Football – bloody hell. The game is still a phenomenal success, commanding attention and generating money on a scale the early pioneers cannot have comprehended. The breadth of its influence is reflected by the writer David Goldblatt in his excellent social history of English football, The Game of Our Lives, when he recalls the British governor of Aden, Sir Richard Turnbull , telling then Foreign Secretary Denis Healey in the mid-1960s that association football would be one of only two monuments the fast-dissolving British Empire would leave behind (the other was the phrase ‘Fuck off”). As Goldblatt says: “Cricket, the game of gentlemen, would leave its mark in much of the Empire, but football, the game of the people, would be everywhere.”

And yet. The slow drip drip of concern and doubt does not go away. Football may well be everywhere, all-consuming, an unstoppable force, but the feeling that there is something very wrong is building slowly but surely.

Let’s start with the Premier League. The richest and most high-profile in the world, and arguably the most successful. Of its 32 titles contested, five have been won by Chelsea and eight by Manchester City. That’s just over 40% of the titles contested, and 13 of the previous 21, or about 63%, since Chelsea first won in 2004/05.

Chelsea changed the game when Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich bought the club in 2003. He immediately went on a £100m spending spree, which helped secure a Premier League and League Cup double in 2004/05. While the numbers were bigger, it can be argued there wasn’t much difference between Abramovich ‘buying’ the title and Jack Walker doing the same at Blackburn Rovers 10 years earlier in 1994/95. But the numbers are important. Walker spent £100m over the course of his nine-year tenure at Blackburn, a figure that included redeveloping the club’s Ewood Park stadium. Abramovich matched that figure in his first transfer window just on players.

It was a significant turning point. Walker was arguably the last of the traditional owner benefactors in British football to turbocharge his club’s success – Leicester City under Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha could be argued as a similar case, but it was the new economic reality that Abramovich imposed on the game that had attracted Leicester’s owners, themselves the billionaire bosses of a global retail business. Vichai drew on a fortune estimated to be £1.9 billion, although The Guardian estimated it took just £60m of spending to secure the title in 2015/16.

Abramovich’s success in building a respectable profile out of the chaos of post-Communist Russia was noticed by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family and ruler of the United Arab Emirates. And so in 2008, he acquired a majority stake in Manchester City, helped by a family fortune of around £300 billion. Such is the nature of the economies of the Gulf states, the UAE’s nominal GDP of $569.1 billion cannot be ruled out as a contributary factor. And while discussions about whether or not City are effectively owned by a nation state prompt what we can best call lively discussion, the benefits to it of the country being so closely associated with success in The World’s Most Successful Football Competition are clear.

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So the scale of the economics has changed, with even the traditional powerhouses of Liverpool and Manchester United – still the only truly global brands in English football – finding it hard to keep up. As for the other Premier League winners, Arsenal, while the club remains the closest to retaining a traditional ownership model, that owner is US sports tycoon Stan Kroenke (estimated wealth around $22 billion) and oligarch money from Alisher Usmanov has flowed into the club’s coffers.

With a scale of economic change such as this, the stakes become even higher. Which brings us to the very significant current problems facing The World’s Most Successful Football Competition. Because it seems that for Chelsea, a little more had to be done to attain success. It is now clear that, between 2011 and 2018, the club made £47m in secret payments to unregistered agents and third parties, payments that helped secure the services of Samuel Eto’o, Eden Hazard, David Luiz, Nemanja Matic, Ramires, André Schürrle and Willian. Four more players are named in the Premier League’s report, but they have been redacted with no explanation as to why.

These offences weren’t uncovered by the Premier League, which had also failed to ask too many questions about the source of Abramovich’s wealth when he bought the club. Chelsea’s new owners had reported them. There can be no doubt that Chelsea gained a sporting advantage from signing those players. But astonishingly, the Premier League has ruled that no sporting sanction should be applied. Instead, there’s a £10m fine – small change in today’s football finance world – and a suspended transfer ban.

The uncomfortable truth for the Premier League is that the integrity of Chelsea’s three title wins in 2009/10, 2014/15 and 2016/17 is in question. There is no easy solution, because it cannot simply be argued that the title should be awarded to the runners up. Who knows how each game would have gone had all teams been competing on a level playing field? But the campaigns are tainted.

Manchester City, as I’m sure I don’t need to remind you, currently face 115 charges for an alleged range of offences including disguising payments from ownership as sponsorship, and providing undeclared salary or bonuses to players and managers. The case has run on interminably, and what little faith observers had in the Premier League dealing with it properly was further eroded by the Chelsea verdict. Even if City are found guilty, will the Premier League conclude that no sporting advantage was gained? Again?

City have won six of the last eight titles. It’s a great story, the club that worked its way up through the leagues and back to the top after years in the wilderness, who challenged the big guns and upset the established order, who proved that anything was still possible. But that picture is blurred by the possibility that City also skewed the playing field. We’re not really here, you might say.

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What is indisputable is that there are question marks over the sporting integrity of a competition when two of its most successful teams may have achieved that success by gaining an unfair advantage. For sport to work properly, for it to capture the imagination and inspire devotion and loyalty, people have to believe that what they are seeing is real. Chelsea and City cast a long shadow of doubt.

Belief in what we see has also been put to the test by the introduction of VAR - a move packaged as one that would eliminate mistakes but which was really introduced to give the TV companies that put so much money into the game even more content and even more power. I’ve made it clear that I’d love to see the back of it, and I’m not alone.

In a survey of 8,000 fans, the FSA found that 75% wanted rid of VAR, and 86% had concerns about expanding its remit. Uppermost among the complaints was the fact that VAR was reducing those spontaneous moments of joy, as fans increasingly waited – or were forced to wait – to see if what they thought they’d seen was actually what they had seen. The very experience of being at the match was being damaged and fans were concerned.

The Premier League’s response? Well, it called into question the veracity of the survey as respondents were self selecting – an attack line subsequently recycled by at least one journalist who should have known better – and then claimed its own survey work showed “fans are largely in favour of keeping VAR.” Not for the first time, the Premier League didn’t share details of how its research was gathered.

Given the growing disquiet about the state of the product, few companies would choose to contemptuously dismiss criticism of a measure by customers who’d had that measure imposed on them, but this is the Premier League we are talking about.

Add in unrest about ever-rising ticket prices, fans being moved from long-held seats to make way for corporate areas, the erosion of concessionary pricing, late kick-off changes, anti-social kick-off times. And sprinkle with a general feeling that the fans the game is happy to use as marketing fodder when selling passion and loyalty to commercial partners are seen as an inconvenience at best. It’s a picture that should trouble anyone who cares about the long-term good of football.

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But there’s more. So many conversations about the state of the game feel the need to start with the caveat that it is a great economic success. But a recent BBC examination of the finances of clubs in the second-tier Championship showed clubs in the division had lost a total of £3 billion in the last 10 years. In the supposed economic miracle of the Premier League, three clubs – Chelsea, West Ham and Spurs, all from the capital city – have posted combined losses of just under half a billion pounds for the year. Clubs at this elite level are selling themselves their own stadiums, hotels, and women’s teams to balance the books, and Brighton and Hove Albion, a club that has benefitted from over £400 million in interest-free loans from its owner, is regularly held up as an example of a sustainably run club.

The riches on offer in the Premier League incentivise clubs outside the competition to gamble everything on getting there. But once there, as we’ve seen from the examples above, the financial challenges do not end.

What worries me is not the football bubble bursting – to use a phrase often toyed with – any time soon, but decline over the longer-term. Many of those running clubs or the game more widely are not in it for the long-term. Their approach is a relatively new addition to a game that existed for generations before they came along, and I suspect not too many of them care too much what happens for generations to come.

You’d be unduly alarmist to predict disaster, but you’d be a fool not to worry.

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The question of what makes a real football fan is a perennial one. Back in the day, the view that “hooligans” were “not real fans” was often aired. But the uncomfortable truth was that the blokes – I never heard of any female hooligans, which is a story in itself – who used to try to knock seven bells out of each other were as dedicated and knowledgeable about their clubs as fans who chose to express their support in other ways.

Labelling someone ‘not a real fan’ continues to be the ultimate expression of disapproval. Fans don’t make it easy for ourselves at times by engaging in divisive debates about whether fans who don’t go to matches, or fans who don’t go away, or fans who don’t live near the team they support are ‘real’.

Those conversations are present in every subculture, because a sense of belonging, of being part of a group, necessarily has an exclusive as well as an inclusive edge. Think of the dividing lines in music subculture, for example – “I saw them live before the first album came out”; “I saw the original line-up” and so on.

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Lately, the accusation that selected groups of fans are not ‘real’ fans seems to be used with increasing frequency to push a view that real fandom is indistinguishable from passive consumption. Fans are criticised by managers and players for not supporting them sufficiently uncritically. It’s a fairly crude attempt at deflection, but it takes hold. The view that ‘real’ fans are more likely to be critical when they see insufficient application to the cause rarely gets an airing. But it is an obvious point to make.

Empty seats at games has also been cited as evidence of an absence of real fans, or of a shortcoming in a club’s support. Of course, the nature of fan rivalry means we’ll seize on pretty much anything to put one over on the other lot. But more and more fans are uneasy at using empty seats in the opposition sections as a bit of one-upmanship at a time when price increases and discriminatory concession policies are pushing more and more fans out of the game.

Add late changes to kick-off times, anti-social kick-off times, a transport infrastructure that is not fit for purpose, and it is difficult to really justify using non-attendance as a reason to question fans commitment. It is useful, however, in deflecting attention from some of the game’s deeper-seated problems, such as avaricious pricing policies.

Few things fuel the idea that fans must be grateful for whatever they get more than the deployment of the criticism that those who complain or criticise are “entitled”. Of course there are examples of arrogance, overbearing behaviour, and even a touch of entitlement. But, to take the unhappy example of my own club, Tottenham Hotspur, fans who pay some of the highest ticket prices in Europe have been labelled entitled because they want to see more than 8 wins in the last 31 home games, consider having barely enough players to field a team as a failure, and would like to see some basic evidence of competence on the pitch during games.

It seems that anything beyond paying up and consuming the product unquestionably is not only frowned upon, but prompts plenty of opinion about what fans should and shouldn’t be doing. And, as has so often been the case, the conclusion seems to be that any problems are the fans’ fault. It’s a pity that fans are not quite so central to thinking in other areas.

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Extraordinary developments in the ongoing story of how fans are treated in European competition this week from the Atalanta v Borussia Dortmund game.

When the game was announced, the Italian club said that it would only allow Dortmund to sell tickets to buyers with German passports and home addresses. This was apparently due to suspected connections between Dortmund’s ultras and those from Atalanta’s rivals Napoli. This prompted protests from a number of Dortmund’s fan groups, who are some of the largest and most organised in Europe.

But matters were ramped up when German police began visiting German-based fans with tickets to prevent them from travelling, and other fans were detained and turned back at airports. Even more extraordinarily, according to one of my contacts in Germany, some of the small number of Dortmund fans who had arrived in Bergamo were visited by police and had their tickets confiscated.

Dortmund’s Sudtribune group announced before the game that the organised groups would be boycotting the game, and a statement said: “Such measures, in this form and intensity, have never before been implemented in connection with Borussia Dortmund’s international away matches.” The group added it was seeking information on the “background and legal basis of these measures”.

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Someone used the phrase “the sanctification of fandom” in an online discussion with me recently. It got me thinking about the role and profile of fans in football, because there is a lot of discussion about this right now.

In particular, the question of what fans have a “right” to say and feel crops up a lot. Is it OK to boo, to express displeasure with what you are seeing? Is there a right or a wrong time to do this? The word “entitled” comes up a lot. As does the concept of a “true” or “real” supporter.

The relationship between fans and players, and fans and their clubs, gets far more attention now, and it is heavily mined for material to feed the enormous content machine that has been built around football. That tends to mean interactions often get blown up to have far more significance than they would do without the always on content cycle.

I remember hearing about Spurs legend Steve Perryman years ago flicking a V sign to fans of his club after scoring a goal. He’d been on the end of some stick from the crowd and gave some back after proving his point. The incident passed with the game. These days it would be all over the media for at least the following week, groaning under the weight of elaborately over-constructed moral and ethical frameworks.

Fans, in general, want to see those playing for their team make some effort, show some pride, and display basic professional competence. Some entertainment and a few victories are also appreciated. If they aren’t seeing that, it should be no surprise when they express their displeasure. Should that descend into personal abuse and harassment? Of course not, but I don’t think shouting “You’re rubbish” or booing someone off is abuse.

Should players respond? Well, in life generally you shouldn’t dish out what you’re not prepared to receive, so the same applies in football. That’s basic manners. But does expressing criticism make fans any less fans, or not “true supporters” as one under-pressure manager insisted recently? I don’t believe it’s ever wise to question the legitimacy or quality of any fan’s support – it’s a no-win game because support can be expressed in so many forms.

It’s convenient to blame the fans for not giving the right kind of support. But, as Perryman told me when I was working with him on The Boys from White Hart Lane, the professional’s focus should be on the pitch, on their own performance – you put the crowd in the background. His teammate Micky Hazard told a matchday interviewer much the same more recently – it’s the player’s job to lift the crowd, and you do that by keeping your focus on the pitch.

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That’s maybe not a popular line to take. The idea of the crowd as the 12^th man has really caught on, and of course we love to buy into it. But is it any more than a comforting conceit? It’s easy to understand how a really passionate support can lift a group of players, just as a really negative atmosphere could knock them off balance. But between these extremes is the crowd really any more than background noise?

If you buy into the view that the crowd is always the 12^th man, then ironically it lets the players and managers off the hook for bad performances – and more than one manager recently has sought to blame poor support for poor performance. This, in turn, prompts another round of the old media favourite routine about how unreasonable and stupid fans are.

It is hard to argue that some sections of fandom are less patient, more vitriolic, less understanding than maybe they were – that’s partly a product of the social media age. But increased discontent is also rooted in other factors of the game’s own making. High ticket prices, late changes to kick-offs, anti-social kick-off times leading to more time off work and more expense, VAR, the constant efforts to reduce the element of uncertainty – all these things contribute to general discontent with where the game is going that manifests itself in negative expressions from supporters. Why shouldn’t fans complain when they are short changed? And when did we start needing permission to express discontent?

The game has made a rod for its own back, undermining the cohesiveness that made football the people’s game, and its culture of never explain, never apologise doesn’t help.

Liverpool fan Gareth Roberts wrote eloquently about the trade-off between fans and the game recently. Yes, maybe at times too much is made of the significance of fan culture – and I hold my hand up as one of the fanzine generation that contributed to that – but there also needs to be more recognition of why fans feel as they do by those who are quick to criticise fan negativity. Dismissing or belittling fans who don’t fall into a set way of expressing their support helps to obscure the many underlying problems football should be confronting. Which might be the point.

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There has rightfully been a lot of criticism about FIFA’s ticketing policy for the World Cup finals this summer. But while some outlets, notably the Morning Star and The Athletic, have covered the issues around the allocation of tickets for fans with disabilities, the situation created by FIFA has not attracted the attention it should.

FIFA has restricted disabled access tickets to the three most expensive categories, is charging the companions many fans with disabilities need with them, and is not restricting the resale of disabled access tickets, which are now appearing on resale sites for many times their face value.

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FIFA has so far refused to engage with supporter organisations, despite its policy clearly being in contravention of its own statutes and international human rights standards. And across the whole range of its policies at what is shaping up to be a festival of unprecedented greed even by football’s standards, it is rolling out the line that all money generated goes back into the game. Answers to what “back into the game really means on a postcard please.

Football Supporters Europe is trying to get the approach changed, and reminds us that FIFA’s Gianni Infantino infamously declared in November 2022 that “Today, I feel disabled.” The more you hear about this summer’s Worl;d cup, the less attractive it sounds.

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Brighton and Hove Albion published end of year accounts for 2024-25 recently, and the always excellent Swiss Ramble provided some analysis (subscription required). I’ve got huge admiration for how the club’s current ownership have brought the club back from the brink of extinction to the force it is today. But I have an issue with how so many hold the club up as a great example of a financially well-run club.

There is a lot the club does well, although some of its ticketing policies could do with looking at and its banning of The Guardian for reporting on allegations about its owner doesn’t reflect well on it. I can’t imagine the club’s likeable and generally excellent head of media being too pleased with the censorship either. But the idea that it provides a financial model for others to follow is for the birds – seagulls included.

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The club made a £56m loss, a performance described by Swiss Ramble as: “One of the worst results in England’s top flight last season”. The underlying loss is reported as £111m. And this despite a £107m loan from the owner, who is widely reported to have put about £400m into the club since he bought it in 2009.

Now if Tony Bloom wants to pump vast sums into the club he supports, that is absolutely fine. But let’s not hold Brighton’s funding model up as one for others to follow. A point the new regulator, whose establishment was opposed by Brighton’s ownership, will surely have in mind.

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We drove south for the start of the 1998 World Cup, stopping off to watch the opening games in small town bars along the route. Football wasn’t quite all-consuming in France at that stage. We had tickets for England v Tunisia in Marseille, and for a mouthwatering clash in Toulouse between Roberto Baggio’s Italy and Marcelo Salas’s Chile. After avoiding most of the nonsense in Marseille, we drove along the coast and, breaking the journey, pulled up one evening by a beach somewhere near Beziers, if I remember correctly, where we spotted some huge Chilean flags on poles planted on the sand, several coaches and what looked like a beach party.

