined in the convention – which would also include involving fans in the work SAGs do – is not going to prevent those people who want to push their divisive agendas from doing so. But it would go a long way to ensuring the ground was less fertile for them.

Leave a comment

A brief update on the joys of European travel, to add to what I have written about so many times. Spurs visited Monaco recently, that sceptred tax-free isle south of France. They were told alcohol would be banned, no bags were allowed, power banks were banned, as were umbrellas, the away was being rebuilt, the ladies toilets were portacabins and there was likely to be a strong smell of sewerage (there was). Oh, and you’d probably be asked to remove your shoes before entering the ground. After much to and fro, small bags were allowed in. The systematic abuse of travelling fans in Europe continues.

A recap on Premier League action so far this season regarding how regular matchgoing fans are treated – more antisocial kick-off times, more missed deadlines for TV schedule announcements, continued erosion of concessionary ticketing schemes, continued rise in ticket prices, increasing incidence of schemes in which longstanding fans are moved to make way for corporate sections, increase in draconian requirements for ticket use, growing evidence of prioritisation of one-off visitors over longstanding fans, growing rumours of dynamic ticketing models on the way. Has there ever been an industry that has treated its best customers with such contempt and disregard, and which is so utterly incapable of understanding the value of anything over the price of everything?

Share The Football Fan

Finally, though, something unreservedly positive. Following a huge campaign that brought together fans, players and pan-European institutions, La Liga’s attempt to play a domestic game abroad has been defeated. Serie A looks even more isolated in its attempt to do the same, and must surely now back down. And the latest controversy looks to have prompted football’s governing bodies to ensure that this fundamental threat to our game never resurfaces. Congratulations to FSE for pulling together a huge and powerful coalition, and to all who raised their voice.

Leave a comment

Photo by Marcus Reubenstein on Unsplash

Anna Burgess has seen it all before. She’s travelled all over Europe following Liverpool FC for years, and she represents away supporters on the Spirit of Shankly supporters union committee. Like most regulars at European aways, she isn’t surprised by shoddy treatment. But the recent trip to Istanbul made her even more determined that things must change.

The game was by no means the worst experience Liverpool fans have had. But it’s the constant low-level experience of what is, to be frank, utter contempt that is really hitting home – and not just at Liverpool. Most fans knew what they were letting themselves in for, but the official advice given out by Liverpool for travelling fans left little doubt.

Here’s a selection of choice cuts.

• You must carry photo ID at all times.

• Your only access to the stadium is via buses with no access or toilet facilities, that would take at least an hour to complete their journey.

• You will not be able to take anything that could be used as a projectile into the stadium – including phone chargers needed to ensure phones with digital tickets work.

• You may be held back for up to 90 minutes after the game.

But, says Anna, “there were nowhere near enough coaches. A few mates said that when they arrived there was no space for them. They rang the club to see what to do and they were told to make their own way. Despite being told not to do that in the official advice.”

At the gates, says Anna “it was a racket – pure and simple theft. I’ve reflected on the female stewards going through my bag and it was like they were shopping and picking out what they wanted to keep. Absolutely outrageous. Some girls had Tampax and sanitary products confiscated.”

Again, Anna is not unfamiliar with items being taken. A few seasons back, away in Europe, she had a phone charger confiscated “because you might give it to a man to throw”. Where do you even start with that?

“There’s a lot made of wanting to get a different sort of fan to games, and we know they don’t want people like us there really,” said Anna. “But how are you going to attract that demographic if you can’t take a lippy in, or some hand gel to at least make the toilets useable when there is no soap, no hot water and often no lighting?”

She emphasises that no one should have to put up with this sort of treatment, but makes the point as yet another illustration of the game UEFA and the clubs talk and the one they walk.

“I went there knowing that they would likely take things, but I didn’t realise it would be as blatant,” she says. “When I left, there was loads of rubbish on the floor and items they had confiscated that were of no interest to them. Unsurprisingly, the bags with all of the things they clearly wanted to keep had gone.”

There were problems inside the stadium too. “The lads I was on the trip with said that they couldn’t get to their seats because all the police were in them. I realise nobody goes to their seat on a European away, but it was very cramped in the stands.”

Other fans I spoke to were told they would not be allowed to take inhalers in, despite being asthmatic. When Spurs played in Istanbul last season, fans were advised that diabetic needles and epi-pens were banned. They were told “the club doctor will administer any injections”. Seriously!

Subscribe now

I’ve been writing about this for years, and it seems that the issue is beginning to be picked up by the mainstream media. Henry Winter has been consistent in raising it for some time, and articles such as the one carried by the Daily Mail about Liverpool’s visit to Istanbul will help – although that piece still buys into the idea that harsh measures are necessary because of potential crowd trouble.

For change to happen, fans need to speak up and demand better. But clubs must do the same. Too often there is a reticence to challenge in case it makes things worse, but this is just giving in to intimidation. In my experience, there’s also an unwillingness to make waves with other clubs you might need to do you a favour in future. Clubs need to start putting their fans, their paying customers, first.

Anna says: “I’m going to email the club to ask for a wash-up meeting and just a general discussion about our treatment in Europe. We really need to start doing stuff around the St Denis convention.”

Few have heard of the convention, and it is scarcely used. But it is a valuable tool. It is, in full, the Council of Europe Convention on an Integrated Safety, Security and Service Approach at Football Matches and Other Sports Events. I wrote about it in some detail two and a half years ago, and the independent review into the shocking events at the 2022 Champions League Final described it as follows.

“The aim of the Saint-Denis Convention is to provide a safe, secure, and welcoming environment at football matches and other sports events with an international dimension. In order to achieve this, Parties shall:

“a. Adopt an integrated, multi-agency and balanced approach towards safety, security and service, based on an ethos of effective local, national and international partnerships and cooperation;

“b. Ensure that all public and private agencies, and other stakeholders, recognise that safety, security, and service provision cannot be considered in isolation and can have a direct influence on delivery of the other two components;

“c. Take account of good practices in developing an integrated approach to safety, security and service.”

