Following Norwich City’s entirely predictable relegation from the Premier League, it was not surprising that many of their fans blamed the board of directors, including 80 year old TV cook and national treasure Delia Smith. The board, they said, didn’t ‘invest’ in the playing squad like other Premier League clubs and therefore couldn’t compete. The club needed new owners, not local people who ran it sustainably, but by anyone with deep pockets. They had seen what happened at Newcastle United when Saudi Arabia bought the club and so Premier League safety. Why couldn’t the Canaries do the same?
For Norwich fans, add many, if not most, fans. While it matters to some supporters who owns their club, of greater significance is how much money they have to spend on players. Accountability and fan ownership is one side of the coin, but it doesn’t matter if you keep getting relegated, when you can’t compete with clubs with generous benefactors.
You can understand it. If you support Norwich you want them to stay up. You don’t want to turn up and watch them get dicked by clubs whose owners have more money than God. You want Norwich to have the same kind of money. If the money comes from a country with a terrible human rights record, well that’s not your fault, is it? You just support the team.
The reality is actually very simple. Most of us want our clubs to live beyond their financial means. In Bristol, few Shitheads care much that owner Steve Lansdown subsidises his massively loss-making City as long as the club performs well. Across town, no one cares that Rovers are solely owned and have their losses covered by Jordanian banker Wael Al Qadi. On the day the Gas were promoted, there were no demonstrations complaining at the owner, or his dubious choice of manager. On the field everything was tickety boo. The two clubs’ fans will only kick off if the club fails on the pitch. If the owner has to plug the financial gaps, that’s what he’s there for, right?
What’s more, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle now. There are all kinds of fair play arrangements but some clubs are always able to spend more money than others. And to compete, even in the lower leagues, clubs have to ‘speculate to accumulate’, as we fans say, which is another way of saying we should spend what we haven’t got and hope for the best.
The English game itself doesn’t care who owns clubs. Almost all the top clubs are foreign owned, by American hedge funds, middle east oil money; that kind of thing.
Norwich City should be careful what they wish for. Look at relegated Burnley, whose new owners ALK Capital essentially took out loans to buy the club which then required the club itself to service them. A leveraged buy out, rather like that at Manchester United, albeit on a smaller scale and with potentially disastrous consequences now the club has been relegated. Do the loyal fans at Carrow Road fancy a bit of that? But then again, that’s a matter for the suits. Fans are only there to support the team.
The ownership model for English football is broken. More than that, I doubt that it can be fixed given the way football is heading. As long as people keep paying for Sky and the like we will be relying on vast sums from often dubious business people to compete and succeed. As things stand in football, there’s only boom and no bust. As long as the gravy train stays on the tracks, who’s to worry?