We parked and went down to the beach to investigate, where we were welcomed in the gathering dusk by a large group of Chile fans who had come off the coaches. There were barbecues, beer and games of beach football, and the fans urged us to join them. Their warmth and generosity restored some faith after the ugliness of Marseille, and we stayed with them for a few hours swapping tales of following our teams. They told us they saved for four years, putting money away every month so they could follow their country at the World Cup. In Toulouse the next day, Chile’s fans outnumbered those of Italy by four to one.

I thought of those people as FIFA announced ticket prices for the World Cup in the USA next summer. You’d have to put a lot aside every month to afford to follow your team at this tournament.

Football Supporters Europe estimate it will cost a supporter a minimum of $6,900 to follow their team from the opening game to the final. That is nearly five times what it cost during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. And remember, that is just the ticket prices. I wanted to post the link to the prices, but go to FIFA’s website and try to find it. World football’s governing body is unusually coy about providing these details, preferring, as FSE says, to issue price tables “gradually and confidentially”.

The English FA has released a table of prices – between $265 and $700 dollars for England’s opening game against Croatia in Dallas. England’s Free Lions supporter group called the pricing “a slap in the face to supporters who support their team outside of the flagship tournament that appears every four years” and added that “supporters of the participating nations have been completely let down”.

Worse still, as FSE points out, “the lowest price category will not be available to the most dedicated supporters through their National Associations, as FIFA chose to reserve the scarce number of category 4 tickets to the general sales, subject to dynamic ticket pricing.” This, it says, is “a monumental betrayal of the tradition of the World Cup, ignoring the contribution of supporters to the spectacle it is”.

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Football writer Henry Winter, who has consistently spoken up for fans, got it right when he said: “As well as greed, it’s also naivety by FIFA. Pricing out real fans risks problems with segregation. Plus the atmosphere will be diluted if many of the usual noise-bringers are priced out. TV will hate that. It pays FIFA fortunes for atmosphere generated by supporters.”

FSE has called for an immediate halt to ticket sales to enable discussion with fan associations and national football bodies to find a solution that “respects the tradition, universality, and cultural significance of the World Cup”. Few expect that to happen, but it is the right call to make. Fewer still expect FIFA’s success in securing leading contender status for the World Fleece Prize (hat tip to England’s Football Supporters Association for that one) not to be closely observed by clubs elsewhere, and especially not those in the Premier League.

But the uproar over ticket prices at the World Cup is itself a product of the success of supporter campaigning over pricing. Not too long ago any complaints about football prices would have been met by the reaction “well, don’t go then” and trite arguments about supply and demand. But the economics of football do not work in the same way as economics elsewhere, and the recognition that the game is too often guilty of exploiting the unique customer relationship and squeezing the fans whose contribution to the spectacle helps boost its economic value has led to some searching questions and some sustained campaigning.

It’s a campaign that has been covered frequently by The Football Fan, and recently over 100 fan organisations signed up to a call for a halt in price increases in order to make room for a conversation on how, as the campaign slogan puts it, to stop exploiting loyalty. That campaign was backed by UK MPs in an Early Day Motion in Parliament.

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There’s some way to go. The Premier League says pricing is down to the clubs, but some clubs are now saying they can’t discuss pricing because the Premier League is in discussion with the FSA. And I know of at least one club that is insisting the new Football Governance act does not cover discussions over ticket prices. It explicitly does (Schedule 4, s4 (2) since you ask), so getting club executives to actually read and be aware of the legislation is going to be one of the new regulator’s initial tasks. Fan organisations need to use the leverage the Act gives them, too.

And the Premier League also continues to insist the average price of a ticket in the PL is £38. Fan groups have long asked to see the working, because it just doesn’t ring true. It’s possible that some convoluted creative accounting can bring an average to that figure, but the devil is in the detail. The PL has used the figure to give the impression that most people can get a ticket for £38 at most games. That’s simply not true, and to imply so is disingenuous – a word too many in football see as an aspiration rather a criticism.

The rows over football ticket pricing feed off a deeper discomfort about the failure to recognise the difference between price and value, and about how much that we hold dear and have contributed so much to is being carelessly swept away by a relentless tide of monetisation. Overstating the case? Be honest and ask yourself if you care as much about the World Cup as you used to, if you’re starting to question how much longer you can keep doing this?

For the New Year, wouldn’t it be good if football made a resolution to be enlightened rather than simply enriched? We can but dream. In the meantime, thanks for following The Football Fan in growing numbers – and see you on the other side.

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It’s been a long time coming but the reselling of event tickets for above face value is to be outlawed in the UK. Widespread press reports came ahead of an official announcement on 19 November confirming government plans to ban the resale of tickets above their original cost.

There’s some confusion over how, or if, this will affect football. And I understand that the football industry wasn’t consulted by those pulling together the latest proposals. That’s partly because the problem of ticket resale inflation and industrial-scale ticket farming by agencies is far worse and more prevalent in the music business than in football, where there are more complex membership schemes and varying classes of ticket access to deal with.

Football tickets, however, are sold on for profit and at some scale, as a BBC investigation revealed in September. These ‘tickets’ often do not exist, so that issue would be dealt with under legislation on fraud. And the problem is difficult to tackle because the companies doing the selling are often based outside the UK, and so beyond the reach of UK law.

It is also already illegal in the UK for anyone other than a seller authorised by the event organiser to sell a football ticket. So reports that the new rules ‘do not apply to football’ are slightly misleading, giving the impression that the practice of reselling football tickets for more than face value is being ignored. It’s not in the new rules because existing legislation covers resale of football tickets.

The 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act made it illegal to sell a ticket for a football match unless authorised to do so by the organiser. The legislation was rooted in the events at the Hillsborough FA Cup semi-final in 1989 and the recommendations of the Taylor Report into them. The report recommended outlawing the selling on of tickets on the basis that it could lead to a breakdown in segregation, and to the possibility of people without tickets travelling to games and attempting to buy from touts or otherwise gain entry to the ground.

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It’s worth pausing for a moment to remember that neither of those things caused what happened at Hillsborough. And also that proposals to outlaw the selling on of tickets and to introduce seating were considerably more enthusiastically adopted by football than some other major recommendations Taylor made – that fans should not be priced out and that a fair price for a ticket at the time (1994) would be £6.

But to return to the subject at hand, football clubs signed deals in which they gave so-called secondary agencies permission to resell tickets to their games in return for a payment. So the criminalisation of selling on tickets, alongside the rise of the ticketing agencies and their deals with clubs, has led to the absurd situation in which a fan can be arrested for selling a ticket at face value to another fan, while a secondary ticket agency that has signed a deal as an official club ticketing partner can resell a ticket for 10 times face value perfectly legally.

Most people saw what the secondary agencies were doing for what it was – legalised touting. One of the things that prompted me to get involved with the Supporters’ Trust at Spurs about a decade ago was the club’s deal with Stubhub. As a rule, fans don’t like touting because it has a negative impact on us and goes against many of the values built up over years of supporter culture, but the move sparked particular ire at Spurs because the club, with its then characteristic lack of awareness and penchant for shoving a foot up the barrel of the nearest shotgun, had just been running an “Out the tout” campaign.

The message seemed to be “Out the tout unless they have paid us a lot of money”. Research the Trust carried out showed that 91% of tickets being sold on Stubhub were being sold well above face value. So the Stop Stubhub coalition was born, a campaign that took us into meetings at the House of Commons with MPs such as Sharon Hodgson who have helped bring the current proposals forward, into conversation with ethical ticket exchanges such as Twickets, and finally to Spurs deciding to axe the deal – while saying they’d always intended to do that anyway.

A flavour of the debate, and the club’s attempts to defend the indefensible, can be found in this report from the local Tottenham Independent, which gave the campaign a lot of support.

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The proposed new law may not apply to football, but there is an opportunity here. If the resale of tickets above face value is to be made illegal, that should logically mean it is illegal whether it is authorised or not. So the legislation should address this.

This week’s announcement does not, in itself, constitute a new law. It is an expression of intent to bring forward legislation in next year’s King’s Speech. What happens next is the process of haggling over wording and detail. Which is where some of the issues I’ve raised need to be tackled.

There’s also the issue of how UK law can be applied to a transaction that occurs overseas. The simple answer is that it can’t, and that’s why so many of the secondary ticketing agencies are registered outside the UK. But what if the law was written in such a way that it applied at the point of using the ticket at the event location?

Secondary ticketing is big business, which is why the industry put so much time and effort into trying to stop these proposals seeing daylight. Efforts to defenestrate the proposed legislation will continue apace, so fan organisations would do well to push for the detail that’s needed to make the new Bill work as it should.

As part of the process of making the improved fan engagement the new Independent Football Regulator will be looking for work, fan groups should be pushing clubs to recognise the direction of travel over the resale of tickets above face value. We need to finish the job of getting the secondary ticketing agencies out of football.

At the same time, we need to get rid of the poorly thought out legislation that criminalises fans for selling on tickets at face value. Such a transaction may well contravene club allocation schemes, in which case the instigator of the transaction would lose some or all of their privileges as a ticket holder under the rules of the scheme. There is no need for this transaction to be a criminal offence.

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In a related move, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced a major drive targeting what it sees as unfair online pricing practices. Practices in the spotlight include drip pricing, where additional fees are added at various stages in the transaction process, and pressure selling, where techniques such as limited time offers are used to force customers into making quick purchase decisions without considering alternatives.

Eight companies have been targeted, and they include two of our secondary ticketing agency friends – Stubhub and Viagogo, the latter the target of action by supporters of Manchester City, one club which has a commercial deal with the agency.

Put these moves together with the #stopexploitingloyalty campaign that has been coordinated by the Football Supporters Association over the last 18 months and there’s evidence of a potential sea change in the way ticket sales are viewed. No one is arguing that businesses should not be able to charge prices that reflect demand, but what we’ve seen too often across music and football is the naked exploitation of the fan loyalty that helps fuel that demand. The passion and atmosphere dedicated fans provide is an integral part of a valuable product, not something to be squeezed until it is crushed.

To make sure that potential becomes something more substantial and lasting, fans are going to have to keep pushing their case.

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The ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans travelling to Birmingham for their team’s Europa League game against Aston Villa poses challenges for those who, like me, have always been against blanket bans on fans and collective punishment. It also brings the role of Safety Advisory Groups into perspective, and underlines the importance of sharing information as fully and accurately as possible.

I reacted to the original decision as someone who has observed many attempts to ban fans over the years, and who knows “we have received intelligence” is frequently used as a trump card by those who want to do so. This, coupled with the framing of the original decision as being made because of an inability to guarantee the safety of visiting fans, worried me.

My view has always been that if a venue thinks it cannot guarantee the safety and wellbeing of those within and around it, the venue should not be permitted to host events. When it seemed that, in this case, the decision was made because the safety and wellbeing of a group of fans could not be guaranteed because they were highly likely to be Jewish, I was even more troubled. Surely we could not be saying our football grounds are not safe for Jewish people?

It turns out we weren’t.

I’m aware that an attempt to strip this back to some basic facts and draw general conclusions about the treatment of fans risks either getting lost in or embroiled by the noise around a number of other agendas that can’t be fully separated from this specific incident. But I think it’s worth a try.

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The original decision originated with Birmingham City Council’s Safety Advisory Group (SAG). Every local authority has a SAG, and members of the local emergency services as well as venue officials sit on it. The SAG advises – the clue is in the name – the local authority on whether or not the safety certificate enabling the event to go ahead should be issued. The terms of reference of Birmingham’s SAG are set out online.

SAGs tend to be quite secretive in the way they operate, and SAGS that advise on football matches tend not to have any representation from football fans. That is something a number of fan reps in London, working with then-FSA caseworker Amanda Jacks, managed to push back successfully on, gaining places on SAGs including Haringey, Islington, and Hammersmith and Fulham. Interestingly, Brent – which is responsible for Wembley Stadium – refuses to communicate with anyone. Advances were also made in Liverpool and Manchester.

The trouble with being secretive and not communicating properly is that other people can define your message for you in the space you leave. Birmingham’s SAG appears to have said nothing in public. Instead, Birmingham City Council put out a statement saying what the SAG had advised. That statement said that “advice’ was provided by the SAG “based on a risk assessment provided by West Midlands police”. Aston Villa FC also put out a statement saying “no away fans may attend the match” due to “an instruction from the Safety Advisory Group”.

You’ll have noticed a pattern that those of us who have dealt with football supporter issues for years are familiar with. Institutions and organisations issuing as little information as possible and when they do, being careful to make sure that people understand any decisions were really taken by other people. The key is not to be responsible for anything.

This was the information upon which the subsequent furore was based. And that information rapidly became ‘the safety of a predominantly Jewish group of fans can’t be guaranteed’. At which point lots of people decided to jump in without a full grasp of the facts in order to prove views they had always held had been right all along. That applies to all shades of opinion about an issue much wider and more complex than football and supporter rights.

I’ve said I was initially worried about the ban and what seemed to be the reason for it. And that’s why I initially had sympathy for Prime Minister Kier Starmer when he questioned the decision. If a group of people’s safety could not be guaranteed because they would be identified as Jewish, that would be giving in to antisemitism.

But I was also aware of the reputation of Maccabi Tel Aviv’s fans, and the cultural significance of the Maccabbees, whose name the club’s name is drawn from. A significant section of the club’s support has a long-established reputation for being racist and violent, and last November were involved in serious clashes in Amsterdam before and after a game against Ajax.

I’ve linked to a Wikipedia page above in order to give access to a wide range of reports on the events. And it’s probably important to say here that while I don’t believe antisemitism was absent from the events surrounding that game, the vast majority of the problems look to have been caused by the Maccabi fans and their offensive behaviour.

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It transpires that the decision to ban fans was not taken because the safety of a predominantly Jewish group of fans could not be guaranteed, but because that same group of fans were deemed a serious threat to public order. There is an important difference.

I’ve said that I have heard catch-all assessments of groups of individuals used to justify harsh measures before, and that I am suspicious of them. But I’m also not someone who believes you can ignore hard evidence. So I had to ask myself, if I had been a fan rep in that SAG meeting, would I really have been able to argue that any problems could be dealt with without serious risk to those at and around the match? Much as my gut tells me that generalisation is dangerous, I haven’t seen much evidence of travelling Maccabi Tel Aviv fans just going along for the game and some sightseeing.

After days of controversy, in which most of the people you can usually guarantee to be wrong about pretty much everything had had their tuppenyworth, it turned out that police did have hard evidence that the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans posed a serious and credible risk. That information seems extremely likely to have been leaked from one of the bodies unhappy about being thrown under a bus by people trying to prove a point. And it’s more substantial than some of the as yet unseen evidence allegedly compiled by people shouting on social media.

My initial worries about blanket bans loosely applied and about possible antisemitism were proved unfounded. But they had been fuelled by how the issue was presented, not least by a Prime Minister who I expected to have been better briefed than he evidently was. What appears to have been a knee-jerk reaction by him put a lot of people under pressure that shouldn’t have been, and framed a debate that did little to promote rational response.

I will, however, look forward to him speaking up for fans the next time a blanket ban is imposed when there is no good reason. Because the issue of blanket bans is still a concerning one, and one that pan-European group Football Supporters Europe (FSE) has been grappling with for some time. And as it happens, the organisation acheived some success that may help in situations such as this in future.

I’ve said above that one of the problems often faced when decisions to ban supporters are made is lack of transparency and accountability over the process. And it’s rooted in the St Denis Convention, which I’ve written about before. On October 6, the Committee on Safety and Security at Sports Events, of the Saint-Denis Convention, adopted “a Recommendation on the use of collective bans against away football supporters”. The UK ratified the Convention in 2023 and approved the recommendation.

The recommendation calls on states “to prioritise individual accountability over collective restrictions, and to apply collective bans only in exceptional circumstances, where such a measure is necessary to maintain public order and safety.”

What that does is establish a process for proportion and transparency to be used, without removing the ability to take action in the face of hard evidence. I spoke to Stuart Dykes, who is Director of European and Institutional Affairs at FSE, and an experienced fan campaigner I’ve known for years.

Asked about the decision to prevent Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from attending the match at Villa Park, he said: “It’s not something we could easily support. Our approach and that of the Council of Europe is to encourage proportional responses targeted at individual perpetrators rather than entire fan bases and to ensure that any restrictions on fans are applied only in cases where there is a documented extreme risk to public order.”

He noted that FSE has, on occasion, challenged similar decisions in court, with most cases ending successfully.

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The recommendation from the European Committee helps because it requires the public authorities, among other things, to be transparent about the reasoning behind a ban and to provide documentary evidence of the perceived risk or threat to public order. It also makes clear that such bans should only be imposed as a last result. Countries such as Italy and France regularly impose bans on away fans. This could be a tacit admission that they aren’t capable of dealing with them, or simply because they can’t be bothered to.

So in the Birmingham case the onus would have been on the police to provide details of their risk assessment evidencing a specific threat to the public order.