To put it bluntly – this is not happening. And despite the damning verdict of the Review on UEFA’s role, that organisation is still not stepping up to do what it could. There have been improvements, with the dogged efforts of Football Supporters Europe securing regular discussion and consultation on fan affairs where before there was none. But too often those forums become platforms for excuses about why UEFA can’t really do anything when it is the local authorities who really make the decisions.

It is true that, particularly in France and Spain, local police forces are a law unto themselves. And that too many local councils view football fans as a problem first and guests a poor second. But could and should UEFA be doing more as the competition organiser?

Share

Spurs fan Kat Law is a member of the Football Supporters Europe board, and co-ordinates work around English clubs in European competition. She’s also a member of UEFA’s Fan Advisory Forum, so unlike many fans she has a direct line into the organisation. And she says there have been improvements. “UEFA’s new stadium regulations mean the things they can control are improving in some areas – but that’s on the stadium footprint, not beyond. Multi-agency work is the challenge,” she says.

UEFA, powerful as it is, can’t compel police or public authorities to do anything, and it is often their decisions that cause the most problems. But there are things UEFA can do.

Among the measures Kat and others are pushing for is a standard list of items that are permitted to be taken into stadiums – and that should include medical supplies. “It’s one thing when the approach to fans causes inconvenience,” says Kat, “but quite another when people’s health is being put at risk. That has to change.”

Staging European competition games generates money and profile for the cities in which they are held. Where the safety of visitors cannot be guaranteed, where visitors are routinely attacked by security forces and preyed upon by stewards, where basic principles of hospitality and safety are absent, UEFA could, as the competition organiser, refuse to allocate games to cities.

But withdrawing games, especially at short notice, presents its own logistical challenges. This is not an easy solution, but a line has to be drawn somewhere and somehow.

Fans are beginning to organise more strongly around these issues, with all fans of English clubs involved in European competition meeting regularly under the umbrella of the FSE and the Football Supporters Association as part of a process that feeds into structured dialogue with UEFA. Supporter networks in other countries are considering similar.

But clubs need to be more prepared to submit complaints to the official UEFA delegate at games about any issues – because that is the route UEFA has to respond through.

The great irony in all of this is that punitive measures are said to be necessary because of the risk of fan violence. But more often I hear from fans of all clubs that trips reveal great cities and hospitable people, but poor policing and matchday experience. It is too often the measures introduced to prevent trouble that cause it.

One fan I spoke to didn’t make the trip to Istanbul because he’d had enough. “Planning for a shit trip, experiencing one, reflecting on it as one and paying top dollar. At 64, who needs it!” he said. Many more will go, fuelling complacency that there will always be an audience. There will be, but that doesn’t make treating it badly right.

Leave a comment

UEFA’s approval of two domestic league games, one from Spain and one from Italy, to be played outside those countries has predictably caused a storm – and attracted ridicule as the organisation has said it is approving the games on the basis that it doesn’t approve of them and isn’t setting a precedent.

The problem for UEFA is that, ultimately, it is FIFA that makes the decision on whether to grant approval, and it turns out FIFA’s regulations are probably too flimsy to withstand a possible legal challenge. Blocking the requests from La Liga and Serie A could therefore prompt a legal action which, if successful in getting the games to go ahead, really would set a precedent.

That’s something a few of the apocalyptic articles in the press don’t seem to be considering, and the fact that all 55 UEFA member associations have committed not to make further such requests without consulting UEFA has also been overlooked in the rush to declare the end of football as we know it. Critics say the commitment to consult is “meaningless” – and the past attitude of most football authorities to the concept of consultation has understandably prompted cynicism – but no commitment at all would be even more meaningless.

Share The Football Fan

Make no mistake, these matches going ahead – Villarreal v Barcelona in Miami, USA, and Como and AC Milan in Perth, Australia – is A Very Bad Thing. It tears up the level playing field in both those leagues, as every team will not have played the same number of matches under the same conditions. It directly undermines the ticket to every home game brought by season ticket holders – something that could itself prompt legal action – and it allows the argument for precedent to be put in future.

But it’s also possible the attempt will prompt football’s competition organisers to get their houses in order. This week the European Parliament voted to adopt a report on the role of EU policy in shaping the European Sport Model (ESM). As this X thread from Football Supporters Europe points out, the ESM “specifically ‘calls on the sport’s governing bodies to prevent domestic competition matches from being played abroad’.” It also calls for the ESM to be protected “against pure-profit entertainment models” and for “the involvement of fans in decision making.”

FSE’s own statement may be a bit pragmatic for some, but it is a realistic and sensible stance – one that pins responsibility where it should be (on FIFA and the respective leagues) and which acknowledges the unity that has been achieved in the short time since this latest attempt to undermine the domestic football model was announced. It could yet help win the war that this battle is only a part of.

The photo at the top of this post shows the view from the away end at Galatasaray v Liverpool in this season’s Champions League. © Anna Burgess

I’ve waited until football was back before writing about it being back, in order to avoid yet another season preview. And yes, this is always the best part of the year for everyone, before harsh realities kick in to make fools of those who rushed in with hope. But increasingly, the new season brings with it not the joy of expectation, but a sense of fear that the simple beauty of football may have been messed about with once too often.

In England’s Premier League, yet more ground is being conceded to TV with the introduction of live touchline interviews with substituted players, cameras briefly on the pitch for close ups of goal celebrations, and camera access to dressing rooms at half time. Let’s be clear. Precisely no one aside from TV executives has asked for these changes, and few will welcome them. Substituted players won’t want to answer crass questions (“How does it feel to be subbed off on the verge of a hat-trick?”) and will soon learn to media train any answers into banality. Neither players nor managers will want the detail of half-time talks beamed live to everywhere, and so will need to find other ways of saying what needs to be said. And camera operators scampering onto the pitch in the aftermath of a goal is all a bit breaking the fourth wall.

