Big Story
Yesterday, we noted that the avalanche of negative media stories about the Glazers’ regime at Old Trafford seemed finally to be pushing the moderate fans into the rebellious camp. Pointing to the same piece we noted in the Daily Mirror by Oliver Holt yesterday, Ian at Two Hundred Percent suggests there is a “sea change” in the analysis of football and money by the English media:

In an extraordinary article in the Daily Mirror yesterday, Oliver Holt put forward a call to arms to all football supporters and offered an impassioned defence of those that are protesting against the way that our game is being mismanaged at the moment. Last Friday the Daily Mail, of all people, ran an article on FC United of Manchester that came close to being a eulogy and was at the same time a stinging attack on the Glazer’s management of Manchester United. The Guardian is getting its teeth well and truly into the proposed Manchester United bond issue, with new stories about the state of the club’s finances being reported on a seemingly daily basis. There’s something in the air. Attitudes are starting to change.

The writers on the sports pages are generally given a freer political reign than those in other parts of a daily newspaper. Much as it might seem jarring to see FC United being talked about in the Daily Mail, it isn’t, upon reflection, actually that surprising. Football is in the process of eating itself, and football sells newspapers. At this moment in time, however, there is a tangible sea change in the attitude of the printed press in its attitude towards football and money. The bare fact of the matter is that articles such as the two linked to above simply wouldn’t – apart from the ever-impeccable David Conn in The Guardian – appeared in British newspapers a year ago.

This change in attitude towards money and football, with an apparent recollection by the press that fans are more than customers and that subordinating football to the vagaries of the market with no regulation by the football authorities might not actually be the best idea, seems to be the result of several high-profile crises in the Premier League. Manchester United and Liverpool top the list, and the debt at other Premier League clubs such as Portsmouth and West Ham is all too obvious. But these cases are hardly the first time English football clubs have over-reached themselves. Leeds United are the most obvious recent example, but lax financial regulation by the football authorities and the willingness of club owners to gamble their club’s future on the market dates back to the 1980s in England.

Tottenham Hotspur, for example, were the first English club to be floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1983, and the club embarked on an ambitious attempt to become a leisure-orientated company based on the Hummel brand, then diversifying into other areas such as travel and restaurants. These efforts were an absolute disaster, and the football club faced bankruptcy by 1991 not because of poor performance on the pitch (Tottenham were quite successful, winning the FA Cup in 1991 with stars such as Gary Lineker and Paul Gascoigne), but solely because the football had become subordinate to business. And that business was not a success.

Spurs were saved by the essentially enforced sale of Paul Gascoigne to Lazio and a takeover by Amstrad chairman Alan Sugar. But Tottenham Hotspur Football Club was no longer in charge of itself; it was now part of, and ultimately dependent on, the performance of Tottenham Hotspur PLC.

Manchester United would follow Tottenham onto the Stock Exchange, leading eventually to the debt-ridden Glazer takeover. And now, despite extraordinary success on the pitch under Alex Ferguson in recent years, United find themselves more and more in debt as the football club itself is subsumed under and reliant on the complex corporate structure of Red Football Limited, and need the market to respond to their bond issue, or face even greater problems.

Just as a media storm now surrounds the Glazers, there was much criticism of the man who had taken Spurs to the brink of bankruptcy, Irving Scholar. Many questioned the PLC model. But it was all forgotten soon enough, as other clubs embraced the market model, in most cases disastrously. Football was seen as riding a rising tide of prosperity as television money flooded in.

And so as clubs now needed to produce dividends, the relationship between the fan and the club was transformed: extraordinarily, ticket prices at Manchester United increased by 241% between 1989 and 1995, and at Tottenham by 118%. Football was now seen as a profit-making business rather than as a public utility, as Anthony King puts it in The End of the Terraces. Can’t afford to go to the game any longer? Tough.

How was this sold to fans? King says the new regimes at clubs like Man Utd and Spurs “had to establish the legitimacy of profit-making as the clubs’ central meaning and, following from this, the new directors have had to transform the relationship between the fans and the club. Such a transformation can only be achieved through altering the way in which individuals understand themselves and, in particular, making fans see themselves as customers.” The English media, King explains, played a key subservient role in accepting this transformation.

