The fight for football’s soul: How corporate greed and political apathy poisoned the English game

Special report: Ahead of the return of the Premier League on Friday, Miguel Delaney explains how antiquated regulation and dubious international investment has left English football in a deceptively perilous state

For all the angry noise between Mike Ashley and the recently departed Rafael Benítez this summer, it is the decidedly more subdued tone from the Newcastle United supporters that says so much more.

It offers this starkest of messages.

“We’re just going into every season without hope,” Alex Hurst, chair of the Newcastle United Supporters’ Trust, laments to The Independent. “It is very demoralising.”

One of his experiences in the role illustrates exactly the feeling of futility for the club’s supporters in their current situation. As chair, Hurst is permitted occasional meetings with a senior Newcastle executive – usually managing director Lee Charnley – as mandated by the Premier League rules on fan engagement. Ahead of those meetings, he will receive a slew of messages from fellow fans asking where the club’s money is going and what its plans are. But there is a problem.

“The issue we have is that the only person who can actually answer the big questions doesn’t have to appear,” Hirst explains. “Mike Ashley has no formal role at Newcastle United. He isn’t an employee. He doesn’t come into that.”

So, while Hirst finds the club “very good” on day-to-day logistics issues for supporters, they can never get to the big issue.

It is a perfect distillation of a wholly imperfect situation, as well as an illustration of the powerlessness the club’s fans generally feel. Yet another disappointment in just over 12 years of aimlessness.

That number represents something else that is just as stark. It is how long Ashley has owned the club, and means that ten per cent of Newcastle’s entire 127-year history – a storied history that has seen the club grow into a social institution for hundreds of thousands of people – has been subject to the business whims of one man.

That is a fact worth standing back and reflecting on. There is clearly something wrong about that.

But it is not just an issue with Newcastle.

There have been similar problems with club owners right through the football pyramid: from Leyton Orient through Coventry City, Bury, Bolton Wanderers and all the way up to the biggest of them all, at Old Trafford.“I’m sure it’s the same for Manchester United fans,” Hirst adds. “They can speak to whoever at the club but there are blokes in Florida who wouldn’t dream of speaking to them. It’s not just that they come in and do what they do at these institutions. It’s that they don’t even seem answerable to the Premier League or the FA. They are the one per cent.”

That provokes an even starker question.

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Far from the one per cent, you would probably struggle to find an institution anywhere in Britain – or, indeed, anywhere in the world – as representative of the surrounding population as the local football club. In so many senses football is the only universal sport: the historian David Goldblatt has even described it as a social phenomena beyond any other – including popular music. The football club is nowadays truly “unique”, in the words of Mark Palios, the former Football Association chief executive who is now the owner of Tranmere Rovers.

Many local authorities and police now see the football club as the sole true community hub in many small towns. It thereby offers an essential outlet.

Football clubs are part of the fabric of our country (Getty)

“They are part of the social fabric of this country,” Palios argues. “It’s even things like the infrastructure of the family. You get bonds going to games that you don’t get elsewhere. It’s just massive for communities.”

So how is it that these social institutions – that are so central to so many people’s lives – have been allowed go almost completely unprotected by state authorities? How have they just been left open to the highest bidder, whoever that may be?

How do we have a situation where perhaps the best-run club could be the worst example of the problem: where an institution as great as Manchester City may well be being used as a state vehicle for Abu Dhabi?

Just how have we got to this?

“It is a massive, massive problem in the game”, one source, who works at the top level of football administration, argues. “And that it is now being brought up in Prime Minister’s Questions says a lot.

Part of the issue, however, is the historic lack of state interest as well as the connected government policies.

In what is really a remarkable situation for a country that professes to so cherish sport – and in stark contrast to many European countries – Britain has never formally treated it as a distinctive part of its culture with inherent sociological values.

“There is an unwritten law in football that government interference is not welcome and they are kept at arm’s length,” Palios explains.

The next problem, though, is that there are precious few written laws within the game to protect our clubs.

One, the fit and proper persons test, “patently failed”, in the words of Palios.

Another has been subject to – and consequently eroded by – the forces of history and economics. Some of this even goes back to 17th century legislation surrounding the gathering of people in public places to control political protest. That meant that football clubs grew out of a legal context where, to actually complete a project like the construction of a new stadium, they had to become legal companies. Just like any other business.

There are two common types of ownership structure for football clubs in England: i). public limited companies regulated by the stock exchange to which it is registered and ii). private limited companies ran be shareholders.

“(Limited companies) was the only legal form in which football clubs entered and went through the 20th century,” Goldblatt explains. “So the possibility of fan ownership, social ownership, the socio model you find in Spain etc, all of those were excluded from the very beginning before anyone had even thought about it.”

The early FA at least thought about the social side of the game with the introduction of Rule 34 at the turn of the twentieth century. Just as professional football was beginning to take off, the FA imposed rules that allowed clubs to form limited companies, while prohibiting directors from being paid, restricting dividends to shareholders and protecting stadiums from asset-stripping.