There are several points to make here. The first is that when TV seeks to reflect what is ‘real’, what often happens is that the people doing the real things end up performing a version of reality for TV. It’s why the first series of a reality TV show is invariably the best, because the participants haven’t worked out how to play the game. So this drive to make things more authentic actually results in making them less authentic. I’ve said before that the relationship between football and TV is increasingly one in which the tail wags the dog, and these latest innovations – along with the awful VAR (supposedly improved this season by generously providing explanations of decisions for the mug punters at the live games ages after the incident has passed) – are prime examples of how the compelling simplicity of a game that has held the attention of successive generations for over 150 years is being overshadowed by a set of gimmicks.

Those who run football should value what they have more – and resist the constant pressure from TV companies to provide new elements to spice things up for the viewers. (I’m getting strong aromas of Monkey Tennis here.) If the game becomes unrecognisable, what guarantee is there that audience interest will not wither? If that happens, TV execs won’t want to spend the money they are now.

In the meantime, TV will continue to drive the majority of late fixture changes and anti-social kick-off times, contributing to the growing sense of alienation felt by matchgoing fans who everyone says they value, but who see very little evidence of that. I’ve written about the tension between the game and the crowd before, and that will continue to be a theme this season. Also continuing will be the #stopexploitingloyalty campaign run by an increasing number of fan groups under the umbrella of the Football Supporters Association. It would be nice to think there are some football executives out there with the nous to get to grips with these tensions.

This whole issue took on a new, although not original, twist, when the prospect of playing domestic league games overseas was raised again. La Liga has asked for permission to play the Villarreal v Barcelona game in December in Miami, while Serie A wants to play the AC Milan v Como game in Perth, Australia.

This idea – remember the Premier League’s wizard 39^th game wheeze, first aired in 2008 and raised again in 2017? – is not original. But it keeps being raised, and while the Premier League is staying quiet this time, there is no doubt it is willing its Spanish and Italian counterparts on so that – regrettably – England has to follow suit.

Once again a fundamental football principle is at stake. League titles are valued because they are the result of every team playing every other team at the same grounds, home and away. Call it a level playing field of level playing fields. The sheer bonkersness of the thinking behind this latest idea was revealed by Villarreal’s president Fernado Roig’s promise to fly all season ticket holders to Miami free of charge.

Villarreal have 19,500 season ticket holders. Aside from the expense, the sheer logistical challenge of transporting that number of people to the game would be quite something – and let’s not even start talking about the environmental issues. Also, the reasons previously given for moving games included opening the game up to new audiences – those audiences currently so well served by TV coverage and its attendant innovations. If the same audience will be watching live in a new location, what is the point?

Of course, what this is really about is normalising the playing of domestic games abroad – and spending whatever it takes in order to do so.

But the idea is not as popular among overseas fans as some would have you believe. Spanish, Italian and English games are seen as being defined by being played in their respective countries, an overseas game is seen as inauthentic in the same way many gridiron fans view the London NFL games with suspicion. But what the fans think doesn’t matter – or so the people waving and cashing the cheques would like to think.

The frequency with which this idea is raised enables professional sage observers to opine that it is inevitable it will happen. But that’s what they said about the European Super League. Fans and players are likely to mobilise in numbers over this. And the presence of English football’s new regulator will be important.

Fan groups attempted to get the ability to block the playing of domestic games overseas written on the face of the bill, but that was blocked by the FA, which feared regulatory overreach. The FA is keen to stress it is firmly against the idea, but doubts about the FA’s ability or resolve to protect the game have deep roots. The Football Governance Act does contain provision that can be interpreted as the ability to block overseas games if there is not sufficient support for the idea. With the backing of strong opposition from fan groups and players, this could be a chance for the regulator to demonstrate its worth.

Share

All I’ve said here will, no doubt, be dismissed as outdated raging against innovation and entrepreneurialism – the argument that is the last refuge for those who have run out of justification for their relentless greed. But The Football Fan has always been about recognising the true value of the game. A welcome reminder of that came in Sid Lowe’s wonderful article about the return of Real Oviedo to the top flight in Spain – a timely reminder of why the simple things mean so much. Ironically, the story would make a great TV drama and a great advert for the game – but TV and too many of those supposedly promoting the game would never give the story a chance to breathe in the first place.

Leave a comment

I’m currently reading Joey D’Urso’s book More than a shirt. It’s a fantastic read – well written, excellently researched and intelligently executed. It’s about the symbolism of football shirts, and D’Urso takes a truly international journey in order to link themes and promote understanding of the bigger picture. And that’s something we could certainly do with more of.

I also recommend a look at the latest edition of the Fan Engagement Index from Kevin Rye’s Think Fan Engagement project. I’ve argued frequently with Kev, who I’ve known since his days at Supporters Direct, about the methodology and conclusions of the Index, but measuring the quality of fan engagement is going to be an extremely important task in the new regulated era, and anything that helps us keep beyond the corporate doublespeak is worthwhile.

Before we close, a plug for Misha Verollet-Dahncke’s Unmodern football Substack, and in particular a post headlined Football is the police state’s petri dish. The police using football as a testing ground is a theme I have written about numerous times (there’s a fair bit on the subject in my ebook Taking Our Ball Back) and this is the view from a German perspective.

The Brazilian football and culture website Ludopedia has kindly asked to publish some of my posts, so you can now read me in Portuguese. There’s plenty more there, all part of the site’s stated aim of “expanding access to knowledge and promoting critical reflections from football.” It’s well worth checking out.

• The photo at the top of this post shows the jetty where you can arrive by boat at the home ground of Venezia FC – surely one of the most pleasurable match day arrival points in what is one of my favourite places in the world. © Martin Cloake

In a sport, which by definition must contain different entities that compete against each other, having the same people in control of more than one of those entities has to be a bad idea. But this is football, the laboratory of bad ideas, and so we must talk about multi-club ownership (MCO).

There are a host of questions that need answering about Crystal Palace’s demotion from the Europa League and, while I have sympathy for Palace and the club’s fans, some of the questions are aimed at the people in charge at the south London club. I’m assuming a level of knowledge about the case, so I’ll try not to go over ground readers will be familiar with.

