For a sport forged in the fires of Britain's industrial revolution and popularised by the working classes, to deny football's social and political impacts is not only foolish but dangerous.
Football is a religion for millions - an escape from the mundanity and difficulties of everyday life. Friendships are formed, relationships deepened and even love is found within the terraces of a football stadium. The beautiful game is as much a social exercise as it is a sporting one.
First elected to the Football League in 1893, Bury FC spent their 127 year history embedding themselves within the local community. Every business, household, and individual had the football club etched within their DNA. For ninety minutes every-other Saturday, whatever you had going on at home or work was put on ice. For ninety minutes you weren't an individual but a collective. All that mattered was what the scoreboard read at full time.
With average attendances of just over four thousand people, Bury were by no means a big club, bouncing around English football's third and fourth divisions with little in the way of excitement. But of course there is so much more to a football club than domestic successes and packed out stadiums, it's the community around it.
Football is about the pub you visit for a pre match pint, the burger van outside the ground, the bus that ferries you there and back and most importantly, the army of volunteers keeping lower league football tick. The programme sellers, the kit man, the photographer, the stewards working tirelessly, out of nothing more than pure love for their team.
When Bury FC was expelled from the Football League in August 2020, this community had its heart ripped out. The pub is now empty on a match day, the burger van has moved on and the volunteers once paramount to a club's success now work to revive their club from the ashes.
What initially drew a community together has now forced it apart. The four thousand Gigg Lane regulars now feel disconnected from each other, no longer a collective but rather individuals with nothing in common but the memories of what they once had and may never have again.
I think what fans outside of these communities fail to understand, is that below the riches of the Premier League, every club is just one bad owner away from this happening to them. Derby County once on the brink of Premiership glory, wound up losing the 2019 play-off final to Aston Villa, setting the club into free fall and ultimately leading to their relegation to League One following a twelve point deduction. A city so close to restoring its place at the summit of English football, torn down to lower league obscurity in just a matter of years thanks to the financial mismanagement all too common across the EFL.
John McGinn celebrates scoring against Derby in the 2019 play off final (BBC Sport)
Whilst the recently announced Independent Regulator for English Football is a welcomed reform, the fact it took the death of a football club and collapse of countless others shows just how disconnected the Government are from these communities, seemingly unaware of the impact the failure to protect these clubs has on the working class fans that singlehandedly made the beautiful game what it is today.
50 out of the 72 clubs in the EFL are in regions where the average disposable household income is below the national average. These communities would be hollowed out by the loss of their football club. This absence of civic pride and cultural heritage is the reason why the need to protect football clubs stretches well beyond performances on the pitch.
Back in 2011, a Parliamentary Select Committee expressed the desire to "create an environment were clubs are protected from over-ambitious or otherwise incompetent or duplicitous owners,"- begging the question as to why it took the Government almost twelve years to act when the problem was staring them right in the face for over a decade?
In essence, the EFL (in particular the Championship) is the world's biggest casino. The financial difference between the Premier League and the Championship is now so stark that clubs are willing to risk complete obliteration at the chance that they can make it to the top and enter the world of obscene TV money and cushy parachute payments.
In the year of its inception (1993) the Premier League's turnover was £45 million and the EFL’s was £34m, meaning that EFL turnover equated to 75% of the top-flight’s figure. In the thirty years since, Premier League revenue has increased thirteen times faster than that of the EFL, leaving its yearly revenue worth just 6% of the Premiership's.
With this in mind, it is obvious as to why owners push for these unsustainable levels of spending. The risk of a points deduction is seemingly worth it when the other side of the coin supplies untold riches and guaranteed financial support for seasons to come. It is worth noting that for every team that goes up through the playoffs (with the final being dubbed the "one hundred million pound game") there are those who try and fail, and for these teams, the consequences can be catastrophic.
Bolton Wanderers were taken over by administrators in May 2019 over an unpaid tax bill of £1.2 million. Considering that Premier League clubs had made £4.8 billion the season before, putting the future of a centuries old football club in jeopardy over a sum akin to the monthly wage of Mohamed Salah seems to highlight just wide the disparity is between the Premiership and the EFL and the need for a regulator to step in and protect these institutions.
From the perspective of Hull City, we've seen it all.
February 2001 saw the locks change at Boothferry Park as the club plunged into administration. Seemingly from some of the club's darkest days, the Tiger's rose up the ranks of English football, securing their first promotion to the top flight in the team's history.
What followed was a decade that would be remembered as the most successful in the East Yorkshire side's history. If you were to tell one of the fans scrambling to save their club some twenty years ago that the future would hold five seasons of Premiership football and an FA Cup final, they would probably be grinning ear to ear. If you told them that the same two decade span would see ownership turmoil and a shameless attempt to strip the club of its identity, the smile would probably quite quickly fade.
2014 saw then owner, Assem Allam, put forward a proposal to remove the 'City' portion from the club's name, under the guise that "in marketing, the shorter the name the more powerful [it is]". I feel that this exemplified the shift in feeling from football club owners during this time, more concerned with the views of potential overseas investors than that of lifelong fans. In a game in which a few million pounds can separate Premier League promotion and administration, it's no wonder owners side with the cash rather than the community.
Losing 'City' from Hull's name was not just a marketing decision to streamline the brand for overseas business, but trying to rip the community identity from the club. The owners wanted a commercial asset not a community one.
Branding the suffix 'City' as "common" and a "lousy identity", Allam thought the working class connotations of Britain's industrial cities was a tough sell for foreign billionaires more concerned with a snappy name and cute mascots to flog to their overseas audience.
Hull City fans protesting the changing of their name (the Independent)
Under the Independent Regulator announced today, changes such as those proposed by Allam would require fan approval before being implemented. Any decisions impacting a club's crest, colours, name or stadium location would require the consent of supporters, a welcomed reform, cementing the fact that football belongs to the fans, not the owners.
Personally, I think in our current owner, Acun Ilıcalı, we have someone who understands that you can have all the investment in the world, but it's the fans in the stadium and throughout the community that make the club what it is.
Previous owners would have never stepped foot in the Botanic Inn, rubbed shoulders with the fans or wandered around the city centre before a game. For a man who lives and works on the other side of the continent, Ilıcalı boasts the kind of visibility that you'd expect of a local business man owning a football team, not an overseas multi millionaire.
The Independent Football Regulator is not designed to give each club their own personal Ilıcalı but rather make sure that the antithesis of Acun, owners intent on running football clubs into the ground, are kept at arms length from the English game.
Hull City owner, Acun Ilıcalı, amongst fans in the Botanic Inn (Hull Live)
It is worth prefacing that that an Independent Regulator is not the answer to all of the games problems. With state ownership slowly creeping into the football pyramid, a regulator that solely assess the finances of a prospective owner, not the ethics, is one laced with future problems.
Additionally, as with every Government appointed position, there is the concern that the influence of party political interests could be a stumbling block for what is meant to be an 'independent' regulator. Issues regarding lobbying will be as prevalent amongst a football regulator as it will be across any regulated sector, be that energy (Ofgem) or financial services (FCA).
Despite this, the move towards regulation is the right one. There are few institutions more important to local communities than football clubs and there are even less to which their absence would cause such great loss to local areas. Protecting the future of English football is less about the twenty two players on the pitch and more about the millions to which the beautiful game is not just a pass time, but a religion.
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