What is it about Football that attracts undesirables?
Football is the world game of that there can be no doubt, however the phrase becomes extremely tiresome as a promotional gambit in Australia. Football gives an undesirable the chance to elevate one’s ego into a global stratosphere that appeals.
It used to be that football clubs in England were run by people in the local community. In Australia the clubs were run by people from the ethnic community to which the club was linked. In both cases those involved were proud to be a part of such an organisation.
The reason there was a pride was because clubs were all vibrant places to be. There was a feeling of belonging, pride in your town, city or ethnic roots, a link with home that could never be broken. A collective allegiance and sense of unity. Ask a supporter of any of those clubs and they will all remember attending their first games as a wide-eyed little boy holding onto a parent’s hand and looking at that richly coloured patch of grass that would soon grace men who would become their heroes. It is like falling in love for the first time, the moment etched in one’s mind, every detail easy to recall.
In 1983 Irving Scholar a property developer who lived in the tax haven of Monaco took over Tottenham Hotspur and changed football forever. Scholar decided to float Tottenham on the stock market, thus becoming the first club to do so. Yet the rules of the Football Association at the time were prohibitive as they restricted Directors from being paid, having unlimited dividends from their involvement or receiving any surplus funds if the club was wound up. Scholar found a way around this by forming a holding company which did not abide by those rules. He then made the club, the players, staff and ground a subsidiary of that holding company, enabling him and his fellow directors to profit immensely from the float. It did not take long for other clubs to follow suit.
As a result football is full of club owners who seem to wallow in the toxic relationships they have with the fans and the communities that their clubs are supposed to represent. These owners motives are questionable. Many are based on commercial opportunity, and vanity and nothing else. Do they champion the clubs the represent or just themselves? One has to ask how fans the world over tolerate these people.
If we look first at two clubs steeped in history in England, who have suffered at the hands of such owners. Newcastle United is one, and Blackpool is another. Mike Ashley the owner of Newcastle is obviously a very clever business man, as is Karl Oyston owner of Blackpool. Yet both men’s relationship with the fans of the clubs they own is at described as being at ‘breaking point.’
These two clubs have huge importance in their communities and could even be described as assets in the communities they represent. Both reflect a history and a link with the past and the evolving times of each place. Both touch individuals in a very personal way. Both hold special memories for thousands of individuals who live or lived in the area. Both clubs possess legends in the true sense of the word, and as Blackpool fans showed, respect and acknowledgement of such legends is not to be compromised.
The decision to remove the statue of Stan Mortensen from its plinth resulted in protests that resulted in Blackpool’s game against Huddersfield being abandoned. Mortensen the only man to score a hat-trick in an FA Cup final is not only a true legend in Blackpool, but a part of the nation’s football history having achieved the feat in 1953. His statue was apparently dumped in the groundsman’s shed with no explanation. Fans do not take kindly to legend’s being disrespected in such a way.
In Australia two front runners in terms of owners showing almost indifference to the clubs they own would be two men who made their money from mining, Perth Glory’s Tony Sage and Newcastle United’s Nathan Tinkler. Their apparent infallibility as both clubs lurch from disaster to disaster harks back to the Victorian age where the Lord of the Manor could do not wrong in his own eyes, and that he was in fact doing the community a favour.
As in England ownership issues are becoming far more common reasons for the game being brought into disrepute than the actions of players or the comments coming from coaches. Tinkler was recently sanctioned by the FFA, but it was a mere slap on the wrist. Tony Sage escaped any personal sanction following his club’s extensive breaches of the salary cap this season and simply sacrificed his CEO, who he then rewarded by giving him a job in his mining company. The FFA weakly accepted this as a satisfactory outcome.
The FFA like the English FA’s evaluation of owners/directors has become a farce. In both cases money speaks louder than words or actions. For the sake of football and the fans who follow their teams and the game’s governing bodies need to revise how they determine if an owner is in fact the right and proper person to take control of a club that has such a key role in a community.
For those who do not believe a football club or team cannot reflect a social history of a team or area you only need to have attended Lincoln Bertelli’s lecture at the WA Sports History Forum late last year, where he used Socceroos programs to show just how the country, and the team evolved. Having attended the Perth Football Programme and Memorabilia Fair at the weekend there was even more evidence as one flicked back through programs of Perth Glory, and the Socceroos.
Sporting clubs have a massive part to play in a community, and on so many levels. They are there for the masses and not the individuals who have crept into the limelight to promote their own egos. It is crucial that the people wrest back control, for the towns, cities and communities from these people who are unlikely to ever understand the true feeling of a shared allegiance and loyalty. It is also time that those charged with running and protecting the interests of the game as a whole don’t just look at the bank accounts of those looking to come into the game, but at the type of man or woman to whom that money belongs, and their motives.
Sadly very few know the meaning of being a true fan of a club, of being a part of such a special community and sharing its highs and lows.