The explanation of the Birmingham decision under the obligations of this recommendation would have taken the sting out of much of the nonsense and grandstanding that ensued, reinforced rather than undermined faith in the authorities and the political process, and avoided another damaging chapter in the increasingly toxic culture war currently being stoked.

Of course, adopting the approach outlined in the convention – which would also include involving fans in the work SAGs do – is not going to prevent those people who want to push their divisive agendas from doing so. But it would go a long way to ensuring the ground was less fertile for them.

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A brief update on the joys of European travel, to add to what I have written about so many times. Spurs visited Monaco recently, that sceptred tax-free isle south of France. They were told alcohol would be banned, no bags were allowed, power banks were banned, as were umbrellas, the away was being rebuilt, the ladies toilets were portacabins and there was likely to be a strong smell of sewerage (there was). Oh, and you’d probably be asked to remove your shoes before entering the ground. After much to and fro, small bags were allowed in. The systematic abuse of travelling fans in Europe continues.

A recap on Premier League action so far this season regarding how regular matchgoing fans are treated – more antisocial kick-off times, more missed deadlines for TV schedule announcements, continued erosion of concessionary ticketing schemes, continued rise in ticket prices, increasing incidence of schemes in which longstanding fans are moved to make way for corporate sections, increase in draconian requirements for ticket use, growing evidence of prioritisation of one-off visitors over longstanding fans, growing rumours of dynamic ticketing models on the way. Has there ever been an industry that has treated its best customers with such contempt and disregard, and which is so utterly incapable of understanding the value of anything over the price of everything?

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Finally, though, something unreservedly positive. Following a huge campaign that brought together fans, players and pan-European institutions, La Liga’s attempt to play a domestic game abroad has been defeated. Serie A looks even more isolated in its attempt to do the same, and must surely now back down. And the latest controversy looks to have prompted football’s governing bodies to ensure that this fundamental threat to our game never resurfaces. Congratulations to FSE for pulling together a huge and powerful coalition, and to all who raised their voice.

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Photo by Marcus Reubenstein on Unsplash

Anna Burgess has seen it all before. She’s travelled all over Europe following Liverpool FC for years, and she represents away supporters on the Spirit of Shankly supporters union committee. Like most regulars at European aways, she isn’t surprised by shoddy treatment. But the recent trip to Istanbul made her even more determined that things must change.

The game was by no means the worst experience Liverpool fans have had. But it’s the constant low-level experience of what is, to be frank, utter contempt that is really hitting home – and not just at Liverpool. Most fans knew what they were letting themselves in for, but the official advice given out by Liverpool for travelling fans left little doubt.

Here’s a selection of choice cuts.

• You must carry photo ID at all times.

• Your only access to the stadium is via buses with no access or toilet facilities, that would take at least an hour to complete their journey.

• You will not be able to take anything that could be used as a projectile into the stadium – including phone chargers needed to ensure phones with digital tickets work.

• You may be held back for up to 90 minutes after the game.

But, says Anna, “there were nowhere near enough coaches. A few mates said that when they arrived there was no space for them. They rang the club to see what to do and they were told to make their own way. Despite being told not to do that in the official advice.”

At the gates, says Anna “it was a racket – pure and simple theft. I’ve reflected on the female stewards going through my bag and it was like they were shopping and picking out what they wanted to keep. Absolutely outrageous. Some girls had Tampax and sanitary products confiscated.”

Again, Anna is not unfamiliar with items being taken. A few seasons back, away in Europe, she had a phone charger confiscated “because you might give it to a man to throw”. Where do you even start with that?

“There’s a lot made of wanting to get a different sort of fan to games, and we know they don’t want people like us there really,” said Anna. “But how are you going to attract that demographic if you can’t take a lippy in, or some hand gel to at least make the toilets useable when there is no soap, no hot water and often no lighting?”

She emphasises that no one should have to put up with this sort of treatment, but makes the point as yet another illustration of the game UEFA and the clubs talk and the one they walk.

“I went there knowing that they would likely take things, but I didn’t realise it would be as blatant,” she says. “When I left, there was loads of rubbish on the floor and items they had confiscated that were of no interest to them. Unsurprisingly, the bags with all of the things they clearly wanted to keep had gone.”

There were problems inside the stadium too. “The lads I was on the trip with said that they couldn’t get to their seats because all the police were in them. I realise nobody goes to their seat on a European away, but it was very cramped in the stands.”

Other fans I spoke to were told they would not be allowed to take inhalers in, despite being asthmatic. When Spurs played in Istanbul last season, fans were advised that diabetic needles and epi-pens were banned. They were told “the club doctor will administer any injections”. Seriously!

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I’ve been writing about this for years, and it seems that the issue is beginning to be picked up by the mainstream media. Henry Winter has been consistent in raising it for some time, and articles such as the one carried by the Daily Mail about Liverpool’s visit to Istanbul will help – although that piece still buys into the idea that harsh measures are necessary because of potential crowd trouble.

For change to happen, fans need to speak up and demand better. But clubs must do the same. Too often there is a reticence to challenge in case it makes things worse, but this is just giving in to intimidation. In my experience, there’s also an unwillingness to make waves with other clubs you might need to do you a favour in future. Clubs need to start putting their fans, their paying customers, first.

Anna says: “I’m going to email the club to ask for a wash-up meeting and just a general discussion about our treatment in Europe. We really need to start doing stuff around the St Denis convention.”

Few have heard of the convention, and it is scarcely used. But it is a valuable tool. It is, in full, the Council of Europe Convention on an Integrated Safety, Security and Service Approach at Football Matches and Other Sports Events. I wrote about it in some detail two and a half years ago, and the independent review into the shocking events at the 2022 Champions League Final described it as follows.

“The aim of the Saint-Denis Convention is to provide a safe, secure, and welcoming environment at football matches and other sports events with an international dimension. In order to achieve this, Parties shall:

“a. Adopt an integrated, multi-agency and balanced approach towards safety, security and service, based on an ethos of effective local, national and international partnerships and cooperation;

“b. Ensure that all public and private agencies, and other stakeholders, recognise that safety, security, and service provision cannot be considered in isolation and can have a direct influence on delivery of the other two components;

“c. Take account of good practices in developing an integrated approach to safety, security and service.”

To put it bluntly – this is not happening. And despite the damning verdict of the Review on UEFA’s role, that organisation is still not stepping up to do what it could. There have been improvements, with the dogged efforts of Football Supporters Europe securing regular discussion and consultation on fan affairs where before there was none. But too often those forums become platforms for excuses about why UEFA can’t really do anything when it is the local authorities who really make the decisions.

It is true that, particularly in France and Spain, local police forces are a law unto themselves. And that too many local councils view football fans as a problem first and guests a poor second. But could and should UEFA be doing more as the competition organiser?

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Spurs fan Kat Law is a member of the Football Supporters Europe board, and co-ordinates work around English clubs in European competition. She’s also a member of UEFA’s Fan Advisory Forum, so unlike many fans she has a direct line into the organisation. And she says there have been improvements. “UEFA’s new stadium regulations mean the things they can control are improving in some areas – but that’s on the stadium footprint, not beyond. Multi-agency work is the challenge,” she says.

UEFA, powerful as it is, can’t compel police or public authorities to do anything, and it is often their decisions that cause the most problems. But there are things UEFA can do.

Among the measures Kat and others are pushing for is a standard list of items that are permitted to be taken into stadiums – and that should include medical supplies. “It’s one thing when the approach to fans causes inconvenience,” says Kat, “but quite another when people’s health is being put at risk. That has to change.”

Staging European competition games generates money and profile for the cities in which they are held. Where the safety of visitors cannot be guaranteed, where visitors are routinely attacked by security forces and preyed upon by stewards, where basic principles of hospitality and safety are absent, UEFA could, as the competition organiser, refuse to allocate games to cities.

But withdrawing games, especially at short notice, presents its own logistical challenges. This is not an easy solution, but a line has to be drawn somewhere and somehow.

Fans are beginning to organise more strongly around these issues, with all fans of English clubs involved in European competition meeting regularly under the umbrella of the FSE and the Football Supporters Association as part of a process that feeds into structured dialogue with UEFA. Supporter networks in other countries are considering similar.

But clubs need to be more prepared to submit complaints to the official UEFA delegate at games about any issues – because that is the route UEFA has to respond through.

The great irony in all of this is that punitive measures are said to be necessary because of the risk of fan violence. But more often I hear from fans of all clubs that trips reveal great cities and hospitable people, but poor policing and matchday experience. It is too often the measures introduced to prevent trouble that cause it.

One fan I spoke to didn’t make the trip to Istanbul because he’d had enough. “Planning for a shit trip, experiencing one, reflecting on it as one and paying top dollar. At 64, who needs it!” he said. Many more will go, fuelling complacency that there will always be an audience. There will be, but that doesn’t make treating it badly right.

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UEFA’s approval of two domestic league games, one from Spain and one from Italy, to be played outside those countries has predictably caused a storm – and attracted ridicule as the organisation has said it is approving the games on the basis that it doesn’t approve of them and isn’t setting a precedent.

The problem for UEFA is that, ultimately, it is FIFA that makes the decision on whether to grant approval, and it turns out FIFA’s regulations are probably too flimsy to withstand a possible legal challenge. Blocking the requests from La Liga and Serie A could therefore prompt a legal action which, if successful in getting the games to go ahead, really would set a precedent.

That’s something a few of the apocalyptic articles in the press don’t seem to be considering, and the fact that all 55 UEFA member associations have committed not to make further such requests without consulting UEFA has also been overlooked in the rush to declare the end of football as we know it. Critics say the commitment to consult is “meaningless” – and the past attitude of most football authorities to the concept of consultation has understandably prompted cynicism – but no commitment at all would be even more meaningless.

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Make no mistake, these matches going ahead – Villarreal v Barcelona in Miami, USA, and Como and AC Milan in Perth, Australia – is A Very Bad Thing. It tears up the level playing field in both those leagues, as every team will not have played the same number of matches under the same conditions. It directly undermines the ticket to every home game brought by season ticket holders – something that could itself prompt legal action – and it allows the argument for precedent to be put in future.

But it’s also possible the attempt will prompt football’s competition organisers to get their houses in order. This week the European Parliament voted to adopt a report on the role of EU policy in shaping the European Sport Model (ESM). As this X thread from Football Supporters Europe points out, the ESM “specifically ‘calls on the sport’s governing bodies to prevent domestic competition matches from being played abroad’.” It also calls for the ESM to be protected “against pure-profit entertainment models” and for “the involvement of fans in decision making.”

FSE’s own statement may be a bit pragmatic for some, but it is a realistic and sensible stance – one that pins responsibility where it should be (on FIFA and the respective leagues) and which acknowledges the unity that has been achieved in the short time since this latest attempt to undermine the domestic football model was announced. It could yet help win the war that this battle is only a part of.

The photo at the top of this post shows the view from the away end at Galatasaray v Liverpool in this season’s Champions League. © Anna Burgess

I’ve waited until football was back before writing about it being back, in order to avoid yet another season preview. And yes, this is always the best part of the year for everyone, before harsh realities kick in to make fools of those who rushed in with hope. But increasingly, the new season brings with it not the joy of expectation, but a sense of fear that the simple beauty of football may have been messed about with once too often.

In England’s Premier League, yet more ground is being conceded to TV with the introduction of live touchline interviews with substituted players, cameras briefly on the pitch for close ups of goal celebrations, and camera access to dressing rooms at half time. Let’s be clear. Precisely no one aside from TV executives has asked for these changes, and few will welcome them. Substituted players won’t want to answer crass questions (“How does it feel to be subbed off on the verge of a hat-trick?”) and will soon learn to media train any answers into banality. Neither players nor managers will want the detail of half-time talks beamed live to everywhere, and so will need to find other ways of saying what needs to be said. And camera operators scampering onto the pitch in the aftermath of a goal is all a bit breaking the fourth wall.

There are several points to make here. The first is that when TV seeks to reflect what is ‘real’, what often happens is that the people doing the real things end up performing a version of reality for TV. It’s why the first series of a reality TV show is invariably the best, because the participants haven’t worked out how to play the game. So this drive to make things more authentic actually results in making them less authentic. I’ve said before that the relationship between football and TV is increasingly one in which the tail wags the dog, and these latest innovations – along with the awful VAR (supposedly improved this season by generously providing explanations of decisions for the mug punters at the live games ages after the incident has passed) – are prime examples of how the compelling simplicity of a game that has held the attention of successive generations for over 150 years is being overshadowed by a set of gimmicks.

Those who run football should value what they have more – and resist the constant pressure from TV companies to provide new elements to spice things up for the viewers. (I’m getting strong aromas of Monkey Tennis here.) If the game becomes unrecognisable, what guarantee is there that audience interest will not wither? If that happens, TV execs won’t want to spend the money they are now.

In the meantime, TV will continue to drive the majority of late fixture changes and anti-social kick-off times, contributing to the growing sense of alienation felt by matchgoing fans who everyone says they value, but who see very little evidence of that. I’ve written about the tension between the game and the crowd before, and that will continue to be a theme this season. Also continuing will be the #stopexploitingloyalty campaign run by an increasing number of fan groups under the umbrella of the Football Supporters Association. It would be nice to think there are some football executives out there with the nous to get to grips with these tensions.

This whole issue took on a new, although not original, twist, when the prospect of playing domestic league games overseas was raised again. La Liga has asked for permission to play the Villarreal v Barcelona game in December in Miami, while Serie A wants to play the AC Milan v Como game in Perth, Australia.

This idea – remember the Premier League’s wizard 39^th game wheeze, first aired in 2008 and raised again in 2017? – is not original. But it keeps being raised, and while the Premier League is staying quiet this time, there is no doubt it is willing its Spanish and Italian counterparts on so that – regrettably – England has to follow suit.

Once again a fundamental football principle is at stake. League titles are valued because they are the result of every team playing every other team at the same grounds, home and away. Call it a level playing field of level playing fields. The sheer bonkersness of the thinking behind this latest idea was revealed by Villarreal’s president Fernado Roig’s promise to fly all season ticket holders to Miami free of charge.

Villarreal have 19,500 season ticket holders. Aside from the expense, the sheer logistical challenge of transporting that number of people to the game would be quite something – and let’s not even start talking about the environmental issues. Also, the reasons previously given for moving games included opening the game up to new audiences – those audiences currently so well served by TV coverage and its attendant innovations. If the same audience will be watching live in a new location, what is the point?

Of course, what this is really about is normalising the playing of domestic games abroad – and spending whatever it takes in order to do so.

But the idea is not as popular among overseas fans as some would have you believe. Spanish, Italian and English games are seen as being defined by being played in their respective countries, an overseas game is seen as inauthentic in the same way many gridiron fans view the London NFL games with suspicion. But what the fans think doesn’t matter – or so the people waving and cashing the cheques would like to think.

The frequency with which this idea is raised enables professional sage observers to opine that it is inevitable it will happen. But that’s what they said about the European Super League. Fans and players are likely to mobilise in numbers over this. And the presence of English football’s new regulator will be important.

Fan groups attempted to get the ability to block the playing of domestic games overseas written on the face of the bill, but that was blocked by the FA, which feared regulatory overreach. The FA is keen to stress it is firmly against the idea, but doubts about the FA’s ability or resolve to protect the game have deep roots. The Football Governance Act does contain provision that can be interpreted as the ability to block overseas games if there is not sufficient support for the idea. With the backing of strong opposition from fan groups and players, this could be a chance for the regulator to demonstrate its worth.

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All I’ve said here will, no doubt, be dismissed as outdated raging against innovation and entrepreneurialism – the argument that is the last refuge for those who have run out of justification for their relentless greed. But The Football Fan has always been about recognising the true value of the game. A welcome reminder of that came in Sid Lowe’s wonderful article about the return of Real Oviedo to the top flight in Spain – a timely reminder of why the simple things mean so much. Ironically, the story would make a great TV drama and a great advert for the game – but TV and too many of those supposedly promoting the game would never give the story a chance to breathe in the first place.

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I’m currently reading Joey D’Urso’s book More than a shirt. It’s a fantastic read – well written, excellently researched and intelligently executed. It’s about the symbolism of football shirts, and D’Urso takes a truly international journey in order to link themes and promote understanding of the bigger picture. And that’s something we could certainly do with more of.

I also recommend a look at the latest edition of the Fan Engagement Index from Kevin Rye’s Think Fan Engagement project. I’ve argued frequently with Kev, who I’ve known since his days at Supporters Direct, about the methodology and conclusions of the Index, but measuring the quality of fan engagement is going to be an extremely important task in the new regulated era, and anything that helps us keep beyond the corporate doublespeak is worthwhile.

Before we close, a plug for Misha Verollet-Dahncke’s Unmodern football Substack, and in particular a post headlined Football is the police state’s petri dish. The police using football as a testing ground is a theme I have written about numerous times (there’s a fair bit on the subject in my ebook Taking Our Ball Back) and this is the view from a German perspective.

The Brazilian football and culture website Ludopedia has kindly asked to publish some of my posts, so you can now read me in Portuguese. There’s plenty more there, all part of the site’s stated aim of “expanding access to knowledge and promoting critical reflections from football.” It’s well worth checking out.

