Don’t expect hardened Koppites to do anything other than think with their lungs. And certainly don’t castigate them. This, after all, ain’t their game…The excellent David Conn’s incisive skewering of Liverpool’s ownership foibles was, as ever, succint and illuminating, but his gentrified damning of a Kop all at sea missed the point.
No footy fan ever grew up supporting a team of directors. The first 11 and the manager and the stadium and the fans and the pies and the shouting were, and are, the “it” – the grist of weekly-communed adoration.
Upstairs wranglings were never the stuff of such hamfisted public mulling and impotent anguish because, until a couple of years ago, the notion of selling entire clubs to "catch up" with United's Asiatic tailfeathering was utterly alien.
It is only now, in the Premier League’s turgid, hubristic super-age that football has become a game of off-pitch tea-time number crunching, oiled eagerly by broadsheet back-page hyperbole. Football's armchair fans have swiftly graduated to armchair directors – privy to the nitty gritty of all the fiscal snakery playing out above their priced-out heads. On the terraces, however, such nuances remain largely irrelevant.
Much like today's sorry excuse for a mainstream film industry, where the illimitable mirrors of a commerce-anchored media machine see ‘audiences’ swamped with pre-interviews, Cribs-style sneak-preview progs with stars and unashamed revenue discussions before a film is even within two years of airing, the "businessification" of football has decreed that everyone is a cod-economist – with varying degrees of success...
Ask the Kop to take minutes on multinational meetings and their report will be made from terrace chants. Because in the end, those hardy souls will play politics the way they play and watch football: blindly willing success into existence through bitten nails, shredded lungs and cat-called substitutions on a whim.
Yes, ‘all the signs were there’ – in terms of the last 11 months of financial musical chairs, perhaps. But what fifty-year-old fan could have predicted the super-escalated PremierCash mire that is still relatively, and horribly, new in our lives?
No footy fan ever grew up supporting a team of directors. The first 11 and the manager and the stadium and the fans and the pies and the shouting were, and are, the “it” – the grist of weekly-communed adoration.
Upstairs wranglings were never the stuff of such hamfisted public mulling and impotent anguish because, until a couple of years ago, the notion of selling entire clubs to "catch up" with United's Asiatic tailfeathering was utterly alien.
It is only now, in the Premier League’s turgid, hubristic super-age that football has become a game of off-pitch tea-time number crunching, oiled eagerly by broadsheet back-page hyperbole. Football's armchair fans have swiftly graduated to armchair directors – privy to the nitty gritty of all the fiscal snakery playing out above their priced-out heads. On the terraces, however, such nuances remain largely irrelevant.Much like today's sorry excuse for a mainstream film industry, where the illimitable mirrors of a commerce-anchored media machine see ‘audiences’ swamped with pre-interviews, Cribs-style sneak-preview progs with stars and unashamed revenue discussions before a film is even within two years of airing, the "businessification" of football has decreed that everyone is a cod-economist – with varying degrees of success...
Ask the Kop to take minutes on multinational meetings and their report will be made from terrace chants. Because in the end, those hardy souls will play politics the way they play and watch football: blindly willing success into existence through bitten nails, shredded lungs and cat-called substitutions on a whim.Yes, ‘all the signs were there’ – in terms of the last 11 months of financial musical chairs, perhaps. But what fifty-year-old fan could have predicted the super-escalated PremierCash mire that is still relatively, and horribly, new in our lives?
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