Plymouth play host to MK Dons in a final-day fixture with many issues left to be settled and multiple potential outcomes.
As League One enters its final week, it is not exaggerative to say that this season has been like no other. While it looks as though Wigan Athletic should secure the title and climb to the Championship, a host of permutations, some more likely than others, mean they could still finish outside the top two and miss automatic promotion all together, while four sides competing for three play-off berths are separated by just one point point and only two goal difference.
Normally it would seem hyperbolic to suggest, but it is practically impossible to predict what might happen.
The Latics could have secured promotion at home to Plymouth Argyle on Saturday, but were held to a draw that saw the visitors reach 80 points, a figure they share with Sunderland and Wycombe Wanderers, which would normally be comfortably enough to secure a top-six finish and a place in the play-offs.
However, with Sheffield Wednesday currently seventh on 79 points – and with two games remaining – it is not inconceivable that a side could muster 83 points this campaign and not make the play-offs, something which has never been seen before at this level.
In fact, the last time a team secured 80 points and missed the end-of-season promotion fixtures was 2002/3, when Tranmere Rovers were the unlucky outfit. That season was dominated by Wigan, who amassed 100 points to top the division – this time around, they could reach 95 if they win their final two fixtures. That said, in 2009/10 Southampton were docked 10 points for financial irregularities; had that deduction not happened, Huddersfield Town would have finished seventh despite having 80 points.
While Wigan look certain to secure their place in the Championship next season, the second automatic spot remains up for grabs. Rotherham, who have been there or thereabouts all season, currently occupy second place but are level on points with MK Dons. Both teams have stumbled in recent weeks, but while Rotherham overcame Oxford this Saturday, the Dons claimed a vital win at home to Morecambe. The Millers travel to Sunderland on Tuesday evening in a huge game that could have significant impact on all the clubs involved in the run-in.
A win for Rotherham at the Stadium of Light would see them as-good-as promoted going into their final day fixture at Gillingham with a three point lead over the Dons and a goal difference advantage worth a point, especially with the MK side travelling to Plymouth, where their hosts have enjoyed excellent home form this season.
One potential reason for the near-unprecedented high points tallies at the top of the table could be the low accumulations at the bottom; going into the final week, Gillingham have 40 points from 45 games while Fleetwood – currently one position outside the drop zone – have 40 from 44.
With tough fixtures remaining – the aforementioned Rotherham for the Gills, Wednesday and Bolton for Fleetwood – it remains possible that 40 points could be enough to beat the drop, which would be a first for the third tier (the lowest previously recorded as Oxford United’s 45 in 1999/2000).
Even though this has been a wildly unpredictable division, it’s possible to identify a big and possibly growing gap between the teams at the top and those at the bottom. It’s long been thought that the gulf between Premier League and Championship is creating yo-yo teams like Fulham and Norwich, but something similar is developing between tiers two and three – should Rotherham secure promotion, it would be their third in five seasons, while Peterborough, Barnsley and Charlton Athletic, to name just a few, have all suffered relegations from the Championship in recent seasons within a year or two of winning promotion.
Before the start of this season, there were eleven or possibly twelve sides with legitimate ambitions for promotion from League One and maybe a couple more with hopes of making the play-offs. While some of those pre-season contenders have struggled – namely Ipswich Town and Charlton, who go into the final game of the campaign 11th and 12th respectively. Whoever misses out on promotion this year can bank on those two clubs, plus a number of others, regrouping and challenging next time around.
That Plymouth Argyle go into the final game with their play-off destiny in their own hands shouldn’t be overlooked as an outstanding achievement. 2020/21 saw the Pilgrims finish 18th after a terrible second half of the season, which led some pundits to predict a potential relegation battle.