• The photo at the top of this post shows the jetty where you can arrive by boat at the home ground of Venezia FC – surely one of the most pleasurable match day arrival points in what is one of my favourite places in the world. © Martin Cloake

In a sport, which by definition must contain different entities that compete against each other, having the same people in control of more than one of those entities has to be a bad idea. But this is football, the laboratory of bad ideas, and so we must talk about multi-club ownership (MCO).

There are a host of questions that need answering about Crystal Palace’s demotion from the Europa League and, while I have sympathy for Palace and the club’s fans, some of the questions are aimed at the people in charge at the south London club. I’m assuming a level of knowledge about the case, so I’ll try not to go over ground readers will be familiar with.

The rule that UEFA says has been broken is Article 5 of the regulations of the UEFA Champions League, which was introduced in 2025 to cover all UEFA club competitions for the 2025/26 season. The relevant wording is: “No one may simultaneously be involved, either directly or indirectly, in any capacity whatsoever in the management, administration and/or sporting performance of more than one club participating in a UEFA club competition. No individual or legal entity may have control or influence over more than one club participating in a UEFA club competition.”

Anything that would constitute a conflict of interest under this rule had to be resolved by 1 March 2025. The Palace case boils down to the fact that John Textor was considered by UEFA to have been “involved, either directly or indirectly” in both Crystal Palace and Lyon on and before that date.

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To recap the facts, Textor bought a 43% stake in Crystal Palace in 2021 for £90m. Six months later, he bought 90% of Brazilian club Botafogo, along with 80% of Belgian club RWD Molenbeek in the same week. And, almost a year after buying into Palace, he acquired 40% of the shares of French club Lyon.

MCO has been an issue in football since the 1990s, but really gained momentum in the 2010s as the Red Bull group and the City Football Group acquired multiple clubs. Research suggests that over 180 clubs worldwide are now part of MCO groups. By 2022 it would be safe to assume that anyone who knew their way around football would know that having a stake in more than one club might be an issue.

So there are a number of questions that can legitimately be asked of Palace chairman Steve Parish and the club board.

• When did they realise Textor’s involvement might be a problem?

• If Textor’s involvement was not a problem, why did he sell his shares for £190m (realising a £100m profit), in June and in the same month exit from Lyon?

• Why did the Palace board not succeed in hitting the rule deadline of 1 March 2025?

Palace’s case seems to be that Textor, to use Parish’s exact words, “didn’t have decisive influence over the club”. But the rule doesn’t use the word decisive.* Without that word any judgement must surely rest on whether Textor had influence. It is hard to imagine anyone would spend £90m on 43% of something they had no influence on. And those competitors of Palace who did not benefit from the injection of Textor’s 43% could justifiably argue influence was exerted.

Could it be that Palace thought they could get around the rule on MCO? If they did, it can be argued they had good reason.

Because Palace are not the only club where an individual can be said to “simultaneously be involved, either directly or indirectly, in any capacity whatsoever in the management, administration and/or sporting performance of more than one club participating in a UEFA club competition.” At clubs such as Manchester City, Manchester United and, to add spice to this particular tale, Nottingham Forest – the club that has taken Palace’s place in the Europa League – a device called a blind trust has been used to ensure compliance with the rules. And here is where things get really interesting.

Research carried out by investigative football website Josimer (and if you don’t subscribe you really should) not only reveals how blind trusts are being deployed to stop clubs falling foul of MCO rules, but that the device is the brainchild of Sunil Gulati – the chairman of UEFA’s Club Financial Control Body since 2021 and close friend of UEFA president Alexsander Čeferin. In an article headlined Bend it like UEFA, Josimar details the blind trust device, the involvement of Gulati, and how numerous clubs have got around the rules.

As Josimar observes, owners including Evangelos Marinakis at Nottingham Forest and Jim Ratcliffe at Manchester United, as well as executives at City Group, “were smart enough to beat the system at its own game. The door was left ajar – all they did was to push it open.

And, Josimar concludes: “The problem is, however, that it is UEFA which unlocked it. More than that, it had signposted the exit.”

Josimar asked UEFA directly if it had advised clubs on how to circumvent its own rules, exactly what Gulati’s role was, and how its active promotion of blind trusts sat with its commitment to open competition and transparent decision-making. It has received no reply.

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An added twist in this case is that Forest appear to have played a significant role in alerting UEFA to the fact that Palace may be in contravention of the rules, thereby helping to secure a decision they directly benefitted from. Forest appear to have anticipated a potential problem and acted upon it sooner than Palace by setting up a blind trust, then writing to UEFA to ask for “clarity” over Palace’s position. While Forest can claim accurately to have done nothing wrong, they have engaged in what most would see as sharp practice.

This is a tale as much about the application of rules as it is about the desirability of those rules, and it features the now familiar twisting and turning of those who claim to be running our sport in its best interests. For a rule-based system to work it needs to have the confidence of those subject to and affected by those rules. This case is a real mess because rules do not appear to be being applied consistently or in the spirit they were intended, and punishment for not being sufficiently smart in circumventing the rules appears to be worse than for not complying with the spirit of them.

The point has been made too, that Palace are not the only club to be punished. While they have been demoted to the UEFA Conference League, Irish side Drogheda United FC and Slovakia’s DAC 1904 Dunajka Streda have been kicked out of that competition altogether for failure to comply with MCO rules – or should that be for not being smart enough to get around them? Are Palace getting more attention because they have a higher profile in a higher profile league? Or because they have a better case?

The whole thing is a mess, and the whole mess wouldn’t exist without MCO. The solution would be to apply a simple common sense test to the question of whether an individual is involved at more than one club, by seeing whether an individual was involved at more than one club – in any capacity. This would, of course, be characterised as ‘preventing investment’, but it would be nothing of the sort. It would be preventing investment by people who had already invested, and leaving the way clear for other investors who wanted a slice of the world’s most popular sport. UEFA needs to make its position on MCO clear, and act consistently once it does.

There are some challenging questions for fans here too. While fan organisations such as the FSA in England and Wales and European body Football Supporters Europe have stated opposition to the MCO model, and spent a lot of time flagging the problems it can bring, many fans are seemingly prepared to put up with it as long as it benefits their club.

In the research quoted above, the benefits of MCO are listed as hedging exposure, compounding assets, diversifying risk, increasing global talent arbitrage and increasing exit flexibility. You’ll never, as they say, sing that. Here’s yet another example of where the business has forgotten what makes the sport so special. The thing that stands out about the Palace case is that few of the characters in the story come out well.

* As someone has pointed out in the comments, and I’ve acknowledged, the word ‘decisive’ appears in a later, seperate, clause of the rule. Poorly-drafted rules are nothing new in football. This does raise the question of whether someone needs to come under the definition of both parts of the rule or either in order for the rules to have been broken.

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In the last edition I wrote about the growing tension between regular matchgoing fans and TV companies. September’s TV picks have been announced, and on one weekend two games have been moved from Saturday to Sunday for live TV coverage, but subject to late change should the teams be involved in European games that mean they can’t play on Sunday. In which case, the games will be on the original Saturday, where they could have been left in the first place. They are not even pretending to care any more.

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Finally, I have to mark the week in which the Football Governance Act passed into law. It’s the culmination of years of hard work and campaigning, and will establish an Independent Regulator for Football. It is a great opportunity.

Inevitably, those who have always opposed the establishment of the IRF will continue to snipe, and the track record of the powers within the game suggests they will do as much as they can to stymie and frustrate the regulator’s work. But a more sustainable game, better ownership requirements, and improved fan engagement are prizes worth having, and so work will continue.

Also inevitable is that fact that many ordinary fans will ask what has really changed. The regulator needs some early wins to build confidence in it, and a number or areas on the fan engagement front present opportunity. But if, in five years time, we haven’t had another Bury or Southend or Morecambe or … well, that will be the measure of the achievement.

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Tension between the game and the crowd is set to intensify this season. It’s an issue the game needs to deal with better.

The roots of the tension lie in the different types of audiences the game has. On the one hand there is the vast global audience for the planet’s most popular sport. On the other is the comparatively tiny audience that attends games live, and in doing so contributes to the product. Football has not dealt with this tension well, and that matters because the disaffection of the smaller number of people could have a significant impact on the value the larger number place on the ‘product’.

Some of this, quite a lot of it, is down to the relationship between football and television, something I’ve written about here before. Put simply, the times that are best for TV schedulers – a robust breed I remember well from my time working on UK national TV listings magazines – are often not the times that are best for the fans who actually attend the games.

Fans get that TV wants something for all the money it puts into the game, but they don’t need the late fixture changes and kick-offs at times that make using public transport impossible. TV’s increasingly evident lack of concern about all this doesn’t help.

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Next season’s Premier League fixtures are out (the Football League publishes its schedule today) but while the fixture list gives a general idea of the order games will be played in, it’s unwise to make any firm plans beyond the first month or so. Games will be moved for TV and because of European competition commitments, and because of how each affects the other.

Of the 380 games in the Premier League, 215 will be shown live just on Sky – more than ever. Add in TNT Sports and that’s 267 games shown live. You can read a thorough and thoughtful analysis of the TV deal and what it means by Stefan Borson on his Substack. As he observes, the fact that none of these 267 fixtures will be played at Saturday 3pm means “there is an unavoidable conclusion: the Saturday 3pm fixture is in terminal decline.” As it stands, any fixture that remains at Saturday 3pm is almost advertising the fact it is not particularly attractive.

Borson makes another key observation. “It will be increasingly ridiculous for clubs to expect season ticket holders to commit to attend games that will rarely be played at the time and date stated when the fixture list is published.” But this is football so guess what? That’s exactly what a number of clubs are doing, bringing in schemes that punish season ticket holders if they don’t attend a given number of games. It’s utterly crass. And a great example of the tension I’m talking about.

With demand so high, setting up schemes that enable fans to make their ticket available if they can’t go to the game without attaching punitive measures and minimum attendance requirements is not difficult or costly. As long as season ticket holders don’t block other fans, what difference does it make how many games they actually attend in a season? The seat is available, the club doesn’t lose any money (in fact it gains from resale), and the awful PR of punishing loyal fans who may be experiencing the kind of life events we all face would be avoided.

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But the TVcos are not solely to blame. The Premier League hasn’t helped with the choices for the four Wednesday night rounds. Of course the fixture list is a difficult thing to compile, with various provisos meaning some teams cannot be at home at the same time as others (the Manchester, Liverpool and North London teams, for example). The Premier League says it takes “half a year” to put together, but in that six-month period some very basic issues seem to have been overlooked.

Both the games between Tottenham Hotspur and Newcastle United, and between West Ham United and Manchester United, will kick off on Wednesday evenings. Leaving fans who have to travel any distance – which means not just away fans – no way of getting home, and therefore requiring at least a day’s leave. The first Wednesday round sees Spurs travel to Newcastle, West Ham to Old Trafford and Manchester City visit Fulham.

On Wednesday 7 January, Liverpool fans have been presented with a trip to Arsenal, Sunderland fans will be at Brentford, and Brighton and Hover Albion visit Manchester City. But Wednesday 11 February is a humdinger. No fewer than six fixtures involve long trips that increase road traffic, require some time of work, and probably have an impact on workplace productivity too. They are:

• Spurs v Newcastle;

• West Ham v Man Utd;

• Everton v Bournemouth;

• Chelsea v Leeds United;

• Crystal Palace v Burnley;

• Man City v Fulham.

The final Wednesday round is much better, with Aston Villa v Chelsea and Leeds v Sunderland probably the biggest distances involved, but the selection of so many such games for the midweek rounds – including three double headers involving six teams – does not suggest fan convenience was much of a consideration.

But the game’s apparent contempt for fans goes beyond the issue of kick-off times and TV’s influence over a game whose soul it has bought. Throw in the raft of football-only laws that prevent football fans from doing what most other customers in most other entertainment industries can, the pettifogging and inconsistent restrictions on what you can take in to grounds and what you can and can’t do, the apparent prioritisation of one-off visitors who spend more in the club shop over long-established fans and fan communities, and the frustrations of regular matchgoing fans are easy to understand. Especially as they pay top dollar.

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Those frustrations helped the FSA’s successful #stopexploitingloyalty campaign gain traction last year, and will see it extend in the coming season beyond simply the core issue of ticket pricing. When we started talking about setting the campaign up, we wanted to break the narrative that said football fans were treated poorly because we allowed ourselves to be, through the loyalty we showed by continuing to turn up. Hence stop exploiting loyalty. We’ve made a lot of progress in changing the narrative, but dealing with the issue of how to balance the interests of different sets of fans is going to be trickier.

A crude breakdown can split fans into four groups. The first, and smallest, is regular matchgoers. Let’s say “regular” means more than 20 games a season home and away – but already you see the potential issues. Then we have occasional matchgoers, fans who may well be members of club ticketing schemes, who attend enough games to be a part of the crowd but are not as all in as the regulars. Then there are the irregular visitors and one-off visitors –who clubs see as both lucrative and undemanding. Finally, there is the vast TV audience, including fans who will never go to a live game.

Each group has different ways of consuming the product, each group has different needs that cut across the others. It’s the regulars the game needs to rebalance its relationship with. These fans stump up large amounts in advance for season tickets. As a result, they demand a lot. On top of this, they don’t spend on a match-by-match level at anywhere near the rate of other fans. And there are not many of them, compared to the other groups. But it is this group that is getting alienated, and if that alienation leads to a deeper break, then the product changes. Because the traditions and the regularity and the devotion are what helps create the atmosphere that is one of the Premier League’s most compelling draws.

Already the English game experience is changing, flaking away. Ask fans in Germany or Sweden, for example, if they’d swap the atmospheres they create for what passes for atmosphere at many Premier League games and they would laugh. But if this set of fans is pushed out, there’s a loss at a greater level.

These are not new arguments. Writing for Sporting Intelligence 11 years ago, I said that: “Community is at the core of football, and with it notions of identity and place.” That’s part of what makes the ‘product’ so valuable. So football needs to do better in balancing the interests of the regulars who are the heart of what football is with the interests of its other audiences. It would be foolish to say everything would come crashing down if it doesn’t, but it is legitimate to ask if what we end up with will be as valuable – in a financial or emotional sense.

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Someone really did need to live track the thousands of fans on the hundreds of routes into Northern Spain. It would have been fascinating viewing. We knew people coming via Carcassonne, Biarritz, Bordeaux, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, Madrid, Croatia, Corfu, Majorca, Marrakesh and Gran Canaria…

We flew into the humidity of Naples, where Antonio from the B&B was waiting to drive us the short route to the apartment we’d booked. We’d opted for somewhere close to the airport as it was going to be an early start on Tuesday, and the place was located in the sprawl between the suburbs and the airport.

As we drove through the narrow streets I thought of the opening sequence of the Maradona documentary, when Diego is driven from the airport through these same streets after signing for Napoli in a whirling cauldron of lights and sirens and traffic and crowds. It was still light, and it was not long before we caught sight of the first Maradona mural. His image is everywhere. There was just enough time for an exceptionally good pizza and bottle of red before bed and an early start for Spain.

Numbers equivalent to 25% of the total population of Bilbao were expected. I’d already had a journalist contact me about the travel challenges and the narrative was forming - the great trek, the challenge for fans, the question of whether many of UEFA’s Final venues are really set up to deal with such a mass influx.

It was busy but not frenetic when we arrived, after the bus ride along the northern coast to Santander had taken us through some beautiful rolling countryside. The hotel, a four-star at a fraction of Bilbao prices, is great, and we freshen up before meeting the rest of the group we sit with at home games for dinner. There are a lot of United fans in town, but we’ve booked a well-reviewed restaurant away from the main drag and it turns out to be a good choice – great food, friendly service and excellent company.

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We arrived back in Bilbao at about midday on the day of the final, our bus about two-thirds full of United. But once in town it was clear Spurs were here in greater numbers – something we’d been hearing when being contacted by friends who had been in town the previous night as an enormous Spurs party took over areas of the city.

We met friends who’d flown in that morning. Over coffee and pintxos we heard from one who had endured an epic journey after the coach driver missed the pickup point for him and nine others at Dover. The solution involved the police having to ferry them across borders before cramming into a minivan and chasing the coach down the motorway. Then we headed for the boat trip we’d booked which ferries Spurs fans up and down the river, serenading those on the riverbanks. The locals are friendly. The few United fans are not.

It was approaching 4pm as we began to make our way towards the fan zone, which for us was only a 15-minute walk from the ground. We arranged to meet another group of friends in a bar just outside the zone. It was adjacent to a second bar, opposite a small supermarket and already crowded with fans drinking and singing. More groups of friends turned up. The joy was palpable, and the belief that we can win this was growing. Everyone was checking to ensure their digital ticket QR code has downloaded.

We heard reports that queues in the fan park were enormous and beer was about three times the price it was outside. So we decided to stay put for a while. The street was absolutely packed, as was the road leading up to the fan park. Someone in one of the flats above the bar, about four floors up, was catching an inflatable horseshoe that was being thrown up from the crowd in the street and returning it to the cheering throng. Across the street in a residential block, a woman in a green top was conducting the singing from her balcony. More and more people were turning up. “We’re on our way” was now accompanied by a self-deprecating reworking of Shakira’s 2010 World Cup song;

Tsamina mina eh eh

Waka waka eh eh

17^th and I don’t know how

We’re going to Bilbao.