The present discontent with this change that now means a successful club like Manchester United is somehow over a billion dollars in debt and that sees fans squeezed ever more for every last penny due to this commodification of football was expressed some years ago in the creation of FC United of Manchester. But is this fringe rebellion now finally becoming a part of mainstream thought about football?  Ian ends the piece we began with by asking the key question about this: will, as with the Tottenham Hotspur example from the 1980s, the lessons be quickly forgotten?

The game is starting to smell rotten from the inside out, and this smell is starting to become all-pervasive to the extent that even those that have been trying to avoid the smell or [who] don’t have a particularly strong sense of smell are starting to notice it. The question now is whether the current press enthusiasm for sniffing around is a passing fad or something capable of bringing about meaningful change.

Worldwide News

• Dave Hill at the Guardian has a round-up and reaction to the possibility of West Ham moving into London’s Olympic stadium after 2012. Meanwhile, former West Ham boss Eggert Magnusson has hit back at claims his time in charge was characterised by “crazy” spending.
• A match-fixing investigation in China has seen the head of the Chinese Football Association questioned about his own alleged involvement.

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.

Blessed with power, pace, some aerial ability and a calm finish, Zamora led the Albion up two divisions with successive championships at the start of the decade through his goalscoring exploits.

28 goals in 2000-01, 28 again in 2001-02, and 14 in 35 in what’s now the Championship in 2002-03.

When the ball hits the goal it’s not Shearer or Cole, it’s Zamora.

He would, of course, swiftly move on up to the Premier League, a young striker with his record and ability attracting the expected attention: to Tottenham Hotspur he went in 2003, seemingly destined for England duties as both Cole and Shearer approached the end of their careers.

But then for the first time in his career the goals did not come: he never scored for Tottenham in league play, departing after just sixteen appearances for West Ham in January 2004. There, in the Championship, he rediscovered his touch, scoring a decent 13 goals in 39 appearances in 2004-05, including the winning goal in the playoff final to take them back to the Premier League in 2005.

And then the goals stopped again. Zamora scored just six goals in 34 games for West Ham in the Premier League in 2005-06, as he continued to struggle to adapt to the top flight.  He improved the next season, but ended up with just 34 in 136 for the Hammers. His best streak, at the start of 2006-07 season, saw him lead the league in scoring early on with five goals in his first four games, though then arrived Carlos Tevez, and a season of torpor ending in relegation.

So to Fulham Zamora went last season, where he has taken his goalscoring production down to Emile Heskey levels: just six goals in 47 appearances over the two years.

Roy Hodgson, though, continues to pick him, and Roy Hodgson is not a stupid man. And Fulham finished seventh last season, despite the loss of club captain and man of steel Brian McBride. Indeed, it was Zamora who largely filled this unforgiving role: McBride was no goalscoring machine in the Premier League either (40 goals in 153 matches), but you don’t need me to tell you about his other abilities and value.

Yet where McBride became a legend, captain and two-time player of the year, with a pub on club grounds renamed after him, Zamora has become a target for fans: the boo-boys counting only his lack of goals. I’m not suggesting Zamora is the equal of McBride; but nor is he the polar opposite.

Perhaps this is a legacy of the golden early reputation Zamora earned when the goals rained easily in the lower divisions, where he made easy pickings because of his superior size, strength and skill, qualities largely nullified in front of goal at the highest level. Instead, Zamora reinvented himself as an all-around industrious target man, but this transformation in his role has been occluded by his earlier reputation, which he know fails to live up to, as a striker with the golden touch.

Which brings us to this weekend, as Zamora scored the winning goal for Fulham against Sunderland: in the Guardian, Dominic Fifield rips into Fulham’s “vocal minority” who have given forward Bobby Zamora such stick for his lack of goalscoring production.

Zamora clearly felt he had a point to prove here. His headed reward, plundered in front of the visiting support, had prompted home team-mates to converge upon him in celebration only for the striker to shrug off John Pantsil and Damien Duff, stride towards the half-way line and, his eyes fixed on the home partisans in the distant Hammersmith End, put his finger to his lips. That gave way to an outburst of “Shut your mouths”. The minority who have voiced some disquiet were most likely too busy leaping in celebration even to notice.

