None of your business

The argument that fans cannot understand or participate in the business of running a football club has to be taken down

Achieving change is difficult enough. Getting people to believe change is possible is harder still. In the current conversation about reforming football, the accusation that “you don’t really understand that football is a business” is being deployed pretty freely by a certain type of person. They miss the point. The reform debate is here because those seeking reform recognise football is a business, just not one that is run very well.

I was confronted with an example of this when I was asked to talk about the current drive for supporter representation in the boardrooms of football clubs on the Hawksbee and Jacobs Show on TalkSport. They played me a clip of Alan Sugar decrying the notion as nonsense because “at Spurs you’d have 60,000 managers trying to pick the team”. I answered that if Sugar had ever bothered to speak to the fans while he owned the club he would have known that the argument for fans on the board isn’t based on wanting to pick the team. It’s about fans having influence over pretty much everything else, but letting the football people do their job. I said Sugar’s view was “faux intellectual, saloon-bar nonsense”. Which it is.

There are a lot of saloon-bar business tsars out there. They pipe up whenever the idea of fans on the board is mentioned, eager to show their supposed business acumen by pointing out that business really is very complicated and not something for most people to worry about.

What this argument seems unable to recognise is that quite a few of the people who have been running football clubs haven’t done a great job. And it’s often the stupid fans who are only interested in picking the team and spending lots of money they haven’t got on expensive players – something club owners and directors have never done, of course – who end up getting the business geniuses out of the brown stuff in the end. That’s the fans who can be accountants or lawyers or company directors or civil servants or governance experts… What’s so often at best forgotten and at worst deliberately ignored by many in positions of influence in football is that there is a wealth of skill and ability among the fan base at every club that can be used for the good of the club. There are many reasons why this isn’t acknowledged, but it invariably comes down to ego.

Arguing for an improvement in the governance of the game is as much about reducing the ability of ego-driven individuals to exercise power unchecked as anything. There are, no doubt, those who would argue that true entrepreneurialism is about ego-driven individuals exercising power unchecked. But this is yet more saloon-bar wisdom. Modern businesses are increasingly coming to realise that relying on individuals rather than harnessing the power of collective experience actually makes them less, not more, agile; less likely to operate sustainably. And there will be those who will argue that this is only true of certain types of businesses, but the community roots and heritage of football clubs, together with their need to ensure competitors remain competitive, rather than drive them out of business, make football clubs prime examples of where this approach can work.

It’s worth at this point pausing to clarify just what is meant by governance. There was a really simple, accurate exposition put forward by Women in Football’s chief executive Jane Purdon when she was interviewed by my friend Matt Rogan for SportsPro Playbook. She said governance was “how checks and balances are managed, and what we take into account when making decisions”. That’s a great way of explaining it, especially as it allows us to consider the wider aspects of decisions.

There’s too often a reductionism around decision-making that pretends there’s only one set of considerations connected with any decision. This is often an attempt to close off the chances of the decision those at the top want to make being opposed – ruling valid objections off-limits is a tried and tested technique for consolidating power. But sometimes it’s just a matter of restricted thinking.

To illustrate what is meant by reconsidering what is taken into account when making decisions, let’s use the discussions about the European Super League as an example. The decision to sign up to it seems to have been taken on a very narrow basis; do we need to be in it, how much money will we make, how much less will we make if we’re not in it? But there were wider considerations. Did the fans want it, what would the effect on domestic leagues be, how would youth and international development be affected, how would it affect existing relationships with other clubs, authorities and commercial partners?

It seems likely that those questions weren’t given the consideration they might have been if there was a greater diversity of opinion at board level at the clubs that decided to sign up. Those boards are now left to deal with the consequences of a decision that has damaged their brand in the eyes of pretty much everyone they have a relationship with. Good governance? Good for business? I’d argue not.

But what I hope all this also shows is that governance, running football clubs, business decisions – none of these things are complex sciences beyond the wit of ordinary people to understand. Of course it is in some people’s interests to pretend they are, because they want you to believe that only they are capable of understanding such things, and they would really rather you let them get on with it. And this is where the saloon-bar experts perform such a disservice. Which is ironic as, in football, they are often among the loudest critics of the way governance is conducted. Perhaps the apparent desire to undermine any thought that governance could be done differently by different people stems from a lack of confidence in their own abilities. Better to stand outside the room shouting than enter it and put your abilities to the test.

It is also important to make the point that those who are prepared to put themselves to the test, to try to make a positive contribution, must also show they can operate to certain standards. And here is another challenge that those arguing for the reform of football governance face. ‘Getting a fan on the board’ is a simple statement, but what does it mean? As we’re always told by everyone who works in football – everyone’s a fan. (I explored this in a previous newsletter.) We have to ask questions such as what sort of fan? What power do they hold? But we can’t just argue for ‘the sort of I fan I want to see’. And we can’t dilute the requirements for club directors after spending so long arguing they should be strengthened.

So how do we prevent fan representation becoming ‘professionalised’? How do we ensure that the position doesn’t become the preserve of those who move from one directorship to another, never really challenging groupthink or accepted wisdom? This is not to denigrate all directors or non-executive directors - the role being closely examined by supporter groups. The skills and dedication a good director or non-executive can bring to bear can be invaluable. But at football clubs, which are at root community sporting institutions defined by heritage and tradition as much as by current achievement, the need to open up the ability to perform that role is arguably even greater than elsewhere.

It’s a delicate balancing act, but if the current government is serious about some of its claims then providing the resources to help willing individuals gain the skills and experience needed to put their passion as fans to good use in the boardroom should not be too much to ask.

Ordinary fans want to see people they can identify with taking factors they value into account when making decisions, and having the power to do that effectively. That is what sits at the heart of the current debate about reforming governance. It’s not really that hard to understand.

Post header photo by Benjamin Child on Unsplash