Balancing supporter ethics and the business of football
Can football supporters have their commercial cake and eat it, or do a club’s ethics come at too high a competitive cost?
Coventry Sphinx are 180 minutes away from the end of a dream season.
If they win at home on Saturday in their last fixture, they’ll win the Uhlsport United Counties League Premier Division South and be promoted to the eighth tier of English football for the first time.
A week later they’ll either be in a kind of UCL Supercup showcase against the winners of the Premier Division North or trying to pick themselves up off the canvas to win a relegation v promotion play-off match.
This ludicrous and wonderful state of affairs has kidnapped my mind for weeks now. I can’t concentrate on anything else. I think about a future that might never happen as I wake up, as I go to sleep, and for every moment in between. It’s not healthy.
Despite this, a fluke of scheduling allowed me a visit to Villa Park on Saturday. Wow, Aston Villa were good. Unai Emery is a gaffer and a half and his players are in tremendous nick. Home games haven’t been that much fun for years.
Balancing supporter ethics and the business of football
The announcement that gambling sponsors will be withdrawn from Premier League shirt sponsorships in the future is, at best, a step in the right direction. It will have a knock-on effect without a doubt. Either the next band of scrotes comes along to replace the money or it will have to come from elsewhere or nowhere.
When a professional club signs up with a new partner, generally for a front-of-shirt or sleeve sponsorship in the case of the Premier League, the supporters inevitably have an opinion. There are some very sketchy outfits on outfits at the moment and there are more to come, with the exposure of their shonky practices by the supporters of one club ignored by the decision makers of another later on.
The supporters don’t ignore it. Loads of them don’t care but many do and will rightly oppose their club’s choice – and it is a choice – to get into bed with scumbag businesses in scumbag industries.
It’s obviously true that there are some supporters of a club who want their club to behave ethically in every way reasonable in an elite sport, and that there are some supporters who desire and demand investment into the playing staff and facilities.
It’s also true that there is a very large overlap between the two. In that overlap there exists a tension that can never really be resolved.
There’s nothing complicated here. Supporters want success but success is a hungry beast. It must be fed lest it go and live next door. It craves sponsors and partners. Revenue. Income. It demands player scouting and recruitment, coaching, training facilities and stadium infrastructure.
These gears can turn one another. Winning makes a club attractive to players. Players make a club win. But it’s money that feeds the machine and that, in today’s elite football world, means commercial competitiveness and compromise.
Transfer talk is largely asinine. An industry in its own right, the transfer market rumour factory is one of football’s most tedious sidelines, a shameful racket that churns and burns the algorithms by getting fans all frothy about football-adjacent bullshit that isn’t going to happen.
One of its damaging effects is the growth of fandom’s interest in accountancy rather than the actual game. Transfer windows can be ‘won’ and ‘lost’ now. It’s all tallies and totals and the more information we think we have access to, the stupider we collectively get.
How many transfer Twitter accounts does it take to change a light bulb? Who fucking cares. They’re idiots.
But there is also a quite reasonable expectation among supporters that their clubs invest – although that’s a word so loaded within football transfer discourse now that I despise it specifically – in players. There’s an unspoken ballpark at every football club within which the expected outlay on players intersects the wealth of the owners. Supporters expect the club to punch its weight in the market and build the facilities to match.
And it’s not wrong to want that, is it? We want our teams to improve, even incrementally, to keep things fresh and exciting and competitive. Players age. They’re a fluid piece of the machinery. It’s a sport powered by player turnover. With fluidity comes the need to upgrade and improve, which in turn necessitates the readies to be able to do so.
This is the commercial imperative of a football club. It’s why we have sponsors on the shirt and perimeter boards around the pitch. It’s why people can pay for three-course sit-down dinners before a match. It’s why Pink is performing at football stadiums. Weaponising a club’s commercial appeal eventually leads back to the need to succeed on the pitch.
On the other hand, there are those of us who care about what our clubs represent and where they turn to for revenue. If ethics are what we do when nobody is watching then holding oneself to a consistent moral standard even when harbouring disappointment alone is unfortunately part of the deal. There’s no real right or wrong here. Support your club your way. I want mine to act somewhat positively.
That expectation covers a range of choices and behaviours but in the context of commercial partnerships it means there are some sponsors who’d cause me to walk away, some who’d piss me off and some who’d make me tut and roll my eyes. I do – importantly, I think – understand that sticking to my parameters would hit the club in the pocket. I also understand why that’s the very reason I’m in a tiny minority.
My football club represents the community in which it belongs. It represents itself. It represents me. I want it to act responsibly and ethically on my behalf and I will not budge on that view.
Football fandom is a broad church. Not everybody cares about issues like this. Equally, not everyone puts new signings above everything else on their individual list of priorities. Football clubs face a challenge when it comes to balancing the two.
For every club that holds itself to a moral standard there is another willing to take money from human rights abusers to take their place in the pecking order. For every season with a charity shirt sponsorship is another with an overseas bookmaker that might not even exist.
Football’s reliance on such dirty money stinks to high heaven but clubs cannot unilaterally extricate themselves and stay competitive. A large proportion of supporters wouldn’t stand for it and I’m not completely certain that I’m right and they’re wrong.
So how can clubs find this moral balance? By deciding to do things that will cost them money. That will give them disadvantages to overcome and leave them short of quality as much as clean of conscience. It is, fundamentally, a test of a football club’s very identity. No wonder so few of them even dip a toe into the water.
But clubs can do more than nothing without unreasonably setting themselves back. They can be more discerning when it comes to partnerships. Some of the agreements undertaken even by Premier League clubs in the last year or so have revealed a woefully inadequate level of due diligence.
We shouldn’t be talking about clubs dealing with entities that turn out to be fictional or crooked. The minimum clubs should be doing is making informed decisions based on who they are, who they want to be and what any given partnership says about them.
Clubs should engage with supporters’ groups as much as possible because those are questions that they should be asking too. Let’s discuss it together. Let’s get that unspoken ballpark out in the open.
Mutual trust between a club and its supporters is a lofty target but one that would allow for more transparency, better managed expectations and a reduced chance of the club making a massive moral misstep that ends up getting it kicked up the arse.
Asking football clubs to prioritise ethical responsibility over commercial potency, especially at the top level, is unrealistic. That’s just not how it works, and that’s the way it is. But demanding that they care at least a little bit, that they work to raise the pathetically low bar just a touch, would be a start.
“That was Villa's best home game in ages. Everything came together, and pieced itself aside perfectly. It was pure football, and the very best of Villa under Emery.”
The great James Rushton, also at Villa Park on Saturday, gives his view on the win against Newcastle United in his newsletter. If you’re a Villa supporter, you should subscribe.
Salty beef extracts
Wrexham and Notts County prove the unarguable case for greater EFL meritocracy (Football365)
Importing foreign refs to the Premier League won’t fix nauseating claims of bias (i)
All bets aren’t off when it comes to football and its obsession with gambling (The Guardian)
Maybe it’s time to welcome back the old fashioned wing-half – in modern guise (The Guardian)
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