This information, after all, is difficult to find on the internet for the world’s richest clubs.

One club is going out of its way to help those hopping on their oil-fuelled bandwagon: Manchester City Football Club.

Manchester City have kindly presented a ‘bluffer’s guide‘ to ‘supporting’ the club on their official website presumably for all their new fans blocked from accessing Wikipedia.

Amazingly, this guide – which could have served the same purpose but been less embarrassing for the club if done in a smarter way – is presented without any humour or self-awareness whatsoever.

It begins: “Loyalty, commitment, passion and, during the darker times, a sense of humour has been needed over the years to follow the Blues.”

And goes on to suggest the complete opposite is now needed to follow City:

This brazen toadying to the club’s new legion of customers (obviously needed to even begin repaying the millions pumped into the club) must be depressing for loyal City supporters, who indeed have been known for being down to earth and bearing a dark sense of humour over the club’s struggles in recent decades compared to their Manchester rivals.

City once seemed like the club with the most soul in Manchester. Before I moved there in the late 1990s, my grandmother told me of her brothers, who had followed City down to London to support the club in its 1930s FA Cup finals, when United were the smaller team – and postwar, the johnny-come-latelys to glory.

Maine Road, City’s stadium back then, was embedded in the middle of the city’s toughest area, Moss Side, near the city centre; walking to games there was everything you’d imagine supporting a proud old gritty English urban club would be like. Old Trafford, by contrast, was perched further out in bland surroundings, close to a giant shopping mall, the Trafford Center – almost as big as Old Trafford’s megastore.

Fortunately for City’s newer fans, the bluffer’s guide explains its storied past at Maine Road in great detail: “If asked where we play our football, it’s the City of Manchester Stadium – also nicknamed Eastlands due to the area of Manchester it is in. It’s worth noting that from 1923 to 2003 we played our home games at Maine Road.”

Yes, it’s worth noting all right – and apparently nothing further about the club’s entire existence in that period is even to be bothered bluffing about.

We should begin with a pathetically brief description of what a ‘club’ is.

Clubs originated as a basic way for people to associate outside of family to support some kind of common interest. Some clubs have membership, some don’t.

What kind of clubs, then, are those that call themselves such things in Major League Soccer?

Writing at Match Fit USA, Robert Jonas argues — primarily from a Bay Area perspective, given the demise and rebirth of the San Jose Earthquakes in MLS — that clubs don’t exist in the league, in any sense he sees as valid.

For a league that reportedly lost nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in its first decade, 2010 is seeing some teams finally turning an annual profit — even as the country endures difficult economic times. Fans are embracing MLS in ever greater numbers, and new teams have been joining the league every year since 2005. At league headquarters in New York City, I can imagine the broad smiles and back-slapping that must be going on in the boardroom when looking back at how far the league has come.

However, back at the community level, the growth of MLS is having a divergent effect on the individual teams’ local fans and supporters. With each passing season, the idea that these people are actually “stakeholders” in the organizations’ success is fleeting. In fact, I will go so far as to say that identifying with these teams in the traditional sense as “football clubs” is fading fast. Your connection with your local “club” will soon be measured solely in terms of the dollars and time spent on their products and services. Oh sure, we’ll probably still have teams that feel the need to have the word “club” in their titles, but any semblance to the organizations of the past from which they borrow that term will cease to be.

I guess at this point I should clarify what I define as a “football club” in order to support my point of view. Using the traditional definition shared by many teams in a variety of sports, a club is an sporting organization where the community invests their efforts toward a common goal. In soccer, this means a team that is local owned and operated by the same people that participate and follow the progress of that team. Those that invest in the club are given the right to provide input to the club’s management team, and even elect those officials that run the club on a daily basis. The club then returns that investment through entertainment and value.

Jonas goes on to argue – referencing an interesting sounding speech by former Quakes GM Johnny Moore – that because MLS clubs do not have this local ownership by the fanbase, their relationship with their “clubs” is purely transactual, and thus they are not really clubs at all:

In two well publicized instances recently, supporters groups in Seattle and Toronto have raised their voices to express displeasure with their “football clubs.” Focusing mainly on the issues of season ticket packages and their costs, these organized protests have at least garnered official responses from the organizations. Both teams have announced new policies and price points moving forward in an effort to placate their supporters’ concerns. Maybe the Seattle Sounders FC and Toronto FC — two MLS franchises that invoke the notion of being a club by identifying themselves as such — were at least responding in a way that Moore might generally approve of

But really, in both these cases, the issues are not organizational but really that of straightforward customer complaining. The ticket buyers are consumers of a product, and they are voicing their displeasure at the perceived return on their investment. For me, this illustrates clearly the notion that TFC and Seattle Sounders FC are not true “clubs” — supporters do not garner any financial return on their purchases. Pure and simple, they may or may not be entertained during the matches they purchase tickets for, and that is as far as the relationship goes.

