Club Owners Vs Club Fans - "You may not own it, but your club belongs to you" - Excellent Op-ed

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Great oped re being a football fan. Probably applicable to all clubs.

Mirror/Ian Winwood -
Opinion: Why football fans should care as much about who owns their club as they do who plays for it
- Sometimes football fans can be difficult people to like.
- Listening to the wailing wall of noise emanating from Liverpool’s red and blue quarters, and of course from the real-life disaster movie that plays in black and white (Tynetanic! It too will go down!), the thing that has struck me most is how naïve and how gullible too many supporters can be.
- If, as they claim, they care so much for the club they support then why do they seem to care so little about those who might like to own it?
- The relationship between a fan and his or her club is about more than what happens on the pitch. In the majority of cases ‘we’ as supporters have no more ownership of ‘our’ club than we do of the train company that ferries us to an away game.
- The allegiance is entirely illogical, and it is from this quality that it derives its strength. How did my team do at the weekend? ‘We’ lost. ‘We’? Who the hell is ‘we’? What part did I play in ‘our’ defeat?
- To varying degrees, football fans can claim to ownership of ‘their’ club in just one way: moral ownership. Increasingly, at the game’s top table your team does not need you, and if you turn your back on it you will be replaced without anyone in power either noticing or caring. Your allegiance means more to you than it does to them. Because of this, it is up to you to take care of it.
- Personally, I take a very relaxed approach to my team’s on-field fortunes. It is none of my business how well, or how badly, they perform; either I support them or I don’t. All that matters to me is that I have a club to support, and that this club survives longer than I do. If they take to the field in the Premier League (I support Barnsley, so this is looking unlikely) then, great; if they represent the Blue Square Conference North (I support Barnsley, so this is looking likely) then so be it.
- Living in London, I attend perhaps 10 or 12 games each season. Despite the fact that the Emirates Stadium is walking distance from where I type these words, my loyalty has never been tested. And if ‘my’ club ceased to exist, I would support no team at all.
- I don’t believe the reason I am so shocked and irritated by the gullibility of so many supporters when it comes to who owns their club is due solely to the fact that no billionaires have been seen in the neighbourhood of Oakwell. If they were, it would be a sure sign that the barrel is running low on biscuits.
- But to mangle a phrase, if the Premier League sneezes the rest of English football – even world football – catches the plague.
- Just last year many fans of Queens Park Rangers were crowing about how, under new ownership, they were suddenly “richer than Chelsea”. Suddenly, these same fans are learning that wealth has a tendency of trickling up, not down. This is why supporters – and visiting supporters as well – are paying inflation-busting ticket prices to sit in a stadium that looks like it was made out of Meccano, and where leg room is at such a premium it makes an economy class on a charter flight look Air Force One.
- At the top end of the country, the soap opera that is Newcastle United – we could call it Neverenders – groans on. The supporter who appeared on the BBC's Football Focus programme to claim that the departure of Kevin Keegan had “ruined [her] life” offered a snapshot of how hysterical things have become.
- Of course, the departure of the Doncaster demigod was clumsy and a cause of distress for the fans who welcomed him back just months previously. Because of the furore his actions have caused, owner Mike Ashley is now looking to sell. Predictably, many fans are delighted.
- But it seems to me that not enough people are asking questions about who might buy the club, just so long as they have wealth.
- Are Newcastle fans – or fans of any club who like the sound of owners for whom money is no object – really so sure that things can only get better?
- Me, I am not at all convinced. At least in principle, I find this influx of new owners to be not alarming, but frightening. What do they want for their money? What are their motivations? And why are so many supporters accepting these developments without a murmur of protest?
- It is obvious that football’s governing bodies do not care to properly regulate the game for which they are responsible. One wonders just how despicable a character would have to be in order to fail the Premier League’s ‘Fit and Proper Persons’ test. But for football to have winners it must also have losers, and this is a fact that no amount of money will alter.
- Consider this: the agreement of 14 clubs is all that’s required for a Premier League rule to be changed. There is nothing whatsoever preventing billionaires and business conglomerates from buying most clubs in the league, just as there is nothing preventing these owners from lobbying together to alter any rule that doesn’t fit with their business plan.
- Tell me, if you’d just invested a kit-bag full of zeros into a club, would you fancy the prospect of being relegated? No? Well, how about we see if we can get rid of it.
- And if you had no real affinity with this club – no moral ownership – would you care what happened to it were you to walk away?
- You might be blinded by the bling, but these are troubled times for football supporters. As can be seen in the meltdown in the financial markets, big money needs careful control and a rigid structure in order that things don’t get out of hand. Ignorant of this, football runs itself with all the care of the Wild West.
- You may not own it, but your club belongs to you. And it will be you who is left to pick up the pieces should things go wrong.
- That is, if there are any pieces left.
Read Ian Winwood's new football column exclusively on Mirror.co.uk every Friday - Mirror