The rule that UEFA says has been broken is Article 5 of the regulations of the UEFA Champions League, which was introduced in 2025 to cover all UEFA club competitions for the 2025/26 season. The relevant wording is: “No one may simultaneously be involved, either directly or indirectly, in any capacity whatsoever in the management, administration and/or sporting performance of more than one club participating in a UEFA club competition. No individual or legal entity may have control or influence over more than one club participating in a UEFA club competition.”

Anything that would constitute a conflict of interest under this rule had to be resolved by 1 March 2025. The Palace case boils down to the fact that John Textor was considered by UEFA to have been “involved, either directly or indirectly” in both Crystal Palace and Lyon on and before that date.

Share The Football Fan

To recap the facts, Textor bought a 43% stake in Crystal Palace in 2021 for £90m. Six months later, he bought 90% of Brazilian club Botafogo, along with 80% of Belgian club RWD Molenbeek in the same week. And, almost a year after buying into Palace, he acquired 40% of the shares of French club Lyon.

MCO has been an issue in football since the 1990s, but really gained momentum in the 2010s as the Red Bull group and the City Football Group acquired multiple clubs. Research suggests that over 180 clubs worldwide are now part of MCO groups. By 2022 it would be safe to assume that anyone who knew their way around football would know that having a stake in more than one club might be an issue.

So there are a number of questions that can legitimately be asked of Palace chairman Steve Parish and the club board.

• When did they realise Textor’s involvement might be a problem?

• If Textor’s involvement was not a problem, why did he sell his shares for £190m (realising a £100m profit), in June and in the same month exit from Lyon?

• Why did the Palace board not succeed in hitting the rule deadline of 1 March 2025?

Palace’s case seems to be that Textor, to use Parish’s exact words, “didn’t have decisive influence over the club”. But the rule doesn’t use the word decisive.* Without that word any judgement must surely rest on whether Textor had influence. It is hard to imagine anyone would spend £90m on 43% of something they had no influence on. And those competitors of Palace who did not benefit from the injection of Textor’s 43% could justifiably argue influence was exerted.

Could it be that Palace thought they could get around the rule on MCO? If they did, it can be argued they had good reason.

Because Palace are not the only club where an individual can be said to “simultaneously be involved, either directly or indirectly, in any capacity whatsoever in the management, administration and/or sporting performance of more than one club participating in a UEFA club competition.” At clubs such as Manchester City, Manchester United and, to add spice to this particular tale, Nottingham Forest – the club that has taken Palace’s place in the Europa League – a device called a blind trust has been used to ensure compliance with the rules. And here is where things get really interesting.

Research carried out by investigative football website Josimer (and if you don’t subscribe you really should) not only reveals how blind trusts are being deployed to stop clubs falling foul of MCO rules, but that the device is the brainchild of Sunil Gulati – the chairman of UEFA’s Club Financial Control Body since 2021 and close friend of UEFA president Alexsander Čeferin. In an article headlined Bend it like UEFA, Josimar details the blind trust device, the involvement of Gulati, and how numerous clubs have got around the rules.

As Josimar observes, owners including Evangelos Marinakis at Nottingham Forest and Jim Ratcliffe at Manchester United, as well as executives at City Group, “were smart enough to beat the system at its own game. The door was left ajar – all they did was to push it open.

And, Josimar concludes: “The problem is, however, that it is UEFA which unlocked it. More than that, it had signposted the exit.”

Josimar asked UEFA directly if it had advised clubs on how to circumvent its own rules, exactly what Gulati’s role was, and how its active promotion of blind trusts sat with its commitment to open competition and transparent decision-making. It has received no reply.

Share

An added twist in this case is that Forest appear to have played a significant role in alerting UEFA to the fact that Palace may be in contravention of the rules, thereby helping to secure a decision they directly benefitted from. Forest appear to have anticipated a potential problem and acted upon it sooner than Palace by setting up a blind trust, then writing to UEFA to ask for “clarity” over Palace’s position. While Forest can claim accurately to have done nothing wrong, they have engaged in what most would see as sharp practice.

This is a tale as much about the application of rules as it is about the desirability of those rules, and it features the now familiar twisting and turning of those who claim to be running our sport in its best interests. For a rule-based system to work it needs to have the confidence of those subject to and affected by those rules. This case is a real mess because rules do not appear to be being applied consistently or in the spirit they were intended, and punishment for not being sufficiently smart in circumventing the rules appears to be worse than for not complying with the spirit of them.

The point has been made too, that Palace are not the only club to be punished. While they have been demoted to the UEFA Conference League, Irish side Drogheda United FC and Slovakia’s DAC 1904 Dunajka Streda have been kicked out of that competition altogether for failure to comply with MCO rules – or should that be for not being smart enough to get around them? Are Palace getting more attention because they have a higher profile in a higher profile league? Or because they have a better case?

The whole thing is a mess, and the whole mess wouldn’t exist without MCO. The solution would be to apply a simple common sense test to the question of whether an individual is involved at more than one club, by seeing whether an individual was involved at more than one club – in any capacity. This would, of course, be characterised as ‘preventing investment’, but it would be nothing of the sort. It would be preventing investment by people who had already invested, and leaving the way clear for other investors who wanted a slice of the world’s most popular sport. UEFA needs to make its position on MCO clear, and act consistently once it does.

There are some challenging questions for fans here too. While fan organisations such as the FSA in England and Wales and European body Football Supporters Europe have stated opposition to the MCO model, and spent a lot of time flagging the problems it can bring, many fans are seemingly prepared to put up with it as long as it benefits their club.

In the research quoted above, the benefits of MCO are listed as hedging exposure, compounding assets, diversifying risk, increasing global talent arbitrage and increasing exit flexibility. You’ll never, as they say, sing that. Here’s yet another example of where the business has forgotten what makes the sport so special. The thing that stands out about the Palace case is that few of the characters in the story come out well.

