Punk Football at Everton

Most fans have an image that comes to mind when people talk about football club owners. For those, like me, whose formative years were the 1970s and 1980s, it’s the old-school stereotype that pops into our head: the cigar-chewing, sheepy wearing, local boy made good; the man who wants to bring the hard-nosed lessons he learned in the business world to the club that he supported as a boy. But if that all seems horribly archaic and you’re more of a child of the Premier League-era, then the images that come to mind are probably of the game’s new generation of owners, like the Russian oligarch, the Middle Eastern sheik, or the passionless, dead-eyed, American automaton.

Regardless of your age, I’d bet that the one image that definitely doesn’t pop into your head is that of you; the ordinary fan. And yet, there’s probably not a supporter alive who hasn’t at some point idly daydreamt about running the club they follow, imagining the changes they’d make with the first sweep of the new regime. But for much of the game’s history, the likelihood of these daydreams one day becoming reality has always been unlikely.

But is that still the case today? Over the past few decades a revolution has been taking place within English football that has begun to challenge the long-held belief that fans have no place in the boardroom. At the heart of this revolution has been the creation of the ‘supporters trust’, democratically structured organisations that seek to hold clubs to account and advance the cause of fan ownership.

From its first rumblings at Northampton Town back in 1992, with the backing of Supporters Direct the trust movement has blossomed. In English football today there are currently 104 supporters trusts, 73 of which are in either the top-flight or the Football League. Although not all own shares, many do. And there are even some that possess a majority shareholding, like the trusts at AFC Wimbledon, Exeter City and Portsmouth.

In many ways the revolutionaries of the trust movement are simply taking our game back to its roots. Before the arrival of the moneymen, clubs were traditionally owned and run by the fans and the players. The board was elected and the membership deferred to on decisions that mattered. This was football as the embodiment of democracy, or about as far away from the modern sport as it’s possible to be. It was only with the coming of the professional game and its never-ending demand for cash that this supporters’ utopia began to unravel in England.

It was an unravelling that set football on a path that ultimately led to the sport that we know today, one characterised by an unsustainable degree of debt, banana-republic levels of wage inflation and the growing role played by owners without a connection to our clubs. But it could have been different. In other countries, such as Germany, Sweden and parts of Spain, the membership model persisted. As a result, over there, supporters have continued to see themselves as being a vital element within the community of the club, one that has a voice which deserves to be heard.

Punk football, the sobriquet adopted by the English supporter ownership movement, can be seen as this country’s attempt to both recapture the spirit of the game as it existed pre-professionalism and ape the membership model of ownership of continental Europe.

To date, despite its blossoming, punk football in England has largely been a phenomenon of the lower leagues. In the Premier League, there are only two clubs that possess share-holding supporters trusts, Swansea and Arsenal. The former acquired their shares when the club was hovering near the bottom of League Two, in dire financial straits and for sale at a knock-down price. The latter have just three shares out of a grand-total of 62,000, which hardly makes them the Gordon Gekko of supporter ownership.

Two big reasons for this lack of impact at the top are the costs involved in takeovers and also the absence of a level playing field once the fans have taken control.

When it comes to big clubs, the idea that the fans could ever unite to takeover seems remote because it would take thousands to each invest and thousands of pounds to do so; something that has never taken place in world football. Take us as an example. The club is currently up for sale for around £125m. If everyone sitting in Goodison got involved in a takeover, it would still equate to an individual investment of over £3000, which is a big ask.

But even if the fans did manage to beat the odds and gain control, there would still be huge challenges to face. Once at the helm, those same thousands of fans would have to support the club financially, keeping it competitive against rivals backed by deep-pocketed owners, which could very well lead to stagnation or decline. At several clubs where the fans have taken control in the past, such as Brentford, York City and Notts County the inability of the membership to adequately fund the club led to the abandonment of their experiment in fan ownership.

So does this mean that punk football has no place in the Premier League and that trusts are meaningless?

Although ownership, no matter how small gives a voice, that doesn’t mean that without a stake fans and trusts are powerless or without purpose. At rival clubs such as Chelsea, Liverpool and Utd, the trusts active there have sought to become an effective medium through which a strong relationship can be forged between the club and the fans.

These trusts have campaigned upon issues such as the creation of safe standing areas, the improvement of the club’s links to the local community and ticket pricing. Of course the nature of ownership has meant that not all of these campaigns have been a success and there’s been little to stop the clubs involved ignoring the demands of the trusts or any other supporter organisation, which is exactly what has happened on several occasions.

But in an age when our national game has never been more commercialised, as fans we should take comfort from the fact that even in the Premier League there are supporters who refuse to simply be viewed as customers alone.

At the moment, supporter activism is still young and the supporter trust movement a mere infant. Football has changed beyond recognition over the past twenty years and as supporters many of us are still trying to adjust to the new reality. The trust movement is a reaction to these changes and for many fans their way of attempting to redefine what it means to be a supporter in the modern game.

There will undoubtedly be success and failures and times when the struggle appears futile, but as fans, whether we follow a Premier League giant like Everton or a minnow plying their trade in the Conference, if we care about our game and about how our club is run, then it makes sense to be more than just a customer and join together in a trust. And in the long-term you never know what could happen. With enough members and enough momentum, football supporters are capable of achieving just about anything.

Jim Keoghan is the author of Punk Football: the rise of fan ownership in English football, which is published by Pitch Publishing
http://www.pitchpublishing.co.uk/shop/punk-football
www.facebook.com/punkfootballbook

Follow @jimmykeo

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