After some smart recruitment in the summer, particularly bring in a completely new three-man defence in Dan Scarr, Macauley Gillesphey and James Wilson, Argyle went on an incredible run at the start of the campaign, losing just one of their first seventeen games. That sequence saw Ryan Lowe’s team hold on to first place in the table all the way up to Christmas, an achievement that saw the manager eventually catch the attention of Championship club Preston North End.
Following Lowe’s departure to Deepdale in December, Argyle moved quickly to appoint his assistant – Steven Schumacher – as his replacement, a smart move which has seen the Greens remain stable and adapt quickly, playing attractive football and ultimately earning the new boss the League One Manager of the Month award for March.
Waiting for the teams to arrive before kick off between Wycombe Wanderers and Plymouth Argyle on Good Friday, 15th April
A tough string of fixtures towards the end of the season has seen Argyle struggle in recent weeks, particularly a demoralising 2-0 defeat at fellow play-off contenders Wycombe Wanderers, but they will know that a positive result on the final day will give them a great chance of securing an unexpected top-six spot.
Saturday’s visitors to Devon, MK Dons, would have been among most people’s expected candidates for promotion before a ball was kicked this season. A mid-table finish in 2020/21 came after an excellent finish to the campaign under hot managerial prospect Russell Martin, who joined the Dons in 2019 and established a successful, possession-heavy approach.
After a big-spending summer, Martin walked out on the Dons on the eve of the new season, leaving the club in the lurch to join Championship outfit Swansea City. Despite being rocked by Martin’s departure, the Dons made a smart managerial appointment, hiring the previously unknown Liam Manning. Since his arrival, the Dons have steadily grown into promotion contenders despite needing to replace a number of important loan players and midfield star Matt O’Riley in the January window, something which could easily have de-stabilised the squad and undermined their campaign.
Although they too have stuttered in recent weeks, losing back-to-back games against Sheffield Wednesday and Oxford United, Manning’s Dons have really found their groove since Christmas, with the defeat against the Owls ending a run of 15 games unbeaten and being only their second loss since 11th December.
By the time these two sides meet next Saturday, some of the remaining issues could be all but settled, which could totally change the complexion of this fixture.
Whatever happens between now and then, both clubs have overcome adversity and unexpected challenges throughout the campaign and although their end-of-season emotions could swing wildly from delight to despair, they should both be extremely proud.
After such a long time away from being a match-going supporter, was it slightly ambitious to think it would all just be like it was?
Twelve years is a surprisingly long time. That’s how long it had been since I last saw the team I watched most growing up, Plymouth Argyle, in actual live action. There’s numerous reasons for that, central to which was geography but equally important was an overall waning of interest in football and, therefore, a reduced willingness to part with cash for the experience.
The last Argyle game I saw was a Championship fixture in September 2009 at Peterborough, with Plymouth manager Paul Sturrock in his second spell at the club leading the Greens to a 2-1 win thanks to goals from Jamie Mackie and Rory Fallon. It was Argyle’s first win of the 2009/10 season and ultimately both sides would be relegated to League 1.
Fast forward to October 2021 and so much has changed for me – house purchases, changes of career, weight loss, marathons and loads of other memories wiped out by late nights and their supporting substances. In that time, I’d almost totally lost interest and energy for football – no longer a game or the never-ending soap opera it once was, now more of a corporate content factory where victory in the transfer window and social media bear pit trumps actual form on the pitch. Announce Icardi! Take the ratio, admin.
At the height of the pandemic-enforced global lockdown, many of us fell back on nostalgia to replace the hope vacuum created by an uncertain future. I spent a lot of time thinking about my favourite football memories and why they particularly stuck in my mind. Almost exclusively, my personal highlights revolved around watching matches in the flesh and sharing that experience, with friends, family and total strangers. Having televised games on wall-to-wall during lockdown was fine, but watching a series of ghost games played out in front of empty stadiums with canned audio only underscored what was missing, both from matchdays but also my own existence.
