The Fallen: Leeds, Marseille, Forest et al

[KingsX]

In the mass of articles about the business of football, and/or about clubs and their supporters, there are few which show how those topics are related.

This article (by the author of Soccernomics, in that other FT) does the trick.  Long but worth the read -- condensed below.

https://www.ft.com/content/19455408-0b96-11e8-839d-41ca06376bf2

 

 

This is the story of the second-tier clubs that reached the zenith of European football between the 1970s and 1990s: Leeds United, Aston Villa, Nottingham Forest, Rangers, Ajax Amsterdam and Lazio, to name a few.

 

Since then, they have been marginalised by the game’s traditional giants, such as Barcelona and Manchester United, and by billionaire-funded clubs like PSG. Yet the fallen clubs live on as relics. They still matter immensely to some people: a couple of thousand OM ultras spend an entire, uninspiring 3-1 victory over Troyes jumping and singing, making more noise than you hear at most bigger clubs.

 

Until the early 1990s, before television discovered the game, there was very little money in football. The dearth of money lent a glorious randomness to football success. A local businessman who scraped together a few million could win a European Cup. And a provincial side that happened to collect some good players could keep them almost for ever. There was barely an international transfer market, and a club could block a player from moving even if his contract had expired.

 

Today the big clubs have taken over football. The only way to win things nowadays is to have a global fan base (like Manchester United), a billionaire owner (like Manchester City and Chelsea) or to play in London, the city with the highest ticket prices on earth. It turned out that clubs like Leeds and Marseille had very localised fan bases. To use American sports jargon, they were “small-market clubs”.

 

Certainly, over any one season, a club with small revenues can — if everything goes right — beat the big boys. Leicester City kicked off the 2015/16 season with £104m in revenues for the previous year; Manchester United had £395m, yet Leicester won the English title. In the Champions League, the knockout rounds are a randomising device that favour chance. But measured over 10 seasons, the correlation between a club’s revenues and its average league position is about 90 per cent.

 

The fallen clubs have to manage their fans’ anger and delusions. Even after decades of failure, more failure still meets with incomprehension. You’d think it would be a losing battle. But here’s the surprising fact: despite all the frustration and the defeats, in emotional terms these clubs are thriving. In fact, some are attracting bigger crowds than they did in the glory days.

 

Many fans, especially those who support fallen clubs, disdain glory. They find identity partly in opposing today’s big-spending winners, who can seem more like corporations than like clubs. Losing against a big club can feel like proof of moral superiority.

 

The fall itself gives fallen clubs their identity. Managed correctly, the fall can be an unending source of wonderment and self-obsession. At an away game at little Yeovil Town, when a vast contingent of Leeds fans spent much of the second half singing: “We’re not famous any more.” Similarly, Manchester City fans, during their own sojourn in the lower divisions around the millennium, would sing: “We’re not really here.”

 

Marseille (and Aston Villa and Ajax and so on) will probably never be champions of Europe again. Their fans, although they will never admit it, hardly mind.