The Paranoid Brian Glanville on Fan-Free-Football

 

When you get above a certain level football sees supporters as an inconvenience, there to be patronised, fleeced, sold crap, and whipped up until they burst into tears on Five Live as evidence of their 'passion'.

The passion expended on safely securing broadcasting income is the one expenditure that no club minds incurring. Which is why players are currently playing to empty stadiums under testing regimes  unavailable to the rest of the population. The broadcasting money musn't be given back. Get 'em out on that pitch.,

                                                          

Even when Newcastle stank the place out with their mooted takeover by the journalist-murdering Bin Salman gang, it was only when he was seen to be profiting from bootleg sports broadcasting that anyone in football got worked up about it. Left to bubble away in a cesspool like that Bob Lord's comparatively innocuous vision of football run viably without fans could come true, on the knobbly back  of Covid 19.

And now here we are, at a point where a  fan-less season looks a real possibility, but the game goes on.  Im not saying 'open the grounds'. But for every sighing pundit, every player who instinctively turns to the crowd to celebrate, every Barrow fan who waited 48 years to get back into the league...there is a bloke at the top level of the game with a spreadsheet weighing the Prem telly income against the expense of opening and maintaining the ground, policing, fights, accountability, criticism of murderous owners...  and thinking ' how can we make this work for us?'

Inevitably, as The Situation continues, the rift between the top and the rest will widen. One-off pay outs to the lower leagues will only go so far. The post-Prem trickle down of the disenfranchised to the lower leagues didnt happen in significant numbers, why would it now? Small clubs will go under. Grounds on valuable land will be sold.  As for you, you want football? Watch the telly. 

There's more of this Paranoid Brian Glanville stuff  in Flypaper 3, along with a nice poster and some stuff about fanzines and fan activism in ye olde days including a mention of Blammo!'s excellent flexi in support of  the anti-Football Fan ID Card scheme, when all we had to worry about was Colin  Moynihan.  I drew the cover.

Flypaper 3  aka the Pink 'un. Available at the usual sources or through this blog.

Yours in sport.