This useful chalkboard from the Guardian illustrates that again, Zamora was much better value than just the lone goal. This is that old cliche illustrated, workrate.

Fifield even wonders if Zamora might not be a better option than Emile Heskey for the target man role for England. Perhaps we will see both Bobby Zamoras finally get recognised for their value. And maybe he needs a second line to the old ditty.

When the ball hits the goal it’s not Shearer or Cole, it’s Zamora. . .

Programme cover courtesy of the excellent Footysphere.

Big Story
New models in stadium ticketing don’t come along too often, and when they do, they are rarely great for fans. Many in England will remember the massively unpopular bond schemes dreamed up by clubs such as Arsenal and West Ham in the 1990s when they were scrambling around for a new way to suck cash from fans to pay for needed stadium redevelopment. These schemes saw fans asked to plonk down upwards of £1,000 for the mere right to purchase a season ticket (the actual season ticket cost extra). Not surprisingly, fan protests saw these schemes scrapped.

As Tottenham Hotspur look to fund money for the stadium they need to compete with their neighbours now at Emirates Stadium, another model is being floated: fans would be given the opportunity to purchase their own seat, in a scheme that might cost the fan anywhere from £1,000 to to £5,000 per year over forty years. As the Wall Street Journal says, “For the price of a three-bedroom home with a pool in a leafy suburb, you can now buy something really and truly invaluable. Your own stadium seat.”

The WSJ says Tottenham could be the first professional sports team to try this model, with two colleges in the US already having approved such an “equity seats right” program. The WSJ notes in passing that “though the idea may seem preposterous—and even repellent—given the state of the economy, proponents say the plan is actually a boon for serious fans because it allows them to circumvent the annual pain of rising ticket prices”.

This, of course, is the rub: with so many people right now defaulting on their actual house mortgages, some might indeed see it as rather repellent of a club owned by a tax-exiled billionaire to raise this. As for the value, some seats in MLS, at least, are also sold as long-term contracts with locked-in limits on the size of season ticket raises. Certainly, though, owning equity in the seat has a value to it and Tottenham’s idea sure beats the bond schemes of the 1990s.  Would you be interested in owning a seat at your club?

Worldwide News

• The mess at Portsmouth only gets worse, a warning to all who have put their faith in sugar daddies: the players haven’t been paid this week, and now the chief executive Peter Storrie has admitted “there is no money left”.
• The Chief Operating Officer of WPS explains the ins-and-outs of the league’s waiver process.  It’s too much for my head this morning, but it is good to see a league official using a blog to explain this kind of thing. MLS could learn a lesson.
• A US businessman’s attempt to buy Bari has collapsed.
• Goal.com looks at the preparations in Angola for the 2010 African Cup of Nations — all is not well, as Danny Jordaan’s comment is hardly a ringing endorsement: “As for now, no decision has been taken as to whether or not Angola is ready.”  Jordaan is heading South Africa’s preparations for the World Cup, with FIFA yesterday announcing they were satisfied with that country’s readiness for the tournament.
• Remember Michael Johnson (not the runner)?  The Manchester City starlet of just two years ago has gotten lost in the deluge of new, overpaid stars coming to the club. The Times looks at what went wrong.
• There’s more on the murky mess at Notts County from the Guardian, as the story gets increasingly bizarre. I give Sven til the end of October to get the hell out of there.
• It’s the second matchday in the Europa League group stage. Bill has another beautiful map of the contenders, while Jamie Jackson wonders who cares.

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

New York Cosmos logo

The New York Cosmos are back! The legendary name had been  more or less in mothballs for years under the control of G. Peppe Pinton, long rumoured to have been asking for extravagant payment for the trademark. And given what a circus the team was at times (even if this wasn’t always a bad thing), it’s perhaps appropriate (if rather sad) that the trademark of the team has been purchased and will apparently be used for a reborn Cosmos as “a traveling array of all-stars, playing matches around the world.”

