We're not the only club

[davieG]

 

Lost Football Grounds and Terraces of the United Kingdom  · 

 

Leyton Wright  

 

Someone posted about how he has fallen out of love with West Ham in recent years, but melted after a bit of backlash, so here's my take:

I used to bleed claret and blue. Upton Park, the chicken run, pie and mash, the walk up Green Street, Julien ****ing Dicks. It was generational. Something special passed down through the centuries, but those days are gone.

The snakes in suits have been in charge for a long time now, Icelandic and English. With their shady backroom deals and grubby little hands in our pockets lining theirs. Something that is indicative of wider society in general.

All they care about is squeezing every last penny out of us, while they sell our history down the river. The rich and powerful have sucked the life out of the majority of the Premier League and profited massively from it.

The fancy new stadium (the one that isn't built for football, nobody has any idea who paid for it, and is almost always half empty by 70 mins) is just a monument to capitalist greed and corruption

Nobody wanted the move, but only a small few had any say. Taxpayers money vanished into thin air, and nobody's giving any straight answers. It stinks of corruption. Sullivan, Gold, Brady, even Boris was in on it.

They think trophies will distract us from their dirty tricks, but trophies aren't for the fans, they're just a symbol of prize money (and for Man Utd and Liverpool fans to bicker over of course). Real fans know that football isn't about silverware and would trade in any trophy in a flash for their clubs back.

Real football is about community, it's about belonging, working-class pride, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with your mates, week in, week out, through thick and thin. There's not a lot of that in the PL these days.

I've started following my local non-league team instead. The football ain't pretty, but that's the charm of it. There's passion, honesty, and a sense of community that you won't find in those sterile Premier League palaces. You can even hold the trophies in the clubhouse—if you're into that kind of thing!

Plus, it's nice knowing that your hard-earned money is going back into the club and not to some offshore tax haven to make some rich guy even richer, or even supporting human rights abuses in the middle east.

If West ham became fan-owned, I'm sure I would fall back in love with them. I still catch the scores now and again. But until then, the bubble has well and truly burst.

 

DG Maguire
Yep, I moved to Manchester in ‘79, lived all over since including Salford & Trafford, but always walking distance from Old Trafford.
I became semi - detached when the Glazers took over with other people’s money, loaded the debt on to the club, and started trousering £M’s a season while the stadium and the football crumbled.
The last time I went to a match was pre-Covid, and that cost £45, 50p per minute, for pretty poor football. The price has gone up since, but the quality hasn’t.
Some people thought ‘Manchester Man’ Sir Jim Radcliffe would make a difference, but others amongst us knew he was cut from similar cloth to the Glazers, after he based his company & himself abroad to avoid paying U.K. taxes, threatened to close his Middlesborough plant if it had to follow anti-pollution regs, etc.
Now he’s in place he’s cut 250 staff, hiked ticket prices, especially for children & pensioners, cut welfare for former players fallen on hard times, taken away Sir Alex’s ambassador status, & the club’s now aiming to attract more tourists as they spend more than regular supporters.
So the idea of a tram ride to Moston to watch FC United, with their “We’re just a shit Man United” banner, has an appeal. After all, the original United are pretty shit most of the time, and cost a lot more to watch!

 

Leyton Wright
Author
DG Maguire my conspiracy theory about Radcliffe is that he's only there to make the inevitable future takeover from the middle east seem more palatable.

 

Patrick David George Mullis
Spot on. Top flight football absolutely stinks - stolen from the working class by the elite. Now every rich man and his dog wants a piece of the pie. There are quite literally HUNDREDS of consortiums made up of rich elite global investors scouring the leagues and buying up all the clubs! The clubs used to belong to the people but not any more!
The clubs get enough money from the TV pot but still they are happy to squeeze every last single penny out of the fans. It’s utterly disgraceful that this was ever allowed to happen to our beautiful game…

 

Paul Bowman 
Well said from a Leicester fan and the corruption is not just the clubs and people running them but the leagues and F A 's the only genuine people are the fans who never get thought about

 

Joe Richardson
Just around the corner from the Upton Park ground is the Old Spotted Dog, home to Clapton CFC. The oldest ground in London, which is full of charm, history, and an amazing atmosphere.
The premier league and the people in charge are ruining the game from the top, but there are loads of teams, like Clapton CFC, that deserve the support of fans that want real football.

 

Dave Matthews
This is a damning indictment of elite football today. But I believe that it’s gonna be difficult to put the genie back in the bottle now

[Daggers]

Non-league.

[Golden Fox]

There is a lot to dislike about modern football, but there is a lot of nonsense written above about ownership. I'm pretth sure in the past, most football club owners would have been pretty nasty businessmen who would have tried to get as much money out of the fans as they coupd have done. 

 

One of my big memories of my early days of supporting City was the plane with "Pleat out, Shipman out", and then later, we had the boardroom fall outs with The Gang of 4 etc. so you can't look back on the good old days beong because of good owners. 

 

Not defending modern owners: just doubt they are now more greedy than they were in the past!