Bring back meat raffles: Football is better when it’s local

John Nicholson
A meat raffle

Is the Premier League eating itself? With news of 19 clubs meeting to discuss one club, with 18 voting against two over sponsorship deals, with greed and self-interest endemic throughout the league, which in turn leaks like so much toxic waste into the lower leagues, with all of these things, isn’t it time to say enough is enough and walk away from it?

The Premier League was always a financial cabal; it was set up to maximise income for an elite. You might argue this ramping-up of selfish behaviour had been in place since 1983 when the traditional sharing of 20% of the gate money with the away side – an important income to smaller clubs when playing the bigger clubs – was dumped.

But as football got richer – or at least executives and players – we, the fans, got poorer. They told us rises in ticket prices was commensurate with a rise in quality. ‘You’ve got to pay more for better quality’ is a principle we understand well in society, but does it really apply to football, a mercurial and highly variable 90 minutes at every level? Harder to say.


No moral high ground between Newcastle and the PL


Is football better entertainment for all this greed? Is it more fun? Some say yes, many say no. This is why I wrote ‘Was Football Better In The Old Days’ to try and get to the heart of what we mean by all of these words we so liberally use. To try and understand why football remains so popular despite some truly heinous political and cultural developments.

One thing we never used to have to think about was our clubs being owned by foreign countries. Even now, it sounds ludicrous. What next? Will Russia buy Fulham? Why not? Will the Cayman Islands buy Manchester United? Scotland might buy Hartlepool. Who knows? All bets are off. All that matters now is money. Money is the be all and the end all.

It feels like football has been taken away from us somehow. Burnley, one of those great old English clubs borne amongst the mill workers terrace houses and forged on their hard-grafted wages, is now owned by ALK Capital, an American sports investment company.

When Bob Lord was in charge, he was hardly a paragon of virtue but he was born in Burnley and had a successful butchery business, with shops all across Lancashire. Fans were connected to owners, even if they didn’t like them. That is lost now. Who gives a damn about ALK? No-one. ‘Have you got any money?’ is the only question anyone will ask. People’s clubs have become just an asset in a portfolio of many.

This makes our football lives colder, somehow. You could moan about Lord while buying your Sunday joint from one of his shops. There is something brilliant about that. Word might even get back to Lord himself. “When you see him, you can tell ‘im for me, he should never have sold Ralph Coates.”

Who are you going to bitch about at ALK? They’re distant and anonymous. It’s intangible, but we’ve lost something.

To one degree or another, this is the case right across football as it moved from parochial local business to global brand and the Premier League was at the heart of that change.

Somehow, we let it all happen with little protest, forever hypnotised by the money to make our clubs better and that has ended up with, well, Newcastle United being owned by a repressive autocracy. I still can hardly believe that is true.

Newcastle supporters celebrate Premier League takeover approval

And yet amongst the despair these changes invoke in many is the fact that lower-league football right down the pyramid, is also very well attended. The same number of people go to see non-Premier League games as go to see top-flight games. This contradicts what the Premier League propagandists told us all along. More money didn’t mean more fun for these people. Supporting your local club was more important whatever level they were at.

Many have rejected their ‘Premier’ product because it is too expensive for not enough return and it involves putting money in the pockets of terrible people. Going to a smaller club is a profoundly human experience. There is no stress on your moral framework about some Joelinton or other picking up £80k per week. It all just feels local. And that is what football has always been: local. Not a global brand. Not a business with trusted partners. Not a money pit.

So they’ve turned away from the Premier League or have never engaged with it much and they watch small clubs with a few hundred, maybe a thousand or two others. It’s not live on TV. There’s no VAR. There is little in the way of merchandise. There’s just football. And that’s all that is wanted.

Football at all levels shares the same emotions and you are as likely to witness an entertaining game in the Northern Premier League as you are in the top flight. The difference is that it is all smaller scale, all more human and no-one is trying to sell you a club-branded bone saw. You may win a bag of bloody meat in a raffle but you can be pretty sure it isn’t the hacked-up body of a dissident.

So football survives and thrives. The Premier League is awful as a concept, awful in reality. Exploiting the emotional ties that people have to their clubs, pushing out propaganda ceaselessly to pretend this is the best of all worlds, absolutely normal and not an extreme mode of global capitalism which seeks to exploit all of us, all of the time. Cold, mercenary and vicious, it is the antithesis of what football is to those who populate clubs lower down the pyramid.

So was football better in the old days? To put in in the local vernacular, mibees aye, mibbes naw.