A 1-0 win but too late
Words: Tom Reed
Images: Tom Reed
When it finally happened, it was an anti-climax, like most things you have waited years to happen.
Not that the announcement of an Independent Regulator for English football wasn’t generally a good thing, just that the news and the accompanying Clive Tyldesley video was a flat conclusion to years of mountainous hurt in the game.
The decision by the Conservative government, in a new white paper, to make English football the only major European football nation to have an outside arbiter was momentous in itself, given the number of rabid free-marketeers in the party.
Its creation, still to be ratified by the passing of a bill, should be enough to ward off a few of what football finance expert Kieran Maguire calls “wrong uns”, who target clubs for reasons counter to their community remit and responsibility .
Other measures are welcome, if basic protections on such issues as club name, badge design, kit colours and powers over stadium location, again, all sensible but tardy enough for Cardiff City whose shirts went red, and West Ham whose fans were sent crimson in the face on the controversial move from Upton Park.
The feeling of being too little too late pervades, especially for supporters of Southend United, their club facing a March 1 deadline in the High Court to pay an outstanding tax bill of £1.4 million.
Shrimpers fans, who shut down the main road to Roots Hall last Saturday in protest at the way club owner Ron Martin is running things, can legitimately ask what about us?
Not enough too for supporters of Everton, West Brom and Birmingham City, to name but a few, who are currently wearing out Twitter with hashtags demanding a change in club board.
©Tom Reed/ Terrace Edition. Southend United.
The mention of 64 instances of clubs being put into administration since 1992, when the Premier League was launched, was throwaway and indicative of the collateral damage of a system that considered historic football teams as disposable.
Bury FC’s expulsion from the Football League writ large of course, the most obvious recent case of the so called guardians of the game completely failing established outfits but the rest of English football’s crises clubs, are less than footnotes in the tattered history of the game.
Southend players have gone unpaid, just like they did at Aldershot FC before the Hampshire club went bust in 1992, the sport learning next to nothing in the proceeding years, with a litany of clubs suffering the most audacious of indignities in the meanwhile.
A “fake Sheikh” at Notts County in 2009, the £10.25 missing millions from Northampton Town and the repugnant relationship between the Oystons and a section of Blackpool FC supporters, just a random funfair crane grab from the pit of shit below.
The late, great, Brian Lomax, argued around the same time of the Aldershot FC liquidation, that fans had to be partners in the running of clubs, setting up the first ever supporters’ trust at Northampton Town and later Supporters Direct, the single issue organisation aimed at forwarding supporter ownership, both nationally and internationally.
Northampton’s Supporters’ Trust, complete with two elected supporter representatives on the club board came in 1992, the same year the Premier League burst into life, washing away Lomax’s sensible ideas and letting money flow free.
Just 10 years after the formation of the trust at Northampton and following the collapse of ITV Digital and advances from like likes of Giovanni Di Stefano, the Cobblers were acquired by a consortium containing the Cardoza family, leading eventually to a huge council loan going astray, which nearly crippled the East Midlands team in 2015.
Meanwhile, despite the Premier League floating on the overblown lilo of a 2015 £5.136 billion TV deal, Supporters Direct, which helped set up fan-owned operations at AFC Wimbledon and Exeter City and received its income from the English top tier division via the Fans Fund, was caused to merge with the Football Supporters Federation in 2018 due to a “funding crisis”, watering down its community ownership power.
©Tom Reed/ Terrace Edition. Blackpool FC.
That leaves the announcement of a football regulator in a difficult position, potentially scattering owners that have typically taken on clubs but been found out by fans, yet with scant investment in the kind of workable supporter-owned model that is flourishing North of the border at teams such as Heart of Midlothian and short of the two fan rep model that Lomax instituted so well.
The Premier League’s Richard Masters missed the target inevitably with his response to the white paper via a tone deaf over-emphasis on regulation having the potential to damage the top tier’s “agile decision making and ambition”.
The Gloucester Place CEO sidestepped the concept as per, that an extra x billion TV deal for an already rich league might not be as pressing as clubs down the extensive English football pyramid being rinsed by people you wouldn’t trust to run a provincial branch of Halfords, let alone a football club.
Input from the likes of West Ham owner David Sullivan, who said a football regulator is “a terrible idea” was laughable given he and is colleagues took West Ham from the intimate Boleyn Ground to the soulless Olympic Stadium, ripping Upton Park's heart out.
Many West Ham fans haven't and probably won't ever get over it, despite some going to “the Bowl” with the alternative a matchless Saturday, and as such, each time Sullivan speaks on football, serves as a one man advert for outside intervention.
A more avant-garde form of comedy came from Ryan Bourne of that well known footy mad think tank the “Public Understanding of Economics at the Cato Institute” in the Times whose suggestion that a regulator might make “Salford City’s ascent into the league…much less likely?” makes you wonder if he’s actually a Chris Morris creation.
Washington based Bourne, who says he’s a Derby County fan but doesn’t seem to have learned much from the Rams’ recent dice with death, boasts that only “two teams per season have entered administration since 1992 in England’s top five leagues”, like that figure is anything to be proud of.
When Brian Lomax was ailing from terminal cancer in 2015, he faced his life’s work being torn up in front of eyes at Northampton and having watched far too many clubs been taken to the cleaners since he retired from the Supporters Direct sphere. His voice was weaker but his message clearer than ever “Don’t accept tin-pot saviours and two-bit conmen believing it’s them or oblivion because it’s not.”
Good people died, not knowing if their families would have a team to support, that’s the real damage of this sport of the people that hasn’t cared about its humans.
While an Independent Regulator has never been more needed and all the right pigs are now squealing, it’s difficult to forgive this country with a national football obsession but national disgrace governance, that has missed so many chances to change but delivered a late 1-0 win, too little, too late for fans who marched up the high street at Southend.
You can find Tom on Twitter: @tomreedwriting
