Supporters’ trust has been betrayed by clutches of capitalism

Tom Reed
Pride Park

Northampton Town established the first ever supporters’ trust 30 years ago but English football still refuses to learn any lessons.

 

They were rattling buckets at Northampton Town in 1992 for the stricken Cobblers and 30 years later, the debts are in the tens of million at Derby County. With capital firms and Mike Ashley circling, it’s clear nothing has been learned.

Dizzy by Vic Reeves and the Wonder Stuff was top of the charts in November 1991 when Deborah Marshall of the What A Load Of Cobblers fanzine realised the East Midlands club’s programme printers weren’t being paid. She got together with friends, including a certain Brian Lomax, who decided to organise a public meeting on the future of Northampton Town. Debts of £940,000 were revealed, small beer by today’s standards but enough to drown a club then.

The first ever supporters’ trust was created at Northampton in January 1992 with the one message that fans should be partners in the running of clubs. The wins came thick and fast at the Cobblers: two elected fans reps on the board; the completion of the Sixfields Community Stadium with public money; award-winning disabled facilities; and the first equal opportunities policy.

But it was also the year the Premier League burst into life with the strange assertion that despite the power grab, the big boys would look after the little guys and that overseas money was a good thing.

The fan partnership idea got lost among the Sky Sports fireworks and dancing girls, despite Lomax going on to start Supporters Direct and help Wimbledon and Exeter with fan-owned models which flourish to this day.

In that 30-year gap, with the Mansour and Abramovich millions creating an illusory feeling that English football is a rich sport, countless community clubs have faced financial ruin at the mercy of the open market, with fans left blinking into floodlights about to be switched off.

Derby are just the latest but Bury are only just getting back the keys to Gigg Lane after the Steve Dale disaster. Notts County were taken over by fake Middle Eastern investors Munto Finance. Hereford United were wiped out. Leyton Orient fans had to take back their club by force. You couldn’t make a lot of it up.

Yet still English football won’t learn its lesson; reasonable proposals from a fan-led review are likened to living in North Korea by West Ham director Karren Brady and its outcome still up in the air.

Save Derby County is the current refrain, just like it was Save the Cobblers, Save the Orient, Save Wigan, ad infinitum. Barely one club has remained completely untouched.

The executives that have taken over the game know the cost of everything and the value of everything and everything is for sale, from the advertising space where you piss, to your fandom itself via NFTs.

Whole clubs are now being targeted for cryptocurrency takeovers and Premier League outfits flirting with bewildering NFT releases are pushed as clearer options than the real fan-involvement pioneered at Northampton and in Germany with the 50+1 rule.

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Everton fans seemingly have it all in modern football terms, with the overseas owner and the shiny new stadium on the way (bar a bit of form) but they are, by and large, miserable as sin.

That disconnect is compounded by coronavirus in echoey stadia, where fans may as well be shook upside down at turnstiles in the never-ending pursuit of profit that pervades the people’s game.

Football has been ruined by capitalism, alright. We all know it. Now let me get on with my accumulator.

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