Kick-off was 9pm local time and we wanted to give ourselves plenty of time to get in. At around 7pm, we started the walk to the stadium, a group of four of us sticking close as we wanted to repeat entering this final as we did the last one in Madrid in 2019. Every side street delivers more groups of fans onto the main route.

Colour-coded approach routes had been designated for each set of fans and for neutrals. We used the blue route and it delivered us to the outer security check at one corner of the stadium footprint. The San Mames is a relatively new stadium, but not way out of town like so many European Final venues. It’s tucked into the city, emphasising its connection and the importance it holds for Basque identity. It was easy to get to, and the security check had plenty of space and was well organised. We got through the first check, then approached the turnstiles where tickets were to be scanned and a second bag search carried out.

It all went very smoothly, a complete contrast to the chaotic scenes we remember at the 2019 Champions League final. We were on the concourse in front of the stadium building, a handsome, imposing design that looks even more striking lit up for the game. We posed for photos, and failed to contain our sheer excitement. It felt special already. Then we tried to find our entrance gate. Signposting wasn’t very clear, and a steward sent us the wrong way – something we discovered when hearing United songs being belted out from the section we were directed to. We retraced our steps but found out the numbering we have been following is for the VIP boxes. We eventually found a steward who directed us the right way.

Inside, it was initially hard to locate where the precise entrance to our seat section was, or to find the refreshment kiosks. Ladies’ toilets also seemed to be in short supply, and long queues of men were waiting to use them. There was no stewarding to stop this. We reached a queue to get a snack and a soft drink – no alcohol is being served but we wanted to stay sharp for the game itself so that didn’t bother us. The queue was moving very slowly and there appeared to be two people serving hundreds of customers.

As we waited we saw numerous groups of United fans coming into our section. This was supposed to be the dedicated Spurs section where you could only get a ticket if you were registered with the club, so it was a surprise, and the willingness of some of the reds to give it out to the greater numbers of Spurs on the concourse didn’t bode well.

After waiting an hour, including 15 minutes at the front, we abandoned all hope of refreshment and got to our seats with 10 minutes to spare. Still, at least we got in safely – maybe any more was too much to expect.

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You all know what happened in the game now. Not the greatest of spectacles, but an experience I’ll never, ever forget. I’m going to go a bit Spurs for just a little while, because I don’t think I have ever been in the middle of such loud support, or felt such a strong collective will for a team to win since I started going to live games in 1978. Henry Winter remarked that the fans carried the team over the line – and there may well be some truth in that, combined with the sheer strength of will manager Ange Postecoglou displayed and instilled in the players. The goal prompted the limbsiest of limbs scenes, the final whistle prompted a mass outpouring of emotion and relief. I looked down my row to see a friend who’d had a difficult few years with tears of joy streaming down her face, gruff old geezers were sobbing, everyone was shouting and jumping.

For years we’d endured the accusation that we would always fall just short, that we we were the biggest so-called big club to go for so long without a trophy. We even had the word ‘Spursy’ invented to describe just falling short. I was lucky enough to see us win major trophies when I was a kid, but a generation’s eyes had not seen the glory. One League Cup 17 years ago, 41 years since the last European trophy. And now, at the end of an awful season when everything was gambled on this win, all of that was swept away. Sometimes a win is more than a win.

This is why we do it. And it’s why people think we’re fools – all football fans. Because we’d put up with anything just to be there at moments like this. We shouldn’t have to, and people shouldn’t take advantage of the fact that we are prepared to. And one day maybe it won’t be either/or.

An hour after the whistle, after a party in which two thirds of the stadium was still packed and holding on to the moment as the players celebrated on the pitch, we left the stadium and entered the delirious night. As we picked our way across town from bar to bar to the wild celebrations in Da Vinci’s nightclub, the latest twist on the Shakira number could be heard.

Tsamina mina eh eh

Waka waka eh eh

17^th and I don’t know how

We won it in Bilbao.

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Photos: © Martin Cloake

On our way, we’re on our way,

To Bilbao, we’re on our way,

How we get there I don’t care,

How we get there I don’t know,

All I know is Tottenham’s on their way

Reaching a major European football final is a cause for joy. But few outside the hard core of committed fans who follow their teams across the continent realise the logistical and financial challenges that face fans who want to be present when their team plays that final game and hopefully lifts the trophy.

The verse above, taken up by Spurs fans as the knockout rounds of the Europa League progressed, is a pretty accurate summation. If your team wins, it is of course all worth it. If they lose, well, you had to be there anyway. It’s our choice of whether or not to go, and while some of what follows will question if certain aspects really do need to be as they are – I’ve written about the reality of following your club in Europe before – it’s worth establishing from the off that this is something we do for pleasure and it is great to be lucky enough to be able to go to the game.

This, then, is an account of a journey to a final, an insight into the practicalities of following a team around Europe. The focus is on the financial and cultural issues covered regularly here, and I apologise if it’s a little Spurs heavy for some. Other stories are available – this is mine.

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While live men’s football is a huge draw – the Premier League estimates total attendance over the course of a season is around 14.8 million people – the number of fans who regularly travel to away games is far smaller. There are no more than around 3,000 away tickets available for any game in the Premier League, so demand hugely outstrips supply. Many clubs run loyalty schemes which mean the more games you go to, the more chance you have of getting a ticket, and that in turn means each club’s 3,000 away fans will be largely the same people from week to week.

Tickets are still passed on – a major part of football culture in in England – but that tradition is under pressure because of the huge demand. Understandably, fans on loyalty schemes don’t like losing out because someone ahead of them in the queue has passed their ticket to a mate or a family member. But I’d estimate that there are no more than around 4,000 to 5,000 people who go regularly to away games at each club.

European away games are tougher still to get tickets for. There are significant time and cost demands, and competing clubs are obliged to offer 5% of tickets, rather than the 10% or 3,000 required by the Premier League. Combine that with grounds that, in the Europa and Europa Conference Leagues, can have relatively small capacities and sometimes there will be less than 1,000 tickets on offer.

So, I reckon it’s safe to estimate that between 2,000 and 2,500 fans at most can be considered regular attenders at European away games. Across the seven English clubs that were in European competition this season, that’s under 18,000 people. Compare that number with the total attendance across European competition games (17 million League in 2023-24) and then with the total TV audience for the same season quoted by UEFA as 1.6 billion for the Champions League and 654 million for the Europa and Europa Conference Leagues and you’ll understand why what happens to away fans in Europe is low down the list of priorities. It’s a numbers game.

Finals are different. In Bilbao, it’s estimated 37,000 Spurs fans checked in to the fan park at various stages throughout the day of the Final. Many thousands more stayed in other parts of the city and, given what I witnessed, I don’t think an estimate of over 50,000 Spurs fans is excessive. United fans seemed heavily outnumbered, but like Spurs they would have had an allocation of c14,700. The San Mames is a 49,600 capacity stadium, and the remaining c20,200 tickets were made up of 11,000 public ballot tickets and c9,000 for what UEFA calls the football family. Many of those would have found their way to fans at vastly inflated prices. Face value prices, though, were very good, with around half the tickets available in the bottom two price tiers of €40 and €65, with the cost of tickets in the top two tiers rising sharply to €160 and €240.

For regular travellers, it’s almost like a job to do the planning required to get to games. Especially so now that more games means shorter turnaround times between ties. For the many more who don’t or can’t travel as regularly, the level of organisation required can be a major challenge.

Booking for the league phase can be easier as the eight games span from September to January, meaning slightly more time to plan for the later matches. I’m in the top 1,000 loyalty point holders at Spurs, so I know I’m pretty certain of a match ticket at most grounds. That means I can plan in the certainty I can get into the game. I just need to get to where the game is.

Booking.com is a godsend, as you can book accommodation that can be cancelled with a bit of notice, so once destinations are known it’s possible to secure rooms. This needs time and organisation though. UEFA draws now identify league phase home and away opponents and the dates of matches, but there is no advance notice of the order of those games, so you can’t book anything until the schedule is locked in. Nonetheless, researching possible routes to possible destinations is advisable, so that you can move quickly when dates are announced.

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This season, we were driving to an away game in Newcastle on the day UEFA was confirming the schedule. We built in a couple of service station stops where we could get on the Wi-Fi and book hotels and flights. The announcement arrived six hours later than expected, leading to a stressful drive. We managed to book that evening, but prices were already rising steeply.

Moving fast is key because rooms and flight prices shoot up sharply once dates are confirmed. That’s the dynamic pricing model so beloved of promotion companies and which many club owners want to introduce for football tickets. It is pure exploitation and hopefully the new regulator will see that it is not introduced for match ticketing.

It’s when it gets to the knockout stages that the fun really starts. Alkmaar was easy enough to get to, and a lovely place, but at the end of the second leg tie at home against AZ we were set hovering over our phone screens ready to book flights to Frankfurt for the next round in the final minutes, arguing about whether a one-goal lead was enough to be sure we’d be travelling, and fretting that the stadium Wi-Fi would go down. We hit the buy button on the whistle. An hour after the game prices had doubled. Some people were already taking a chance on booking for Bilbao.

Beating Frankfurt gave us a tie against Bodo/Glimt, situated a 17.5-hour drive north of Oslo inside the Arctic Circle. It’s the kind of trip fans love, to somewhere we’d never think of going unless it was for the football, and this promised to be something very different from the normal trips. But with only 404 tickets available, the trip costing at least £1,000 and requiring a minimum two days off – plus some challenging weather conditions thrown in – this was a bridge too far even for many of us seasoned travellers.

Joy at victory in Norway quickly gave way to the madness of getting to Bilbao for the final – which was being held just 13 days later. We’d booked accommodation back in the summer, but even then only in Santander, a one-and-a-half-hour bus ride from Bilbao.

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It took most of a day to research, plan and book what was to be our route to the final. You need to be smart, but not too clever by half and end up paying more for a circuitous trip intended to save money that ends up costing you more than a direct route. Bilbao is not the easiest place to get to, and options from the major European hub airports were fewer than they had been for Madrid in 2019. Flights that were available were already very expensive; trains across northern Spain don’t have the best reputation, and going that route involved multiple changes and long hours of travel. Ferries were 36 hours each way, rising in price, and only sailing at limited times. The prospect of a punishing drive, or an even more punishing coach journey – £99 on Flixbus from Victoria – was looming.

The Club and specialist operator Sport Options chartered flights but they were between £800 and £1,200 for a day trip or a two-night stay in a neighbouring city. We found a flight that took us from Naples to Bilbao on Tuesday morning for €33 (£27.68) per person. London to Naples on Monday afternoon we got for £47 per person via Jet2. Accommodation near the airport was £30 per person for one night, cancellable via Booking.com. From Bilbao, we booked a bus which would take one and a half hours to get to Santander. We’d stay there on Tuesday night, £35 a head, then get the bus – booked in advance – back into Bilbao for match day. So we could get there, we just needed to get back.

Flights back to the UK were still expensive through until Saturday, when Vueling offered a trip for £59 a head. We’d have to make a week of it! Hotel prices dropped significantly in the days after the final, so we booked up at around £60 a head per night for the Thursday and Friday, which would give us time to take in the sights of Bilbao, including the famous Guggenheim museum. Just one remaining issue – we had to get back to Santander on the night of the game.

It turned out every bus was booked until 6:45am the morning after the final. So we got tickets for the all-night party at the night club hired by the group of fans who were organising the boat trips we’d booked for the afternoon of the game. Needs must, and who needs sleep when you’re in a European final? We’d get the bus back to Santander, grab a few hours sleep at the hotel, check out by midday and head back into Bilbao. It would be a five-and-a-half day trip with just one day not travelling, costing just under £500 a head (including bus fares).

A week after the tension of arranging travel came the tension of getting a ticket. At Spurs, we had to apply first via the club. The top c14,700 applicants would get a code enabling us to access the UEFA ticket site, which was the only platform tickets were being sold through. Once in, you could select a ticket in one of four price categories, and if successful would be sent your ticket a couple of days later. Then, on the day of the game, you’d be sent a QR code that activated your ticket. The process worked, although not without a scare when we were unable to log in to our UEFA accounts when the sales window opened. Luckily we had two of us trying, as I’m still waiting for my password reset email!

• Part two, published tomorrow, covers arrival in Bilbao, how the final was organised, and why all this can mean so much.

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  Photos: © Martin Cloake

Knowing the person who would be the face of the regulator was always going to help get an idea of how the body might operate, and so far the signs look encouraging.

Kogan is a heavyweight figure, with knowledge of how the finances and politics of the football business work. He’s worked with various leagues in England and Scotland on media rights, has been a senior journalist at large media organisations, has experience of governance structures, and he’s a fan with a genuine passion for the game.

There has been some initial nonsense about him not being independent – nonsense largely generated by people who have always been opposed to a regulator or, in the case of the Tory Party, people who want to justify a policy u-turn. Kogan dealt with that head on during a highly impressive 90-minute appearance before the House of Commons Select Committee this week, an appearance that also gave some indication of what his approach is likely to be.

To those accusations of lack of independence first. Kogan is a Labour Party member who has written two histories of the party, chaired the LabourList website, and donated funds to the party. At the Select Committee, Kogan also volunteered the information that he had donated funds to the leadership campaign of PM Keir Starmer and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy.

The Tories, desperately looking for a way to square their new leader’s radical anti-regulation stance with their previous support for regulating football – the Bill was produced after a review instigated by a Conservative government and was chaired by Tory MP Tracey Crouch – seized on the issue as proof of cronyism, and several Conservative members of the Select Committee made sure the implication was on public record.

Unfortunately for them, as Kogan pointed out in some detail, he had been approached to take the job by the previous government too. So much for Tory objections, but you can be sure the Labour crony line will continue to be pushed by the likes of Times journalist Martin Samuel, who has mentioned the issue twice since the appointment was announced. Samuel has pushed the Premier League’s attack lines throughout the process, and previously put a lot of effort into propagating the view that the regulator would fall foul of UEFA rules on independence from state interference.

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The UEFA scare proved unfounded, so expect Samuel to continue with the fall-back argument that Kogan is not independent. The definition of independent in this argument appears to be ‘someone with no opinions’, but Samuel surely cannot be daft enough to believe this. Any person with the experience and heft required to take the job of football’s regulator would need to have contacts, and opinions about policy. As Kogan pointed out, independence is written into the Bill (section 11).

He also pointed out he is “not known for being susceptible to pressure”, a reference to his tough negotiating stance that has prompted phrases such as ‘lack of tact’ and ‘confrontational nature’ to be used in coverage of his appointment. Of course, the football world is not exactly noted for the number of delicate flowers in senior positions, so such descriptions serve as reassurance that Kogan is viewed as no pushover by those who have become accustomed to doing the pushing over.

On the subject, while Kogan has so far come across well to people in the supporter movement, he can’t be portrayed as unduly biased towards fans. This appointment needed to be someone who couldn’t easily be portrayed as anyone’s patsy, and Kogan certainly gave the impression he knew his own mind at the hearing.

He spoke of the job being a “critical and fascinating” one that he was “hungry” to take on, and said the regulator would prove its worth by “doing the things we say we are going to do.” He came across as being mindful of the need to show, sooner rather than later, what the regulator could do, to prove its worth not only to the industry but to the millions who value the game. He wants the regulator to be “not a cop, but an asset”, helping clubs meet the requirements expected as a first principle.

I’ll confess my initial worry was that, while Kogan had the necessary financial and business acumen, he may not fully appreciate the fan perspective. Kogan was frank about where his experience was and where it wasn’t – governance generally but not regulation specifically, for example – but spoke impressively about the need to build a multi-talented team able to deliver on the many fronts required. It’s something he has done before. And he had some encouraging things to say about the role of fans.

He spoke of wanting to ensure “a consistent application of fans’ voices in the way their clubs are run,” observing that we needed to move on from the current situation in which too many relationships depended on how much owners were prepared to listen to fans. He was clear that the regulator could not intervene directly on setting ticket prices, for example, but said: “It’s a matter for the regulator to ensure fans have a view on ticket prices”. Fans, he said, “have an ally in the regulator.”

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While Kogan undoubtedly has views on how the game should be run, he was also clear about what the remit of the Bill allowed him to do, straight batting a few of the panel’s questions by saying it wasn’t for him to comment on matters outside the remit of the job, let alone one he had not been formally appointed to. This is someone who understands the power and necessity of process, and it’s safe to say too many in the game have not been across the detail of that for too long.

The prospect of legal challenge from powerful interests was dealt with honestly, with Kogan saying he hoped it didn’t come to that but that the way to deal with it was to do the job properly and to be prepared – and financially able – to defend positions robustly in court.

The Bill is entering its last stages, and I’d like to see some issues around measuring the quality of fan engagement addressed, along with more specific provision to prevent domestic games being played overseas, plus some outstanding questions about media rights and international income resolved. It is the detail of the Bill that Kogan will work to, so it is important that detail covers the ground it needs to.

Kogan will be the chair, the public face people look to for direction, but the role of CEO – yet to be appointed – will also be key as this post will be responsible for day-to-day operations. And there’s a board to be appointed, a body whose composition will also say much about what we can expect. Discussion at the hearing indicated Kogan was keen to get on with recruiting and appointing.