Jonas is right in the most basic, vertical sense: Toronto Football Club are, for example, owned by a company whose aim is to make money, and not by fans. They sell a product, soccer games, for this purpose. That they do not consider themselves associated with fans for the common cause of TFC was demonstrated by the recent ticket price rise debacle. They consider fans consumers to be milked.

But the same is not true horizontally in Toronto Football Club as a cultural institution: that is, the very protests Jonas mentions show that fans have clubbed together for the sake of the sporting organisation in question (Toronto Football Club) in a way that meets Jonas’ definition of a “community [that] invests their efforts toward a common goal.” It is true that the fans do not own this club in a formal sense: but nor can they simply be divorced from it in terms of what Toronto FC is. Cultural capital is important, too.

It is notable that the TFC protests aren’t just about “me”, but are expressing the fears of fans about the damage that pricing out supporters’ groups could do to the club as a whole, built on the idea of “all for one” (I’m simplifying a very complex situation in Toronto, of course).

We could also look at this from the opposite pole. Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch became a bestseller because it illustrated the personal and communal passion that surrounds supporting a football club (in Arsenal’s case at the time, not one any regular fans had any monetary stake in).

Can we not consider that football fans associating to support a common cause in ways uncommon to regular consumer transactions – singing, tifo, protests, fundraising, travelling thousands of miles in support of the team – creates clubs as community institutions in a cultural sense, regardless of formal ownership?

Let’s read Jonas’ words again: “Pure and simple, they may or may not be entertained during the matches they purchase tickets for, and that is as far as the relationship goes.”

If we were discussing purchasing tickets to a movie at our local multiplex – yes. You don’t form either a vertical (with the company from whom you give money to) or a horizontal (with your fellow movie goers) relationship at the cinema that lasts beyond the length of the movie. The same is obviously not true with sports clubs, and particularly peculiarly, with soccer clubs: we find friendships, we find shared spirit, we find lasting ties. Community spirit is intrinsic to a club as much as the opportunity to purchase membership financially, I would argue, even if it is a much more fluid and slippery relationship – yet it might be an even more important one.

In follow-up posts I’ll try to illustrate what I mean in a little more detail, and I’d more than accept that there’s a big difference between being a fan of the club called Manchester United and the club called FC United of Manchester due to the varied opportunities for fans to be a part of those clubs. One is clearly closer to pure consumerism than the other. But fandom and the sense of association around soccer clubs is also not as straightforward in England or in MLS as the swiping of a credit card.

A retraction of the initial blog piece on EPL Talk’s main point (when it became clear the author had misheard “Come on the U” (or something similar) for “Fuck You”) didn’t stop 283 comments discussing the principle of the use of bad language at games by supporters on both sides of the Atlantic. Many pointed out that worrying about offending an English team with foul language at a game of Association Football made little comparative sense, given the reputation of English fans to come up with a vast array of offensive chants.

But how true is it, as the implication of some of the commentary had it, that English football culture is one that tolerates or even welcomes bad language at games?

I’ve been digging through the Football League’s recent fan survey (polling 36,000 supporters) this week for unrelated reasons (there’ll be more to post from it), but in this context, I thought the following chart on “Attitude towards bad language at football matches” might be of some interest (click on the chart to view it full-size):

What we see is this: about half of all fans don’t mind bad language “as part and parcel of going to football matches”. A good third or so say “it doesn’t stop me going to games but it is something I’d prefer eradicated from the game.” Perhaps not surprisingly, 15% of those on the terraces say “it adds to the matchday experience”, while only 6% of those in Family areas agree with that (some might be surprised at how low that 15% is, actually).  7% of fans are either deterred themselves from going to more matches or deterred from taking their children because of bad language. Digging deeper into the survey, 18% of supporters with children under six say they are deterred from taking their children to games.

