Selling Football's Soul

2002 has being doing its best for some time to join that list. First we had suggestions of the so-called Phoenix league, so a few first division clubs could stave off financial difficulties by going down the same road the elite clubs had gone down a decade earlier (ironically, and perhaps significantly, many of the players in this years conspiracy were amongst the founders of the Premiership) and ever since there has been constant talk of the Old Firm defying all footballing logic and joining the Football League in its highest division. Now, finally, 2002 has done it. By allowing Wimbledon Football Club, of Merton borough, London, to move to Milton Keynes, the football authorities have ensured that 2002 will forever be remember in the history of football – for all the wrong reasons.

Of course, the only direct effect upon Burnley FC and it's supporters will be to make an irritating away trip more accessible to all but those Clarets who live in London. The game, however, will quite probably feel the repercussions of this move for many years.

Football has seen plenty of changes over the years, and will no doubt continue to do so. But there is evolution and revolution, necessary and unnecessary change, change which enhances the game and that which degrades it and detracts from it. Allowing Wimbledon to move fifty odd miles around the permanent traffic jam that is the M25 is revolutionary, unnecessary and to the detriment of the game. It should never have been allowed to happen, and indeed in the first place the proposal was rejected by the football league; even after the decision, there was clear concern from both the FA and the Football League, the two highest football powers in the country, at the outcome of the commission appointed to decide the matter – and if neither of those organisations were satisfied by the ruling, then who exactly sat on the commission and what was the basis for their decision?

The commission said there were exceptional circumstances to this particular case. No there weren't. The scenario was simple – a comparatively small club who have been exiled from their community for a number of years and who have in the meantime played their games a few inconvenient but not prohibitive miles down the road, couldn't sustain a nomadic existence any longer. Fine – but a few years ago, Bristol Rovers spent several years exiled in Bath, yet when the opportunity arose, they returned to Bristol, to play in front of similar crowds to those Wimbledon currently host at Selhurst Park, rather than up sticks and move fifty or so miles to a city without a football league representative like, say, Gloucester. Wimbledon's supporters produced evidence to show that the Dons could have done the same.

The difference is that Wimbledon have a chairman whose sole motivation is profit, and who has become obsessed with a plan which he believes will help him achieve this. Quite why he thinks this is unclear, given that there are already two football clubs within twenty miles of Milton Keynes – Luton and Northampton – which do not at present draw such vast numbers of people from the Milton Keynes area. Even as a top flight team ten years ago, Luton did not get the types of crowds that could be expected if there was a football hotbed less than half an hour away. Milton Keynes also has a non-league club, playing well down the pyramid, and if there was such passion for the game in the city, it would surely have risen further up the ranks than it has.

The problem facing Milton Keynes is that it is a new city, a commuter town, to which people moved from other, longer-established communities, many of which had existing football teams. When people moved to Milton Keynes, their allegiances were already formed. Now, their children have followed that lead or have attached themselves to Manchester United or Liverpool or Arsenal – but not to Wimbledon. And fundamentally, football fans of any age are creatures of habit, who cannot simply re-attach their loyalties simply because a club arrives on their doorstep and becomes a more convenient option. Yes, people might come and watch the team when they cannot see their favourite team, but that support will be no more than skin-deep; it will not, cannot, be the kind of support which is the life-blood of a football club, which sustains it through dark times as well as good.

Yet there are people in Milton Keynes who do go to Northampton or Luton in order to get their dose of football. And when Wimbledon move in, there may be just a few who forsake their loyalties and decide to go and watch Wimbledon instead, particularly if the marketing is right. They may not be vast numbers, but given that Luton and, to a greater extent, Northampton have had financial difficulties in recent years and do not have huge supporter bases, those losses could be critical – particularly in the present uncertainty surrounding football clubs throughout the Football League.

And somewhere in that lies the real issue. Football needs fans – it needs them to come through the turnstile, it needs them to watch the game on television. Without spectators – and in this respect, it doesn't matter whether they are casual or passionate – both inside the ground and watching the telly, then football would have no revenues whatsoever. Quite simply, there wouldn't be a game. If, say, this decision indirectly means the end for Northampton Town, then one community which has sustained a football team for many years will have been deprived of one, and one set of fans will have been left disillusioned. And that is before we have even begun to consider the effect this has on existing supporters of Wimbledon, who have already described this as the death of their club and who campaigned so vehemently against Charles Koppel's obsession.

These proposals gave football an opportunity. The chance was there to send out the message that, although we live in an age when football is as much a business as a sport, the fans still come first. It was a chance to remind those who would make their fortunes out of the sport that the game recognises that the fans are the one thing that stays constant in football, that they will still be there long after the players, coaches and boards of directors have moved on, and long after football's boom years have died away.

That opportunity has now been lost. Instead, we now know that football will allow almost any proposal to make more money out of football to pass, regardless of its effect on the ordinary fan. A sport which could once proudly called itself the ‘peoples game' has perhaps irredeemably sold its soul to the marketing men and the executives. As a result it will suffer. It is first and foremost a disaster for fans of Wimbledon Football Club; if they resolve never to set foot inside a football ground again out of disgust, they would be justified. But it is more than that: it is a tragedy to the game.