So will fans notice an immediate difference? Will the regulator get popular embrace as A Good Thing? Almost certainly not, because that’s not how regulation works. The purpose of this regulator is to make football more sustainable, to protect football clubs as community assets as much as possible by changing the financial imperatives that promote reckless behaviour. That will take time, and if in five years we can say that there have been no more Burys or Southends or Readings then progress will have been made.

Fans of clubs further down the pyramid will probably see the benefits sooner than those further up, and indeed there was specific talk at the select committee hearing about the need to move away from the current “series of financial cliff edges” and back to a more recognisable pyramid.

For fans of the bigger clubs, there will be less immediate opportunity to judge success, and I’ve already heard disappointment expressed about this. But this regulator was never going to tell clubs what to do. The point was to create an environment in which it was difficult or impossible to do some of the things club owners have done before. So there won’t be an instruction from the regulator to price tickets at a certain price, for example, but there will be a requirement to consult fans properly and justify pricing decisions.

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It will come as no surprise to hear that my focus will be on the fan engagement aspects and how that all plays out. There is an opportunity for fan groups to make the regulatory system work, but only if they understand the opportunity it provides, and are prepared to robustly pursue its proper implementation. Kogan’s observation about consultation having depended on how much club owners are prepared to listen is key – and fan groups need the confidence to realise that they don’t have to preserve grace and favour relationships any more. They are stakeholders in the game, alongside other stakeholders.

Proof will be in the actions that occur, not the words that are said. Kogan is correct in observing that the regulator could do with a quick win. Cracking down on some of the evasive and disingenuous manoeuvring by some clubs that have consistently worked to undermine the spirit and effectiveness of consultation would be an ideal place to start.

There is a real chance to move on from the debilitating battles in which club owners had sole discretion over when, how, why and how much they listened to fans. Any change will be couched in reasonable, pragmatic and consensus-oriented language – which doesn’t make for populist slogans, but could deliver a more significant change than many believe.

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“Philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it” is the quote that’s guided me most in life – along with “I am playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order” in case I get too full of myself while being guided by the former.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about change – how to achieve it, what we mean by change, and whether the desire for change has taken too much emphasis off the need to interpret. Looking around the world at bigger issues than football I’d certainly argue that the enthusiasm for change is winning out over the need to weigh up the consequences of that change. But that could also be a case of any change being considered better than none.

That question of how volunteer fans reps can exert influence over businesses with multimillion pound turnovers and 100s of full-time staff operating on a global scale has been a challenge ever since clubs at the top end of the game became this big. And it’s influence we are confined to talking about, rather than ownership.

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I’ve written before about ‘Sack the board’, the cry that traditionally went up when things were going wrong at clubs, and argued that the complexities of the current football business required more than simply oppositionism. These days the lines between owners and boards are increasingly blurred, and in any case such wholescale change in organisations of this size can be extremely disruptive. Incremental change or more subtle changes in direction can be what’s called for, but such nuanced calls are harder to popularise and organise around.

There’s also a need to bust some myths, or at least get things in perspective. Fan opposition to boards at Spurs, Liverpool and Newcastle has – over the last couple of decades – undoubtedly played its part in regime changes. But in the end it has been the willingness of the previous owner to accept the money offered by the new one that has counted.

But recognising all of this doesn’t mean that fan reps in this environment should forget what they are there for, which is to push the fan perspective, defend and extend fan interests, and show fans the possibilities an organised approach can create. In short, not simply just being in the room, but remembering why they are in the room.

The early days of the new Fan Advisory Board regime are not encouraging. At too many clubs the process is swathed in secrecy, with commercial confidentiality being used as a catch-all to enable club boards to get their own way and to prevent the transparency necessary for the process to have the confidence of fans.

Communication is largely poor, with some reps interpreting the fact that FABs are internal club bodies as meaning that they should be closed off, with detail of what is discussed or even proposed never disclosed. A classic example of being in the room but forgetting what you went in it to do. The result is FABs being used as PR cover for unpopular decisions.

On top of secrecy has come a clampdown on dissent. I know of cases where fan organisations have been threatened with expulsion from any formal process simply for expressing the mildest criticism. This is simply unacceptable, and not in the spirit of the White Paper that followed the Fan-Led Review.

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I spent the best part of 10 years dealing with a club board that defined fan engagement as “getting the fans to agree with us” and that view is still too prevalent across the game. It has led to division between fan organisations – not an unintended consequence of club policy – and to ridiculous situations where opposition can only be aired by grass roots splinter organisations rather than the formal process set up to consult fans.

Supporter organisation has always operated as something of an ecosystem, with different groups able to play different parts in achieving the same objectives. But recognised fan reps waiting like First World War generals for the masses to go over the top isn’t an ecosystem – it’s a recipe for disaster.

I’ve seen too many examples of fan activists attacking each other rather than working together. But there are also encouraging signs. At Manchester City for example, where the formal club consultation body City Matters has long been seen as a club construct, activity by grassroots groups such as MCFC Foodbanks and the 1894 flags group around the FSA’s highly successful #stopexploitingloyalty campaign on ticket pricing has built links with Fan Advisory Board reps and given them renewed confidence to speak out and to act more transparently. I’ve heard that dismissed as grandstanding. I prefer to call it effective representation. The formation of an independent supporters trust at the last of the so-called Big Six clubs not to have one could be the proof of the pudding.

Fan Advisory Boards as proposed in the Fan-Led Review were always a two-sided coin. We needed proper, formal access to the structure of the clubs we support, not just permission to be heard, but the danger was always that the clubs would pursue a strategy of corporate capture.

The temptation to relax once you think you’re on the inside is great – greater still when it seems there is little enthusiasm to do the level of work required. So there is a lot to be done across the supporter movement to give people the confidence and knowledge to push where necessary, and to stand up against opponents that are far better resourced.

The main objective of the new regulator will be to tackle football’s financial and sustainability problems, but ensuring genuine fan engagement in governance that has the confidence of the wider fan base must also be high on the list. The alternative is a descent into outright opposition and rage as confidence in representation and organisation is extinguished. And we only have to take a look at the wider world to see where thinking any change is good enough gets us.

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The threat of damage to the economic success story that is the Premier League has been used to marshall arguments against a football regulator existing at all, and is now being used in attempts to limit the reach and influence of that regulator. That economic success story is presented, and has been largely accepted, as a given. But how accurate is that story of economic success? And what does it tell us about the need for a regulator in the first place?

At first glance there can be little argument about the League’s economic success. Many of the world’s top players earn top wages to play for some of the game’s most successful clubs at some of the best stadiums in front of full houses and with a huge global TV audience watching.

Figures compiled by EY and quoted in the Premier League’s Annual report for 2023/24 show the League contributed £8 billion to the UK economy during the 2021/22 season, with £5 billion of that economic footprint located outside London. Average crowds topped 40,000 for the first time during that season, and the global TV audience was estimated at over 1.5 billion – a figure that explains why domestic broadcasters alone paid £6.7 billion to secure coverage when the last deal was signed in 2023.

A success, then, by any measure? Well, I’m not going to argue the Premier League is a dud, but I am going to present another perspective. Because looking deeper reveals a strange kind of economic glory.

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Liverpool, who will most likely be crowned champions this season and are one of the two truly global club brands in the Premier League are, according to analysis by Swiss Ramble, on course to make a pre-tax loss of £57m – the highest in the club’s history.

For Liverpool, this loss is no great cause for alarm. The club’s on-pitch successes, domestically and in returning to the Champions League, along with its huge global following pushing commercial revenues ever-upwards, means that it is not in danger of running into serious financial problems unless it makes some very poor decisions.

Which brings us to the League’s other truly global club brand, Manchester United. As an example of how to reduce a financial powerhouse to a debt-ridden basket case, there can be few better examples than United under the Glazer family. The Glazers, of course, have done very nicely out of loading the club with debt. But United the club booked a pre-tax loss of £131m, the second worst in the club’s history and the highest in the division.

New part-owner Jim Ratcliffe is promising to turn things around, but is slashing costs, claiming the club would have gone bust by Christmas if he hadn’t acted. So up go prices, and down go the number of staff jobs. One of the world’s biggest clubs has even had to axe the staff Christmas party, such are its financial problems. Although a new £2 billion stadium is not beyond its means, apparently.

Many will say that these financial troubles are minor for two such big clubs. And it is hard to imagine a financial institution brave enough to pull the plug on such football giants. But these two clubs are not big because of the Premier League. They are big because of long periods of sustained success, and deep roots in community and tradition, that were developed long before the Premier League was even thought of.

You could argue, in fact, that one of the reasons the Premier League is so successful is because these two clubs are in it – at least now that they have decided they don’t want to bin the Premier League off entirely for a European Super League. What, one wonders, would have become of the economic success story if the self-appointed top six had been allowed to get away with that?

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A look across the League reveals that nearly half the 20 clubs in the Premier League lost more than £50m in the 2023/24 season. And losses of that size are neither unusual or infrequent. Being £50m down year after year may be something Liverpool or Manchester United can handle, less so Wolverhampton Wanderers or Nottingham Forest.

Let’s keep looking at the detail of the economic success story. Manchester City, Arsenal and Chelsea are probably the closest to achieving the global brand status of the Big Two – although they still have some distance to make up.

For Chelsea and Manchester City, let’s just say the financing of success doesn’t exactly stack up as a conventional business success story. Much has been written elsewhere about both clubs.

Arsenal take some pride in presenting themselves as a sustainably-run club, and the Gunners’ pre-tax loss of £18m doesn’t look too bad against some of the figures from other clubs . But despite the relatively healthy finances it was still apparently essential for ticket prices to go up next season. As the Arsenal Supporters’ Trust said: “We understand that costs are increasing across football, especially for player wages and agent fees, but feel that Arsenal and all Premier League clubs should be making greater efforts to control these pressures rather than relying on supporters to take the strain.”

Up the Seven Sisters Road at Tottenham Hotspur, analysis of the 2022/23 season’s accounts, the most recent set available, revealed a £95m loss. Spurs, of course, have recently built a stadium that generates around £6m every match day and are widely viewed as a well-run business, although not so much as a well-run sporting institution.

But the business is not so well run, apparently, that Spurs can afford to match the player wage spending of the clubs they say they want to compete against – no such restraint in the boardroom, it must be noted, where the chairman is number one in the highest paid Premier League director charts. And not so well run that they can give anything back to fans – the recently announced freeze in headline season and match day ticket prices disguising the fact that the club has increased charges in a range of other areas.

Not all clubs made a loss. West Ham United made a pre-tax profit of £57m. This has been been achieved through some smart player trading, and recent success in Europe. But, as their competitors would no doubt point out, being given a taxpayer-funded stadium in a very favourable deal hasn’t hurt. (There’s more forensic detail on the ins and outs on the Olympic Stadium Coalition website).

Brighton & Hove Albion and Brentford are regularly posited as the poster boys in the well-run clubs debate, and there is much to admire about what both have achieved. But both depend on beneficial owners not calling in vast loans – in 2022/23 the interest-free unsecured loan to the Seagulls from owner Tony Bloom stood at £373m, while Brentford owner Mathew Benham has backed the Bees with a £62m interest-free, unsecured loan.

Newcastle United, owned let us remember not by a nation state but by a sovereign wealth fund that is absolutely not what the name suggests unless the fund itself is arguing it is in an effort to block the discovery of documents in a court case, made a loss of £11m in 2023/24. Nottingham Forest racked up a £67m loss as they clung on to Premier league status in 2022/23.

And in some of the latest figures released, Bournemouth’s annual accounts for 2023/24 reveal underlying losses of £55m on turnover of £170m, with owner loans of £123m underpinning things. As one observer remarked: “That’s a lot of money to finish 8th.”

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As I said earlier, on one level there can be little doubt that the Premier League is a roaring success. But there is another picture, the one painted above, that features debts, subsidies, the use of vast wealth to get ahead, the failure to trickle down economic benefits to the fans who help produce the product. And it is that last point that may become very relevant if another of the bricks in this big old jenga tower is removed – because if the TV money pulls out, it will change everything.

So yes, there’s success. But is it sustainable? Is it achieved through the best practice? Is it achieved with the best possible outcome?

We need to think too about the impact the Premier League has on the rest of the game. While the League’s PR people emphasise “The Premier League’s scale of support for the lower leagues and the wider game is unmatched in world sport,” management consultants Lane Clark and Peacock observe in the rest of the game “a culture of short-term speculation financed by borrowing or equity injections to achieve Premier League status.”

The benefits on offer mean many clubs will take huge gambles to get in on the action. As one regulatory insider remarked to me: “Reading and Derby County are salutary tales of what happens when clubs gamble on promotion to the EPL – and fail.”

The picture at the top of this piece shows the home of Ipswich Town, former UEFA Cup winners let’s not forget. Their 2022/23 accounts show a pre-tax loss of £18.2m, and this despite a 51% rise in revenue. The club is owned by a US investment company, with a US private equity firm making a significant financial input too. The owners have said they have bought ”an asset, at a lower value, that has potential and history”.

Ipswich look likely to go down this season, and that will test the commitment of the owners – owners who, to be clear, are investors first and foremost. Any initial problems may be offset by the existence of parachute payments, a measure introduced and fiercely defended in explicit recognition of football’s flawed economics (I covered parachute payments in a previous edition). But longer term, it is not hard to imagine Ipswich’s future may not spell out ‘economic success story’.

The more you understand the true nature of football’s unique economy, the more an independent regulator sounds like a good idea.

• There are extensive links to the excellent financial analysis of Swiss Ramble in this, and a subscription is highly recommended if you are interested in football finance and are partial to a musical reference.

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In less than 12 months, football fans around the country have changed a conversation on ticket pricing that had been going on for years. Actions throughout the Premier League have not only seen clubs targeted but supporter groups stand side by side under the banner of #stopexploitingloyalty, a campaign launched by the FSA in response to growing anger over pricing. The campaign has pulled in a new generation of supporters, breathed new life into some organisations, and gained a foothold in the mainstream media.

It’s worth taking a moment to consider what has been achieved. While there’s been disquiet over the rising price of going to the game for years, a subject Nick Harris and I covered in depth last year in a series of articles on The Real Face of Premier League Price Inflation, attempts to do anything about it were brushed aside. It was said it was fans’ own fault for ‘exploiting themselves’ by continuing to buy tickets, that only a mass boycott would change anything, that the prices weren’t that high when compared with sport in the US, that the game would never agree to restrict home ticket pricing as it did when the Premier League agreed to cap away ticket prices at £30 in 2016/17.

Those arguments are being exposed. Fetishising boycotts or blaming fans for supporting their team was never sustainable. Comparing the price of tickets to one-off events or sports in other countries ignored the issues of culture, community and loyalty that help create the atmosphere at English grounds so valued by TV companies. Saying that the game would never agree to price controls ignored the fact that action and the weight of opinion can change the boundaries of the possible.

I wrote briefly about the campaign in December, but I wanted to return in a bit more depth as we are reaching one of the turning points every campaign does.

One of the things that has stood out is the imagination and variety of tactics deployed. This video produced by the Hammers United group at West Ham is a great example, and that chant in the background still has me chuckling.

West Ham fans have staged one of the longest-running campaigns since their club decided to attack concessionary pricing, with Save Our Seniors at Spurs also making their voices heard. Fans at Leicester, Ipswich, Aston Villa, Manchester City, Manchester United, Fulham and Nottingham Forest and elsewhere have also protested. Wolves agreed to reverse plans to increase season ticket prices after fan protests, Brentford announced a price freeze for next season, with the club’s chairman backing the principles of #stopexploitingloyalty, and this week Liverpool announced the club would not be increasing prices for next season.

The club’s statement mentioned “meaningful engagement with its official Supporters Board” as contributing to its decisions, and referenced “the ambition to make ticket access a realistic goal for all supporters”. Fan group the Spirit of Shankly said it had “made it clear that any increase would negatively impact loyal supporters and undermine the traditions and culture of our club.” SOS has played a leading part in the national campaign, and in keeping the wider threat to our game’s culture prominent in discussions.

The Stop Exploiting Loyalty hashtag has proved to be a smart one. It’s turned the finger pointing away from the supposedly stupid fans who ‘allow’ ourselves to be exploited to the clubs which venerate market economics on the one hand while knowingly exploiting the unique customer loyalty of their unique businesses on the other. And it brings in the fact that this exploited audience helps create the atmosphere around the product that the TV companies pay for in order for the money to come rolling in. When the last TV deal was announced, FSA research found that every Premier League club could let every fan in to every game for free and still earn more money than in the previous year. But still the prices went up.

There have been successes, but the campaign as a whole still cannot be called a success. There are rumours that some clubs are planning increases of up to 5% next year. Brighton & Hove Albion have already announced that level of increase on season tickets, together with an attack on concessionary pricing that directly penalises many of those same fans who put their hands in their pockets when the club nearly went out of business not that many years ago. Not so much exploiting loyalty as shoving it in their fans’ faces. And Brighton were seen as one of the good guys. There’s a long way to go.

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A way to go too for fan groups. The movement has been re-energised, new faces are emerging, new groups forming, and new alliances formed. And as always happens when campaigns develop, new questions are being asked. Are the old ways of organising appropriate, or effective? Have demands been too narrow or too wide?

