Premier League Fans — the Boiling Frogs of Football.
(A cautionary tale.)
There’s an adage that applies to this European Super League affair, probably. Something about monsters and snakes. Or maybe let’s go more rural — foxes in the hen houses or reaping what we sow. I bet Malcolm Gladwell would have a term for it. Did anyone read the Tipping Point? I didn’t. Perhaps it applies. In any case, I’m going back to the classroom, where we we taught if you put a frog in boiling water it jumps out, but if you put it in cold water and warm it up it’ll sit there until it boils. It seems us football fan frogs have been sitting in warm water this whole time and we didn’t even know it.
Now it’s boiling over.
I’m not an outlier with my outrage, but make no mistake — this has been a virus brewing in a petri dish of hyper capitalism for a long time. While football for many is a community to which they believe like a religion, for those at the top it’s a commodity they can twist, bend and grab by the ankles to tip out money into shareholders coffers.
The Premier League crying foul do so not because of the “Love of the game” or their insistence that fans come first, it is because of the money involved. The money they greedily think is theirs that they’re at risk of losing. The Premier League doesn’t actively care about fans. If they did, they wouldn’t have let those clubs be sold off piece by piece. They would have actively introduced salary caps, they would have looked to the German system that allows fans to own parts of the club; they would have limited overseas ownership. They didn’t. The government is equally to blame. Boris being lobbied by the Saudis over the purchase of the Newcastle team is just the tip of the fatberg. They do not care about fans. They care about the free market.
UEFA collectively put the fans in cold water and turned on the Bunsen burner years ago. They’ve been seeing how hot it would get before we jumped out, but then before they got a chance, those greedier than them picked up the beaker and threw it into a fire.
Make no mistake, nobody is pure in this. This is filthy business. The Premier League and UEFA have the added benefit of the fans falling in front of the train tracks — but it is not because of anything they’ve done. They’ve tried for years to wring every penny from fans with little thought for the consequences. Did they care about fans when they charged £15 to watch a game? Did they care when they carved up TV rights to anyone that would have them so now the average fan needs THREE subscriptions to watch all the games? Did they try to stop heritage clubs selling to overseas conglomerates? Or when ticket prices soared? Has anyone else noticed the odd silence of Sky Sports, BT and Amazon? I guarantee if this goes ahead, the media companies will be chomping at the bit for a piece of the action.
The fans have been forgotten for far too long, it’s no wonder the Dirty Dozen thought they could just cut them out like the cancer they think they’ve become — after all, the Premier League’s been doing it slowly for years. The insidious terms like “Legacy fans” and “Future fans” sound dystopian, but I guarantee similar conversations have been had in Premier League boardrooms around the country.
The fans are right to be angry, and hopefully this outrage spurs action. But more than that, I hope it makes fans realise how the game has already been taken away from us and we need to get it back. Because the Super Snakes, Dirty Dozen, whatever you call them are right about one thing — football system is creaking under the weight of inequality.
The arguments against the Super League are obvious — this is a pay-to-play competition. One where the rich guarantee their entry to a league they can’t be relegated from and the rest of the paupers have to fight for the right to compete. It is similar to American systems of sports. However, the difference is that in American sports they have provisions such as salary caps, which means, watch your team long enough, they’ll likely win something. This Super League system is a true who can spend the most, wins. It is not fair. But it is also not vastly different to what is currently happening anyway.
The Champions League is woefully stacked in favour of the bigger clubs. Real Madrid and Barcelona only really care about European football. Paris Saint-Germain — overqualified for the French top tier — exist purely to try to win the Champions League (despite never having done so). Aside from the Premier League, the continent competitions are disastrously one sided. One of the arguments Juventus made for the Super League signup because the one-sided nature of their leagues made it difficult to make enough money. Boohoo.
One could argue that the Premier League is facing a similar problem. The rampant investments are beginning to bite and — set-aside the once-in-a-generation Leicester season — and it is predominantly the same teams that are at the top year on year. Crystal Palace couldn’t even fill a subs bench this year and Man City have a bench that could rival most first teams. Is that fair play? A check book is no guarantee of victory, as the smaller sides who’ve toppled giants this year can attest, but it certainly helps.
I know, that is not the point, but it’s a point that people are missing — we created a pay-to-play football league in everything but name and yet we’re surprised when others want to make it official. I’m sure the Super League is gobsmacked by the blowback — they must be sitting there thinking, “Do the fans know that this already happens??”
The money involved and the investment put in by the overseas check books means bigger clubs cannot afford to be mid-table. They need to be at the top to secure the lucrative payments for next season. The problem is they are now not making enough money. This is what happens when you turn teams into companies — they’re responsible to stakeholders, not the fans.
What’s also interesting is the collective uproar, the sleeping dragon that the Super League has woken in a football community. Where has it been? Why aren’t we this outraged about racism in our sport? If we could always ban clubs from Europe, we haven’t we when their fans have been racist? I think we all know the answer to that — and it’s got nothing to do with scarf sales.
One final point — football has become boring. No crowds have made the atmosphere non-existent; the gladiators duel in silence. VAR has robbed great moments because we have to pause while someone draws a hairline on screen where he thinks Bamford’s foot ends. For a long time, money has become the deciding factor far too often. Everything is about the commoditizing of the game. The pandemic has merely shown owners that, actually, hey, do we really even need fans in stadiums?
We’ve been asleep at the wheel. Letting overseas money slowly crash our game into the barriers, and maybe this is the wake-up call we needed to make real change. So, in a roundabout way this Super League could end up being the saviour of the game, after all.
