Thread: How Supporters Became The New Villains Of Modern Football

A good article here, worth a read for any footie fan.

How Supporters Became The New Villains Of Modern Football | The Daisy Cutter

This is the first part, to read the rest of it, click on the link at the top of this post.


Cast your minds back to the recent past when the story of football and the supporters who breathe life into it was irrefutably accurate.
The narrative went something like this –


Once upon a time football was the working man’s game and men (predominantly) could take their kids each week and treat them to a programme and half-time pie while watching players who didn’t seemingly reside in an alien, gold-plated universe.
The son wants to bring a mate from school? No problem. Get permission from the parents and into the car they go.


Alternatively you could go with your mates; enjoy a few pints and sway and chant on the terraces, deafened by an electric atmosphere that crackled with passion and hatred in equal parts. Amidst the steam rising from the thronged bodies and the faint aroma of piss it was tribal in there. Exhilarating and brilliant.


One day a big bad wolf called Sky came along and threw a great big bag of money at the game thus ruining everything. Players’ wages spiralled into unimaginable lunacy, luring in mercenaries from abroad with little emotional link or loyalty to the club’s shirt. Each club’s bloodline of young local talent was severed forever – doing irreparable damage to the national side – while in the ticket office ‘our Barb’ was replaced by an automated service. These and hundreds of other examples meant the club that was once the sporting heartbeat of a community became, in time, a cold stone and steel edifice with delusions of grandeur.


Games meanwhile were switched from Saturday to Sunday to Monday on a television companies’ whim. That train ticket you purchased in advance for the weekend away hundreds of miles from home? I hope it’s redeemable because now it’s on a week night, necessitating time off work, further extortionate travel costs, not to mention a match ticket that’s a fifth of your weekly wage. All this to sit in a vacuous glorified library sitting on plastic seats surrounded by plastic tourists a few feet below guys in suits standing behind glass who have got in for free because their brother works for Heineken.


At least you get to enjoy a pint of Heineken yourself at half-time. In a plastic cup of course and on the concourse. You want to drink whilst watching the game? What are you, some kind of animal? Oh and that will be six quid please.
Your team loses 1-0 and they screech out ‘Just can’t Get Enough’ over the tannoy when the goal goes in.


Unfortunately there is no happy ever after to this tale as a few days later it starts all over again. The seasoncard that cost you over a grand and sustained grief from your partner is used to watch a player on a hundred times that a week limp off with mild fatigue before leaving the ground in a supercar usually only seen in Fast and Furious 7.


The end? There is no end.
The above has purposely been written as a fairy tale because that is slowly and maliciously how the past twenty-two years is being rebranded. The established narrative for how the beautiful game became the soulless, expensive, distant incarnation we all know it as today is perniciously being distorted as a work of fiction and worst of all it’s the ordinary supporters – the new villains of the piece – who are unintentionally aiding and abetting the outrageous lie.
Let me elaborate.................................

Use the link to read the rest of it.

Spot on. Sadly.

& the Saints were lucky to scrape a draw...

Originally Posted by withnallstoke

A good article here, worth a read for any footie fan.

Professional sport...too much of a sport to be a business and too much of a business to be a sport...anymore

Originally Posted by withnallstoke

All this to sit in a vacuous glorified library sitting on plastic seats surrounded by plastic tourists a few feet below guys in suits standing behind glass who have got in for free because their brother works for Heineken.

Tell me about it. I was at a pre season rugby league match down here a while back...they were helping raise funds for the Christchurch earthquake. There was a minute's silence for the dead...the "brothers of the brewery sponsors" were hard at it in the bar behind the private boxes...totally oblivious to not only the game about to start but the minutes silence...absolutely disgusting...where is it going to end...I doubt any of them watched the game...it was free piss after all.

and the faint aroma of piss

on the terraces of the elland road scratching shed in the 70's the aroma was anything but faint.

Originally Posted by taxexile

elland road

Is that in England?

^ barely...

Those were the days Stoker. Young Stanley at the Victoria ground.

Originally Posted by chassamui

Those were the days Stoker. Young Stanley at the Victoria ground.

Now that is history