It’s been important that the economic arguments of the campaign have been rooted in the wider issues about access to tickets, what kind of audience is being attracted, the importance of community and traditional ties of loyalty – in short, about the culture that makes our game what it is. The energy behind the campaign derives in part from a more general frustration at the direction in which the game is going. Here there is both danger and opportunity. The danger is that calls to ‘preserve culture’ become solely backward-looking, conjuring up a rose-tinted golden age; the opportunity is that this strand of campaigning enables us to go wider and deeper. But it is important to retain the focus on pricing, and the campaign could also do with producing more hard research to challenge the economic arguments put forward by its opponents. Drawing deeper on the structures and experiences in countries such as Germany and Sweden will also be beneficial.

One key question is about the role of work inside and outside the room. It’s one that will be familiar to anyone who has been involved in political or campaigning work. The fact is that work has to be done in both arenas, and it has to be linked. Too often those outside the room lapse into oppositionism without acknowledging that in order to succeed a dialogue has to be established and relationships built. But those inside the room can also too often forget that, while every discussion can’t be conducted in public, it is important to keep your mass base informed and yourself accountable.

Being in the room is something we have fought for over many years and it has not been achieved easily. That achievement should not be tossed aside. Equally, the achievement needs to be cherished and built upon, not used as a reason not to challenge, or simply to justify being in the room for its own sake. I worry from some of the discussions I hear that this link is too easily forgotten. The win at Liverpool shows what can be achieved when the balance is right.

Perhaps the most encouraging change in conversation is that it is no longer about why fans in England are not challenging the direction the game is going in, but about how best to do that.

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Some very interesting developments in the ongoing Governance Bill saga, covered regularly in The Football Fan. Manchester City’s victory in the associated party transactions case surely seals the case for independent regulation. The Premier League’s rules have once again been found wanting, and the verdict is pretty damning. Boiled down, it seems what did for the Premier League was the decision to exclude shareholder loans from the scope of rules on APT transactions when other deals which had exactly the same impact were included. And the fact that some of the clubs who pushed for shareholder loans to be excluded were among the most significant beneficiaries of shareholder loans will not have gone unnoticed by m’learned friends.

It seems, amazingly, that if you let the members of a competition decide on the rules they must follow, they will try to set rules that most benefit them. It’s a pretty succinct argument for an independent regulator.

Incredibly, the latest expose of the utter shambles that is the Premier League’s attempt to regulate itself has resulted in the PL calling for, wait for it, more powers for the new regulator. That’s the regulator it has spent months arguing will have too much power – after spending even longer arguing it was never going to happen.

The City case ruling came at a particularly embarrassing time for PL head of policy Clare Sumner and Brighton CEO Paul Barber. They both appeared on a Price of Football podcast to argue why they agreed with a regulator unless it was allowed to do anything significant, in which case it was a terrible idea. Sumner delivered some significant corporate word salad and the opinion that PL rules were carefully calibrated, while Barber spent a lot of time complaining how outrageous it was that not only had Brighton not been asked to contribute but had not been used as the sole research basis for the whole review.

There was much made of the fact that the regulator would cost £10m a year – something that would have to come from clubs – but this appears a bargain alongside the £50m in legal bills alone racked up last year by the PL, and the expected costs of tens of millions in the APT case.

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Barber’s appearance surely brought his stint as the latest acceptable face the Premier League wheels out to an end. (Stocks are now very short). Sources with extensive knowledge of the review process say they have no knowledge of Brighton attempting to contact the Review to give evidence. If Brighton did contact someone, it would be interesting to know who. But anyone could submit written evidence and many (including other PL clubs) did.

Perhaps noses were put out of joint because the Review panel did approach Brentford as an example of a recently promoted club. Brighton and Brentford’s boardrooms enjoy what is called in the trade ‘frosty relations’ after a falling out between the owners. Or perhaps Brighton’s post is handled by the same people who carefully calibrate PL rules.

If, as it appears, Brighton’s didn’t approach the review, could it have had something to do with the fact that the PL was busy telling all its members that the regulator would never happen?

But hold on, who is this setting out how much the Premier League has been engaged in “an enormous amount of consultation” on the Review? And again here? Why, it is Richard Masters, chief executive of the Premier League, an organisation in which Barber’s club holds a 5% share. And an organisation which had as a member of its fan-led review advisory group, which had extra meetings on the subject with the last government, [checks notes] Brighton’s Paul Barber.

It really is, as they used to say on the telly, a funny old game. All of this has proved quite a test for Martin Samuel, who has put in a Stakhanovite effort producing articles saying what a terrible idea the regulator is, and also on what a terrible shambles the Premier League’s efforts to run itself are. He seems unable, however, to take the small next step to recognising the connection between the terrible shambles and the need for an independent regulator.

Here’s a thought. If a regulator which costs £10m a year will, as some clubs have claimed, force it to put ticket prices up, will one that can be conservatively estimated to save in the region of £70m a year in legal fees enable it to put them them down? Answers on a postcard to what Brian Glanville dubbed The Greed Is Good League way back in 1992.

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One of the things that really used to wind me up when I was more formally active was overly restrictive bag policies. The subject came up again this week with news of Fulham’s attempt to ban all bags from the Putney Stand for the game against Crystal Palace. Apparently some Palace fans, who share the stand with the home support, had brought flares in last year so it was bye-bye bags.

Now, before I go on I should say that we always recognised the security issues at play, largely – and this did come as news to some of the safety officials we dealt with – because we didn’t want to be blown up. But there are questions of proportion and discrimination. Banning bags entirely is a considerable inconvenience for fans who have to travel long distances and need to carry, at the least, keys, money, phone and phone charger (in these days of digital tickets). But particularly women.

That’s because of a number of reasons. Women’s clothes traditionally have fewer pockets – social history fans can read more on this in a fascinating article from the sumptuously-named Pudding Cool – and many, if not all women, tend to have more to carry. The whole issue has produced some extraordinary arguments.

I’ve been in meetings where female fan reps have had to explain to all-male panels why women need to carry sanitary products. And I’ve been accused of being a sexist for arguing that some women want to take a small can of hairspray, a hairbrush, mirror and some make-up with them in a handbag. Apparently this meant I assumed ‘they are all dolly birds’. In an industry that bangs on about diversity and inclusion so much, the lack of understanding that THERE ARE DIFFERENT KINDS OF WOMEN is astounding.

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The arbitrary nature of rules was exposed when Spurs were in residence at Wembley and we met safety officials there. They at first insisted that no bags bigger than A5 were allowed. We went away and gathered some actual research which proved there was no greater threat from explosives in an A4 bag than an A5, and that the threat from both was extremely low. The policy got reversed. As did the ban on umbrellas which, you’ve guessed it, has a disproportionate impact on women.

Some of the safety staff used to get very annoyed at being challenged, and did on occasion try to steamroller the ‘terrorist threat’ argument over us. Asking for evidence and risk assessment was a terrible cheek, it seemed. But in the Premier League fan group network we had a secret weapon – two of our most experienced fan reps, Kat Law from Spurs and Lois Langton from Arsenal. Both were extremely determined women and Lois – one of the country’s leading family law experts – also had a very distinctive style in Goth outfits, making her hard to miss. Both liked a handbag. And neither of them took any shit.

It got to the stage where people would know what was coming even before the fan reps said anything, and our success rate in getting people to back down was pretty good. Amusing as it was, it really is quite disgraceful that we have to put forward such basic arguments in this day and age. Congratulations to the Fulham Lillies women’s group at Craven Cottage for being the latest to challenge this nonsense.

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Photo: Nottingham Forest Supporters Trust

Imagine a business that operates as a monopoly. It is the sole supplier of a specific product, and as such it has a committed and solid customer base that will not buy an alternative product. Now imagine that business exists alongside a number of similar businesses that operate on the same lines in a marketplace in which those businesses compete not for customers, but success. And that the competition for success itself generates a unique product which TV companies pay large sums of money to show, and other businesses pay significant amounts of money to be associated with.

Imagine too, that many of these businesses over the years have spent more than they earn because doing so enables increases their chances of succeeding in the competitive arena. And they have done so despite, in some cases, receiving generous public subsidies for the premises in which they conduct their business. They operate in a business environment, created by their own decisions, in which spending more than you earn in order to risk being successful is actively incentivised.

Now imagine that those businesses insisted that, in order to reduce the financial impact of their own decisions to spend more than they earn, they should receive payments from the rest of the business to bridge the gap should their gamble not pay off and they be forced to operate in a less lucrative marketplace.

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It is a scenario that would be treated with derision in most businesses, even in a capitalist system in which loss is too often socialised while profit is privatised (see the banking system). But this is football.

We are talking, of course, about parachute payments. The payments given to clubs that gambled on spending too much, lost the bet and now must pay the bill. The chance that those payments may come within the ambit of the new football regulator is one of the loudest sounds in the general chorus of gnashing and wailing being raised by the Premier League in its last-ditch effort to neuter the regulator.

What is interesting is that nowhere in the bill does it say parachute payments will be abolished. But you wouldn’t realise that by reading some of the hysterical nonsense being spouted by people within the game who should know better, and by editorials and articles in The Times, a publication I am old enough to remember being a serious newspaper but which now acts as a propaganda mouthpiece for the Premier League and some club owners. (Two of our finest football writers, Tony Evans and Henry Winter, have been casualties of the former paper of record becoming a shill for football’s vested interests). We’re told the regulator means parachute payments will go, which means investors will be put off and current owners will have to cut funding for youth academies and women’s teams and put ticket prices up for fans. And even without withdrawing parachute payments the cost of funding the regulator will lead to the same results. Oh, and no one has really consulted any of the Premier League clubs about this.

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Before returning to parachute payments, let’s consider some of the other gripes. When the Premier League clubs say they weren’t consulted, what they really mean is that they haven’t been listened to as much as they feel they are entitled to be, and worse, other people have been listened to. Heaven forfend! Seasoned watchers of the consultation process over the last few years have observed that the Premier League had plenty of share of voice but chose to spend its time first arguing against a regulator, then pretending it wasn’t going to happen, and finally by predicting catastrophic results if it all goes ahead.

But wait. It’s not just me who is refuting the argument that the Premier League has been given little chance to contribute. Who is this telling MP’s last January that “we have had an enormous amount of consultation with the Government on the policies that sit behind the Bill and we have been an active participant in all that, as you expect.” Why, it is Richard Masters, the Premier League chief executive. These people don’t even believe the stuff they come out with themselves.

When clubs say they are going to cut funding and up prices, what they mean is they are going to punish the stupid fans who want this – these are choices clubs are going to make, not inevitabilities. The cost of a regulator will be less than the cost of funding the legal actions the Premier League has found itself embroiled in, and money for executive bonuses seems not to be under threat, for example.

There’s been a sustained assault on the idea of a regulator in the Lords and in the press, with the epitome of desperation being reached in a simply ridiculous article in the Daily Telegraph. Pretty much all you need to know is that it quotes Professor Len Shackleton. Our Len is one of the people behind the Institute of Economic Affairs, the outfit whose crackpot ideas were drawn on by the equally ludicrous Liz Truss when she wrecked the UK economy. He also authored a report the Premier League paid for to rubbish the idea of a regulator. None of this is mentioned in an article which also states as fact that Labour wants to introduce a clause requiring the Foreign Office to ensure any football decisions are in line with government foreign policy. In fact that clause was introduced by the previous Tory government and has been removed by Labour after lobbying by fan groups. If you do subscribe to the Telegraph, you can be sure your money doesn’t pay for basic fact checks. This, too, cannot be considered a serious newspaper.

There was a welcome fightback from Sports Minister Stephanie Peacock to the wave of drivel and the frankly anti-democratic attempts to stymie a policy that was supported by all three major parties (until the Tories decided they hadn’t really supported it at all, despite the original report bearing the name of one of their MPs). There’s clearly a big lobbying operation – however clumsily pursued – in swing so it is important to counter it, especially in age when the absence of facts or basic intelligence and logic is no barrier to ideas being embraced. There’s a worry too that Labour’s noises about sweeping aside regulation in order to encourage growth may be music to the ears of the Premier League, which will have observed the party’s ousting of the chair of the Competition and Markets Authority with interest.

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This is a story as old as capitalism itself, nothing more or less. It’s about people with money not liking to be accountable, observed or in any way prevented from doing exactly what they like. But when this attitude comes up against the communal traditions of football, it is challenged. Hence the current wailing.

That parachute payments appear to be the specific issue upon which the let-us-do-what-we-like lobby are fighting is instructive. It reveals the tactical ineptness of much of the Premier League’s campaign to hold back the tide – because the fact that parachute payments were introduced in the first place is one of the most compelling arguments for regulation.

To put it simply, if you have to offset the incentivisation of bad economic management with more bad economic management, creating a death spiral, then you cannot argue the system works well.

Parachute payments not only incentivise poor practice, they actively add to the inequalities in the system which incentivise the use of increasingly desperate gambles to bridge those gaps. Any halfway reasonable system of regulation in football should be looking to eliminate the need for parachute payments as soon as possible.

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Photo by Untitled Photo on Unsplash

December is always a busy month, and especially so for matchgoing football fans. Which for me means less time to write The Football Fan. So this is a brief roundup as we close the calendar year, and reflect on the season so far as The Season to be merry draws closer.

Governance geek alert but much time and fun has been spent following the debate on the Football Governance Bill in the House of Lords. It’s been both entertaining and depressing, and a very good advert for getting rid of this anachronism and establishing a proper second chamber.

There’s been a clear attempt to filibuster, with over 300 amendments tabled and whole days spent on the definition of single words such as “owner” and “sustainable”, and of what “English football” actually means. Special mention here must go to Lord Parkinson, whose 15 mins on why only 22 clubs have proper heraldic authorisation will surely rank in future volumes of Great Political Contributions of Our Time.

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Lady Brady – remember her from the last edition? – has been especially busy leading the charge against the folly of regulation, reading out long speeches which bear a remarkable resemblance to arguments used against the proposed regulatory framework by the Premier League. Some highlights have included;

• the assertion that the Premier League is really good at regulating the game and at fan engagement;

• fans are the lifeblood of the game and it is “a moral imperative” that their views are heard with respect;

• football clubs are really great at operating “robust systems to monitor and enforce financial sustainability”.

West Ham fans will no doubt be glad Lady Brady thinks treating them with respect is a moral imperative, and will be working hard to find out exactly who the person claiming to be Lady Brady at West Ham for the last 14 years is.

One of the Premier League’s lines has been that the regulator could have “unintended consequences” and that subjecting football to the uncertainties of changes in government policy would be bad for business. It’s another example of how football likes to claim it is like other businesses when it suits it, and not like other businesses when it suits it. Sensing an opportunity, Lord Pannick (he of Manchester City fan banner fame) said: “We listen to concerns that companies that own football clubs need long-term planning, but surely any company is subject to changes of government policy over the years. There is no protection whatever against those and the consequences thereof. I see absolutely no reason why football clubs should be protected by more than the three-year period stated here.”

Baroness Twycross put an end to much of the nonsense when she said: “I understand that some noble Lords believe that the regulator should act as an overseeing body, only acting through the leagues and only stepping in once the leagues have failed to address a problem or, in some instances, not wishing the regulator to exist at all. Without wanting to disappoint noble Lords, including the noble Lords, Lord Maude of Horsham and Lord Hayward, the noble Baroness, Lady Brady, and others who support this amendment, I am afraid that the model of regulation is not one that we are proposing and nor is it the model that the previous Government proposed.”

One particularly unedifying part of the spectacle has been Tory peers opposing and openly attempting to sabotage a bill that they backed when it was put forward by their own party when it was in power - the point referenced by Twycross. This, along with Tory leader Kemi Badenoch rubbishing the need for the Bill despite having previously written to constituents saying she backed it is a reminder that, whatever the doubts about the current government are – and there are a good few – the previous mob were not fit to be near sharp objects, let alone positions of responsibility.

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There have been disturbing levels of ignorance displayed in the debate too, even allowing for the feigned ignorance of the forthright filibusterer. One Lord spoke of the clubs being “different from the competition organisers”. As one friend said to me: “He’s going to get a shock when he finds out who owns the Premier League.” And draw your own conclusions about a line of attack that simultaneously argued against “mission creep” and sought to introduce swathes of widely new material. Oh, and don’t forget Premier League chief executive Richard Masters who, after telling a parliamentary Select Committee he would not lobby for or against the Bill went on to lobby against the Bill. Trust, anyone?

The Government stood firm in rejecting hundreds of nonsensical amendments, and the efforts to have the regulator’s powers delegated back to the clubs and the Premier League beaten back. As the West Ham United Independent Supporters Committee rightly said: “This is a victory for all football fans.” A view Lady Brady is morally obliged to take on board.

There are more battles to come, and I highly commend the commentary on the Bill’s progress on The Pitch Inspection. Martin Samuel’s Clarksonesque howls of anguish in The Sunday Times are also good for a laugh if you have seen all the repeats on Dave.

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The other notable feature of the season so far has been the growth of protests against ticket price increases alongside an increase in joint fan activity. the importance of fans coming together across tribal divides should not be underestimated, with the unified protest before last weekend’s Manchester derby arguably the most significant development. It’s also been good to see fans of clubs such as Brighton, Bournemouth and Crystal Palace stand alongside rival fans despite having no particular beef with their own clubs.