An Argyle fan places a flag in position before kick off at the Kassam Stadium
So far this season, I’ve enjoyed going to watch matches again, taking in games at stadiumMK as a season ticket holder at MK Dons. However, the ambition this year was always to re-connect with Argyle and try to see them in action whenever their away fixtures brought them close to my Buckinghamshire home. The first such match, after having failed to get a ticket within the sold-out allocation at Wimbledon, was a trip to Oxford United’s Kassam Stadium.
It was hard to know how the game would go as a lapsed, exiled fan – I don’t have a Westcountry accent so I would probably stand out a mile. I also don’t have the knowledge of the team that more committed supporters build up over years of comings and goings, so what if I seem like some kind of bandwagon jumper, especially seeing as the team are, at time of writing, top of League 1, having enjoyed a fantastic start. What might happen if I was seen as some kind of imposter, taking up the place of a proper fan among the 1,800 away fans?
I was apprehensive, nervous really, about trying to be a fan again, which is crazy really – I’m a middle-aged man who has been to hundreds of games in my time at all kinds of levels. But wanting to be a part of something, a community, and to share that experience creates a huge fear of rejection and humiliation.
Very soon it became clear that those fears were irrational and unnecessary. The game itself was a rollercoaster and was perfect for this return to being a fan – Argyle were behind early, then equalised quickly and went in at half time 2-1 up. Oxford then wasted a series of chances after the interval, but Plymouth weathered the storm and eventually doubled the lead in the closing stages.
Argyle fans and players celebrate the 3-1 win at Oxford
All the emotions of supporting a team came flooding back – the disappointment of conceding early, the relief of an unexpected equaliser and the joy of seeing a game turned on its head. Then the nerves of seeing your team pushed back, waiting for the inevitable levelling of the scores and ultimately the surreal sealing of the win with the third goal. The pantomime jeering of an opposition player with the temerity to celebrate his goal and the hero-worshipping of a midfielder from Guinea-Bissau who was born the year I took my GCSEs (Panutche Camara, scorer of two goals against Oxford, in case you were wondering).
I’d expected to be something of a detached observer, quietly taking in the game and making astute observations (not that I normally do this anyway, but still). Instead, I found myself completely unbridled, on my feet from the early exchanges and joining in all the songs as best I can – it always did feel odd to me to proclaim Plymuff Argo as the greatest team the world has ever seen, not because they’re not excellent, but because my Home Counties diction struggles with the colloquialism.
Argyle’s fans are terrific. I was sat in the quieter of the three blocks, but the noisy and boisterous support on either side was infectious and it felt totally normal to be sharing the game with the elderly couple on my left and the guy on the right who was enjoying a day out with his boy seeing as his under 11s game had been played the night before.
I’d worried before the game that I wasn’t a fan any more, that I was too aloof and too distant from actual supporters to be able to enjoy the experience, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. My whole desire to get back in touch with football fandom was fuelled by nostalgia – powerful memories from my youth, shared with friends, strangers and, particularly, my parents. Football may have totally changed in those times, but it’s also exactly the same, depending where you look.
Above all else, it was a sense of normality and regularity that I took from the game – no questions about the bigger picture, the future of the sport or the potential damage being done by financial disparity and European Super Leagues. No concerns over foreign ownership, petrostate transfer budgets or games being moved to fit TV schedules – just a football match, three points and then onto the next one.
It was simple, uncomplicated and energising. I’d expected to feel like a fish out of water and for the game itself to be relatively low standard – that couldn’t have been further from the truth. Because I felt invested in the outcome, it was exciting, enjoyable and it felt like it mattered, which is something I’d really missed from my match going hiatus.
Prior to the start of the season, Argyle were expected by many to struggle, maybe even candidates for relegation after a terrible finish to the last campaign. The fact that they are currently top of the table, admittedly having played more games than those around them, just shows the unpredictable nature of football outside the ‘big six’ Premier League bubble.
Whether or not Plymouth stay in the race for promotion is unlikely but also irrelevant – just that there is the opportunity to do so is what makes the sport exciting.