* As someone has pointed out in the comments, and I’ve acknowledged, the word ‘decisive’ appears in a later, seperate, clause of the rule. Poorly-drafted rules are nothing new in football. This does raise the question of whether someone needs to come under the definition of both parts of the rule or either in order for the rules to have been broken.

Share

In the last edition I wrote about the growing tension between regular matchgoing fans and TV companies. September’s TV picks have been announced, and on one weekend two games have been moved from Saturday to Sunday for live TV coverage, but subject to late change should the teams be involved in European games that mean they can’t play on Sunday. In which case, the games will be on the original Saturday, where they could have been left in the first place. They are not even pretending to care any more.

Subscribe now

Finally, I have to mark the week in which the Football Governance Act passed into law. It’s the culmination of years of hard work and campaigning, and will establish an Independent Regulator for Football. It is a great opportunity.

Inevitably, those who have always opposed the establishment of the IRF will continue to snipe, and the track record of the powers within the game suggests they will do as much as they can to stymie and frustrate the regulator’s work. But a more sustainable game, better ownership requirements, and improved fan engagement are prizes worth having, and so work will continue.

Also inevitable is that fact that many ordinary fans will ask what has really changed. The regulator needs some early wins to build confidence in it, and a number or areas on the fan engagement front present opportunity. But if, in five years time, we haven’t had another Bury or Southend or Morecambe or … well, that will be the measure of the achievement.

Leave a comment

Photo by Bruno Kelzer on Unsplash

Tension between the game and the crowd is set to intensify this season. It’s an issue the game needs to deal with better.

The roots of the tension lie in the different types of audiences the game has. On the one hand there is the vast global audience for the planet’s most popular sport. On the other is the comparatively tiny audience that attends games live, and in doing so contributes to the product. Football has not dealt with this tension well, and that matters because the disaffection of the smaller number of people could have a significant impact on the value the larger number place on the ‘product’.

Some of this, quite a lot of it, is down to the relationship between football and television, something I’ve written about here before. Put simply, the times that are best for TV schedulers – a robust breed I remember well from my time working on UK national TV listings magazines – are often not the times that are best for the fans who actually attend the games.

Fans get that TV wants something for all the money it puts into the game, but they don’t need the late fixture changes and kick-offs at times that make using public transport impossible. TV’s increasingly evident lack of concern about all this doesn’t help.

Share

Next season’s Premier League fixtures are out (the Football League publishes its schedule today) but while the fixture list gives a general idea of the order games will be played in, it’s unwise to make any firm plans beyond the first month or so. Games will be moved for TV and because of European competition commitments, and because of how each affects the other.

Of the 380 games in the Premier League, 215 will be shown live just on Sky – more than ever. Add in TNT Sports and that’s 267 games shown live. You can read a thorough and thoughtful analysis of the TV deal and what it means by Stefan Borson on his Substack. As he observes, the fact that none of these 267 fixtures will be played at Saturday 3pm means “there is an unavoidable conclusion: the Saturday 3pm fixture is in terminal decline.” As it stands, any fixture that remains at Saturday 3pm is almost advertising the fact it is not particularly attractive.

Borson makes another key observation. “It will be increasingly ridiculous for clubs to expect season ticket holders to commit to attend games that will rarely be played at the time and date stated when the fixture list is published.” But this is football so guess what? That’s exactly what a number of clubs are doing, bringing in schemes that punish season ticket holders if they don’t attend a given number of games. It’s utterly crass. And a great example of the tension I’m talking about.

With demand so high, setting up schemes that enable fans to make their ticket available if they can’t go to the game without attaching punitive measures and minimum attendance requirements is not difficult or costly. As long as season ticket holders don’t block other fans, what difference does it make how many games they actually attend in a season? The seat is available, the club doesn’t lose any money (in fact it gains from resale), and the awful PR of punishing loyal fans who may be experiencing the kind of life events we all face would be avoided.

Subscribe now

But the TVcos are not solely to blame. The Premier League hasn’t helped with the choices for the four Wednesday night rounds. Of course the fixture list is a difficult thing to compile, with various provisos meaning some teams cannot be at home at the same time as others (the Manchester, Liverpool and North London teams, for example). The Premier League says it takes “half a year” to put together, but in that six-month period some very basic issues seem to have been overlooked.

Both the games between Tottenham Hotspur and Newcastle United, and between West Ham United and Manchester United, will kick off on Wednesday evenings. Leaving fans who have to travel any distance – which means not just away fans – no way of getting home, and therefore requiring at least a day’s leave. The first Wednesday round sees Spurs travel to Newcastle, West Ham to Old Trafford and Manchester City visit Fulham.

On Wednesday 7 January, Liverpool fans have been presented with a trip to Arsenal, Sunderland fans will be at Brentford, and Brighton and Hover Albion visit Manchester City. But Wednesday 11 February is a humdinger. No fewer than six fixtures involve long trips that increase road traffic, require some time of work, and probably have an impact on workplace productivity too. They are:

• Spurs v Newcastle;

• West Ham v Man Utd;

• Everton v Bournemouth;

• Chelsea v Leeds United;

• Crystal Palace v Burnley;

• Man City v Fulham.

The final Wednesday round is much better, with Aston Villa v Chelsea and Leeds v Sunderland probably the biggest distances involved, but the selection of so many such games for the midweek rounds – including three double headers involving six teams – does not suggest fan convenience was much of a consideration.

But the game’s apparent contempt for fans goes beyond the issue of kick-off times and TV’s influence over a game whose soul it has bought. Throw in the raft of football-only laws that prevent football fans from doing what most other customers in most other entertainment industries can, the pettifogging and inconsistent restrictions on what you can take in to grounds and what you can and can’t do, the apparent prioritisation of one-off visitors who spend more in the club shop over long-established fans and fan communities, and the frustrations of regular matchgoing fans are easy to understand. Especially as they pay top dollar.