It doesn’t sound all too promising, to be honest. The new owner of the name is one Paul Kemsley — or PK as he apparently likes to be called — a former director of Tottenham Hotspur and close friend of Newcastle owner Mike Ashley, who also appeared on Britain’s version of the Apprentice.

But just a few months ago, Kemsley’s £500 million property empire collapsed. The company, Rock, was once a major investment of Tottenham owner Joe Lewis, and Kemsley was also close to Tottenham’s former owner, Alan Sugar. Kemsley left Spurs in 2007.

The Times recently explained Kemsley’s growing list of problems:

The collapse of Rock is the latest reverse for Mr Kemsley, who was estimated to be worth £180 million in last year’s Sunday Times Rich List. Last year he was embroiled in litigation with Spreadex, the spread-betting company, after placing several huge bets the week before the collapse of Lehman Brothers that the bank would recover. He also advised Frank Lampard, the Chelsea and England footballer, on a foreign exchange punt that went wrong and became the subject of legal action.

Paul Kemley with Pamela Anderson

Kemsley is known for his aggressive takeover moves, once saying that “If I want something, I will buy it.” He’s had his finger in numerous gambling pies, and was a well known player in high-stakes London poker circles. He owned a racehorse with Harry Redknapp at one stage.

So Kemsley seems to have earned himself a reputation for overstretching himself — will this be the case again with the New York Cosmos?  The idea of turning them into a travelling all-star team is even touted by the Daily Mail as a precursor to seeking an MLS franchise.

Of course, if it turns out any of Kemsley’s old muckers in England such as Joe Lewis or Alan Sugar are interested in investing in the team as serious venture in an actual league (whether USL-1 or MLS), there might be a lot more substance to the rebirth, but that’s a big stretch. Right now, it looks like a sharp bit of speculation by a man known to take a punt on a long shot.

Does anyone see a travelling all-star team having any success in this day and age?

You might not have noticed, but the UEFA Europa League (formerly the UEFA Cup) started play this week. Despite the rebranding, you probably still don’t care too much who wins it — oddly enough, the tournament is back where it started in that sense. In the 1950s and 1960s, then known as the Fairs Cup, its purpose and meaning were unclear, and complaints rained down that it was just another pointless competition cluttering up the schedule. Then came the glory years for the UEFA Cup of the 1970s and 1980s — when and why has the tournament actually meant something?

The Inter-Cities Fairs Cup

The UEFA Cup has rather curious origins as the International Industries Fairs Inter-Cities Cup (lets call it the Fairs Cup for short, shall we?), a tournament first organised in 1955 only for teams representing European cities hosting trade fairs. It’s not particularly obvious from anything I can find why UEFA wanted to promote trade fairs — which at the time were a big deal, showcasing a city’s industry to investors and consumers from around Europe — but it was Switzerland’s Ernst Thommen, Italy’s Ottorino Barrasi (both future FIFA vice-presidents) and England’s future FIFA president Sir Stanley Rous from England who got the tournament off the ground, independently of UEFA.

The first tournament stretched over three seasons from 1955-58, in the early days of European competition — the European Cup was founded two weeks earlier than the Fairs Cup in April 1955. Teams from Barcelona, Basle, Birmingham, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Lausanne, Leipzig, London, Milan and Zagreb took part in the inaugural Fairs Cup. Similar to the Europa Cup today, British teams hardly saw the tournament as a priority, as the F.A.’s historian explains: “In those days the Football League and the FA Cup were the priorities for English clubs. They were wary of European competitions, then so new, in case they got in the way of their ‘bread and butter’ competitions.”

The tournament took three years to complete, as matches were timed to coincide with trade fairs, presumably to raise the profile of the fairs and at the same time promote intra-European football. Each city was only only allowed to enter one team (a rule that would remain in place until 1975), and the initial reaction to this was for cities to put together scratch teams from several clubs in to represent them — such as the London XI, which lost to Barcelona in the first Fairs Cup final 8-2 over two legs.  The Times‘ correspondent at the match noted the disability that “representative” city teams drawing on numerous club sides had. “Barcelona are a club side, and they demonstrated better teamwork throughout the entire match.”