Standing in a queue and waiting in a car park to finally return to a stadium and catch a game. In a strange way, it felt kind of apt – I don’t know exactly how long it’s been since I last went to the match, least of all as a punter, but it’s definitely in the realm of years rather than months. In itself, that seems extremely sad; the boy from the middle of nowhere with the insatiable appetite for football, a passion so great that he studied the sport at university and toured the south of the country in search of a career, bouncing from club to club like an unsure golfer.
So why now after so long away? If the truth be told, I totally lost my love and interest in football. One of the dangers of turning your passion into your paycheque is that you close off what you do to escape from the real world. Working in football became a real grind; watching matches lost its sparkle, especially when fans become customers and the attendance is more important than the result.
After so long away from it, much of my interest returned during the pandemic, partly because, in all honesty, there wasn’t much else to focus on. I stopped going to games because time is precious and I wanted to waste mine doing other things. Over the years I continued following my big team – Spurs – and enjoyed seeing them improve massively from where they were when I was young. That bubble kind of burst, however, when they appointed a manager who ‘guarantees trophies’ but in a style totally at odds with the club’s tradition and with a management approach based on avoiding blame, singling out individuals and generally protecting his own reputation. The trophies never arrived so Mourinho had to go.
That appointment typified priorities of the biggest clubs – instant success is more important that traditions or values, because neither of those bring in the money. Being in the Champions League is all important now to the clubs with the biggest outlays in order to preserve their status at the top table and prevent anyone else from stealing their slice of the pie.
With that in mind, it was never a huge surprise when the European Super League was announced earlier in 2021; owning a football club is an expensive business, so protecting your investment to guarantee a future profit needs a secure stream of income in the short term. That kind of steady revenue is totally at odds with the competitive nature of sport where risk is inherent – a poor run of form here or a bad string of injuries there and all of a sudden that Champions League spot becomes Thursday night trips to far flung Eastern Europe and a greatly diminished tv revenue.
Queueing the rain at stadiumMK to watch Dons vs Spurs in pre-season. I eventually made it into the ground 10 minutes after kick off to see Spurs comfortably win 3-1 – it was only after I got home later that evening that I learned Dons had missed a penalty in the first five minutes.
Front the point of view of the ESL club owners, it makes sense – protect your income, massively reduce the chance of seeing that income fall into the hands of someone else and watch your investment steadily grow.
At the time, I remember reading something that likened the ‘big six’ English clubs to being like the ‘big four’ supermarkets – greedily gobbling up the little businesses by hoovering up their customers while also expanding into new markets, leaving behind their traditional fanbases, laughably referred to as ‘legacy fans’. In this sense, fans like me are no more than customers – years of supporting the club that my dad did means nothing.
This makes it difficult to love your club. There’s something unique about going to football; admittedly a lot of what makes it great also makes it repulsive to many – the passion and tribalism that creates an indescribable bond spills over all too easily into pathetic scraps on the street and juvenile ‘banter’ in the stadium.
There’s a couple of old cliches that try to explain what it’s like supporting a football club: that it’s either a religion where everyone gathers to worship and pray or it’s like being part of a family except that everyone wants much the same thing. You can add in a couple of extra layers to both those ideas by including the shared experience of going to a match and the sense of community created by following a single entity that represents your town, city or borough.
All of which is lost when football becomes purely a made-for-TV exercise.
Watching games on television during the height of pandemic lockdown did make for an excellent distraction: something to focus on other than the rising death toll, something that really wasn’t important in the grand scheme of things. But after months of games in front of empty stadiums, it probably struck home to the big club bigwigs that those pesky legacy fans really aren’t that important to the whole business anyway, so why bother considering them in the next evolution of investment protection?
