Sack the board

If fans want a say in how our clubs are run, we have to to be prepared to deal with the tough questions.

Calling for the club’s board to be sacked when things aren’t going well is almost as traditional as questioning the referee’s parentage after a poor decision. Like all populist slogans, the simplicity is the attraction. And, like all populist slogans, it starts to come apart a bit when tested.

In the days when ownership structures were simpler and football clubs were run by a successful local business person, calling for the owner to go when things got rough could be done in the knowledge that there were plenty of other buyers who might be willing to take a punt. Owning a football club was seen as something of a civic honour and it only needed relatively modest success to be in a position to take over the reins.

It's different now, and the pool of potential owners of the clubs at the top of the game, by which I mean the top two divisions, has got smaller as the price of clubs has risen. At the very top, as journalist Tariq Panja put it, that potential pool is “the world’s plutocrat class, nation states looking to polish images, and opaque private equity firms”. All of which makes pushing for and achieving change of ownership that much more difficult.

The current situation at the club I support, Tottenham Hotspur, has prompted me to set out some thoughts on this – something I can do more freely now I have stepped off the board of the Supporters’ Trust. I’m conscious many will wonder just what the fans of a club sitting fifth in the Premier League, playing in a world class stadium and watching one of the best strikers in world football on a regular basis have to complain about. So bear with me, and don’t fall into the trap much of the mainstream media does of treating fan dissent with contempt – more on which later.

During the nine years I was formally involved with the Trust, we dealt with simmering discontent over the conduct of the owners, ENIC, and the board, chaired by Daniel Levy. Much has been achieved during the 22 years they have run the club, and there’s little doubt that it is a business success story. But football, while it is without doubt a business, is also a sport. And one trophy in those 22 years, the longest fallow period in the history of an iconic club, does not constitute sporting success.

The detail of what has fuelled the dissatisfaction is probably too much for a general audience, but suffice to say those running the club have made themselves difficult to like and have, therefore, unwittingly made recognition of what they have achieved more difficult. An aversion to criticism of any kind and a habit of flatly denying that which everyone knows to be true haven’t aided relationship building. Latterly there’s been a growing realisation that the club has no discernible strategy for sporting success.

On the back of this discontent, the demands to back calls to get ENIC out of the club would arise frequently. As a formally constituted Supporters’ Trust whose objectives included acting in the best interests of the club, we always resisted that. Because calling for owners to go without any alternative in place is effectively calling for the club to be run by no one. Which would be disastrous.

Current economic reality means that it’s no longer possible to remove an owner and simply hope a new one comes along. But football is also littered with tales of false messiahs who have won fans over with lots of fine talk but gone on to deliver very little, at best. So any organisation with a responsibility to act in the best interests of the club cannot just back a leap in the dark. It has to seek detail and assurances about what comes next.

Taking a nuanced position in the face of populist binary sloganising is never easy, but it’s a situation that has been faced by many supporter organisations. At Manchester United, a club that most certainly falls into the category of being accessible only to the richest of potential buyers, the ‘Glazers Out’ sentiment has been around for years. The club’s Trust is run by some dedicated and talented people, and draws on the skills that can be found in every fanbase by boards smart enough to recognise what their fans can offer. The Glazers, in line with many modern owners, haven’t been particularly smart in this respect, but the Trust has doggedly stuck to a position that doesn’t let them off the hook.

Rather than retreat into the safe oppositionism of ‘Glazers Out’, the Manchester United Supporters Trust has kept the pressure on the current owners by raising key questions and pushing for answers while remaining open to conversation with any alternative buyers who demonstrate serious intent. Trust officers have suffered serious and unacceptable abuse as a consequence. But they held the line. The Glazers, in an unusual move perhaps intended to spark an auction, have now announced their intention to sell, and so M.U.S.T has published an open letter to prospective buyers outlining what fans would require from any new owners.

It's the sort of move that usually provokes TalkSport to roll Simon Jordan out to rant about fans getting above their station, but it was exactly the right thing to do. While fans of clubs at this level no longer have a chance to own their clubs, they absolutely have the right to demand that the people that do meet certain standards. Those who say this wouldn’t happen in any other business simply don’t understand the football business. Think of it as the price of the unrivalled brand loyalty of customers.

When Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich was forced to sell up, the Chelsea Supporters’ Trust set out the standards it believed any new owner should be required to meet. Of course, there was some cynicism about where the commitment to standards was when Abramovich was pouring his billions in and skewing the competitive balance of the game, but the key point for this article is that the Trust was partly responsible for ensuring that the club wasn’t just sold to the highest bidder, but one that met a set of standards.

Manchester United and Chelsea were put into play by very different events, enabling the Trusts at these clubs to publicly set out what they saw as desirable qualities in a new owner. At clubs where no sale process has been announced and no buyer has expressed an interest, fan organisations have to work with what they have. The more extreme elements of conspiracy theorists on social media like to portray this as evidence that the fan organisations are being bribed by the club owners, but grown-ups recognise this is simply practical reality. You have to try to make what you have better until a suitable alternative comes along.

The pragmatic view is also challenged by those who argue that if enough fans make things unpleasant enough, owners will be forced to sell even if they don’t want to. There are a number of things wrong with this argument.

The majority of fans like to support their team and be entertained as a positive experience that gives them a break from the travails of everyday life. So they don’t particularly want to get involved in protests and certainly not in ‘making things toxic’. It’s hard enough to mobilise people for the mildest of events, let alone this.

But even more of a mistake is the assumption that the owners of a multibillion-pound asset will sell for anything they believe is below value because people have been nasty to them. High finance doesn’t work like that, and when billions are at stake, people are prepared to put up with a lot.

The idea of forcing a sale is embedded in a rewritten past at Spurs; a past in which Alan Sugar was forced to sell Spurs to ENIC because the fans were unpleasant to him. It’s true that Sugar, himself a terrible communicator and a chairman who really wasn’t interested in anyone’s opinion but his own, made and continues to make a lot of fuss about the ungrateful fans who never appreciated him. But the fact that he sold the club for £17m more than he paid for it tells you what you need to know about the reason for the sale. Interestingly, some of the people who argued that ENIC, who he sold to, were the saviours of the club are now among ENIC’s most vociferous critics. Proving once again fans need to know what they are getting rather than just fall for the seductive words of a new suitor.

The other example often used to dismiss the pragmatic approach is the sale of Liverpool against the wishes of then-owners Tom Hicks and George Gillet. The American duo had created a toxic atmosphere at the club and supporters were up in arms about their stewardship. But what forced the sale was the placing of the loans they had taken out to finance their purchase into the toxic assets division of the Royal Bank of Scotland. The bank demanded the sale of the club, and that eventually led to the takeover by Fenway Sports Group.

The fans played their part, and made sure the new owners realised it was important to keep them onside. And FSG was smart enough to do so, saying the right things enough of the right times about the club’s culture and traditions to take fans with them, but also recognising that their prime asset was a sporting one that needed to be invested in.

None of those struggles can be summed up as a simple ‘sack the board’ affair. It may well be that further down the pyramid it is easier to run an old-style campaign, but even there things are often more complex. Look at Portsmouth, for example. A club saved by its supporters who bought it, owned it, and nurtured it after scandalous mismanagement only to then decide to sell it. A move which is not currently causing unalloyed joy on the south coast.

All of which brings us to Everton, currently suffering from years of poor decision-making and looking odds on to be relegated from the top-flight for the first time in their history. The club’s Trust hasn’t really been active for some time, but a coalition of fan organisations is demanding the board’s removal. It is hard to blame them, especially after the board’s disgraceful attempt to brand protestors as thugs who threatened the safety of directors at games. That attempt was amplified by some mainstream sports journalists who should have known better than to repeat an allegation without checking it out, but again demonstrated the unfortunate habit too many of them have of readily believing the worst about fans.

It's impossible to see how the relationship between the Everton board and its fans can recover from that incident, but the fact remains that with no prospective buyer in sight, calls to sack the board indicate little more than understandable desperation. That is not a criticism of the fans making the call. They, like all fans, have a perfect right to express an opinion within acceptable boundaries. But sooner or later a Trust, or whichever body takes on that mantle, will need to get to grips with making a relationship with whatever owners are there work. Because the alternative is just to concede.

The aspiration for fans to have a say in how our clubs are run is no less relevant than it has ever been. But the complexities of how to achieve that aspiration are far greater than they ever were. More fans need to realise this, and give their support to those organisations willing to tackle the tough questions.

Photo: Tembela Bohle