The #stopexploiting loyalty hashtag has cleverly moved the conversation on from one in which fans were blamed for paying the prices and supposedly exploiting themselves to one in which the finger is pointed clearly and directly at the clubs who exploit that loyalty. Props to my old Spurs Trust board colleague Anthoulla Achilleos for coming up with that one. More and more fans have had enough and are questioning many things the clubs hoped had been established as given.

Particularly encouraging its the emergence of new faces and a younger energy, and of efforts to assert independence and consolidate unity. At West Ham, where multiple fan groups tussled for years, there is a stronger sense of togetherness; at Manchester City there is a flickering of truly independent general organisation and evidence that fans can recognise the difference between the club and the owners; and at Tottenham Hotspur there has been a mini-revolt – with waves still rippling outwards – as grassroots groups reject the Club’s obsession with control and legitimate questions are asked of a board that has ignored challenge for too long.

All of this provides a bright note upon which to end the last edition of the year. See you on the other side.

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The photo at the head of this post shows Ibrox Stadium from the away end. Pre-match info told us there would be no netting in front of us obscuring the view. And there wasn’t. As you can see the netting was at the side of us obscuring the view. Now, I now it’s not the worst. But why does the word disingenuous come up so often in football. Happy holidays!

Progress can come slowly, but it is important to recognise it when it comes. Just a few years ago the most common response to anyone raising the subject of the price of football tickets was a dismissive ‘more fool you for buying them’, or a call for everyone to boycott games that demonstrated a lack of understanding of the culture of football supporters.

That has started to change, and the recent actions staged across two Premier League weekends under the banner of the FSA’s Stop Exploiting Loyalty campaign show a growing strength of feeling. (The main image above shows protests at, from the top, Spurs, Liverpool and Fulham). What’s smart about the slogan is that it places the argument that football is a unique business with a special kind of customer loyalty centre stage.

Going to the match is what fans use to define themselves. Being able to get to see your team live is seen as the ultimate – even by fans with little chance of doing so. Clubs know that; they know fans will keep coming back because of football’s unique customer loyalty. That’s part of the reason why the argument that ‘if you don’t go there are thousands more who will take your place’ is phoney. Because not only do clubs know that the most dedicated fans will move heaven and earth to go to as many games as they can, they use the passion of those regular fans to market and sell their ‘product’ to TV and beyond.

That’s why, when Nick Harris and I wrote earlier this year about the real face of football ticket price inflation (and you can find some hard numbers to back up these arguments in that piece) we asked the question: “Should match-going fans be subsidised by the product they create?” Our conclusion was: “It is getting increasingly hard to argue they shouldn’t.”

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That might seem a bold move for some, and it will certainly not be an idea embraced in club boardrooms. But remember, football usually has to be dragged kicking and screaming towards good ideas – and I don’t define good here as ‘beneficial only to the people that own clubs’. Along with growing discussion in the mainstream media about whether the driving up of prices has gone too far, there is an increasing realisation among fans that allowing ourselves to be blamed for our own exploitation is nonsense. 

We make the game the spectacle it is. Of course the players are the most important element, but we learned during the pandemic that players on a pitch in front of empty stands creates a very different ‘product’. So while it’s not strictly true to say football without fans is nothing, we’ve seen that football without fans doesn’t amount to very much. Certainly football without the regular fans whose emotional investment creates such a unique and vibrant atmosphere, anyway. 

It may be true that if those fans stopped going others would replace them. For a few games at least. But it requires a special dedication to negotiate the logistical and financial hurdles involved in following your team regularly, and how many of those replacement fans would stick at it for season after season? Once they saw you need your head examined to spend the time and money the regulars do, they would drift away. And who could blame them? 

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It's not hard to imagine getting to a stage at which regulars begin to drop out and, as those replacing them realise the cost of doing so, the ‘product’ inside the ground begins to deteriorate. Those turning up to sample the atmosphere will realise that they are supposed to create the atmosphere, not experience other people creating it. Spectating will begin to change from an active to a passive pursuit. And the spectacle will lose its allure.

There’s evidence this is starting to happen already. There is an increasing sense of weariness at the prices, the inconvenient kick-off times, the constant marketing, the prioritisation of almost anything apart from the football itself. And always, much to the annoyance of the Premier League’s self-styled masters of the universe, there is the example of Germany, where the value of supporter culture and recognition of what makes the football ‘product’ so special is deeply embedded. In Sweden too, there is not only recognition that another way besides the headlong pursuit of more and more money is possible, but that in England there is a danger of something very precious being lost.

So the game in England does need to Stop Exploiting Loyalty, and instead Start Valuing and Nurturing Loyalty. Treating the fans with respect, and giving them something back from the profits they create is good business sense, as well as The Right Thing To Do. So I’d like to see the argument for subsidising match-going fans be put more firmly as the conversation about ticket prices gathers pace.

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The Football Governance Bill got its first reading in the House of Lords on 13 November, and the debate – which I’ve linked to in full – provided some indication of the battle lines over the coming months. 

The Premier League finally managed to get the Conservative front bench to embrace its attack lines, although sadly for it this was the wrong side of the general election. But the Conservative benches give those lines a good airing. Expect the themes to be developed. In short, the Premier League is a huge success, legislation might be needed but not this legislation, watch out for mission creep and unintended consequences, this is state control by the back door, and do we really have to give the fans any say? Oh, and the EDI stuff is a bit woke, innit?

There was a revealing line in the opening contribution from the opposition, from Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay. He was worried about all the things mentioned above, and particularly worried about the backstop power the Bill proposes to give to the regulator. This could, he said, “lead to a scenario where the regulator forces one business to give its money to another.” That phrase neatly encapsulates so many problems. 

It's long been clear the people owning the clubs currently at the top of the pile either don’t get or don’t care about the game as a whole. That’s partly why there is a Premier League in the first place. The whole point of the Bill is to try to protect the men’s game in England as a whole, because that is at the heart of what makes football a business like no other. The owners of the top clubs seriously believe that people come to see just them – so why should the opponents get anything? Any money generated is “their” money. Not money generated by a game between two teams, or a competition between 20 or 124, or by a game that has existed for hundreds of years and which is deeply rooted in our culture and consciousness. No. It’s their money. 

So we should be grateful to the Noble Lord for putting such arrogance and greed on public record. Lord Parkinson was one of a number of speakers to use the phrase “unintended consequences” – a phrase the Premier League and its mouthpieces have peppered the debate with without ever really articulating what those may be. The suspicion is that what they are really worried about are the intended consequences of the Bill.

Lady Brady spoke bravely. One might think that having sold a club she ran to someone who was convicted of money-laundering may have made her reticent about speaking on governance matters, but Brady was uncowed. She wanted to “regulate our clubs without suffocating them” and save football “without removing its aspiration and ambition”. Of course.

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There are worries, too, about beefed up fan engagement. A number of speakers asked “which fans are to be consulted?’ and “how are we to define a fan?” These are stale lines long since discredited. Most fan organisations are far more democratic, representative and accountable than the people who buy football clubs, and those people have traditionally not been held to the standards it is apparently so important to hold fans to. This objection, along with some of the frankly bonkers contributions from fringe libertarians late in the debate, can safely be dismissed.

There was a worrying lack of detail being grasped at times. Those trumpeting the enormous success of English football appeared not to recognise how many Premier League clubs were making losses and how more than half the 92 clubs in the top four divisions are technically insolvent. The way the regulator would work and how much it would cost was also beyond some, as was a thorough understanding of how the backstop and financial redistribution would work. 

There were attempts to argue for the women’s game to be brought into the regulator’s remit, and while I have some sympathy for the thinking behind that from a principled point of view, I don’t think it would be a good idea. It would do a disservice to a game that is at a very different stage of development to the men’s and needs its own solutions.

Surprisingly little was made of how poor regulation has been when left in the hands of the Premier League and Football League. The case for independent regulation is almost entirely made by looking at what the result of self-regulation is. That’s a connection that Sunday Times columnist Martin Samuel seems unable to make. He is against the introduction of a regulator, but frequently rails against the incompetence of self regulation. It doesn’t add up.

Expect the arguments outlined above to be propagated as the Bill progresses. We’re into the trench warfare bit and the Premier League will try to take as many lumps out of the reform process as possible. But reform is coming, and we need to make sure what passes into law is the best it can be.

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I’ve worked in the media long enough to know a thing or two about brand redesigns. But most of all, I know how vital knowing your audience is to effective communication. Which brings us neatly to the latest from Tottenham Hotspur, the club I support and which just keeps providing material – sadly not in a good way.

The club has, depending on what you zero in on, redesigned, remastered, or reimagined its “brand identity”. There’s a dynamic evocation interface – sorry, a story on the club’s website – here by way of explanation. And a more traditional announcement here. 

Now, stay with me, as this is not going to turn into one of those situations familiar to anyone who has taken a guided boat tour of the Thames in London where the guide says: “Over there is the Museum of Modern Art. Well, they call it art …” I get the need for clear visual identities and branding messages and versatility in deployment. Really, I do. But the main problem with the way the Club has communicated this is that it has given a message to its fans that reads like a marketing industry internal brief. And that’s something the Spurs supporting marketing professionals I know think too.

Check the language. “Remastered brand identity”; “rolled out across all the club’s physical and digital touchpoints”; “supported by a silhouette version that allows for a more playful expression of the brand”; “refreshed assets enable a more playful, daring approach for the Club’s brand across the multitude of platforms on which it now features, with a particular focus on clarity in digital environments.” And so it goes on. And on. 

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As I said, there is a place for all this. But fans of a football club are not overly fussed about whether or not their club’s brand identity can be playfully deployed going forward with more clarity in digital environments while being run up the flagpole in a blue sky environment to see if anyone salutes it. Because the “brand identity” either works or it doesn’t. If you have to tell people what your identity is doing that usually means it’s not doing it very well. 

The announcement itself is poorly pitched. Everyone I’ve spoken to about it thought at first that the badge was being changed – something that would have exercised fans very much indeed. Dig deeper and in fact the badge stays the same but now it can be used in different colours and with a silhouette. There’s also a new font and the reintroduction of a monogram in the new font. 

There will be good reasons for all of this, but the announcement does a terrible job of communicating them. The language is suitable for Campaign or PR Week, but when used for a football audience it comes across as word salad and it invites ridicule. Although ridicule is the only solution to the set of slogans that come with this redesigned imaginamastering. There’s clearly been some focus group brainstorming in which the participants have been hopped up on a Haribo sugar rush. White Hart Lane – White HOT Lane – hot – fire – ignite the goal – ignite the soul … It certainly makes for a long night of the soul, I’ll give it that. 

All of this culminates in The Cauldron Awaits – a phrase utterly devoid of meaning when deployed in this context and which, used in the proximity of a cockerel, makes it seem like an advert for stock cubes. 

The Club also can’t get out of the habit of claiming it is innovative when it isn’t. The announcement on the club website claims Spurs were the first club to “modernise its identity” in 2006. That will be news to Leeds United, for example, whose identity was famously modernised in 1973 when Don Revie called in a design consultant to work with kit manufacturer Admiral. The result was the famous Leeds ‘smiley’ badge, and the PR consultant who created it was Paul Trevillion, an industry legend and Spurs fan who has worked on a number of projects with Spurs. If the current Spurs board were capable of recognising that anyone other than themselves was worth listening to they might have discovered this before making themselves look ridiculous with inflated claims. 

The garnish on the word salad is provided by a cringe-inducing three-paragraph quote attributed to one of the club’s directors. I won’t reproduce it here as it might break my hard drive, but it is difficult to decide whether the quote is produced by artificial intelligence or simple lack of intelligence. 

The big unanswered questions are how much did all this cost, and was it really a priority? Pretty much anyone in football knows the biggest brand projection issue Spurs have is that it is a club that was once one of the most trophied in football that has won just one minor trophy in 24 years. Imagine the marketing benefits of actually winning something. But winning, as we learned when the club’s chairman rated losing a big final above winning a small final in his list of achievements, and from the tale of the Champions League Final watches, is not a priority. 

Marketing can be very effective. But it needs something to work with.

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Main image courtesy of the FSA.

“Is football at this point a net good for humanity?” That is the question at the heart of a book that is a vital read for anyone who wants to understand the journey from beautiful game to bountiful game.

Observing that football is now big business is nothing new, but Delaney, the chief football writer for The Independent, clearly and thoroughly sets out an essential modern history of a game that has become so much more than just a sport to reach a point of existential threat. He writes as a genuine football fan who also understands and cares about issues of global economic and political power. It should relegate the phrase ‘stick to the football’ to the dustbin of history.

As Delaney says in his introduction: “The story of modern football is about how it has been transformed and distorted by three main forces”. These are geopolitics, hyper-capitalism, and a “willing facilitation” of both by football authorities unable and unwilling to deal with either. It explores a tension that runs through much of what I write about in The Football Fan, the one that exists between the sport’s need to maintain competition and the business imperative to kill off the competition. And it explains how that tension made football ripe for takeover so that “the game is increasingly used for questionable purposes, and primarily dominated by questionable forces”. 

The book is the successor to David Conn’s The Beautiful Game as the definitive story of the game’s modern development, and a companion to Bradley Hope’s Blood and Oil and Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People as a portrait of the global economy. That may seem like heavy going, but Delaney establishes from the start his love of the game itself and what it should be about. As he says in his introduction to the tale he is about to unfold: “None of this is what football is actually for. It doesn’t actually exist to make a profit. It is still at its heart a mere game that is played to represent communities, not autocratic rulers.”

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As you read through the careful setting out of how the game got to the point it has, what strikes you again and again is how those running football and its clubs have so consistently failed to realise its true value, and how that failure has delivered the game into the hands of those who now use it. Where once the local butcher, baker and candlestick-maker owned local clubs to boost their standing in the local community, now the hedge fund manager, the billionaire and the autocrat seek to use the allure of football clubs for their own more complex and far-reaching purposes.

Delaney goes into detail to explain this, showing why the rapacious forces exerting an ever-tighter grasp on the game recognised what those who previously held sway did not. The Barcelona of 2008-2012 are identified as pivotal – a team that captured the imagination and earned adulation. That reach, that popularity, has an obvious appeal to anyone who wants to exercise power and assert influence on a global stage.

Mention state ownership of football clubs and you’ll soon encounter a Manchester City fan with raised hackles. But this is about more than City. There is a direct line from Tottenham Hotspur’s Irving Scholar pushing aside the old FA Rule 34, which prevented club directors from taking dividends and protected the status of clubs as sporting and community assets, through the establishment of the Premier League, to the situation we find ourselves in today. Under chief executive Richard Scudamore the Premier League was, to coin a phrase that resonated with a time in which we were told things can only get better, “intensely comfortable” with lots of money pouring in. Questions about where that money came from, how it would be used and what for, and what effect it would have on the sport itself were dismissed.

As more and more money poured in, more and more money was needed to compete. And that soon meant the £300m spent by local steel magnate Jack Walker to help Blackburn Rovers secure the 1994/95 league title looked positively quaint. Bigger forces were now in play, and Delaney spends some time looking at why and how Roman Abramovitch took control of Chelsea. He references a quote from Putin’s People in which the international investor Sergei Pugachev suggests: “Putin’s Kremlin had accurately calculated that the way to gain acceptance in British society was through the country’s greatest love, its national sport.”

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The Abramovitch takeover was a game-changer, but there’s more to come, and Delaney deftly details the complex geopolitical calculations behind Qatar taking control of PSG, the United Arab Emirates’ interest in Manchester City, and the Saudi Arabian factor in the buy-up of Newcastle United. There’s extensive material too on how the World Cup was bought and how Qatar took centre stage even as arguably the greatest player in the history of the game lifted the famous trophy.

The author carefully sets out how the enormous firepower of state-backed clubs – and whatever the arguments about precise legal ownership there can be no doubting the state influence – has affected competitive balance. PSG’s dominance in France has brought the game to crisis point, City’s recent dominance in England threatens to do the same for a variety of reasons. The question of whether the reduction of jeopardy that is so essential for the successful realisation of the ambitions of football’s new owner class poses an existential threat to the game is never far away. Most poignant of all is a mini-portrait of Barcelona as a club sent mad by its own success, reduced to an economic basket case as a result of the beauty it created and a failure of vision.

But there are shafts of light in what is often a dark tale. Delaney looks at other leagues in Europe where success has built on embracing, rather than simply monetising, concepts of community and tradition. Unlike many mainstream football writers, he also acknowledges the influence of supporter activism, spending some time on the subject and quoting extensively from figures such as Ronan Evain, the chief executive of Football Supporters Europe, throughout. He is, too, honest and direct about how too many fans have allowed tribal loyalties to colour their vision.

I’m aware I risk the accusation of confirmation bias, but Delaney’s book makes an irrefutable case for independent regulation of football. Left to its own devices, the game has too often failed to recognise its own value, has tied itself in knots trying to please individuals who see their individual interests as more important than the collective, and brought itself to a point where its ability to retain its appeal in the long term is in question.

This is both an essential guide to what football has become, and a reminder of its true value.

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