The second tournament was for clubs only, but the stipulation that they must be from cities holding trade fairs was continued, and sixteen teams entered. Barcelona won again, in a contest that spanned three years to 1960. Similar to today’s Europa Cup, the Fairs Cup operated under a cumbersome and drawn-out group stage system until the semi-final stage.

After the second event, the tournament was contested within a single season; this added to the fixture list burden on many teams, and complaints began to spread about its purpose.  What, after all, did it really mean to be the best team in Europe that holds a trade fair?  Yet as football under the floodlights against exotic European competition became an increasingly glamorous and money-spinning priority for top European teams, the appeal of the Fairs Cup grew as a secondary European tournament, hanging onto the coattails of the benchmark European Cup.

The UEFA Cup

And instead of dying a silent death like so many other ill-conceived intra-European contests (stand up, Anglo-Italian Cup), the Fairs Cup was given purpose in the early 1970s as a serious competition, when it was taken over by UEFA and renamed the UEFA Cup, with the trade fair connection removed. It was now the ‘Runners-Up Cup’ — with only the national champion going to the European Cup, the chance for exciting European action for teams finishing second in their leagues quickly gave the Cup a prestige for two decades that it never otherwise had before or since. A playoff between the last and first winners of the Fairs Cup, Leeds United and Barcelona, was played to decide who would keep the Fairs trophy; perhaps fittingly, Barcelona — the most successful team in the history of the Fairs Cup — won.

Tottenham Hotspur won the first edition of the UEFA Cup in 1971-2; the glorious teams that won the tournament in the 1970s speaks to the quality on show, with Liverpool winning it twice in the early 1970s ahead of their European Cup glory years, and Juventus winning their first ever European trophy in it in 1977. The tournament was where many great teams first burst on to the European stage, just before they become enough of a powerhouse to win their domestic leagues consistently and graduate to regular European Cup competition. With countries having just one entrant to the European Cup, the UEFA Cup was always bound to be filled with prestigious teams.

Spurs' captain Allan Mullery lifting the UEFA Cup, celebrating their victory in 1972

The beginning of the end for the UEFA Cup’s prestige came with the launch of the UEFA Champions League in 1992. With countries now having as many as four entrants to that, the quality of the UEFA Cup inevitably suffered. Its purpose became even more confused in 1999, when it was merged with the European Cup Winners Cup, and a group stage was added in 2005-6, guaranteeing teams more games but only adding to the sense it was all rather pointless. With teams that had failed to qualify from the group stage of the Champions League also parachuting into the tournament, it was not so much the Runners Up Cup any longer, but the Also-Rans Trophy. The attitude towards the tournament shown by Spurs manager Harry Redknapp earlier this year — despite his club’s many glory moments in the tournament over the years — showed how far it had sunk, as Spurs put out a weakened team seemingly bent on eliminating themselves.

UEFA Europa Cup

The format has been changed once again for the 2009-10 season with the rebranding of the tournament as the UEFA Europa Cup, with the Intertoto Cup also folded directly into it. I have to call on Wikipedia to explain how it’s all going to work, because it’s really not worth trying to keep track of this ourselves:

A new format for the UEFA Europa League will be introduced for the three-year cycle, starting in the 2009–2010 season. The biggest change is that there will be a group stage with 12 groups of four teams (in a double round robin) instead of eight groups of five (in a single round robin).

Qualification will also change significantly. Associations ranked 7–9 in the UEFA coefficients will send the Cup winner and three other teams to the UEFA Europa League qualification, all other nations send a Cup winner and two other teams, except Liechtenstein, Andorra and San Marino, who will only send a Cup winner. Usually, the other teams will be the next highest ranked clubs in each domestic league after those qualifying for the UEFA Champions League, however France and England will most likely continue to use one spot for their League Cup winner. Additionally, three places in the first of four qualifying rounds are still reserved for Fair Play winners. For the inaugral 2009–2010 season these places will go to Rosenborg of Norway, Randers of Denmark and Motherwell of Scotland.

Generally, the higher an association is ranked in the UEFA coefficients, the later its clubs start in the qualification, however every team except the title holder has to play at least one qualification round.