This at least encouraged the idea that working for the club was a form of public service. But the well-meaning restrictions could not withstand the growing commercialisation of the game.

It sums up so much that Rule 34 was eroded at the height of Thatcherism. Although the FA badly needed to update the regulations in the wake of the problems that arose from the connected lack of investment –from outdated facilities to the struggles with hooliganism – they did not need to sidestep them completely, as happened in 1983.

Former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Getty)

That was when Tottenham Hotspur sought to become the first club to float on the stock market, and their advisers asked the FA if they could form a holding company to evade the restrictions of Rule 34. The governing body – in a move that genuinely changed football history, but did not seem to involve even a moment’s deeper thought – obligingly stood aside.

The way was then opened for what we have now. A free-for-all.

“English football in that regard had become completely wide open. And the degree to which the FA and Football League ever thought about regulating who could own a club… it wasn’t an issue,” Goldblatt says. “This was a time when football didn’t make money. You were desperate for anyone to take over a club and pay the bills, so anyone is allowed in. It’s incredibly light-touch regulation.

“The dominant ideology ensures people do not even think it’s an issue, since the idea that basically anything and everything has been up for sale has been ingrained in British political culture since Margaret Thatcher started selling everything off in the mid-1980s.”

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It is a striking thought that Roman Abramovich initially looked into buying Barcelona and Real Madrid before Chelsea in 2003 – only to find the Spanish clubs were completely off-limits due to the fact they are completely owned by their members.

They are admittedly two of only four clubs in Spain with that structure (along with Athletic Bilbao and Osasuna) and La Liga obviously has its own inherent problems. It similarly cannot be denied that English football has collectively seen huge benefits from the current situation. It has meant that its top division has become the one true global league – and perhaps the greatest product in the game – flush with money due to its proactive courting of international investment.

But this is also how the issue of who owns your club has become so elusively subject to greater historical forces, which has led to greater problems. Post Thatcher, football obviously grew to the point where it started to make serious, serious money – and began to generate a lot of capital way beyond finance – which made the sport attractive to all manner of interests.

That has created an element of pot luck about who buys clubs, giving rise to a growing problem.

And it is probably the biggest problem in the game – and one that has not been subject to enough security. The greatest and most damning shame is that, for those clubs already bought by decidedly ambiguous parties, the horse has not just bolted but raced off far into the distance. There is no coming back.

There is similarly little that can be done to help many clubs at this moment in time, as the futility felt by so many fans at clubs including Manchester United and Newcastle United shows. That has only served to cause further hostility.

How can Newcastle fans effectively protest? (Getty)

“People accuse those of going to the game of validating the regime, and people say you need a boycott,” Hurst explains. “But I’m a football fan and I have got friends and family who will go the match and I won’t see them there. It has that social cost.

“Also, I’m one person. Last season, we had a game against Everton scheduled for 3pm and it was moved something like 12 days beforehand due to the Europa League. So we can’t even hold the club and league to fixtures we have bought tickets for. We have so little say as fans at the minute.

“There are people who have not gone to a match since relegation in 2009. That is a decade they have not been going to a game. We had a protest for the game against West Ham last season, where we decided to go into the stadium after kick-off. I expected to see the ground empty but ultimately there were only about 2,000 that day who did. I realised then that it is just not going to take effect. You have to look at it a different way.”

So, Hurst is trying a different approach. He is looking to the future.

“We’re going to try, as a Supporters’ Trust, to raise serious money. Because everyone has tried everything else. People have tried not going. People have tried protesting outside the ground, protesting Sports Direct, boycotting merchandise, boycotting food inside the stadium. And he is still there. It’s unrealistic to raise £300m but what is not unrealistic is to raise maybe a couple of million pounds so there could be something there for fans to buy into the club. Even if it’s a small per cent.”

Palios’ own ideal for Tranmere United is actually along the same lines.

“I’m looking at a permanent structure. What I’d like to do is see something along the lines of close to 25 per cent owned by the council. A golden share that allows them to restrict and vet the ownership that comes in. And then 25 per cent possibly for supporters, but through a special purpose vehicle that is more manageable than just 1,000 supporters owning the club. And so you get that necessary two-way communication with fans, and then fifty to fifty-one per cent of private investment.”

It sounds like an ideal for all clubs. Yet, at the moment, it is a pipe dream for most.

But the growing feeling is that this is something football – as well as the authorities – absolutely have to start thinking about. They have to remember what the game represents.

The fight for the soul of English football (Getty)

"The combination of stripping away all old regulations so that all you have left is unprotected limited companies just results in a pervasive culture where anything can be privatised," Goldblatt adds. "Meanwhile, social ownership is not even on the table, let alone seen as a feasible alternative. There is just pathetic regulation from the FA and the English Football League.

“Again, one goes back to Germany, where there is a really serious fan movement that is seriously organised with networks who really make a noise when stuff like this is happening. There are also fanbases who are prepared to inconvenience themselves to make things happen. People really give a damn. But a combination of factors has made English football easy pickings.”

And that has led to a hard time – as well as numerous hard questions – for so many supporters.