It is hard to comprehend that a football club that had been part of the fabric of English football for 125 years is no more. Bury having been expelled from the English Football League this week become just the second club to be expelled since Leeds City, who were expelled 100 years ago in season 1919-20. They are the only two clubs to ever be expelled from the Football League, but may soon be joined by Bolton Wanderers.
Bury was 134 years old as a club having been formed in 1885. They had won the FA Cup twice and had remained in the top two divisions of English football until 1957. They were founding members of the Lancashire League and like many clubs were formed when two Church sides merged.
Bolton Wanderers were founded in 1874. They are 145 years old and they too started off as a Church team. They were one of the 12 founding members of the English Football League in 1888. They have won the FA Cup four times and been runners up three times, Won the League Cup twice and spent 73 seasons in England’s top division. Which is more than half of 131 years in English Football!
Sadly, as we have seen age and longevity mean nothing in the modern age as the high streets of England have seen shops such as F.W Woolworth’s, which opened its first store in the UK in Liverpool in 1909, disappear. It expanded to 800 stores across the country and in 41 days in 2008 they closed, and the company went into oblivion. British Home Stores was another established store, formed in 1928 and had 163 stores in high streets up and down the country, but in 2016 it closed its doors and was gone.
As anyone who is a lifelong supporter of a team in any sport will tell you times such as these are unimaginable. It is like losing a loved one. To many the sporting clubs that they support are an extension of who they are. In England the local team is, or certainly always was a focus, a part of the community, a team to take pride in, that reflected all of those who lived in that town or city, and represented them wherever they played.
Of course that has changed in the past thirty years as people have become more migratory, moving to different towns and cities when they marry or because their work dictates. If they come from somewhere else they will rarely betray the team of their past and adopt the team where they live now. Which has been challenging for many clubs.
It has been even more challenging in other parts of Britain where the community worked together in shipyards, mines, car manufacturing, or rail yards. These communities worked and played together, there was a strong communal bond, and supporting their local football team was another thing that they did together. Taking pride in that team and the sons of colleagues who may have broken through into ‘their team.’
Sadly, that too has changed, as many of these big industrial organisations have, like the established shops, disappeared. In Bury it has been revealed that since 2010, the town council has suffered cuts of UKL85m, which equates to 61% of its annual budget. As a result libraries and other establishments linked to the town’s identity have closed their doors. So is it any wonder that eventually the local football team would one day follow?
Football, like many sports is built on memories, magical moments in a club’s history, wonderful players who have worn that club’s colours and the fans being able to say they were there to witness those moments and those players. Ironically Bury’s woes reminded me of my team defeating them 8-0 in December 1979! A game in which the victors were coached by Bury’s former manager, Bobby Smith, and four players were playing against their former club, and two scored!
Sport is also about rivalries, and there is often more than banter when it comes to rival sides meeting. Bury and Bolton were the closest of rivals. Meetings between the two have been rare in recent times, but the results stand at 30 wins a piece. While some fans may sneer and claim to be happy that their arch rival is no more, they will soon realise that to lose a rival, your team loses a great deal. That one meaningful game a year which if you lose stays with you for months until the chance to avenge defeat comes around again is gone, and no new rivalry will ever replace it.
This shows that each club is intricately interwoven. It is not just about clubs developing players and selling them on to the big clubs, or players whose careers are on the downward slide dropping down the divisions to draw a salary for one more year, and trade of past glories. It is about previous games, events in those games, and the result when the final whistle blows.
It is hard to accept the demise of Bury when the distance between it and the City of Manchester is just 14 kilometres; Bolton is even closer just 12.5 kilometres in distance! There are tram/train links from Bury and Bolton to Manchester where two of the richest clubs in World Football are located.
Clubs which are paying their highest paid players Kevin De Bruyne UKL350,000 a week at Manchester City, and Paul Pogba UKL290,000 at United.
It was the late Gordon Banks who in discussion suggested that every Premier league player on such wages should be made to donate UKL10,000 a week to the lower division clubs. As without these clubs English football would, in his opinion die. He felt that each player should be allowed to choose the club that they wished to support, with a limit as to how many players could ‘support’ one club. It was a sensible if not romantic idea.
It is one that is now suddenly being aired by many. Yet it will be hard to expect a foreign player to feel any affinity with any lower league side in England, so why would they make such a donation? What may be a better idea is if the English Premier League and the English Football League negotiate that a percentage be paid by the club to a lower league side once any player is paid a salary in the hundreds of thousands a week. When you consider that English Premier League clubs paid out a total of UKL1.41bn in the off season on new players a percentage of that money would go a long way to saving the historic community clubs across the nation.
Has football lost its way? It used to be about clubs that represented communities, but now its about capitalism. Having money, making money and spending more money. If you don’t believe that to be true explain the fact that at Tottenham Hotspurs new stadium members of what they call the “H Club” pay an estimated UKL30,000 a season for their seats! That would almost pay the salary of a player at Bury.
It makes you wonder what the great Spurs player Danny Blanchflower would make of that, after all it was he who summed up the wonder of going to watch live football when he said “Whether you’re a player, manager, trainer, director, supporter, reporter, kit man or tea lady, football possesses the power to make the week ahead sparkle with a sense of joyous well-being.”
For the fans of Bury that sparkle has been extinguished, for many others like Bolton the sparkle is flickering, and barely being kept aglow. The checks and balances that fans were told the EFL and EPL had put in place to avoid such situations have clearly failed. Let us hope that the powers that be are burning the midnight oil to find a solution to ensure that no other long-standing clubs that have enriched the game over the years are lost in coming months.