Apart from the teams mentioned, an additional 15 losing teams from the Champions League qualification round two will enter in the fourth and last UEFA Europa League qualification round, formerly known as the first round, and the 10 losers of the Champions League qualification round 3 will directly enter the UEFA Europa League group stage. The 12 winners and the 12 runners-up in the group stage will advance to the first knock out round, together with eight 3rd placed teams from the Champions League group stage. The losing finalist for the domestic cup competition will still be entitled to be entered for the UEFA Europa League should the domestic cup winners qualify for the UEFA Champions League.

Right, then. Got that?

The central reason for the latest name changes has little to do with the format — the tournament already had a group stage, after all — but as a branding tool with UEFA taking over the sale of television rights for the entire tournament, instead of teams selling their own rights. With the central sale, UEFA has raised the value of the competition, which one supposes will also mean more prize money and thus more incentive for teams to take it more seriously.

What UEFA hasn’t done is managed to raise the meaning of it all to supporters across Europe; the tournament now seems as pointless to win as the Fairs Cup of the 1960s with the plethora of entry requirements and drawn-out groups stage. The tournament’s glory days of the 1970s and 1980s seem to be confined to the same dustbin as the name UEFA Cup.

If you are lucky enough to visit White Hart Lane on match day, you might hear the Tottenham fans chant “Glory, Glory Tottenham Hotspur” to the tune of the song popularly known as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”.

This is a patriotic American song — the sort of thing one hears sing over a loudspeaker at a fireworks display on July 4th, or belted out by a High School marching band around Thanksgiving. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, for example, does a nice, sober version of this patriotic melody.

It was weird to hear Spurs fans rooting on their team with the music from this popular but staid American anthem. Almost as weird (and weirdly moving) as hearing Liverpool fans sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” — a song from the Rogers & Hammerstein musical Carousel — popularized by singers like Anita Bryant (pictured), Doris Day and Judy Garland (whose version is used here to animate a photomontage celebrating the fellowship of the ring!). And let’s not forget Jordan Sparks, who belted it out for American Idol.

You have to understand: for those of us raised outside the UK, there’s something fundamentally incongruous about the idea of Liverpool fans knowing the words to a song from Carousel.

Inspired by a song she’d heard Union soldiers sing, Julia Ward Howe wrote the lyrics for “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in 1861. Many of you will know at least the first two lines of the opening stanza:

Mine eyes have seen the glory
Of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage
Where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning
Of His terrible swift sword;
His truth is marching on.

As loaded with images of God’s wrath as it is, this is a neutral, ‘cleaned’ up version of the original song sung by Union soldiers marching into battle during the Civil War. Then it was known as “John Brown’s Body” (also known as “John Brown’s Song”). (PBS has a great web page with audio clips & text about its origin, and University of Virginia professor Franny Nudelman has written the book about this stuff.)

There are different versions of the song lyrics – but here’s a simple one that gives you a sense of its peculiar, and peculiarly moving images:

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
But his soul goes marching on.

Chorus:
Glory, glory, hallelujah,
Glory, glory, hallelujah,
His soul goes marching on.

He’s gone to be a soldier in the Army of the Lord,
He’s gone to be a soldier in the Army of the Lord,
His soul goes marching on.
Chorus:
John Brown’s knapsack is strapped upon his back,
John Brown’s knapsack is strapped upon his back,
His soul goes marching on.
Chorus:
John Brown died that the slaves might be free,
John Brown died that the slaves might be free,
His soul goes marching on.
Chorus:
The stars above in Heaven now are looking kindly down,
The stars above in Heaven now are looking kindly down,
His soul goes marching on

Other versions have more complex lyrics – like:

“He captured Harper’s Ferry with his nineteen men so true
He frightened old Virginia till she trembled through and through
They hung him for a traitor, themselves the traitor crew
His soul is marching on.”

Or,

“Oh, soldiers of freedom, then strike while strike you may
The deathblow of oppression in a better time and way;
For the dawn of old John Brown was brightened into day,
And his truth is marching on.”