The biggest clubs in Europe are now essentially vehicles either for state-funded soft power PR campaigns or investment arms for (predominantly) US capitalists. In essence, the name of the club, its geographical location and the community links that infers are now irrelevant – these clubs are realistically franchises that could play their games anywhere in the world so long as it suits the broadest TV viewing market.
Complaining about this feels a little like ‘Old man shouts at clouds’ and it will take an unimaginable shift in the way the game is run to turn this particular tanker. This summer’s transfer splurge by Paris Saint-Germain (Owned by the Qatari state), only highlights this by taking star players, for ‘free’, from Barcelona, Real Madrid, AC Milan and Liverpool, plus a big-money transfer from a powerless Inter Milan, in a real demonstration of strength.
The state of the game at the highest point got me thinking about what it was I really enjoyed and loved about football. It was never about the biggest names, the transfer gossip or the endless debates on telly (who remembers Andy Gray and the Boot Room off the mid 90s?). For me, despite being a Spurs fan, it was never about going to watch them play – my parents retired to Cornwall when I was five years old, so I grew up around 250 miles from Tottenham and my supporting experience was limited to watching frequent disappointments on Sky.
Instead, my live football fix was formed at my local league club – Plymouth Argyle. When we first moved to the south west, Argyle were an old Division Two (now Championship) club. I remember going to my first game – I’d fallen in love with football, like so many people my age, during Italia ‘90, seeing England get the semi-finals, Gazza’s tears, Lineker’s goals and all that. It was a great time. Over the summer, I joined a local football club (not easy to find in deepest, darkest rugby country) and I wanted to consume every possible aspect of the game possible.
We were encouraged to take in a game at Argyle’s ground, Home Park, during the pre-season to 1990/91 and a friend of ours got hold of a pair of tickets for a friendly with Wimbledon – the Crazy Gang! Just two years on from the greatest FA Cup upset of all time, beating Liverpool 1-0 in the final at Wembley, the Dons would be bringing the likes of Vinny Jones, John Fashanu and Dennis Wise to Plymouth for a warm-up match before the new campaign. It promised to be a great introduction to live match action.
The game finished goal-less and and my Dad vowed never to return to Home Park. He broke that vow 18 months later to accompany me on a trip with my football club to see Argyle play Newcastle United in a league match just before Christmas. That game was also dire, with both sides setting up either side of the halfway line and launching long balls at each other until eventually the visitors broke the lines and stole the win with a goal from Gavin Peacock. It was more like trench warfare than football and the old man renewed his vow to avoid visits to Argyle, a promise he would keep this time for over a decade – and I don’t blame him; it was awful.
Plymouth Argyle’s Home Park: AKA the ‘Theatre of Greens’. The tight turnstiles, the wooden seats, the pasties. Brilliant.
However, and somewhat bizarrely, I was hooked. Most Saturdays for me meant either playing football myself or, as I grew up being a swimmer, taking part in competitions up and down the westcountry – it should be noted that I was never any good at swimming, but my mum was the coach, so I had limited choice. Even as Argyle slid down the leagues into what was originally Division Four, but was at the time known as Division Three (It’s now called League Two), the experience of going to games was addictive. I grew attached to Argyle as my ‘little club’ and the fortunes of the team and players became as much a part of my fandom as those of Spurs.
Going to matches as a teenager would be restricted to once a month initially, but as I got a bit older I could get to a few more of the bigger matches. In particular, after multiple seasons of decline, Argyle found themselves in the bottom division of elite football, but with an up-and-coming, energetic manager in charge: Neil Warnock. I didn’t really understand what good or bad football was at the time, but Warnock turned the ship at Home Park and the team were on the up. Games were exciting with the team playing fast, attacking football and winning games.
The 1995/96 season would end with Argyle being promoted via the play-offs. I couldn’t attend the final itself but the semi-final second leg remains to this day one of my all-time favourite moments watching football.
