When Herbert Chapman expressed incredulity in his newspaper column 80 years ago upon receiving a letter from a supporter who felt he should make 4 changes to his usual team selection he couldn’t have envisaged the extent to which such decisions would be scrutinised were he managing now. He would have had to think twice before allowing himself in a subsequent column to bemoan that much criticism was due to supporters lack of a proper understanding of the game and in yet another to suggest that barrackers should be subjected to ‘strong action’ and ejected if necessary. “At clubs we cannot permit barracking and the strongest possible measures to prevent it are justified.” he wrote at the time. He may find it strange many seem to feel creating an openly hostile environment for their own team can be justified now and as products of an entitlement culture many of today’s supporters would be indignant should their manager express such views.
Chapman’s views were voiced back in a time when supporter power was probably greater than now. Back then the challenge was to get fans through the turnstile on matchday itself when supporters could leave the decision to pay for entry to the ground until literally the last minute. Pretty well the only revenues available to the club were what they could take at the turnstiles so supporter contentment was important. While expectations may have been more tempered there was no commitment to turn up if the team had had a couple of bad results and the atmosphere negative. In an age where you’re obliged to pay an annual membership fee to buy a ticket a month or two in advance and, in the case of Arsenal where some two thirds of tickets sold are annual season tickets, such supporter powers of sanction have become more limited as their expectations have increased.
The globalisation of the game has further sapped supporter power. Now less dependent on local support potential absentees can be replaced drawing matchday supporters around the world. The two German friends for whom I arranged tickets for the Dortmund game weren’t Dortmund supporters. Arsenal has enough pull in Germany to make a visit to Arsenal more attractive than many other teams. The contention that attendances could eventually dwindle if results aren’t going well enough seems reasonable but if Tottenham’s level of success over the last 10 years or so is enough for them to feel confident in commissioning a 56,000 capacity stadium, without a league title for more than half a century and only one appearance in the CL then Arsenal’s results could be much poorer than they have been before feeling concern.
Even so any impact might expect to be seen more in ticket prices than attendances. Matchday is still an important revenue stream but broadcasting revenues exceed them and before long commercial revenues will also. In many other big clubs they do already. Hence those paying for TV subscriptions already have as much power as those attending games. With commercial revenues the numbers turning up on matchday are less important than the number of live broadcasts and their global reach. Or the number of website clicks and the number of Facebook and Twitter followers the commercial team can show. Those following Arsenal are in many ways at least as influential as those actively supporting the club.
I wrote a piece sometime ago (here) regretting the extent to which the financial juggernaut that is modern football has made consumers of supporters and that unwittingly supporters were complicit, though not primarily responsible, in a gradual disconnect between club and supporter. With that it seems supporter power has dwindled while small groups of supporters’ willingness to stage more frustrated protests against perceived shortcomings increases.
It has been almost 10 years since United supporters grouped together to protest against Glazers leveraged takeover but the Glazers are still there and the green and gold protest scarves currently unavailable according to Amazon! Arsenal’s own black scarf movement has been in existence for 5 years but has only added to the number of such Arsenal supporters groups further diluting the influence a single stronger supporter group might have. It seems easier for the club to manage a number of small groups. If supporters can’t agree on what support to provide their club how can the club expect to go about trying to satisfy them all? The reality is that it’s impossible to collate the thoughts of tens or hundreds of thousands of supporters into single expression so those acting collectively can only ever represent a tiny minority. The internet age with its plethora of blogs and social media allows supporters to argue among themselves with every protest in turn meeting counter protest often in angry exchanges. Faced with the impossible task of pleasing all of the people all of the time unsurprisingly the club can just stand by and let them get on with it without any need to get involved. Taking a distance from it all as Wenger might say becomes more an essential than a choice.
The greater the supply of any commodity the more its currency is devalued. So it is with football opinion which is instantly available in huge quantities 24 hours a day. Any day sees another open letter to manager, players or owners listing grievances real or imagined and lists of 5 or 10 things the club, manager, someone must do or players to be signed or got rid of. Even the commissioning of aerial banners protesting against something or someone at some football club or another has become a regular enough event to be seen as a hackneyed form of protest. Web sites and even mainstream news media have taken to quoting Twitter comments as though they have a greater meaning than the description of the service (it’s called twitter for heaven’s sake!) should convey.
Against swirls of prosaic offerings football executives and their clubs have learned to dance in the rain as each successive storm whips up and then blows itself out. As they come and go Wenger and the club to some extent draw into themselves. Silent Stan Kroenke learned some time ago the value of saying nothing. Wenger in fulfilling his contractual obligations to give press conferences can often be heard talking of sections of support in the third person – as something outside the club.
“… when you are from this club, you are from this club. You are in or out of this club, you cannot be both.” He said earlier this month
Wenger has accepted that instant, emotionally led opinion is now ‘part of the game’ while discounting much of it as ‘predictable’ saying “I am long enough in the game to know that when you play well, but lose the game, you get flooded with critics, however, if you play a very bad game, but you win it, everyone says how great you are.” As Wenger asserts it’s the internal bond that matters most “What is important is how close we are together inside the club and how much we can respond to people who question our quality” he seems to be acknowledging that a disconnect between large sections of support with different levels of expectation or entitlement is now a part of the modern game.
“I don’t try anymore to think what people think. What is important is that we are united.” Says Wenger adding “… we were united in the game, determined, committed and after that people take what they like or don’t like – we have to accept that. What’s important is what we do inside the club.”
Yet in some ways supporters are managed far more today than they could ever have been when they were free to decide on the day whether to pay to go through the turnstiles. Modern supporters may have the appearance of greater voice and many forums in which to express their opinion but in reality they have less real power and influence over their clubs than ever before.
While there’s inevitably some nostalgic regret about the changing nature of support there’s probably as much frustration among supporters at their own relative impotence. If the manufactured drama of that frustration can sometimes be quite ugly to witness it’s also easy for the news media that feeds it, and pertinently the clubs, to then dismiss it as disproportionate.
Herbert Chapman may find it hard to understand many modern supporter attitudes but football itself has changed enormously since his day and inevitably concepts of support have changed with it. As with many social changes they are neither wholly bad nor all good – they’re just different.
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