Interesting numbers: a large number of fans at Football League games shrug off bad language, a substantial minority would like to see it eradicated, and small numbers both love it so much it adds to their matchday experience or are so concerned about it they don’t take their children to games. A complicated picture of the experience of bad language thus emerges in English football culture (at least from this statistical sample), one that depends a lot on whether a fan is there for a family experience or not in general.

One could question the wording of the survey, of course, as the phrasing of it as the use of bad language being “part and parcel” of going to games, and not really defining what is meant by bad language (I don’t think I have to specify how far this range goes), makes for very malleable interpretations. Overall, it’s perhaps surprising that such a large chunk of fans would actually like bad language eradicated, rising to 45% of supporters in Family areas.

Now, this is only in the Football League, the level below Manchester United in the Premier League, if we’re still relating this to our initial prompt. That league’s own fan survey (the most recent one I could find online came from 2008) phrases the issue differently. Instead of asking those broader questions about whether fans would like bad language eradicated from games, or asking how it impacts their decision to bring children to games, it simply looks at how offensive fans find chanting:

The survey also notes, unsurprisingly, that older fans are much more likely to hear something they define as “offensive language/chanting”, 47% of those over 65 years old. On a sidenote, it’s rather alarming to see that the trends on “abuse about sexuality” and “abuse about gender” are going the wrong way, though the latter is partly explained by the changed phrasing explained in the footnote above.

The Premier League says that “Once supporters are at a Premier League match, have they witnessed any examples of poor fan behaviour? Encouragingly, in the vast majority of cases they haven’t”, but it would be far more useful to have the more detailed analysis of the Football League’s survey on this issue.

As for how this all relates to the American side of the pond: I couldn’t find any surveys of Major League Soccer fanbases, but it sure would be interesting to have some statistical comparison rather than just anecdotes.

Outside the City of Manchester Stadium. 2 December, 2009.

Photo credit: notFlunkyon Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

The US Cover

“What makes a player?”  Answers to this question, here quoted from Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger’s foreword to the newish book A Beautiful Game, are plentiful in world football.  We debate the right age to go pro, the role of intensive youth academies, shifting population demographics, the dangers and benefits of increasing professionalization, and more in hopes of figuring out how to best tap the potential of millions of children playing the game with unstructured joy.

So how does Wenger, a man at the helm of a club with the types of resources and networks most around the world can only dream of, respond to his own question?  By focusing on an emotional attachment: “What makes a player?  Skill, of course.  And athleticism.  Intelligence, commitment, humility, courage and desire as well.  What makes a top player?  All those things and one thing more: the greatest players – whatever their backgrounds, whatever journey they have made – all love football with the same intensity as they did when they were little boys.  They love the game and maybe that, more than anything, is what makes us happy when we watch them play.”

With all due respect to Mr. Wenger, and while appreciating that his response is from a worthwhile book intended to inspire rather than deconstruct, the evidence for his claim is lacking.  From the 41 stories of players from 41 countries collected in the book for which Wenger was providing a foreword, it seems obvious that the actual ingredients that go into a ‘top player’ are more complicated—and more interesting—than just loving the game.

In fact, once a player gets to the top it is not clear love matters much anymore.  Take what one of Wenger’s own former players, Brazilian Gilberto Silva, says when telling his own story in A Beautiful Game: “At 16, the simple joy of the game had finished. And the job had begun.”  Or take the way Finn Toni Kallio reflects back from his current life as a pro: “Football, I guess, is different for me now.  I’m not excited about it, maybe, like I was when I was a little boy going to watch my uncle play.  I don’t go along to training with a big smile on my face every day: you have good days and bad days.  Back when we were kids, there was no stress, no responsibility.  We were just having fun.  Now, football’s my job.”

There are, of course, top professionals who still love the game with a youthful passion, and many such stories are included in A Beautiful Game.  But part of the intrigue of having these diverse stories together is a recognition: while becoming a top player does necessarily start with the naïve yet elegant joy that is the best part of childhood, from that point forward the game can work in many different ways.

The Book

A Beautiful Game, which was released this month in the US with the sub-title ‘The World’s Greatest Players and How Soccer Changed Their Lives’ after having been released last year in UK with sub-title ‘Football Through the Eyes of the World’s Greatest Players,’ is a noble effort to relate the joy of the game.  Put together by English actor, writer, and broadcaster Tom Watt, with a portion of proceeds going to UNICEF, the book’s 41 stories (mostly from players who had recently plied their trade in England—understandably for the sake of access) relate players’ childhood experiences with the game in several pages of unbroken narrative.  Eschewing references to the details of the players’ professional careers and international success, and interspersing glossy pictures of the game in all its guises, the book seems mostly geared towards an audience of fathers and sons.