Argyle were pitched against Colchester United (more about them another time, probably). Play-off semi-finals are played over two legs, home and away with the winner on aggregate progressing to a winner-takes-promotion final at Wembley. After losing the first leg 1-0 at Colchester’s ground, Argyle knew that they would need to win at home to make it through.
I was stood on the terrace behind the goal – the Devonport End – where all the songs and the noise originated from. As a 15 year old who had never really belonged in any group or felt part of anything before, it was amazing – singing, shouting, swearing – it was liberating and exhilarating.
Argyle were fantastic that day – they raced into a two-goal lead on the night, making the aggregate score 2-1, only to be pegged back to 2-2 with the visitors scoring in the second half. If the game finished that way, it would go to a nervy period of extra-time and potentially a penalty shoot-out.
Into the final five minutes and the action was taking place way down the other end of the pitch. Even 25 years later, I can vividly remember thinking that momentum was going against Argyle and that they had no chance of making it through. Then from nowhere, a cross in from the right hand side found Plymouth’s diminutive left-back, Paul Williams, in space at the back post. His diving header was awkward, but effective, finding the net and giving the hosts a lead they would hold to book their berth in the final.
The stadium erupted – Home Park at the time was a ramshackle collection of terraces, stands and uncovered sections. For a club that normally had attendances of around 5,000, to be part of a 19,000 crowd felt like the biggest barrage of noise, celebration and joy imaginable. Everyone streamed onto the pitch, singing sings of salutation for the players, the manager and even the chairman.
It was an evening that had everything – at its best, football has that ability to ebb and flow between failure and success, with the ultimate outcome in the balance. The best matches are never the 5-0 thrashings, but the ones where your side appears to have thrown it away but somehow manages to steal victory.
There would be times in life where I would attend Argyle games more regularly, especially in my early twenties and with my mum. We formed a really close bond by attending games together (she was originally a fan of Crystal Palace), and some of those games, afternoons and moments before she died in 2004 are among my most treasured memories.
So that’s how I came to find myself stood in a queue in the rain in Milton Keynes in 2021. Because while I know I cannot repeat that sense of belonging and that attachment which grew in my teenage self, I want at least some of the experience to be refreshed.
After deciding that I wanted to get back into watching games live, I thought long and hard about what it was I got out of going to watch games and why it was something I cared about. I could go and watch my big club, especially now they’re in a new, huge stadium – I have been to see Spurs play in the flesh, many times, and have experienced some fantastic atmospheres and occasions at White Hart Lane, but, if the truth be told, I do feel a bit like a tourist when I’ve been there because I don’t go regularly enough – I couldn’t afford the cost or the time.
The commercialisation of top-level football makes following a big club even less attractive – there’s so much discussion and promotion of Premier League football that it feels like a never-ending soap opera; it doesn’t feel real or genuine as the superstars are so vast.
I mulled over some options for securing my football fix: living in MK means there are a number of different options within an hour or so but my instant reaction to paying £25 to watch Northampton or Luton play is that it’s too expensive – not because of the sheer cost, but because I don’t care how they do. Part of the joy of the experience is in the emotions created by the outcome so attending every game as a neutral will always leave something of a hollow feeling.
On the flip side of that, stumping up to watch a Premier League team is an expensive hobby – the cheapest season tickets at Spurs cost more than £900 and a single Matchday, including ticket, travel and food, will set you back around £100. For that kind of investment, its understandable that you want to feel entertained, see attractive football and, ultimately, a positive result – none of these things are guaranteed in sport.
I decided that now was the time to rekindle my love for my small club – Plymouth Argyle at a time when clubs outside the Premier League need all the support they can get. To re-visit the supermarkets analogy, there has been a real energy in the last 18 months to shop local where possible and I feel that supporting your local or lower league club is the football equivalent of this.
It’s not feasible for me to make the 500-mile round trip to Devon every other weekend, but I did consider a season ticket at one point to put something into the club and to show my support. Instead, I’ve opted to use my central location to get to as many away games as I can – there are roughly seven or eight fixtures within a reasonable journey from where I live, including a few that I haven’t been to before. I can’t wait to follow the club’s progress, even if they are among the favourites to be relegated from League One.
