Today may represent my last day as a football fan.
My “fanaticism” has been waning for some time. Attending football matches has given way to domesticity and a degree of financial prudence in recent years; I cancelled my Sky Sports subscription more than two seasons ago; and I have long since stopped going out of my way to catch Match Of The Day (rammed as it is now with inept presenters, lazy summarisers and risible commentators).
I still subscribe to When Saturday Comes and read it cover to cover but have been struck of late that the only upbeat articles therein focus on football as nostalgia: the magazine’s writers love their days gone by but seem pathalogically to loathe almost everything about the modern day game. And I know what they mean because I feel much the same way.
Almost every football fan who ever paid attention to the game before 1990 seems to feel the same way. Those who fell in after Gazza’s Tears don’t seem to understand that what passes now for top-flight football is a confection that bears little resemblance to what is remembered by those of us who stood on terraces and remember games being played on pitches of mud or water rather than grass. Not everything was better then (the extinction of running sewers on the terraces is to be welcomed), but a vast amount was.
I’ve been a Spurs fan since 14 May 1981, when I was nine years old. Before that, like virtually every other boy of my age growing up where I did, I supported the all-conquering Liverpool for a couple of seasons. But I watched the 1981 FA Cup Final replay from my bedroom in the Middle East (where my family was living at the time) listening to the commentary whistle in and out of reception on the BBC World Service. The game kicked off after 10pm local time on a Thursday night, but I was allowed to watch as Friday wasn’t a schoolday, and I fell in love with the thrilling, attacking football played by Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester City and the five goals the teams traded that night.
If City had won, I may well have been condemned to a quarter of a century of the constant misery that grips the City-supporting fans I know: my City-supporting barber when I lived in Manchester seemed perpetually to be on the brink of tears every time he contemplated the club’s fortunes, which was almost his only topic of conversation. I really wish I was there today to witness his pessimism as Trashcan Sinatra‘s Human Rights Warriors sit atop the Premiership table.
As it was I was drawn to the winners of that game, Spurs, thanks to Ricky Villa’s amazing winning goal. Since then I’ve followed every twist and turn – two more FA Cups, a UEFA Cup, a League Cup, Hoddle, Ardiles, the amazing 1986-7 season where Clive Allen scored 49 goals and the team very nearly won everything (yet somehow won nothing), Gazza, Lineker, the brink of insolvency in 1991, Klinsmann, the mid-90s flirtation with relegation, the risible succession of underachieving managers (including, sadly, Hoddle and Ardiles) – until the present-day mini-rennaissance under Martin Jol.
But today I truly understand the words one fairly dour Yorkshireman said in the spring of 1984 when he resigned as Tottenham Hotspur manager. Speaking to the press as he left White Hart Lane for the final time, Keith Burkinshaw said, “There used to be a football club there.”
I didn’t really grasp what he meant at the time. I was only 12 and didn’t then understand why the concept of a football club as a floated public limited company was so disastrous. But it meant we’d lost the second most successful manager we’ve ever had – he resigned because his vision of a successful football club did not match the board’s vision of a successful PLC.
Since then, businessmen have ruined the game that captivated me for the first time as I watched the 1979 FA Cup Final in the company of my uncle and grandfather. Spurs is now controlled by an organisation called the English National Investment Company, which tells you everything you need to know about the way football ownership has been going since long before Roman Abramovich rolled into town.
ENIC’s front man at White Hart Lane is Daniel Levy. I don’t doubt that Levy loves the club – unlike Abramovich, Glazer et al, Levy had a Spurs season ticket long before ENIC bought its stake in the club. But, for a fan - a true fan who appreciates the importance of stability, security and the need for a proper pre-season preparation – Levy has an appalling record for appointing and sacking managers.
Within weeks of becoming Chairman in 2001, he sacked George Graham, installing Glenn Hoddle a couple of days before our most important match in years – an FA Cup Semi-Final against Arsenal.
We lost.
Two years later, when he finally realised Hoddle is an appalling manager, Levy sacked him in September 2003, just six games into the season and after Hoddle had spent millions over the summer. We got a caretaker in for the rest of the season.
We finished 14th.
In the summer of 2004 Levy appointed Jacques Santini as manager. He lasted just 13 matches, after – you’ve guessed it – spending millions on players.
Since then we have been in the safe, if deeply unspectacular, hands of Martin Jol. Hamstrung as he was when he was parachuted into the job in November 2004, Spurs ended the season in their customary 9th place.
Thereafter, in his two full seasons in charge, Jol has taken us to consecutive top five finishes – something no Spurs manager has achieved since Burkinshaw in 1982 and 1983. Last season Spurs also reached at least the quarter-final stages of three cup competitions.