For me, however, A Beautiful Game also offers an interesting data set: a rare chance to consider the question of what makes a player from the perspectives of the players themselves.  Reading the book highlighted for me that while I’ve seen many ‘experts’ analyze, criticize, and proselytize their ideas about player development, I’ve rarely seen efforts to get perspectives from the guys who end up on the field.  We seem to know a lot about the mechanisms of player development, but we know a lot less about the phenomenology.  And if there is one thing players know beyond their embodied understanding of the game, one thing that might allow them an off-field escape from sports clichés and uneducated analysis, it is their own experience.

The UK Cover

So one of the reasons I appreciate A Beautiful Game is that the stories remind me of my “real job” teaching lifespan development: the players’ accounts are the types of life-story narratives that make for the richest data we have about lives.  Which also meant that I couldn’t stop myself from doing some of the things that I do as an academic; I couldn’t stop myself from counting, categorizing, and critiquing.

In that vein, I was pleased to find that the players’ stories in A Beautiful Game mostly avoided proscribing trite ‘life skills’ such as teamwork, or discipline, or self-esteem as keys to success.  At some level those things certainly matter, but they are rarely what make the difference for the fortunate few who make it to the elite levels of the game.  In fact, on several of the few occasions where the players talk about what the game taught them the lessons are about failure rather than success—I found Artur Boruc’s Eastern European fatalism particularly amusing: “You learn things from playing the game.  Maybe the most important is that it teaches you how to lose.  We have a saying in Poland: ‘One minute you’re driving the car, the next you’re underneath it.’”

Instead of highlighting life lessons, the book focuses primarily on falling in love with the game—on the game as a source of joy and an outlet for passion.  But in doing so the stories also highlight the diverse ways that love happens.

In discussions about US player development, for example, most contemporary emphasis is on professionalizing youth soccer: we are dismissing the traditional American combination of sports and school in favor of promoting private academies and professional contracts.  We seem focused on extending the youth reach of MLS teams, standardizing coaching, and organizing elite clubs, while often ignoring ways of getting kids to play the game for fun—ignoring the importance of city parks, recreation centers, public schools.  Yet one of the striking things about the stories in A Beautiful Game is how many of the players learned the game by just having opportunities to play for fun.

As an example, one of my favorite stories in the book (along with those of Fabio Cannavaro and Mahamadou Diarra) was from Dutchman Robert van Persie.  In explaining how he came to the game he says little about Holland’s renowned coaching system and much about “The Cage” – a Rotterdam city “playground set up for football, surrounded by nets so the ball would stay inside it.  The size of the pitch was perfect for us – 25 metres from goal to goal – and it was really central, so people could come from all the neighbourhoods around to join in.  I played there almost every single day.  Almost all my friends were boys I met at The Cage: friends from around the world.  Rotterdam is a port city so people have come from everywhere.  I had friends from Holland; friends whose families came from Morocco, from Turkey, from Surinam, from the Cape Verde Islands.”

Even after he had been incorporated into a local club’s youth program, van Persie went back to The Cage on his own to play with the type of inspiration that no professional system could provide—like many great players, he had both passion and opportunity.  In fact, by my count well over half the elite players in A Beautiful Game attributed their success more to opportunities to play informally than to their formal connections to clubs and professional systems.

Of course, many of the players learned the game through combinations of both formal and informal play—a mix eloquently described by Mexico’s Claudio Saurez when reminiscing about the wisdom of a coach who “told us that the secret was to go out and play a cascaritas [an informal street game], but do it seriously!  That would be the ideal: to have fun playing at the same time as being able to shoulder the responsibilities.”  And that is something I suspect American players need much more than further professionalization.

The Paths

It is also worth noting that the patterns of players developing through formal or informal channels did not always fit with stereotypes.  While we tend to think of Africa, for example, as an icon of informal player development—the barefoot street urchin discovered by the benevolent talent scout—in his story Côte d’Ivoire’s Emmanuel Eboué describes a decidedly formal upbringing with his Dad (a former footballer himself) dropping him off daily at a small Abidjan youth club for practice, even before moving up to the famous ASEC youth academy.  In France, in contrast, Franck Ribéry describes no involvement with “organized football” until age 12—despite the fact that his country is often identified as a model of professionalized youth academies,.