The song became, as evidenced by the above lyrics, a popular vehicle for celebrating the story John Brown the abolitionist — a white man who was so opposed to slavery that he took up arms and led a raid on Harper’s Ferry, a munitions facility — an arsenal, in fact. (No kidding!) His aim was to set an example with a successful raid that would lead to massive internal rebellion against the slave holding governments of the southern states. The raid failed, and John Brown and his comrades were hanged by the US government.

Amazing, then, that only a few years later soldiers fighting “to preserve the union” would honor a man executed by the government for trying to start a civil war. John Brown’s story is one of the most fascinating in American history — it is, however, not often taught in schools. One can imagine why — because in telling that story, we find ourselves confronted by ugly truths about how violently the United States committed itself to slavery, and for how long. From this point in history, John Brown’s raid looks like the right thing to do: but it raises the question as to why more people didn’t throw their lot in with those held in bondage.

Today, he is largely remembered as a religious fanatic.

Anyway, it is without a doubt one of the all time great political songs. Not in melodic beauty — JBB is mind numbing, relentlessly repetitive. But it’s thus a marching song well suited to Spurs fans who (and you know I love you) can’t seem to do better than sing “Come On You Spurs” or “If You Hate Arsenal, Stand Up” — over and over again. “John Brown’s Body” is up there with “Strange Fruit” as one of those songs that changed the world. It is a song with a crazy history — and it is a song about crazy history. Once you know who John Brown was, why he fought and why he was hanged, when you hear that music you can’t but feel a certain crazy determination in your bones to just get out there and make something happen. Audere Est Facere indeed.

So, in the end, “John Brown’s Body” has a meaning very similar to “You’ll Never Walk Alone”. It means something like: Everyone else in the living world might think you are crazy — but we’ll follow you even if it means following you to our graves, knowing that we have righteousness on our side as we do so. Especially if you are taking on Arsenal.

Editor’s note: this post is adapted from the original post at Jennifer’s excellent blog, From a Left Wing.

A strange twist in this tale emerged today: three Arsenal fans are sueing their own club over racist chanting at the Emirates Stadium involving the words “Yids” or “Yiddos”, used against Tottenham fans.

In a letter sent to the Arsenal chairman, the fans – a Jew, a Muslim and a Christian – claim that the use of the anti-Semitic words “Yids” or “Yiddos” in reference to players and fans from Tottenham Hotspur amounts to a breach of Race Relations Act.

Their solicitor, Lawrence Davies, a leading human rights lawyer at the London law firm Equal Justice, has asked the club to take immediate action to stamp out all racist chanting at the club.

Mr Davies’s letter, sent this week to Peter Hill-Wood, makes it clear that the season-ticket holders can sue the club for breach of contract as Arsenal has a written policy of taking firm action against racist behaviour in the stadium.

Arsenal fans argue that the use of the words “Yids” and “Yiddos” in reference to their north London rivals is not racist but simply directed at the club’s Jewish history and point out that Tottenham fans even refer to themselves as the “Yid Army”. But Mr Davies says this does not stop the language from being offensive and anti-Semitic.

Mr Davies says in his letter: “The test in law is whether the language concerned causes offence to the person concerned. Our five clients are all Arsenal supporters and three are season-ticket holders. The season-ticket holders include a Jewish member and a Muslim member. They have all felt offended.”

He claims that by taking no action, the club would appear to be in breach of the Race Relations Act 1976 in the provision of a service or permitting harassment to occur without challenge.

His letter adds: “The season-ticket holders have a contractual relationship with the club. The contract states that fans exhibiting racist behaviour will have their contracts terminated and will be ejected form a particular match. None of the ‘Yid’ chanters have been challenged.”

Other Arsenal fans are bemused by this — at the popular Arseblog, there’s the view this is a spurious legal action.

I think everyone would agree that any kind of racist chanting needs to be cut out but this seems just bizarre to me. From what I can see Arsenal have been tremendously pro-active when it comes to this sort of thing, certainly more than other clubs who let their fans sing all kinds of songs. And to bring ‘human rights’ into the equation smacks of attention seeking to me. Let me clarify, any kind of racist chanting is absolutely wrong, but I’m not quite sure what this legal action against the club, not the fans who they can surely identify, will do.