Share The Football Fan

Those frustrations helped the FSA’s successful #stopexploitingloyalty campaign gain traction last year, and will see it extend in the coming season beyond simply the core issue of ticket pricing. When we started talking about setting the campaign up, we wanted to break the narrative that said football fans were treated poorly because we allowed ourselves to be, through the loyalty we showed by continuing to turn up. Hence stop exploiting loyalty. We’ve made a lot of progress in changing the narrative, but dealing with the issue of how to balance the interests of different sets of fans is going to be trickier.

A crude breakdown can split fans into four groups. The first, and smallest, is regular matchgoers. Let’s say “regular” means more than 20 games a season home and away – but already you see the potential issues. Then we have occasional matchgoers, fans who may well be members of club ticketing schemes, who attend enough games to be a part of the crowd but are not as all in as the regulars. Then there are the irregular visitors and one-off visitors –who clubs see as both lucrative and undemanding. Finally, there is the vast TV audience, including fans who will never go to a live game.

Each group has different ways of consuming the product, each group has different needs that cut across the others. It’s the regulars the game needs to rebalance its relationship with. These fans stump up large amounts in advance for season tickets. As a result, they demand a lot. On top of this, they don’t spend on a match-by-match level at anywhere near the rate of other fans. And there are not many of them, compared to the other groups. But it is this group that is getting alienated, and if that alienation leads to a deeper break, then the product changes. Because the traditions and the regularity and the devotion are what helps create the atmosphere that is one of the Premier League’s most compelling draws.

Already the English game experience is changing, flaking away. Ask fans in Germany or Sweden, for example, if they’d swap the atmospheres they create for what passes for atmosphere at many Premier League games and they would laugh. But if this set of fans is pushed out, there’s a loss at a greater level.

These are not new arguments. Writing for Sporting Intelligence 11 years ago, I said that: “Community is at the core of football, and with it notions of identity and place.” That’s part of what makes the ‘product’ so valuable. So football needs to do better in balancing the interests of the regulars who are the heart of what football is with the interests of its other audiences. It would be foolish to say everything would come crashing down if it doesn’t, but it is legitimate to ask if what we end up with will be as valuable – in a financial or emotional sense.

Leave a comment

Photo by Terrace Grain on Unsplash

Someone really did need to live track the thousands of fans on the hundreds of routes into Northern Spain. It would have been fascinating viewing. We knew people coming via Carcassonne, Biarritz, Bordeaux, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, Madrid, Croatia, Corfu, Majorca, Marrakesh and Gran Canaria…

We flew into the humidity of Naples, where Antonio from the B&B was waiting to drive us the short route to the apartment we’d booked. We’d opted for somewhere close to the airport as it was going to be an early start on Tuesday, and the place was located in the sprawl between the suburbs and the airport.

As we drove through the narrow streets I thought of the opening sequence of the Maradona documentary, when Diego is driven from the airport through these same streets after signing for Napoli in a whirling cauldron of lights and sirens and traffic and crowds. It was still light, and it was not long before we caught sight of the first Maradona mural. His image is everywhere. There was just enough time for an exceptionally good pizza and bottle of red before bed and an early start for Spain.

Numbers equivalent to 25% of the total population of Bilbao were expected. I’d already had a journalist contact me about the travel challenges and the narrative was forming - the great trek, the challenge for fans, the question of whether many of UEFA’s Final venues are really set up to deal with such a mass influx.

It was busy but not frenetic when we arrived, after the bus ride along the northern coast to Santander had taken us through some beautiful rolling countryside. The hotel, a four-star at a fraction of Bilbao prices, is great, and we freshen up before meeting the rest of the group we sit with at home games for dinner. There are a lot of United fans in town, but we’ve booked a well-reviewed restaurant away from the main drag and it turns out to be a good choice – great food, friendly service and excellent company.

Share

We arrived back in Bilbao at about midday on the day of the final, our bus about two-thirds full of United. But once in town it was clear Spurs were here in greater numbers – something we’d been hearing when being contacted by friends who had been in town the previous night as an enormous Spurs party took over areas of the city.

We met friends who’d flown in that morning. Over coffee and pintxos we heard from one who had endured an epic journey after the coach driver missed the pickup point for him and nine others at Dover. The solution involved the police having to ferry them across borders before cramming into a minivan and chasing the coach down the motorway. Then we headed for the boat trip we’d booked which ferries Spurs fans up and down the river, serenading those on the riverbanks. The locals are friendly. The few United fans are not.

It was approaching 4pm as we began to make our way towards the fan zone, which for us was only a 15-minute walk from the ground. We arranged to meet another group of friends in a bar just outside the zone. It was adjacent to a second bar, opposite a small supermarket and already crowded with fans drinking and singing. More groups of friends turned up. The joy was palpable, and the belief that we can win this was growing. Everyone was checking to ensure their digital ticket QR code has downloaded.

We heard reports that queues in the fan park were enormous and beer was about three times the price it was outside. So we decided to stay put for a while. The street was absolutely packed, as was the road leading up to the fan park. Someone in one of the flats above the bar, about four floors up, was catching an inflatable horseshoe that was being thrown up from the crowd in the street and returning it to the cheering throng. Across the street in a residential block, a woman in a green top was conducting the singing from her balcony. More and more people were turning up. “We’re on our way” was now accompanied by a self-deprecating reworking of Shakira’s 2010 World Cup song;

Tsamina mina eh eh

Waka waka eh eh

17^th and I don’t know how

We’re going to Bilbao.

Kick-off was 9pm local time and we wanted to give ourselves plenty of time to get in. At around 7pm, we started the walk to the stadium, a group of four of us sticking close as we wanted to repeat entering this final as we did the last one in Madrid in 2019. Every side street delivers more groups of fans onto the main route.

Colour-coded approach routes had been designated for each set of fans and for neutrals. We used the blue route and it delivered us to the outer security check at one corner of the stadium footprint. The San Mames is a relatively new stadium, but not way out of town like so many European Final venues. It’s tucked into the city, emphasising its connection and the importance it holds for Basque identity. It was easy to get to, and the security check had plenty of space and was well organised. We got through the first check, then approached the turnstiles where tickets were to be scanned and a second bag search carried out.