Meanwhile, in my research for match options, I came across this season’s promotion from my new(ish) local club, Milton Keynes Dons. The reason I live in MK is that I came here to work for the club and enjoyed seven amazing years doing just that (again, probably more on that another time). After having had no fans in the ground in the last 18 months, you can now buy a season ticket at stadiumMK for £230, which equates to a tenner a game and is much less than during ‘normal’ times.
In my opinion, the club should be applauded for this step and I want to show support for this initiative, so in addition to watching my team on the road throughout the season, I’m now a season ticket holder at stadiumMK – I think League One is going to be really exciting this season with a lot of teams realistically in with a chance of promotion. While I do have a strong affiliation to the Dons after my time on the staff, I’m still of a mindset that I’m going there to watch games involving two teams, not supporting one or the other (except when Argyle visit, of course).
The irony of this situation is not lost on me – I feel totally disenfranchised by my big club and a desire to watch ‘real’ football in person, so part of my solution is to watch the original Franchise Football Club. Much has been written on the story of Wimbledon, MK Dons and everything in between, so there’s no need to add to it here.
In the course of planning this article, I’ve read much about the Dons for this season and they’ve put together an interesting team, looking to play attractive football. However, on the eve of the campaign, their promising young manager, Russell Martin, was spirited away to Championship club Swansea, sending the club into turmoil, which could affect their fortunes through the year – time will tell.
So this marks the start of something, although what that might be is unknown, which is kind of the point. I have no idea what experiences, positive or negative, might be waiting out there or what characters might be encountered along the way.
As football clubs welcome fans back after 18 months away, my social media timelines have been buzzing with positivity and happiness for supporters to be reunited with their heroes, their friends and even their families. It’s been great to see and after my own hiatus stretching back further, it feels even better to be a part of it again.
Late in the evening on Tuesday 27th August, it finally happened: after months of threats, possible breakthroughs and false dawns, the English Football League (EFL) were finally forced to expel one of its member clubs, Bury FC.
This was a truly sad end to a long and drawn out saga, the culmination of a series of events that has seen this historic club, founded in 1885, cast from the league setup after 125 years of membership and into almost-certain liquidation. Just a few months ago, in April, the club’s fans, players and staff were celebrating the momentous achievement of promotion from the league’s lowest tier, League 2, to the third rung of the English football ladder, League 1.
However, that promotion itself came in the face of a growing crisis at the club with players and staff reporting unpaid wages dating back to February and the club’s owner buckling under the weight of mounting debts, many of which were leveraged against the club and its assets to meet spiralling interest payments and ongoing commitments.
How the club got into this position is one matter for debate. Punching above its financial weight with player wages reportedly in the same ballpark as clubs two divisions higher, it was evident that this was likely to end in tears, but when that actually happens it’s always the fans that feel the effects worse.
While the club’s owner, whose actions seem to have stymied any potential sale and therefore made survival even more unlikely, will ultimately walk away from the ashes of the team’s Gigg Lane home, it is the supporters who will suffer from the club’s demise the most.
Going to the match is something of a British institution; generations of men, women, boys and girls taking the trip on a Saturday afternoon to follow their team, come rain, wind or shine. Family outings, meeting up with the lads, taking the boy to his first games – all rites of passage for football supporters up and down the country.
That sense of community and importance to the local area is even greater for the nation’s provincial clubs; away from the bright lights of the Premier League, it is our smaller clubs where fans gather, fall in love with their club and build tight-knit networks around their Saturday ritual. You get to know the people who sit around your season ticket seat and share the highs and lows of supporting your team. In many ways, being a fan of a lower league side is much like being a member of a family – there’s a firm sense of togetherness, empathy and loyalty towards the group, looking out for each other and with a much deeper sense of belonging than can be found in many of the global corporation-esque super clubs.
