I’ve not been to many United games and my Dad’s stories of how he and my Granddad used to have season tickets seem plainly absurd, with the cheapest United season ticket setting you back £532. Like me, my Dad and Granddad must have been to less than a game a season since the inception of the Premier League, and the perpetual gargantuan leaps in ticket prices that have come with it. On 14 August, around one hundred and fifty football fans, some travelling from as far as Newcastle, gathered at Marble Arch for the ‘Affordable Football for All march’ to the Premier League headquarters to protest the seemingly never ending rise in ticket prices that threaten to lock working class people out of the game they hold so dear.
As the rain fell hard, the mood was buoyant. Putting club allegiances aside, it was the Liverpool fans (closely followed by the Geordies) who provided the largest turnout, something which stands as a testament to how they, in spite of their various owners’ mismanagement of the club, have retained some semblance of a much eulogised ‘club community’. The march was overwhelmingly male, white and middle aged, and as far as I could tell, I was the youngest person there who wasn’t with their parents. While all speeches paid testament to the increasing diversification of football supporters, this didn’t manifest itself in the march, something the supporter’s clubs really need to work on.
On the march I encountered the same ‘Football Against Apartheid’ banners I’d seen on previous Gaza demonstrations. I spoke to John, an Arsenal fan and the founder of the initiative, and asked him why it was that he felt there needed to be a pro-Palestinian group that’s linked specifically to football. ‘Apartheid racism is the worst form of racism, and we get all this talk about silencing racist com from fans, while at the same time the people implementing this are actively promoting the normalisation of an apartheid state.’ Football Against Apartheid is looking for people to help them on match days and in any other ways, they can be found here.
As many of the speakers pointed out, there is something unique about supporting football that makes its increasing inaccessibility unique. As football clubs become increasingly commercialised there is no such thing as a ‘competitor product’. Our clubs are part of our identities, with a football club owner inheriting a virtual monopoly on purchasing the club. One fan told of how increasing season ticket prices at Anfield meant he had to remortgage his house. These are the lengths working class people will go to to preserve one of the few aspects of their identity that remain after decades of neoliberal onslaught. The Premier League and its constituents’ indifference to the needs of their fans shows no sign of swaying and it falls to football supporters and their allies to stand up and be counted.
The march was organised by the Football Supporters’ Federation who can be found at http://www.fsf.org.uk
Good initiative but the level of support is dwarfed by the actual attendances at games so I cannot see the Greed League or the Football League taking much notice of this. As a Wolves-supporting FSF member who used to be in its predecessor organisation the FSA from the late 1980s onwards, I can safely say that militancy among Football fans has declined since the largely working class composition of crowds has been replaced by the ones we now see sitting in virtual silence, occasionally applauding with their hands and hardly ever breaking into song. South of the Midlands, Premier crowds, with some notable exceptions, are all like this nowadays.
The FSA was formed to fight Thacher’s plan to impose Identity cards on Football fans and we won by mobilising fans around a petition. But this has been reversed via the back door – All-Seater stadia are what has changed the class composition and the degree of control over fans; we all have numbers or cards now to allow club bureacrats and police to identify us at all times.
All-seater was achieved by the manipulation of the Inquiry into Hillsborough and the manipulation of the Hillsborough campaign against that Inquiry, in order to allow Alan Sugar to open the door to international capitalism in the form of the Premier League (aka the Greed League), which is independent of the rest of Football, Rupert Murdoch and all the international capitalists who have taken over clubs since.
The FSA fought that too but lost. Then we amalgamated with the much more traditional, club-based Football Federation to form the FSF and lost our mojo. Apart from a half-hearted campaign to bring in safe standing, not a lot goes on.
Why don’t you support FC United – the beating heart of a deprived community in Moston, with Left Unity members in Manchester involved and loads of Man United fans who lost the battles against the Glaisters?