Similarly, while many of the players in A Beautiful Game describe an exclusive focus on soccer as their only childhood passion a nearly equal number describe having had diverse interests—from school, to other sports, to jobs.  Some of the more interesting examples include Artur Boruc, who describes having “passed exams in Polish dancing,” Norway’s Morten Gamst Pedersen, who grew up above the Arctic Circle “doing handball, ice hockey, gymnastics, orienteering, skiing,” and Brazil’s Gilberto Silva, who spent his early adolescence as an “apprentice upholsterer” and his late teen years out of the game working at a candy factory.  Based on the evidence here, early specialization is by no means a requirement for later elite performance.

So what are the requirements?  Silva, another of my favorite narratives in the book, points out the near impossibility of answering that question: “When I look back to where I came from and think about where I am now: how could I have imagined what would happen to me?  How could I have imagined I would become a World Cup winner?  How can I explain it now?  I had people who put the right situations in front of me; I was lucky: I got a second chance and I took it.”

Those last bits—opportune situations sprinkled with bits of luck—seem to me worth highlighting if only for how rarely they are part of our discussions about what makes a player.  Take, for example, the pattern I found most surprising in the player narratives: the nearly 60% of players whose success could be at least partially attributed to the fact that a father, grandfather, or uncle was a high level player, coach, or administrator.

Considering how few adult males in the general population are high-level footballers, the fact that well-over half of the 41 elite players in A Beautiful Game had at least one of those as a mentor seems significant in several ways.  First, it points out the genetic luck necessary for having the physical characteristics to be a top level athlete.   Tomáš Rosický, for example, did not just work harder than all the other kids in Prague, he was blessed with a combination of quickness, balance, and grace that I suspect had also helped his father get a chance at Sparta Prague.

Second, the prominence of having relatives in the game probably says something about the importance of networks in making opportunities.  Taking nothing away from their long journeys and intense commitment, it seems plausible that Blackburn’s Ryan Nelson mightn’t have been one of the few New Zealanders to play in the Premier League had his grandfather not been a Kiwi national team coach, or that Kanu mightn’t have ever left Igboland if his father were not a one-time chairman of Nigerian club Spartans (now Heartland F.C.).  These were not instances of nepotism, but more abstract examples of what sociologists would call social capital—having the connections and the know-how to negotiate complex systems in ways that maximize opportunities.

Third, even beyond fathers and grandfathers, it is notable how many of the players in A Beautiful Game identify the people immediately around them as their role models and their inspiration.  When the players in A Beautiful Game discuss people that most influenced them, many start by giving cursory credit to global stars: a memory of watching Maradona in his prime, or having brief obsessions with Real Madrid.  But mostly those mentions give way to much more heartfelt memories of challenging an older brother in ongoing yard games, of the local coach who first made soccer meaningful, or of the mom who lovingly tolerated an endless supply of muddy laundry.

Many of the players note that they now think of themselves as role models, perhaps failing to appreciate the lessons of their own stories: the actual influence of sports celebrities on our daily lives is nothing compared to the importance of our tangible community.  None other than today’s ultimate icon Lionel Messi, for example, gives the obligatory Argentine credit to Maradona before noting: “there wasn’t anybody who was an idol for me as a boy.  I grew up with my brother and my cousins.”  But it may be Ribery who said it best: “I wasn’t a great one for having heroes, you know.  I certainly didn’t spend my childhood glued to the telly: I was too busy outdoors with my mates, playing football and having a laugh.”

In the US much has been made of the importance of having a visible professional league for the future of the game, often based on the assumption that kids will look to the pros to learn how it is done.  But one of the conclusions I draw from using A Beautiful Game as data is that there is no one way for it to be done: you cannot look at the finished player and design a system to produce more.   Instead, if you start by looking at the young player you realize how easy it would have been for things to be different—how much was about the child having the luck, the help, and the opportunity to successfully negotiate whatever system they found themselves in.

So what makes a player?  Wenger’s response that they “love the game” may indeed be a good starting point, but the real answer is almost certainly about something more.  Something that may actually be embedded in the types of stories told by A Beautiful Game—stories that are less about top-down youth development schemes and professionalized club systems and more about the realities of young lives.