You are an important part of your club and it is an important part of you.
That in itself is the real tragedy in this loss – and it feels like a bereavement: here we have not just the closing of a business, but the cessation of an entity which provides thousands of people with something and somewhere to aspirate their emotions, ambitions and, in many cases, their actual reason for being.
It sounds dramatic to pitch it in those terms, but to many of the supporters of football clubs, it truly is their religion – to have that stripped from their psyche will leave a massive hole.
Apportioning blame in this situation certainly won’t bring the club back but working out how this has been allowed to happen may provide some clues as to how it can be avoided in the future. We live in a world where there are Premier League players sitting inactive on benches earning weekly wages that would keep many a club afloat, but it can’t be their responsibility to fund their colleagues and, ultimately, rivals. They are only being paid what someone is prepared and able to pay them.
The disparity between the top-flight ‘haves’ and the lower league ‘have nots’ continues to grow at an alarming rate, something which feeds the desire to chase success and reach the pot of gold at the end of the footballing rainbow. Achieving promotion to the Premier League can take a club from a position of keeping its head barely above water to profitable sustainability – just ask a recent riser like Bournemouth – but it’s a precarious position that can be taken away just as quickly – see Bolton Wanderers, Portsmouth, Leeds United et al.
Facilitating this kind of survival tightrope is at the heart of the issue. Achieving success and climbing the leagues is so incredibly valuable that clubs – and their owners – will take all kinds of risks in their pursuit of victory at the expense of simple business logic. In what other industry would senior management even consider paying out more that they make?
Unfortunately there can only be a limited number of winners in any season, so for every side that climbs a ladder, there are plenty more who slide down a snake, whether that be in terms of their league status or their ability to balance the books.
In that respect, the EFL have taken a lot of the stick for the demise of Bury with questions over their Fit and Proper Persons test for club owners and the level of control they wield over members’ financial actions. There is only so much that the central body of what is effectively a members’ club can do to police its constituents, but perhaps it is time for firmer governance and greater restriction over finances – even if this threatens to reduce competitivity with Premier League clubs and their fiscal muscle.
In an ideal world, the game’s wealth would be shared far more evenly – does Mesut Özil really need his £350,000 a week and do Manchester United have to spend £98 million on Paul Pogba? If he didn’t and they didn’t, the game at the highest level would hardly wither and die, but without more evenly distributed funds, the chasm that already exists will only expand over time. Eventually that could see more clubs disappear from the system, and there’s even some logic behind an argument to reduce the number of professional clubs in the English game to reduce the financial land-grab that currently exists in the lower leagues.
However, in both these situations, it’s impossible to force the toothpaste back into the tube – Premier League owners, players and agents are hardly likely to donate their earnings for ‘the good of the game’, while asking lower league clubs to become semi-professional or amateur setups would never be a move that could be supported politically by all.
Which kind of leaves us at something of an impasse; with so many stakeholders – Premier League, Football League, Football Association, and the growing power of clubs and players – there exists a huge power vacuum at the top of the game. Who actually runs football in the UK and what are their motives?
There is no single entity or governing body that has the authority to step in and make rulings with the long-term sustainability of the game and its incredibly loyal followers at heart – each organisation with any power has its own agenda, which in turn is dictated by the motivations of its own stakeholders. For instance, the Premier League has to pander to the whims of its clubs, who continue to carry the threat of banding together with Europe’s elite outfits to form a European super league, so anything that could threaten their dominance or profitability is certain to fall on deaf ears.
By its very nature, football is a competitive business – winning, losing, promotion, relegation – but it’s time for that level of tribalism to be diluted for the greater good. Without a more balanced sharing of the game’s eye-watering incomes and a will to create an even playing field, we could well see a wave of clubs going under and eventually drowning beneath unsurmountable debt and over-commitment.
sixteeneightyone 