It all went very smoothly, a complete contrast to the chaotic scenes we remember at the 2019 Champions League final. We were on the concourse in front of the stadium building, a handsome, imposing design that looks even more striking lit up for the game. We posed for photos, and failed to contain our sheer excitement. It felt special already. Then we tried to find our entrance gate. Signposting wasn’t very clear, and a steward sent us the wrong way – something we discovered when hearing United songs being belted out from the section we were directed to. We retraced our steps but found out the numbering we have been following is for the VIP boxes. We eventually found a steward who directed us the right way.

Inside, it was initially hard to locate where the precise entrance to our seat section was, or to find the refreshment kiosks. Ladies’ toilets also seemed to be in short supply, and long queues of men were waiting to use them. There was no stewarding to stop this. We reached a queue to get a snack and a soft drink – no alcohol is being served but we wanted to stay sharp for the game itself so that didn’t bother us. The queue was moving very slowly and there appeared to be two people serving hundreds of customers.

As we waited we saw numerous groups of United fans coming into our section. This was supposed to be the dedicated Spurs section where you could only get a ticket if you were registered with the club, so it was a surprise, and the willingness of some of the reds to give it out to the greater numbers of Spurs on the concourse didn’t bode well.

After waiting an hour, including 15 minutes at the front, we abandoned all hope of refreshment and got to our seats with 10 minutes to spare. Still, at least we got in safely – maybe any more was too much to expect.

Subscribe now

You all know what happened in the game now. Not the greatest of spectacles, but an experience I’ll never, ever forget. I’m going to go a bit Spurs for just a little while, because I don’t think I have ever been in the middle of such loud support, or felt such a strong collective will for a team to win since I started going to live games in 1978. Henry Winter remarked that the fans carried the team over the line – and there may well be some truth in that, combined with the sheer strength of will manager Ange Postecoglou displayed and instilled in the players. The goal prompted the limbsiest of limbs scenes, the final whistle prompted a mass outpouring of emotion and relief. I looked down my row to see a friend who’d had a difficult few years with tears of joy streaming down her face, gruff old geezers were sobbing, everyone was shouting and jumping.

For years we’d endured the accusation that we would always fall just short, that we we were the biggest so-called big club to go for so long without a trophy. We even had the word ‘Spursy’ invented to describe just falling short. I was lucky enough to see us win major trophies when I was a kid, but a generation’s eyes had not seen the glory. One League Cup 17 years ago, 41 years since the last European trophy. And now, at the end of an awful season when everything was gambled on this win, all of that was swept away. Sometimes a win is more than a win.

This is why we do it. And it’s why people think we’re fools – all football fans. Because we’d put up with anything just to be there at moments like this. We shouldn’t have to, and people shouldn’t take advantage of the fact that we are prepared to. And one day maybe it won’t be either/or.

An hour after the whistle, after a party in which two thirds of the stadium was still packed and holding on to the moment as the players celebrated on the pitch, we left the stadium and entered the delirious night. As we picked our way across town from bar to bar to the wild celebrations in Da Vinci’s nightclub, the latest twist on the Shakira number could be heard.

Tsamina mina eh eh

Waka waka eh eh

17^th and I don’t know how

We won it in Bilbao.

Leave a comment

Photos: © Martin Cloake

On our way, we’re on our way,

To Bilbao, we’re on our way,

How we get there I don’t care,

How we get there I don’t know,

All I know is Tottenham’s on their way

Reaching a major European football final is a cause for joy. But few outside the hard core of committed fans who follow their teams across the continent realise the logistical and financial challenges that face fans who want to be present when their team plays that final game and hopefully lifts the trophy.

The verse above, taken up by Spurs fans as the knockout rounds of the Europa League progressed, is a pretty accurate summation. If your team wins, it is of course all worth it. If they lose, well, you had to be there anyway. It’s our choice of whether or not to go, and while some of what follows will question if certain aspects really do need to be as they are – I’ve written about the reality of following your club in Europe before – it’s worth establishing from the off that this is something we do for pleasure and it is great to be lucky enough to be able to go to the game.

This, then, is an account of a journey to a final, an insight into the practicalities of following a team around Europe. The focus is on the financial and cultural issues covered regularly here, and I apologise if it’s a little Spurs heavy for some. Other stories are available – this is mine.

Share

While live men’s football is a huge draw – the Premier League estimates total attendance over the course of a season is around 14.8 million people – the number of fans who regularly travel to away games is far smaller. There are no more than around 3,000 away tickets available for any game in the Premier League, so demand hugely outstrips supply. Many clubs run loyalty schemes which mean the more games you go to, the more chance you have of getting a ticket, and that in turn means each club’s 3,000 away fans will be largely the same people from week to week.

Tickets are still passed on – a major part of football culture in in England – but that tradition is under pressure because of the huge demand. Understandably, fans on loyalty schemes don’t like losing out because someone ahead of them in the queue has passed their ticket to a mate or a family member. But I’d estimate that there are no more than around 4,000 to 5,000 people who go regularly to away games at each club.

European away games are tougher still to get tickets for. There are significant time and cost demands, and competing clubs are obliged to offer 5% of tickets, rather than the 10% or 3,000 required by the Premier League. Combine that with grounds that, in the Europa and Europa Conference Leagues, can have relatively small capacities and sometimes there will be less than 1,000 tickets on offer.

So, I reckon it’s safe to estimate that between 2,000 and 2,500 fans at most can be considered regular attenders at European away games. Across the seven English clubs that were in European competition this season, that’s under 18,000 people. Compare that number with the total attendance across European competition games (17 million League in 2023-24) and then with the total TV audience for the same season quoted by UEFA as 1.6 billion for the Champions League and 654 million for the Europa and Europa Conference Leagues and you’ll understand why what happens to away fans in Europe is low down the list of priorities. It’s a numbers game.