Today, the media unites in reports that Levy is to sack Jol imminently. If this comes to pass, it will happen after three matches of the season and after a summer in which the manager has spent £40m buying a series of new players. It will also come after Spurs won their last match 4-0.
Whether or not Jol is the right man for the job in the long-term, his record to date means he certainly deserves more of a crack of the whip than this – the sort of shabby, panic-driven move that smacks for all the world of the same desperation that permeated Leeds United when their failure repeatedly to qualify for the Champions League brought about financial meltdown.
Worst of all, the campaign to undermine the manager and question his ability via the media has clearly been orchestrated from the White Hart Lane boardroom (or “sources close to” it) and Jol’s treatment has been contemptible. This is not how my club should conduct its affairs.
Levy will bring in yet another manager (caretaker or permanent), again too late to allow him to bring in the players he wants and hampered by the lack of a pre-season in which to familiarise the players with his chosen tactics. The club will effectively be in a holding pattern until next summer, praying for a cup run to assuage the fans and that the new guy can squeeze out of the existing players the same overachievement Jol has managed.
I am truly unsure, however, I will be there to witness how things unfold. Like the WSC writers, I’ve moaned about the state of football until I’m bored of my own moaning. But my support for Tottenham has never wavered like this – I’ve never before felt as disillusioned with Spurs as I am today, having read this morning’s back pages.
I have no desire to associate myself with an organisation run by people whose very conduct suggests they are unfit for purpose. I have no intention of spending another penny on “supporting” an organisation that chooses publicly to undermine the efforts of the best manager it has had in almost 25 years.
I dare say I’ll watch some big matches on television going forward but the relentless hype and the merciless march of English football’s capitalists might just finally have worn me down to the extent that I now fully expect to become the creature I could not even understand until a couple of years ago – a bloke who genuinely doesn’t follow football.
The heart and soul of the football club with which I fell in love has gone. And like Keith Burkinshaw before me, I abhor what’s left.
I don’t have time to write as much as I would like, but could I just raise one thing which I think has done much to damage the game, but rarely gets pointed out, namely the arrival of a daily sports supplement in so many daily papers.
Whenever I read these 8-12 page screeds, I can’t help but think that they are written by people who are writing because they fear losing their jobs, not because they actually have something to report. The amount of stuff and PR nonsense that gets printed, all for the sake of proving that they can fill 8 pages, is ridiculous. It’s sort of a sporting version of the 3am page in the Mirror. (Does that make it the “3pm page”?)
Being a Manchester City supporter (I wish to point out at this stage that I do not cut the Minister’s hair, not that such a task would take too long…) and fan of cycling I’m beginning to feel almost persecuted by the patent nonsense and gossip that gets written by half-witted scribes.
Can we not accept that in truth, not that much happens in sport on a day-to-day basis, or at least not that much that can’t be reported in a compendious results section. Rarely does something worth reporting actually happen. Shinawatra’s takeover of City is undoubtedly one, but that is a story, as opposed to mere gossip or puff.
Sadly for Spurs, and more particularly Martin Jol, he is now on the receiving end of poisionous speculation, the source of which is more likely to be found in the bottom of a reporter’s bottle of Bells than from a well-placed contact at the Club.
And once the gossip starts a dangerous snowball starts, as no paper wants to be the last to print the news of Jol’s sacking. Worst still, they all want to be able to print dreadfully self-congratulatory copies of the speculative headlines that they published more in hope than expectation, so they can say “we told you first.”
One final aside – I didn’t know that the Minister’s allegiance was settled on a day when I cried real tears when the team I had supported for many years lost. Nor did I know that his allegiance was given so simply to the winners. So as far as I’m concerned not only is he a glory boy, but a Johnny-come-Lately as well. (That’ll teach you to print a long list of Spurs subsequent achievements, chiz chiz. You’ve never won the division two play-off trophy though, have you? Eh? Eh?)
I am a Manchester United supporter since 1990. I don’t have time to write as much as I would like, so I will simply sum up thus:
1) Tottenham are shit;
2) Jol out, and
3) Manchester City aren’t even a big club.
No seriously, I have enjoyed reading this post and the subsequent comment, as on my holidays in France it makes a change from reading the Michelin guide whilst waiting for tomorrow’s l’Equipe to come out.
I believe I am in a unique position to contribute to this debate as I have never been a football “fan” like the Minister and Bearded Baby. I would consider myself a sports enthusiast.
I have followed Manchester United since 1977 (in the sense of collecting stickers and thinking Ron Atkinson was A Good Thing) and I actually started watching matches in England for real on my departure from public school and admission to university in 1990.
This was because the unwritten public school social ban on “the plebs’ sport” was thereby lifted (we even studied Tom Stoppard’s football-hating “Every Good Boy Deserves Foul” for A Level English).
