http://www.twohundredpercent.net/?p=7298
Supporters Direct: A Better Alternative Vision For Football
In the three years since I last attended the annual conference of the
supporters' trusts umbrella organisation, Supporters Direct (SD), there have
been significant changes. Communications manager Kevin Rye's suits have got
sharper. Chief Executive Dave Boyle's suit. well, he was wearing one (although
it would be cruel to suggest it was made to measure while he was elsewhere, so
I won't). The seats on the top table have got comfier. to the point of
luxuriousness. And the food has got better - some of those attending won't eat
as well until next year's conference.
But most importantly of all, as football's governance becomes more widely
recognised as the key to the game's future, SD has become more damn right than
ever, with a report to prove it. And the organisation looks more ready to
persuade everybody who matters in the game that they are more right than ever.
The two-day event took place in the unfeasibly plush surroundings of the IET
building in London's Savoy Place - I feel I should be wearing a tie just typing
that, let alone attending a conference there. And the theme was a strong
reflection of the changing mood within football.
SD is only a decade down the line from being a "something must be done" protest
movement. So it was inevitable that the "man the barricades" section of the
community would still have a voice at the event, and not only because
"left-wing film director" Ken Loach was the headline speaker. Loach once
described SD as the only good thing New Labour had ever done - and you'd no
sooner call him a Labour Party man than call Sheffield Wednesday's chairman a
Sheffield United fan (see below). And he re-iterated that support in what must
have been a tub-thumping speech - the vagaries of public transport engineering
works meant I didn't arrive at conference until after he'd finished, but some
of the furniture was still shaking when I got there.
Conference convened after a mixed year for the movement. The high-profile
Manchester United Supporters' Trust (MUST) campaign to force the Glazers out of
Old Trafford has been imaginative, well-thought through and realistic; an
example of how to mobilise supporters' opinions and interests into the proper
"voice" the Trust movement is designed to give its members. The high-profile
concession of majority ownership at Notts County to un-named, unproven and
ultimately unreal "wealthy Middle Eastern" investors was an abrogation of
responsibility for good governance and sensible financial management.
But the focus of the Conference was less about pure ownership issues and more
about the general state of football finance; how the Trust movement's
principles are vital to the future well-being of the game in this country and
must be seen to be vital at the significant decision-making levels. The debate
at the end of the first day was, by its very existence and make-up, an example
of the successful maturity of SD from "something must be done" to "this must be
done.and here's how." The panel was representative of the major strands of the
game. General administrative management, in the unfeasibly young-looking
director of external affairs for the Football League, Gavin Megaw. Senior
supporters representation, in the form of MUST vice-chairman and articulate
angry young man Oliver Houston. And two hugely imaginative invitees. Christian
Mueller, the German Football League's chief financial officer until a few
months ago. And Lee Strafford, Sheffield Wednesday chairman until a few weeks
ago.
Although the debate was supposed to be around a "better vision for football,"
that vision thing quickly gave way to that financial control thing. Megaw
robustly defended the Football League's slow but steady progress towards proper
regulatory control of the game's money, with the consent of its member clubs.
Mueller robustly defended the German financial football model, tight regulatory
and ownership control from the centre based on fundamental, and fundamentally
unarguable, economic principles.
Oliver Houston robustly argued. everything, stemming from a passionate belief
that there ought to be a law against all that is wrong with the game's
regulation of finance and ownership. And Strafford was a real catch, a mixture
of views plucked from his experiences as lifelong Wednesday-ite (lifelong
without the inverted commas), chairman and successful ("retired at 35"
successful) businessman. Strafford soon "hated loving the club" after becoming
its chairman. If "I knew then what I know now" he wouldn't have touched the
place with a bargepole so much as whacked a few people at the club over the
head with one.
He painted a picture of "serious issues at executive level," with
self-interested "backward thinkers" from the "old world" who hadn't "noticed"
the problems money had brought to the game and had failed to "recruit
professionally and cleanly" for many years. And so on, for a long time - I fear
for Wednesday if he left anything out. He didn't name names over his eventual
departure from the club - Dave Boyle fought shy of asking him the searching
questions in this regard (frustrating for the journalist in me but rightly so -
the conference wasn't about that). And he added an intriguing view of fans
happy to have their pictures taken "in the bar" with players who weren't good
enough, asking "what were players doing in the bar, anyway?" The applause that
this remark received suggested the audience were predominantly members of the
Temperance Society. This impression failed to last into the second half of the
England/USA game.and the free bar attached.