Andrew Guest writes weekly for Pitch Invasion. He is an academic social scientist and soccer addict living in Portland, Oregon.  Having worked (and played) in Malawi and Angola, he has a particular interest in Africa.  He can be contacted at drewguest (at) hotmail.com.

Outside Emirates Stadium.

Photo credit: Stephen Iliffe on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

Big Story

You probably read yesterday about the bugging of England team meetings by an unknown party, with several hours worth of recording offered up to media outlets.

It’s interesting to note that also yesterday, a court case settlement involving a newspaper, the News of the World, and well-known publicist Max Clifford offers insight into the lengths the press are prepared to go to peek behind the curtains of football’s leading figures.

The Guardian reports:

The News of the World was tonight accused of buying silence in the phone-hacking scandal after it agreed to pay more than £1m to persuade the celebrity PR agent Max Clifford to drop his legal action over the interception of his voicemail messages.

The settlement means that there will now be no disclosure of court-ordered evidence which threatened to expose the involvement of the newspaper’s journalists in a range of illegal information-gathering by private investigators.

This is not the first settlement the NofTW has made; £700,000 was paid to Gordon Taylor, head of the Professional Footballers’ Association, after a private investigator working for the NofTW hacked into his phone messages.

An expensive settlement, given the NofTW’s editor at the time said “I never asked for a Gordon Taylor story, I never commissioned an Gordon Taylor story, I never read a Gordon Taylor story, I never published a Gordon Taylor story. With all respect to Gordon Taylor, he is hardly a household name.”

But messages on Taylor’s phone featured many prominent football figures, including Sir Alex Ferguson and Alan Shearer.

Another known victim in football was David Davies, former executive director of the Football Association. There’s no information when he was targeted, but it’s fair to guess that it may have coincided with the News of the World’s “fake sheikh” sting of England manager Sven- Goran Eriksson in 2006.

Unfortunately, the willingness of those targeted to settle out of court with the News of the World means we may never know the extent of the operations the newspaper took to spy on prominent footballing figures.

Quick Hits

• The reports by Deloitte on football’s finances always receive considerable publicity, and buzz with positivity about rising revenues in European football. At the same time, we know particularly in England, that this rising revenue does not mean clubs are stable or profitable, a key fact missed in Deloitte’s reports, as Paul Kelso says in the Telegraph: “As a test of financial health the focus on revenue alone borders on the specious, akin to complementing a man in intensive care for having a full head of hair.”
• Two’s a crowd for a penalty kick, the J-League rules.
• Chester City Football Club’s 126 year-old history is over. The club were wound-up today over unpaid debts. Time for a Phoenix club to rise from the flames. Cardiff and Southend, meanwhile, have a stay of execution from the high court.

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

When two clubs’ long, drawn-out crises both reach their denouements the same day — with Portsmouth FC entering administration, and Chester City FC expelled from the Football Conference — it’s worth paying attention to what the supporters have to say in response as they are left picking up the pieces, and consider the lessons we might learn from them.

First, Portsmouth’s Supporters’ Trust was careful to recognise the broader impact of the club’s collapse — not just on the fans, but on the staff and on local businesses still owed money by a club whose revenue was in the tens of millions last year. They made the point that the lack of transparency in the club’s dealings had been a serious problem. In their press release, they said:

Portsmouth City Football Club Limited has today confirmed that it has entered into administration. Although this brings an initial nine point deduction it does give the club the opportunity to rebuild.

Sadly administration will have a negative impact on local businesses that are now unlikely to receive the money they’re owed. We also feel for the staff who have devotedly served the Company and whose jobs are now at risk.

We now urge all Pompey fans to unite together and show to the World what this club means to its fans and its community.

We do understand the difficult job that Andrew Andronikou has ahead of him as Administrator, and as an organisation the Supporters’ Trust is willing to provide support to him in working towards a more stable future for the football club.

The next owner of our historic club needs to understand the passion of the Pompey fans and communicate and co-operate with them with greater transparency.

This club belongs to its fans and its community, it’s this reason that Portsmouth Football Club will never die.

Meanwhile, when a club that has existed for 125 years reaches the sorry state that Chester City have, it’s no wonder their supporters, organised in the City Fans United (CFU) Supporters’ Trust, ask how the football authorities could have allowed such poor and shady business practices to destroy their club.The Football Conference, after expunging Chester’s record from the Blue Square Premier records this season, said that “Friday’s events are unparalleled in the history of our national sport and it is with much regret these circumstances have evolved” (as if the Conference themselves had not played their own cretinous part in that “evolution”).