But the real seeds of my enthusiasm for actually watching football had been sown in the year I spent in France in 86\87 attending St Etienne matches at the Stade Geoffroy Guichard (since renamed the Owen Wonder Goal Stadium – shortened from The Beckham Lost Us The World Cup All On His Own Despite Setting Up The Owen Wonder Goal Stadium).
In that enclosed, heavy, dirty little colosseum I saw and heard the fervour of the Stephanois fans for “les verts”, the club of Platini, Rocheteau and Marius Tresor. I saw Enzo Francescoli playing for Matra Racing Club de Paris (a player whom everyone in the crowd watched for the entire 90 minutes, in their own little version of the Zidane film), and Wenger’s Monaco sweeping all before them with a magisterial Hoddle at 10 and a surprisingly prolific Mark Hateley leading the line (even then Wenger was being attacked for having too many foreigners – until they started winning and then the French press wanted to adopt them).
Then in 1990\91 something happened which sparked my interest in reading and talking about football on top of just watching it – yes the World Cup, but more importantly for me, there was Gazza going to Italy and therefore Football Italia on Channel 4. Let’s be honest, that’s been the best football show on British television for 20 years. Apart from being intelligently produced, it introduced us to something about football which just didn’t exist in England – glamour. The game in Italy had an exoticism and a folklore with which, for the neutral viewer, English football couldn’t compete. Okay, sure, Barnes, Rush, Dalglish, Hansen, Souness…but I’ll raise you Maldini, Baresi, Gullit, Rijkaard, Van Basten. Then, more recently, Del Piero, Cannavaro, Desailly, Batistuta, Zidane. Maybe it was just the indefinable attraction of “foreignness”, maybe their apparent ease and technicity on the ball, maybe it was just the fact that the players knew how to speak to the press and had a touch of “class” about them that English footballers didn’t. Whatever it was, as a broadly neutral football enthusiast, which I was then, that was what I wanted to watch.
I personally think that English football set out to usurp Serie A and has, in its own way, succeeded. The Premiership is certainly the new Serie A. Our footballers drive Ferraris, date beautiful women and most of all, our footballers are foreign superstars now. I’d invite anyone to name a club in the Premiership whose best player is indisputably English. Perhaps Liverpool. Perhaps.
What appears to have happened is that hundreds and thousands of people a bit like me were prepared to pay to watch the best players in the world in a stadium near them, not truncated in a Saturday morning TV slot. Not being “fans”, the only allegiance they had was to being entertained.
I can see two reasons why this has been, in some ways, a disaster for the English game.
Firstly, the football circus that is the Premiership is a purely artificial construct. You cannot tack onto English football culture the trappings of glamour and class unless you fire everyone involved in the game who doesn’t have either. Glamour, culture and class come from the society out of which the game evolves, they can’t be bought. English culture, and in particular English football culture, comes from the working classes, poor and industrial communities. The fervour of fans for the game comes from their circumstances. Football is pretty much everything to them. How can you have players driving Ferraris and dating pop stars next to that?
Secondly, while I think there is no doubt that pure English “fans” like to see attractive football (why were Best, Hoddle and Gazza so popular otherwise?) you simply cannot try to change the way the game is played in England to the detriment of the physical, committed, up tempo game which has always been its main attraction. Players like Norman Hunter, Steve MacMahon, Bryan Robson, Graeme Souness, Roy Keane, even Vinny Jones were far more popular in England than they would have been in Italy or Spain. Where the Premiership tended to succeed in its early years was in integrating a touch of the exotic, a touch of class and skill, usually in the form of a single player (Cantona, McManaman, Ginola, Bergkamp, Kewell) into a team of physically intimidating individuals. That picture seems to have changed. We already have the arch-recuperator Makalele at Chelsea and his successor John Obi Mikel. We could conceive of Ferguson playing Carrick and Hargreaves across the middle this season. Wenger has Gilberto. Has anyone seen any of these players put in a proper full-blooded tackle? Where are the Keanes, the Battys, the Vieiras? Fans of Man U, Leeds and Arsenal respected these sorts of players the most because they epitomised the physical battle absent from Serie A and which is ebbing away from English football. You only have to look at Rio Ferdinand, who wouldn’t look out of place as a libero in Serie A, and compare with Steve Bruce. Which player was better? Which player was more popular with the fans?
So in conclusion, I apologise for being part of the problem and sympathise wholly. Where are the real fans now? What do they do at weekends? Are they the ones applauding Sven at the City of Manchester Stadium? Pretty soon all the part-timers will have gone too, as unless you’ve cashed in your share options and are sitting on a beach earning 20%, the experiment hasn’t really worked.