Reforming football - the time is now

It's a pivotal time for the football governance debate

It has been almost two months since I last wrote a newsletter, and so apologies are due to subscribers who I aim to keep updated at least once a fortnight. I write not just as an observer but as a participant, and I’ve found myself at or near the centre of the extraordinary events that have sent shock waves through English football. The workload, around day jobs and domestic commitments, has been punishing for volunteer fan reps and I simply have not had time to sit and gather my thoughts for an update worthy of your attention. 

I can say one thing with absolute certainty. Recent events have proved that football’s governance model is irreparably broken. So broken that its failings have led directly to a situation where it will be swept away and replaced, and where the balance of power in the English game alone will never be the same again. Extraordinary is a much-misused word, but entirely accurately deployed in this case. 

It has been the attempt by the so-called Big Six, now the much-diminished half dozen, to break away into a closed European Super League that has dominated. But before that, my voluntary role as co-chair of the Tottenham Hotspur Supporters’ Trust had begun to expand rapidly. The League Cup final between my team and Manchester City was selected as a test event as the country attempted to ease itself out of lockdown. Neither the public health nor the football authorities made any attempt to consult fans and the result combined missed opportunities to create goodwill with flawed test circumstances.

But the ESL story dwarfed everything. The story of how a combination of grassroots anger and volunteer fan organisations defeated a scheme backed by a global investment bank and a number of multibillion pound global businesses has been told elsewhere, most notably in my opinion in BBC journalist Paddy Gearey’s film Three Days That Shook Football. I should warn you I’m one of the talking heads in the film. 

The initial noise has died down, but the situation we now find ourselves in is one none of us could have predicted even six weeks ago. I’ve written about governance and fan engagement for years, as well as taking an active role in the process through my work co-chairing the Supporters’ Trust at my club. What follows are some observations drawn during a rare opportunity to pause for breath.

It’s important to fully appreciate the scale of change, and to break down the detail of that change. Conversations that never seemed possible are now being had, ideas that were seen at best as idealistic are now being actively considered, unlikely alliances are being formed – the entire landscape of football has changed. 

The Premier League, always a bulwark of resistance to any prospect of regulation of its members, is now an advocate of regulation. It has seen that, left unchecked, the most powerful among its members would have destroyed it. And so it has decided it must assert itself as a competition organiser rather than simply be a trade association, and it has realised it must work with both supporters and the government in order to safeguard itself.

A similar realisation has been felt at UEFA. Where once it would not speak directly to fans, now it actively seeks an audience. It too saw that the most powerful in its ranks were prepared to undermine it even while seeking favoured status. 

The power of the biggest clubs has been broken. They had used the threat of breaking away for years to wrest concessions from the rest of the game, continually trying to skew the system in their favour. That threat is now gone – they tried to make the break and were humiliatingly forced to retreat almost instantly. They have destroyed any authority or influence they once had, and there is going to be a hard road back to rebuilding trust with the people they must work with. 

The game changer in the UK was government intervention. In the House of Commons, Secretary of State DCMS Oliver Dowden spoke of football as an important part of the country’s cultural heritage that had to be protected. Here was a government most assumed would be steadfastly against any form of intervention in private business indicating it was prepared to intervene. The prospect of treating clubs as an asset with protected characteristics was now very real. Football, a business like no other. 

Of course, this is also a government that likes to style itself as a people’s government. And there are 18 million football fans among the people it claims to govern on behalf of. So it will be so much harder to capitulate to the vested interests – dare we say the elite – than it has been before. There is real hope the rhetoric will not be empty. 

All of that has brought us to a place in which genuine reform of the game, reform that gives ordinary supporters a real voice where it matters, now seems possible. It was something I did not think would be a possibility for a generation after the ball was dropped at the end of the last big effort to reform the game conducted by the Government Expert Working Group in 2016. But such is the scale of the catastrophe visited upon the old order by the arrogance and detachment of those who liked to be considered its leading lights that everything is back on the table. 

There is, of course, danger ahead. Some clubs will still be focused on how they can concede as little as possible rather than do the right thing. There is a real chance that introducing fan representation at board level will create a professional class of fans reps, captured by the corporate culture they were created to change. It’s not just new faces that are needed, although there is a sore need for new and different faces in football boardrooms, but a change in the entire culture. 

How do we define success? What does sustainability really mean? Is there really a link between gate money and available transfer funds, particularly at the top level of the game? Where does the balance between individual team success and the need to maintain healthy competition come? There are so many questions that need to be approached in new ways.

What has really struck me, perhaps because I have been in the middle of it, is the energy, talent, determination and imagination of ordinary fans. Supporters across the country have made a difference, and they’ve done so by using the qualities too much of the football industry has overlooked time and time again. 

That has been inspiring, but another aspect of supporter sentiment has not been. It is an occupational hazard that whenever you put yourself up to do anything, you’re accused of being self-serving, ineffective, or both. Even as one of the greatest victories for fan power unfolded, there were voices saying the ESL would never have happened anyway, and that what fans did made no difference.  

As the prospect of real reform comes closer, those same voices are still at it, saying that fans can’t possibly understand the issues and ignoring the body of experience that has been built up through the efforts of so many people over such a long time. The irony of all of the cynicism, the whataboutery, the apparent belief that sloganising alone can bring any answers, is that – left unchallenged – it only serves to uphold a system many pushing all those negatives claim to want to change. It eats away at hope.

But these truly are extraordinary, changed times. It could, of course, yet come to nothing but it is hard to escape the feeling that an old order is gone and we are present at the birth of a new one. What becomes of new-born hope is in our hands.