“This one hurts,” tweets a Bristol Rovers fan, after today’s home defeat to Exeter City. “We, as fans, deserve more.” Do we? Do we fucking really? On what basis? Because we, or rather you, turn up week in, week out; cheering on the team in large numbers, regardless of now crap the team is, how useless the manager is, how distant the latest owners are? That, in itself, gives a fan the right to “deserve more“? I don’t buy this.
If it was true, Manchester United fans would deserve better than their current 14th position in the Premier League. Over 80,000 people turn up at every home game and the team is shit. But they, as fans, deserve more? In truth, they probably deserve everything that’s coming to them. In the case of Manchester United, one of the biggest football clubs on the planet reduced to a cash cow for absent billionaires who don’t give a toss about the football and a project for a billionaire businessman who forever promises the Earth and consistently achieves nothing. This ‘we deserve’ bollocks is a typical vague sense of entitlement football can somehow ingrain itself in the fans’ psyche.
Of course, the sixth successive defeat for Rovers will have hurt. The supporter lives to see her or his team win. They are there for the dark days, too, because that’s what being a supporter is all about, but football is all about the winning.
I began to fall out of love with Rovers in 2006 following what is known as a ‘boardroom bust up’. An ambitious group of directors came up with a serious long term plan to rescue the club from the doldrums and build a strong, sustainable football club and the Rovers establishment, essentially the forces of conservatism, won the day. During the ensuing 19 years, the club has muddled along, with no clear direction or ambition, plans to build a new state of the art stadium have been abandoned, with the club choosing to stay at the unfit for purpose Memorial Stadium by building a number of cheapskate patchwork improvements. Now, the club stands perilously close to a catastrophic relegation to the bottom tier of the English Football League and people are saying “We, as fans, deserve more.”
A succession of hopeless owners from local builder Nick Higgs, to the Jordanian playboy and man baby Wael al-Qadi and now Kuwaiti businessman Hussain AlSaeed have succeeded only in taking the club where it is now, a loss-making League One club on the verge of relegation. Things were so bad, al-Qadi appointed the odious Joey Barton as manager. And what did most of the fans do throughout that time? They did what fans do. They watched the football, cheered through the good days and moaned through the bad ones.
There were no organised demonstrations, no groups of supporters working to change the direction of the club. The fans usually got behind the team on matchdays, then went home for tea. Football is about many things but it isn’t, at least not for everyone, the be all and end all. Beyond getting angry on forums, newspaper letters pages and on the radio, there is an acceptance. We’re shit and we know we are. We want to be better, for sure, but there’s nothing we can do to change things – so why bother? Which brings me back to “We, as fans, deserve more.”
While football may be for many a distraction from real life, real life itself doesn’t work that way. Rarely in the real world do you get something for nothing. You may work harder to gain a reward, but if you don’t work hard at all, it’s unlikely that you will. If you want change to come, then you have to work for it, you need sometimes to get your hands dirty. If you want nice things in life, they won’t just come along if you do nothing to help bring them about. Just saying you deserve more means you will get more. I might think I deserve to be paid for this blog, or just to attract more readers, but wishing those things won’t make them happen.
As I always say, the football fan usually ends up with the club it deserves. Manchester United fans tamely accepted the takeover by the Glazer family, as they took hundreds of millions of pounds out of the club, because they had arguably the greatest manager of all time, Sir Alex Ferguson, keeping the football side of the club successful. Now, the club is a mess, following Fergie’s retirement and the decline that has followed. And now many thousands of fans have been replaced by the day trippers who bring far more money to the table. You can argue that they had no influence with the ownership but most fans didn’t even try to gain any. Unless you are, say AFC Wimbledon or Exeter City, clubs with genuine fan involvement and ownership, you tend to take what you are given. It’s the same thing as “the workers united will never be defeated”. Most fans just want to watch the football and given my time all over again, I’d have done just that. But I didn’t. Instead, I got too near the flame that burns within my club, got burned and I never got over it. I know dozens of people who have done the same. In the end, is it really worth the hassle? So much easier to whinge and complain in the media or on social networks.
I am not urging anyone to get involved at their football club of choice. It’s a matter for them, as it was for me. Someone – turns out it wasn’t Edmund Burke – once said this: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Well, if you replace “evil” with “incompetent wankers who own football clubs and have no emotional attachment to them”, you can work out my feelings on the matter. If a club’s owners are shit, get organised and campaign to get rid of them. If they’re shit and you can’t be bothered to get organised and campaign, then that’s fine, too. But please don’t tell me that you, the fans, deserve better because you really don’t. As the song goes, you only get what you give.
