Bring on relegation and the fun that follows…
For a couple of years in the late 70s I was a Littlewoods football pools collector. This involved collecting coupons and money from people’s houses. As I did so, I would stop and chat to steelworkers, shop workers, bank managers and sometimes enjoy the flirty attention of an attractive teenage daughter. It was a great cross-section of society and I got friendly with quite a few people, so much so that at Christmas, they’d invite me in, give me a drink and a hefty Christmas box. I loved it and it taught me a lot of life lessons.
I got to keep 12.5% of the money I collected. That meant on a good week I could trouser over £20, which in the late 70s was rather a lot of money. My boss said I’d created an exceptionally profitable round because people liked me and when the punters liked their collector, they tended to spend more money, or at least it kept the attrition rate low to zero.
So he asked if I’d like to take on another round for more money, I turned it down. I was happy with my £20-plus and thought working longer for more money would be stressful. I’d have to hurry around, not chatting to anyone, not doing the very thing which had made it successful in the first place. That made no sense to me, but he was astonished and grumpily accused me of lacking ambition. I replied that my ambition was to enjoy myself first and foremost, because if you didn’t enjoy it, what was the point in doing it? Clearly, the realities of the adult world hadn’t yet made themselves clear to me. But that stayed with me, and has remained my raison d’etre, when possible, ever since. Fun first, money later. And at around this time in every season that always comes back to me because of the panic over potential relegation out of the top flight.
One of the most subversive opinions you can hold as a football fan in the modern era is to stop believing relegation from the Premier League is a terrible thing. It’s not. And likewise, promotion to it – for many clubs and their fans – is a double-edged sword. Great to win a league or come second, but a season of expensive and often grim misery usually awaits, during which you’ll be told survival is a great achievement in itself. Another lie. But if we doubt it, the Premier League will tell us that these aches inside are only growing pains.
I know this better than most as a Boro fan. The last couple of seasons we played well, won a lot and it was fun. Everyone was happy. This year it’s predictably bloody awful, everyone is getting at each other, there are a lot of frowns and not enough smiles, and almost no fun at all. It makes me long to be relegated, so we can go back to winning more in the second tier and relax a little.
That’s why I say, especially for clubs like the Boro, relegation is success, because you’re freed from the Premier League’s grasping, skeletal, bony, death-cold clutches. Freed from its lies.
I fully realise this point of view is sacrilege to some, but the ceaseless vaunting of the Premier League product needs serious counterbalancing.
This is a business which has so hypnotised fans, players, managers and owners as to its primacy and desirability, that getting knocked out of the cup competitions, or even the Champions League, to try to preserve resources, in order to merely survive in the Premier League or make the top four, has become entirely normal.
Yes, being in the top flight guarantees the club a massive cash slush fund, but it guarantees everyone that, so you gain no competitive advantage. In other words, the money is effectively worthless. You spend it all paying over the odds for, and to, average talent, and that just winds fans up even more. And these fans probably have to pay a lot more to see the home games and a hell of a lot more for many away games.
A win against Huddersfield, Barnsley or Burton Albion cheers a fan more than a loss to Spurs, Arsenal or Chelsea. We all know that losing to a much better side is worse than winning against anyone, in any league. Yet the marketing of the Premier League seems to have made many people believe this simply isn’t the case. We should be grateful, happy even, just to tread on the hallowed Premier League soil even if it’s no fun. They sell the Premier League as a thrilling valhalla; some sort of heavenly pinnacle of achievement and merely existing in it is a superior lifestyle for everyone.
I saw one poll this weekend which suggested 43% of fans would rather take Premier League survival over winning it one year and being relegated the next. That is the depth of the Premier League’s money mind control.
Sometimes the way relegation is talked about, you’d think a club will actually go out of existence if they go down, rather than just play in another league. It’s all taken far too seriously. The Premier League – aided by its hypnotised acolytes – aggrandises itself by painting life outside as a wilderness, when the truth is, life is better. The away days for fans are less stressful, it’s easier, and costs less to get tickets, and the whole experience isn’t the sporting equivalent of shopping for tea candles in IKEA.
Our next game is away at Stoke. Does that fill anyone with more joy and enthusiasm than an away game at say, Wolves or Norwich or Rotherham? For most, it surely just doesn’t. The lush uplands pastures of the Premier League for many are, in reality, a field of tares.
Easily the best thing to happen to a newly promoted club is to get relegated immediately. You get enough money to keep the club financially buoyant, you get parachute payments, and then you can go about enjoying your football again. Okay, sometimes you have a few awful seasons, but awful is awful, whatever level you ply your footballing trade. Why pay over the odds for Premier League awful?
Maybe being a yo-yo club is the best of all worlds. A club can slip down the leagues and become a basket case, but relegation isn’t an excuse to run a club badly and that’s the real reason for the collapse of some clubs, relegation down the leagues merely being the consequence of that mismanagement. .
As far as another worry about relegation goes – that it means cost-cutting at the club and the consequent dismissal of workers – well, that’s all a matter of priorities for the club. Many chose the wrong ones. You could keep 50 staff on 20 grand a year for the cost of one footballer’s wages. Get rid of one of those over-priced, average footballers that you signed to try and compete in the top flight and keep the club workers in employment.
All those years ago I had the choice between more money, more pressure and less fun, or less money, no pressure and more fun, and out of pure gut instinct I chose the latter. As far as football goes, I still don’t think it’s the wrong choice and no amount of marketing relegation as disaster will convince me otherwise.
We live life for a good time, not for a long time, and hanging on in quiet desperation to 17th place in the top flight feels much more like losing than winning, no matter how much the Premier League wants us to believe that in their world, pain is pleasure.
John Nicholson