In their press release about the news, the CFU said:

Today the member clubs of the Football Conference have voted to expel Chester City FC from the competition.  City Fans United are dismayed and saddened that this situation has been allowed to occur, however we have previously stated our belief that years of financial mismanagement meant that this decision was inevitable. We are angry that Chester  City FC was allowed to fall into such a sorry state and we call upon the  football authorities to review their rules on the ownership and financial  control of football clubs, before the supporters of another football club are  forced to endure the pain felt by fans of Chester City FC.

Both sets of supporters are right to emphasise that their clubs will go on — in whatever hopefully reformed or possibly entirely new forms — but also to suggest that lessons can be learned in both how clubs communicate with fans and that the football authorities, starting at the top with the governing body in the Football Association, need to look at how this has happened at two clubs so different yet united in the almost comedic level of mismanagement that has seen both sent crashing down, while all those in charge of the game who should have taken action stood around paralysed.

Big Story
The Guardian reveals today that the Premier League is considering introducing a play-off tournament for England’s fourth UEFA Champions League spot:

Currently the club which finishes fourth goes through but the new proposal would mean a play-off between the clubs finishing fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh. The intention is to inject more competition into a league in which qualification has for years remained in the hands of the same four clubs.

Premier League sources have confirmed that the play-off proposal was presented at the most recent meeting of all clubs, on 4 February, and the league’s chief executive, Richard Scudamore, was authorised to return with further details in April.

It is understood that the idea was enthusiastically supported by all clubs – except the so-called big four of Chelsea, Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool. Scudamore, and the league’s secretary, Mike Foster, will examine the practicalities of how a play-off system could work: whether it should take the form of a home-and-away knockout system, similar to that in the Football League, or incorporate seeding. They will also look into when matches could be fitted into a crowded fixture calendar before making recommendations.

A majority of at least 14-6 would be needed to pass the rule change. ESPN Soccernet, though, reports the opposite on the support of the clubs, saying:

Soccernet understands the idea has little support among the clubs, who are concerned that it could cost English football one of its coveted places in the Champions League.

It has been suggested that only the first three European spots be decided on league position and the fourth place be determined by a play-off. That could mean the teams finishing between fourth and seventh play a mini-knockout competition.

Such a move would be seen as a measure to inject more competition into the league, but if the team finishing seventh qualified for and won the Champions League place play-off, it could affect English football’s coefficient – and eventually it is possible England’s quota could be cut from four to three clubs.

In addition, the fixture programme is so congested already that extending the season is not something most clubs would encourage, especially in a World Cup or European Championship year.

Back in the Guardian, however, John Ashdown says the idea “makes sense” for most clubs despite the risks of fixture congestion (it should be noted that the Netherlands abandoned its own play-off for their second CL spot just two seasons ago).

One wonders a little about the timing of this. On the one hand, this year is seeing the most competitive race for fourth place since Spurs’ infamous food poisoning incident in 2006.

One other other hand, the playoffs would create a new revenue stream for the league, and at a time clubs are struggling financially, the accusations of greed might be less stinging than they were a year or two ago with the Game 39  fiasco.  The Football Association would also welcome another moneyspinning game or three at Wembley.

It also brings into question the purpose of the league system. Playoffs in American sports generally make sense because of the division of the regular season competition into divisions or conferences. It makes no sense to have a play-off when everyone has played each other an equal number of times in the course of the league season. Tony Cascarino lays into the idea from this perspective on the Times’ blog, taking a swipe at American sports in the process:

Such a move undermines the whole season. You play for 38 matches, you have your ups and downs and at the end of it the best team wins the league and the worst teams go down. You can always say the league table doesn’t lie after 38 games – well, if this idea was brought in it could.

Football is cying out for some credibility but this smacks of a gimmick. Where does it stop? Do people really need the extra entertainment of a play-off at the end of a season? Are we becoming like the United States where we have a short attention span and are bored by the thought of a league season finishing after 38 games?