Finals are different. In Bilbao, it’s estimated 37,000 Spurs fans checked in to the fan park at various stages throughout the day of the Final. Many thousands more stayed in other parts of the city and, given what I witnessed, I don’t think an estimate of over 50,000 Spurs fans is excessive. United fans seemed heavily outnumbered, but like Spurs they would have had an allocation of c14,700. The San Mames is a 49,600 capacity stadium, and the remaining c20,200 tickets were made up of 11,000 public ballot tickets and c9,000 for what UEFA calls the football family. Many of those would have found their way to fans at vastly inflated prices. Face value prices, though, were very good, with around half the tickets available in the bottom two price tiers of €40 and €65, with the cost of tickets in the top two tiers rising sharply to €160 and €240.

For regular travellers, it’s almost like a job to do the planning required to get to games. Especially so now that more games means shorter turnaround times between ties. For the many more who don’t or can’t travel as regularly, the level of organisation required can be a major challenge.

Booking for the league phase can be easier as the eight games span from September to January, meaning slightly more time to plan for the later matches. I’m in the top 1,000 loyalty point holders at Spurs, so I know I’m pretty certain of a match ticket at most grounds. That means I can plan in the certainty I can get into the game. I just need to get to where the game is.

Booking.com is a godsend, as you can book accommodation that can be cancelled with a bit of notice, so once destinations are known it’s possible to secure rooms. This needs time and organisation though. UEFA draws now identify league phase home and away opponents and the dates of matches, but there is no advance notice of the order of those games, so you can’t book anything until the schedule is locked in. Nonetheless, researching possible routes to possible destinations is advisable, so that you can move quickly when dates are announced.

Subscribe now

This season, we were driving to an away game in Newcastle on the day UEFA was confirming the schedule. We built in a couple of service station stops where we could get on the Wi-Fi and book hotels and flights. The announcement arrived six hours later than expected, leading to a stressful drive. We managed to book that evening, but prices were already rising steeply.

Moving fast is key because rooms and flight prices shoot up sharply once dates are confirmed. That’s the dynamic pricing model so beloved of promotion companies and which many club owners want to introduce for football tickets. It is pure exploitation and hopefully the new regulator will see that it is not introduced for match ticketing.

It’s when it gets to the knockout stages that the fun really starts. Alkmaar was easy enough to get to, and a lovely place, but at the end of the second leg tie at home against AZ we were set hovering over our phone screens ready to book flights to Frankfurt for the next round in the final minutes, arguing about whether a one-goal lead was enough to be sure we’d be travelling, and fretting that the stadium Wi-Fi would go down. We hit the buy button on the whistle. An hour after the game prices had doubled. Some people were already taking a chance on booking for Bilbao.

Beating Frankfurt gave us a tie against Bodo/Glimt, situated a 17.5-hour drive north of Oslo inside the Arctic Circle. It’s the kind of trip fans love, to somewhere we’d never think of going unless it was for the football, and this promised to be something very different from the normal trips. But with only 404 tickets available, the trip costing at least £1,000 and requiring a minimum two days off – plus some challenging weather conditions thrown in – this was a bridge too far even for many of us seasoned travellers.

Joy at victory in Norway quickly gave way to the madness of getting to Bilbao for the final – which was being held just 13 days later. We’d booked accommodation back in the summer, but even then only in Santander, a one-and-a-half-hour bus ride from Bilbao.

Share The Football Fan

It took most of a day to research, plan and book what was to be our route to the final. You need to be smart, but not too clever by half and end up paying more for a circuitous trip intended to save money that ends up costing you more than a direct route. Bilbao is not the easiest place to get to, and options from the major European hub airports were fewer than they had been for Madrid in 2019. Flights that were available were already very expensive; trains across northern Spain don’t have the best reputation, and going that route involved multiple changes and long hours of travel. Ferries were 36 hours each way, rising in price, and only sailing at limited times. The prospect of a punishing drive, or an even more punishing coach journey – £99 on Flixbus from Victoria – was looming.

The Club and specialist operator Sport Options chartered flights but they were between £800 and £1,200 for a day trip or a two-night stay in a neighbouring city. We found a flight that took us from Naples to Bilbao on Tuesday morning for €33 (£27.68) per person. London to Naples on Monday afternoon we got for £47 per person via Jet2. Accommodation near the airport was £30 per person for one night, cancellable via Booking.com. From Bilbao, we booked a bus which would take one and a half hours to get to Santander. We’d stay there on Tuesday night, £35 a head, then get the bus – booked in advance – back into Bilbao for match day. So we could get there, we just needed to get back.

Flights back to the UK were still expensive through until Saturday, when Vueling offered a trip for £59 a head. We’d have to make a week of it! Hotel prices dropped significantly in the days after the final, so we booked up at around £60 a head per night for the Thursday and Friday, which would give us time to take in the sights of Bilbao, including the famous Guggenheim museum. Just one remaining issue – we had to get back to Santander on the night of the game.

It turned out every bus was booked until 6:45am the morning after the final. So we got tickets for the all-night party at the night club hired by the group of fans who were organising the boat trips we’d booked for the afternoon of the game. Needs must, and who needs sleep when you’re in a European final? We’d get the bus back to Santander, grab a few hours sleep at the hotel, check out by midday and head back into Bilbao. It would be a five-and-a-half day trip with just one day not travelling, costing just under £500 a head (including bus fares).

A week after the tension of arranging travel came the tension of getting a ticket. At Spurs, we had to apply first via the club. The top c14,700 applicants would get a code enabling us to access the UEFA ticket site, which was the only platform tickets were being sold through. Once in, you could select a ticket in one of four price categories, and if successful would be sent your ticket a couple of days later. Then, on the day of the game, you’d be sent a QR code that activated your ticket. The process worked, although not without a scare when we were unable to log in to our UEFA accounts when the sales window opened. Luckily we had two of us trying, as I’m still waiting for my password reset email!

• Part two, published tomorrow, covers arrival in Bilbao, how the final was organised, and why all this can mean so much.

  Leave a comment

  Photos: © Martin Cloake