Megaw had a difficult job preaching "evolution not revolution" over financial
regulation in the Football League, emphasising that measures such as imposing
transfer embargoes on clubs not paying their taxes were not only working but
were a "long way down a very hard road" from the unregulated game of ten years
ago. Not everyone was convinced that matters were progressing fast enough. The
idea of an independent financial regulator for football appeared to be getting
confused with government "interference" in football. Megaw in particular tried
to hide behind the suggestion that FIFA wouldn't wear it. But Houston was
having none of that. In fact he was having none of most of what Megaw was
saying. "Debt," Houston said, "has as much place in football as cigarette
machines in primary schools," and should be the subject of government
legislation.
If Strafford wasn't playing devil's advocate by this stage he was doing a fine
impression. He claimed chairmen had opposed financial regulation down the years
because the fans won't have it." And he called on fans ("us", he said, in a
brief moment of populism) to "get rid of that excuse" by being more realistic
about their clubs' financial limitations. He suggested that "only in the last
year" were fans properly "engaging in the discussion," which.er.sat
uncomfortably, shall we say, with FC United's general manager Andy Walsh, who
has spent every waking minute of every day for a decade "engaging" in the
discussion and much more besides (Walsh received the "Richard Lillicrap" award
for services to the Trust movement the following day). To be fair to Strafford,
he had just received a deep psychological wound, having been called "the
gentleman on the end" by a previous speaker who then compounded the felony by
adding "chairman of Sheffield United."
Observing all this was a perpetually bemused Mueller, who was moved to ask "why
do you need owners?" Mueller, of course, was from a radically different
football background. But the answers he got were little more than pointing that
out, variants on the theme "we do things differently here," as if that were a
good thing. Mueller was fresh from one of the many conference workshop
sessions, where he had explained, to general understanding and approval, how
Germany "do different things" there; requiring professional clubs to not only
show financial health for their near-future but show their workings-out as well
(he also explained some of this to a backdrop of "God save the Queen," sung
drunkenly outside conference by an England fan.at 4.05pm, three-and-a-half
hours before the England/USA kick-off, by which time, one wag observed, he'd be
as likely to have fallen in the Thames as fallen into a pub).
Mueller's workshop presentation, jam-packed with common sense, formed a
double-act with Coventry University's Dr. John Beech and his vividly accurate
presentation entitled "Just how broken is football's financial model?" And if
that title pulled few punches, his follow-up the next day pulled even less:
"Ways to know your club is up the financial creek before it enters
administration," a talk which concentrated on some familiar names, which I
won't mention because that would be unfair on Sam Hammam, Ron Martin, Peter
Ridsdale. Former Hereford boss Graham Turner once called Beech "scurrilous" for
highlighting a £1m loan in the Bulls' accounts that recently celebrated its
tenth birthday. Beech wore this as a considerable badge of honour.
There was much more besides, throughout the weekend, SD attracting an
impressive mix of guest speakers and lecturers on topics including "using
social media" and the "social and community value of football." The former
introduced me to a social media site called "audio boo," named after the
reaction to most articles I've written. The latter was based on an in-depth
study presented by Dr Adam Brown from social research organisation Substance,
which echoed SD's long-held views that football's social and community values
were immense. "That's a relief," noted Boyle, thankful that years of his life
had not been wasted on a misconception.
The Guardian's David Conn, a long-time champion of the Trust movement, spoke
for "ten minutes" at a previous conference I attended, a "ten minutes" which
lasted much of the morning. So I was prepared for his "ten minutes" this year -
packed lunch, change of shirt etc. But this time Conn stuck to the timetable -
in keeping with the slick organisation of the modern SD - although he still
found time to give the Glazer family a good booting. Just before the end of his
speech, there was a fly-past in his honour by the Red Arrows aerial display
team. Someone at the conference claimed this was actually for something called
"Trooping the Colour", whatever on earth that is. But most people knew who was
more worthy.
The overwhelming view of this conference was that greater fan involvement in
the governance and ownership of professional football was an idea whose time
had come; both morally, as had been the case at all the previous conferences
I'd attended, and politically, with the main party's manifestos all containing
commitments to that principle. Whether this was touchingly naïve faith in what
is after all a Conservative-dominated government remains to be seen. I'm sure
Ken Loach would have had a view on that. But SD certainly looks and acts more
than ever before like an organisation whose time has come. It was an
impressive, mature conference, for which SD deserve every credit.
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