Fan power won the day - now it's time for real change
It was
Gary Neville, I think, who said something the other night about how football has kept a lot of us going these past 12 months. He's right. No matter how bleak the world has been at times, the relentless offering of televised games we've had pumped into our homes has been a welcome distraction from R numbers and South African variants and all the other terms that meant absolutely nothing to us at the start of last year.
We're all very grateful for it, but many will relate to the feeling that, as welcome as all this on-tap football on the telly has been, the kind of exhilaration you experience from being there at the ground, seeing your team score an important goal, has been missing.
That sort of emotion, those precious few seconds of escapism, can't be truly replicated on your couch at home; not when you know you've probably got to do something mundane, like putting the bins out, just after full-time.
No, nothing we've witnessed in football has come close to stirring up those kind of feelings in this last year... not, at least, until those magical couple of hours on Tuesday night.
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Seeing how
quickly the Super League plan unravelled, knowing the amount of embarrassment it must have brought to those who had secretly dreamt the thing up, genuinely brought me a sense of happiness I've not felt from football in some time. The plan didn't just crumble, it exploded, like an 8,000-piece Lego Millennium Falcon lobbed off the top of a multi-storey carpark. The 48-hour maelstrom that had gone before almost felt worth it to see it come to such an emphatic and unexpected end.
As football fans we're hardwired not to dwell on things for too long: to think about the next game or the next season almost as soon as the last one is done. But this is a moment to savour. A calculated plan to yank the sport even further from the grasp of the communities and its working-class origins has been foiled, largely, by the dissenting voices of the supporters. Drink it in. This is a big deal. We, the little guys, won.
But as much as we are right to slap ourselves on the backs here, this is also a time for reflection: to take stock of how we even got to this point in the first place and, more importantly, how we fathom out a way to make sure we don't end up back here before we know it.
So, what can we learn from all of this? Anything we didn't know already?
Honestly? Not a lot. Long before now, most of us will have
reluctantly accepted that many clubs see us as consumers now, not supporters. It doesn't matter if your dad brought you in for your first game on his shoulders when you were four, if it's a toss up for a ticket between you and someone who'll come once, watch a game and go and blow a grand on merchandise in the megastore, it's not a contest.
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The tentacles of corporate greed started wrapping themselves tightly around this sport long ago, but many of us were too busy swigging from the same Sky Sports-ified punchbowl to see it coming. The fact is, as much as we pray this is a watershed moment, to an extent, it's already too late. Not enough people gave a shit years ago when the likes of the Glazers, key figures in the ill-fated Super League plot, were able to wedge a foot in the door at Old Trafford. The fact they did and have subsequently sucked millions from the club having invested next to nothing, is a sad indictment of
how unregulated all this has been by football's authorities. Fit and proper owners tests, I hear you cry? Nope, no idea either.
And what of Uefa and Fifa? As much as we're all very upset about the sheer brazenness of the Super League plot and its blatant disregard for football as we know it, is it really time to start painting those guys as the victims of a scheme to make lots of money? Those who throw stones shouldn't reside in Nyon glasshouses.
When it comes to debates like this, modern football - the unscrupulous businessmen, sports-washing nation states and oligarch owners that now call most of the shots - is, by nature, laced with hypocrisy and deceit. For the most part we're at the hands of this elite, which is what makes Tuesday night so special. For the obscene collective wealth of those at the core of the Super League plan, it's the fact that us, the downtrodden masses at the very bottom of it all, had the power to overthrow it.
In unison, on those rare occasions when something is big enough to set aside rivalries and find that common ground, football fans still have an awful lot of power. The greed and all the rest of it we already knew plenty about, but this is the one thing we've truly
learned from the chaos of the last few days.
This, then, we hope is just the start. For now the Super League is dead, but those couple of days when it felt very much alive should not be forgotten. Our job now is to not let this lie. Challenge the authorities - in football and beyond - to tighten the regulations. Talk of legislation being passed to make clubs majority fan-owned seems fraught with complication at this stage. It's a lovely idea, yes, but given how far down the path we've already strayed, it's a fanciful one. But then again, as this week shows, if enough people speak up, it's not necessarily impossible.
Grab the pitchforks. Let's make this the start.