One possibility to alleviate this concern would be to weight the play-off to reward the teams that finished higher up, as is done in Greece. Wikipedia explains their system:

In the play-off for UEFA Champions League, the teams play each other in a home and away round robin. However, they do not all start with 0 points. Instead, a weighting system applies to the teams’ standing at the start of the play-off mini-league. The team finishing fifth in the Super League will start the play off with 0 points. The fifth place team’s end of season tally of points is subtracted from the sum of the points that other teams have. This number is then divided by three to give the other teams the points with which they start the mini-league.

It seems unlikely the Premier League would introduce a complicated system like that for its play-off. Either way, the idea is certain to attract less opposition than Game 39, and will have a definite attraction for clubs outside the big four.

Quick Hits

• Celtic are not in as much financial trouble as Rangers, but things still aren’t as rosy at Parkhead as last year: “Pre-tax profits were down from £8.36 million to £1.27million while bank debt increased from £0.97 million to £3.13 million.”
• Chinese football, drenched in crisis and controversy in recent months, received a fillip with China surprisingly winning the East Asia Championship this weekend.
• Soccerlens asks US Soccer why no American referees will be taking charge of games at the World Cup this year.
• The Guardian, in a leading article, calls for a supporter to be put on the board of every football club, as momentum in the media favouring supporter involvement in club governance continues to grow.

The Sweeper appears every weekday, and once at the weekend. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

Big Story

As a General Election looms, the Telegraph is reporting this weekend that there are plans in parliament for a regulatory body (“Office of Football Regulation“) to prevent clubs from running up irresponsible debt-to-turnover ratios and stop the winding-up orders that have in recent days threatened the existence of several long-running English teams.  Legislators are also looking into ways a regulatory body could give fans a greater say in governance of their clubs.  Momentum for this wide-ranging legislation has picked up in recent days:

The potential government plans – ahead of the forthcoming general election – follow a decision by Tony Lloyd, the Labour MP, to table an Early Day Motion in the Commons calling for supporters to hold tangible stakes in their clubs and for the government and the football authorities “to create a binding framework which will regulate club debt”.

The Telegraph declares that the move “would be one of the most controversial political interventions into sport in history” and will meet resistance from all quarters, including the Premier League, the Football Association and the Football League (although it doesn’t lay out clear reasons why).

In a separate story, the Telegraph details how Manchester United supporters and other rival supporters’ groups, galvanized by Tony Lloyd’s early day motion, are soliciting government ministers to assist in efforts to wrest control of their clubs from owners whom they believe do not have their club’s best interests at heart:

Those in the boardrooms of clubs and footballing authorities who chose to dismiss the fans’ movement as a gentle, unthreatening wave of dissent risk being caught out like King Canute. Fans’ anger over leveraged debt, the increasing sophistication of supporters’ methods, and the soapbox offered by the General Election, mean that this is a movement that must be taken seriously.

Manchester United Supporters Trust president Richard Hytner, who is looking at several different fan ownership scenarios for Manchester United, says “ours is not a case built on sentiment; it is based on commercial common sense. Loyal fans who love our club are worth a fortune and worthy of respect.”

There is certainly a populist element to recent promises of more government oversight of club affairs, and supporters should be wary of exploitation from political parties seeking election on the back of promised “commercial common sense.”  It is far from certain that government-enforced debt regulation and increased fan participation, while admirable, will yield “a new and prosperous chapter,” as Hytner believes it will for United.

But moves for more government regulation of football debts at least in principle reflect a growing belief that clubs should no longer be seen as private financial interests to be exploited by self-interested owners, but public entities with long, autonomous histories, with fans at their centre.  Pitch Invasion will be watching closely as this story develops…

Quick Hits

• West Ham co-owner David Gold believes the Premier League has an obligation to save Portsmouth from oblivion because it will deeply impact the other top-flight clubs: “That can’t be right. For that reason, you have an obligation to save a football club. We have allowed Portsmouth to get into this mess. The brand is 20 Premier League football clubs. We must take responsibility.”
• The BBC’s Emma Wallis reports on racism pervading Italian football: “In a country where Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi famously described US President Barack Obama as ‘tanned’, it is perhaps not surprising that tackling racism is a minefield.  Writer Francesco Pacifico says the concept of racism is different in Italy. He says it is difficult to eradicate racist attitudes because ‘in Italy there is no notion of a few rotten apples… we’re all rotten apples.’”
• EPL Talk looks at the clumsy introduction of Fox Soccer Plus, and the contninued lack of communication to US viewers about the implications of changes to the soccer broadcasting strata.