I was out this afternoon, walking along the sea front and by the lake grounds at Portishead, enjoying the absurdly mild Boxing Day air. I got home, checked the football results and social media and saw that my old team, Bristol Rovers, had drawn 0-0 at AFC Wimbledon. In terms of the footballing qualities of both teams, I have no idea whether this is a good result for either team, but in terms of the size and stature of both clubs, on the face of it, this was a better result for Wimbledon. Or was it?
You all know the story of Wimbledon and I hope you do because it will save me cutting and pasting sections from Wikipedia to inform you. Anyway, they are fan-owned and fan-run in a way that I wish I had better understood over a decade ago. I love them for that alone. Anyone who loves football for what it should be at least ought to have a degree of empathy for what they have achieved. A multitude of promotions, coming from non-existence to the Football League. This was a fairy tale story in the way that Bournemouth, Leicester and Wigan’s were not.
I then learned that the home team had played almost the entire game with 10 players, having had one sent off in the first few minutes. Wimbledon’s achievement today is quite special, then. But competing on what is not a level playing field is even more of an achievement.
For instance, in recent years Rovers’ chairman has put £5 million into the club. Together with a number of loans from other directors and even venture capital groups, there is only one word to describe a club operating under such a financial regime: insolvent. Others have described situations at other clubs, where rich “investors” have put in millions as financial “doping”. Of course, I would not dream of putting Rovers in that category, but I’d love to know the difference. It’s still another way of spending money you haven’t got.
I would certainly not accuse all Gasheads as being big-time Charlies because it is hard to be big time in the fourth tier of English football, but it seems to be very easy to patronise other clubs. For instance, for reasons which are unclear, today’s game was not “all ticket” and, sadly for some, Gasheads were turned away. I have no idea whether it should have been all ticket nor whether anyone from either club was to blame, but I do cringe when I see things of social networks from some Rovers supporters which say, in effect, that these poxy little clubs can’t cope with the support a massive club like ours gets. They have no right to even be in our league. And we’ve got far more money than them, even if a lot of it was unearned and remains borrowed. And don’t you forget it.
I read the same thing kind of things last year, when Rovers spent an ultimately successful year in non league football. A minority were forever dissing the smaller clubs for their poor facilities and stadia, certainly when compared, which they weren’t, to the state of the art facilities at the Memorial Stadium where you can still piss in a portakabin and get soaked on an open terrace.
All this piffle detracts from the story of two very different football clubs. One run on a sound financial footing, with the full democratic involvement of all the supporters and another run on the basis of boom and bust with zero involvement of anyone outside the boardroom and, actually, a good few in it.
Perhaps one or both clubs has made a cock up and it is quite possible that some home fans were turned away too. That’s a horrible thing to happen and it’s rarely happened to me because I supported Rovers when they were absolutely crap and on a downward spiral and you could fit our away following onto a few buses and a fleet of MOT failures.
The “my club is bigger than your club” is one of the least attractive arguments in the game. It’s patronising, sneering and downright disrespectful but it seems some folk get a kick out of that.
I wish every club was run on the basis of at least some supporter involvement, preferably like Wimbledon, but also like a Barcelona or Bayern Munich with some genuine accountability to the fan base. It would be nice if those so knowledgeable fans at the so-called bigger clubs walked the walk rather than talked the talk in how to make things better, but it’s far easier to make cheap jokes about other clubs than effect change, especially if they are allegedly smaller clubs.
The vast majority do not sneer and indeed respect the achievements of those who have sought, against the odds, to return football to its supporters. It’s also sound advice that you don’t diss other people when you’re on the way up because the way football works you will probably meet them again on the way down.
