FOOTBALL REVOLT
How football emerged Left Wing Soccer author Daniel Fieldsend explain the gab between fans and board.
By Daniel Fieldsend By all appearances Prescot is just one decent length road with some shops and banks on either side. It actually has a bit more going for it than you’d first imagine – Daniel Craig lived there for a bit, Stu Sutcliffe (of The Bealtes, red.) went to school there; there’s a watch-making museum and, just off to the left, there’s a football stadium. That weekend we’d been at the Bernabeu. Flashing lights and replica shirts; global tongues and world renown footballers. It was a million miles away from Valerie Park (the Prescot side street where AFC Liverpool ground-share with Cables, red.) yet I couldn’t help but be fascinated by AFCL. A club founded on the back of some disenfranchisement by Liverpool fans in 2008 during the Hicks and Gillete years. It was a dark winters evening when we went with around fifty people in attendance. I sat there listening to the players. You could hear the connection with the ball and the crunch of every tackle. It was the game at its semipro purest and I couldn’t help but wonder whether or not the fifty in attendance understood the complexity of the team they were supporting. Allways business AFC Liverpool, despite their humble
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facade, provides us with a platform through which the financial history and shortfalls of the game can be explored. You see football has always been a business. We lament the influx of commercialisation in our modern era, yet when entrepreneurs conceived stadium designs a hundred years ago they did so with the intention of running a profit: “We own the spectacle, lets cattle in and charge.” Nevertheless for many years the relationship between fan and owner was a coherent one of mutual dependency. Where else could owners receive a profit? The working man had a ‘half day’ free every other Saturday with football providing him ample opportunity to forget himself. The drudgery of hard labour was only made easier through the tribal attachment and forming of an identity at football matches. Once again, supporter and owner needed one and another. Fast forward one hundred years and it’s all changed. Why do AFC Liverpool fans feel so dissatisfied? Well their founder Allun Parry said at the time of the clubs substratum that ‘the nature of the Premier League is [that] even if Liverpool’s prices are kinder than others, they’re still too expensive for massive amounts of supporters. Many can’t go at all and many others can only afford to
go to a few games a year.’ Rationalising AFC Liverpool: ‘What happens to those supporters in question? They can come and support us with fellow Reds, wearing the same colours and singing the same songs. It will hopefully bring many people back through the turnstiles’. Profit maximisation Several factors attribute towards the replacement of fans through turnstiles with consumers of global backgrounds. The initial step towards the slow burning shift from fan dependency towards profit maximisation came for owners with the foundation of the Premier League. Enticed by the notion of financial independence and control over tv-revenues from Rupert Murdoch’s BskyB Company, first division clubs in 1992 agreed to form the Premier League. It is easy to forget, but in the years preceding the formation of the Premier League the English game was at an all-time low. Hooliganism was still an issue for the Tory party to condemn. The Hillsborough disaster challenged all leading bodies to re-evaluate how they regarded spectators. English clubs were only just able to return to European competition following Heysel – with the First Divisions top players plying their trade in Scotland and