It is an often-stated truism that football clubs hold a special place in the hearts and minds of those who support them, and beyond that, we might even say that football supporters’ feelings and experiences cannot be done justice by merely binding them together under the broad label of ‘fandom ’. Though football supporters routinely refer to themselves as ‘fans’, there is a collectively shared understanding that the role football plays in supporters’ lives is something that goes far beyond traditionally held notions of passively, or even actively, merely following an object of fandom .
Debates as to the useful categorisation of different kinds of football ‘spectator’ (Giulianotti 2002), as well as on wider contemporary notions and phenomena of fandom (Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998; Sandvoss 2003; Gray et al. 2007) are now relatively well established, with such studies opening up the private and public experiences of ‘being a fan’ to deeper academic scrutiny. In particular, this has helped scholars—many of whom are football fans themselves—to draw telling connections between the cultural, the social, the economic and the political.
For many supporters of English—and other—football clubs, those connections have become much clearer in recent years, as the experience of supporting their club has been transformed, shifting even further away from what were already naïve or hopelessly romantic ideas revolving around what Walvin (1975/2000) called ‘The People’s Game ’. English football has never truly belonged to its people, the fans.
Yet looking beyond questions of legal ownership or control, we can also say that such a notion as ‘the people’s game ’ was only able to emerge because over many generations football provided a space in which ordinary working-class people were able to feel a meaningful connection with their club and the game itself. It is now doubtful that such a connective, shared space exists, particularly at the higher levels of the game, and certainly not in anywhere near the kind of widespread or collective way that Walvin and others have rightly celebrated.
Despite the modern game’s infancy being watched over dotingly by the predominantly working-class inhabitants of Britain’s industrial towns and cities, it was higher classes who held the power in terms of ownership and control. The aristocratic milieu of football’s codification extended into the corridors of power of the authorities that steered the game’s development into and beyond the twentieth century. The clubs themselves shifted from a typical founding status as works or church teams to take on broader identities as representatives of local civic pride.
The burgeoning popularity of football, not least in the fact that people would pay to watch it, soon saw football clubs run as businesses, increasingly under the ownership of successful local industrialists. Goldblatt describes the developmental character of this period as a “trade-off between the aristocratic FA and the urban middle-class professionals and businessmen who formed the majority of the football directorate” (2015: 8). Arguably therefore, the class structure of English football at that time amounted, perhaps crudely, to a functionalist microcosm of wider society, with working-class fans (and players) being overseen by a new wealthy middle class of owners and shareholders who no doubt revelled in that local status (Mason 1980: 48–49). Club ownership might in turn have afforded opportunities to hobnob with the upper classes who ran and patronised the game at a national level.
Things were never so simple of course, as tends to be the case with abstractions of social class hierarchy . Friction between fans and owners, and between owners and authorities, has been a regular feature of football’s development. As this book outlines, football has faced many challenges from the exigencies of wider social forces, with clubs and authorities variously resisting or falling into line depending on the prevailing dynamics of competing class interests within the game. Amidst all these changes, fans had come to be regarded as little more than football’s flotsam and jetsam, prone to following the flow while remaining loyal to their club’s fluctuating fortunes. There was little sense that much thought need be given to supporters’ interests;
they knew we would crawl through the sewers to get our fix. (Rogan Taylor, cited in Tempany 2016: 146)
Football fandom did not just randomly develop a more radical urge to stake a more powerful claim for control in recent years. As with wider political engagement, there are ebbs and flows of more or less radical thought, with a desire for the revolutionary grasping of power never completely dormant. A particular unfolding of broader social, economic and political processes led English football into crisis towards the end of the twentieth century. That state of crisis, and importantly the various ways in which the game’s owners and administrators sought to solve it, resulted in significant collective disillusion within football supporter culture . This left any notion that football was in any meaningful sense theirs, that it was the ‘people’s game ’, less convincing than ever.
The accelerated nature of those changes forced many fans to face up to that increasingly stark reality. An overlapping combination of cultural and economic tendencies patterned what Webber—aptly, following Polanyi—termed “The ‘Great Transformation’ of the English Game” (Webber 2017: 16). It was from this sense of disenfranchisement and disenchantment (or any number of other terms with the prefix dis- often used to describe protesting football fans), underscored by what Cleland called “the disconnection felt from a decline in traditional bonds” (2017: 75) that supporters began to articulate their opposition to the changes they were experiencing.
From grumbles on the terraces and in pubs, to the pages of fanzines , to packed-out public meetings and independently organised campaign groups, this opposition grew into a movement that would transform how some—though certainly not all (Cleland 2010)—supporters viewed their relationship with their club. This transformation envisioned supporters in a more pivotal and active role, as authentic guardians of their club; all based on a growing belief that only its fans had the long-term interests of a football club truly at heart.
Such a view has even started to permeate the level of national politics, with the 2009 All Party Football Group reporting in its enquiry into football governance that “the one group that are most under-represented in the sport are the people who should have the most say: the fans…(who) can be a force for good in football. They tend to have the future of their clubs at heart” (cited in Garcia and Zheng 2017: 2–3). How closely the political intent behind such rhetoric matches the radical purpose of many fans, remains a matter of some doubt.
Likewise, Garcia and Zheng note how the 2010 DCMS enquiry into football governance sought to look into ways to facilitate ‘greater supporter involvement’ in addressing some of football’s ‘serious’ problems, though this was tellingly prefixed with the qualifier that any solutions should “not impinge upon English football’s undoubted strengths” (cited in Garcia and Zheng 2017: 14). Although the language is suitably vague, the inference is that the fundamental market logic of English football’s success is not to be troubled in the quest for solutions to what are presumably unrelated problems.
Supporter Ownership: Terms of Reference
During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, a number of clubs have come under the legal ownership of their supporters. It should be pointed out from the outset that the term ‘supporter ownership’ refers here to the phenomenon of collective fan ownership, and not instances of ownership by wealthy individuals or syndicates who happen to be fans. This is a distinction not grasped by everyone in football;
They used to ask for a supporter on the board, and I used to say: ‘Don’t you think I’m a supporter? I’ve invested millions in this club.’ It’s foreign to me… But good luck to them. (Former Notts County Chairman Derek Pavis, cited in Conn 2003)
Under the ‘supporter ownership ’ umbrella, a number of different organisational models and structures have emerged. Whereas some fans have taken on full ownership of their club, others are only part owners. In the majority of cases, supporters—typically through a supporters’ trust—were only able to take an ownership stake at a time when the club’s future was in jeopardy, usually following periods of financial mismanagement by private owners. This context is important to bear in mind when assessing the successes and failures of supporter ownership, as in many cases, the supporter owners were starting on a less than stable financial footing.
There are also examples of newly formed, so-called ‘breakaway’ clubs . These are clubs set up by supporters who felt their club had been taken away—either geographically (as in the case of Wimbledon FC’s relocation from South London to Milton Keynes, resulting in the fans’ breakaway...