Surely, though, the legal action is pointing out that the club are failing to challenge fans engaged in what the letter to Hill-Wood calls ‘Yid’ chants. Supporter-led initiatives against racism in British football have been a huge boon to the game in the past two decades: whilst there will always be racist individuals, collective racist chanting has been largely (if not completely) eradicated, and individuals trying to engage in it should be ejected.

The question, instead, seems to hinge on whether or not chants involving the word “Yid” are racist in this context. The curious situation is that the majority of the people (but, not all) being targeted by the chants — the Spurs fans — are patently not actually Jewish, and they themselves have a certain culpability in this whole affair due to their vociferous “Yid Army” chants in the first place. That doesn’t make any anti-Semitic response right, of course, but it’s all so unnecessary anyway.

My own view, as a fan of Tottenham and someone with significant Jewish heritage from London, is that all of the chanting about “Yids” — from whichever side of the barricades — is quite spurious in itself and doesn’t belong at the football. It only leads to what is at best unpleasantness; as an example, look at the comments left at Arseblogger about this today.

In Britain, this action will also be seen in the context of the ongoing debate over political correctness, and there will be many like Arseblogger who see this as making a mountain out of a molehill. What do you think? Is this malignant anti-Semitism, or just benign rivalry?

Reading captain Graeme Murty told BBC Sport: “We know that at the moment we are massively inconsistent. It’s not easy to justify spending so much money to watch us perform and this is giving something back to the fans.”

Steve Coppell’s side have endured a difficult beginning to their second season in the top flight and following their 3-1 defeat at Fulham on Saturday are only five points clear of the relegation zone.

“I would be lying if I said that the poor start didn’t enter certain people’s thinking,” said Murty, who is in his 10th season at the Berkshire club.

“It can’t be good going to places like Fratton Park and coming out after a 7-4 loss wearing a Reading shirt. But more than that there has been a growing realisation among the players of how expensive it is, especially for parents who bring their kids to a game.”

A nice touch, even if £5,000 between twenty-odd blokes making more than that each week isn’t a lot of cash. Still, it sure beats the stinginess of a Gareth Southgate, for example, and is good PR for the Premier League a week after the Sport Minister’s scathing comments about the obscene wages in football.

One also wonders what this means for the bigger disappointments this year such as Wigan or Spurs — perhaps they should be paying their fans to go to games. Or maybe they could do them an even bigger favour and win a match.

Anyway. For those who don’t follow the NBA, Steve Nash is a very good basketball player (has been the NBA Most Valuable Player), a particularly articulate and cosmopolitan fellow, and perhaps the most soccer-esque player in the league: his visionary passing almost shames Ronaldinho. Indeed, there’s little doubt he could have played international soccer himself. OK, only for Canada, but still. His brother, Martin Nash, has played 33 times for their country. His father was born in London, a lifelong Spurs fan. Hence his interest in Tottenham.

Nash is apparently chums with Spurs supremo Daniel Levy, and their dreadful sporting director Damien Comolli. According to Fox Soccer, he’s interested in investing in Tottenham.

I would love to own Spurs, but I don’t have a spare £300million in my back pocket, so it’s not going to happen,” Nash told the New York Times.

I am a lifelong fan of the club and it’s obviously extremely profitable and well run.

When my career is over I would love to think there might be the chance of being involved with the club in some capacity.

I have a lot of experience in many aspects of professional sport, so who knows? I would be excited and proud if that could ever happen.

Alright, so it’s really just a stock answer with no substance, though I wouldn’t be surprised to see him buy a small chunk some day — there’s no way he could ever “own” Spurs himself. The NBA doesn’t pay that well. Whilst Nash’ interest would spur (sorry) a little interest in soccer amongst basketball-heads in the U.S., it would probably be a better sign of soccer’s health here in North America if Nash invested in an MLS team as well or instead.

And I must admit discussing this was little more than an excuse to post the following video of Nash heading the ball to Amare Stoudamire in the NBA’s Slam Dunk contest.

EDIT: Thanks to Mark in the comments for noting the following video is even better.