 - Last login: 2 months agoJaCk044
- Jack is a 45 year old guy from England, UK.
- Likes 1,212 pages, 1,139 videos, 1 photo • 89 fans • Received 53 reviews
- Member since Apr 21, 2007
A wandering wordsmith, professional tea drinker and consumer of web-trivia ... "Hang the sense of it and keep yourself occupied".
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They are wrong but it hasn't stopped disaffected fans have formed their own co-operative clubs: FC United fcunitedofmanchester.co.uk [fcunitedofmanchester.co.uk] - formed after the Glazer's took control of Manchester United - are doing well in the amateur leagues and Liverpool fans, who mocked United supporters mercilessly when the takeover brought United off the stock-exchange and burdened them with millions of pounds in debt (underwritten by the Glazer family) are now doing the same after they in turn were taken over by an American business consortium. Liverpool fans are unhappy that the club has 'sold its soul' to big business without finding any irony in the fact that they've already "sold their souls" long before Tom Hicks and Gillette rode into town, chewing gum and making bold promises. Okay, maybe not chewing gum, but when Tom Hicks spoke of the Liverpool franchise, it spoke volumes about his lack of understanding towards the Liverpudlian community who support their team through thick-and-thin. They don't care how many shirts are sold in China. All they want to see is a team competing for the league title.
But even a club the size of Liverpool is slipping behind the corporate giant that is Manchester United simply because they cannot generate anything like the merchandise sales in the far-east, never mind the amount of match-day tickets. Liverpool's ground holds less than 50,000 while Old Trafford can seat over 75,000 in comfort. "Do the math," as they say.
Peter Kenyon, Marketing Director at Chelsea was widely derided for his bombastic claim that the Blues would be 'bigger than Manchester United' within five years. As a global brand, it might take him 50 years to come close but people like him simply don't understand the deep-rooted traditions within a football club. It's essentially about the local community, not the worldwide brand, which makes a club what it is. You cannot wave a cheque-book at these communities because they do not operate on the level that Peter Kenyon and other reptiles appear to. Money is not the driving force. Honour, passion, love and, above all, loyalty, is their motivation. It isn't something easily explained, least of all understood, by the new class of football supporter. A middle-class white male, typically, with plenty of disposable income and an instinct to follow the team in front, 'the prawn-sandwich-brigade', as Roy Keane famously described them threemonkeysonline.com/als/-roy-keane.html [threemonkeysonline.com/als/-roy-keane.html] .
The benefit of these fans is dubious: of course, they bring more hard cash into the game but force prices up out of the reach of a great many fans. Your average market trader who pops down the 'Bridge to watch Chelsea is less likely to cause trouble than your average beer-swilling, song-chanting yobbo (a debatable point, but generally, for the sake of argument, I'll go along with it) but every club has a hardcore of supporters who organise trouble against rival groups. It's a tribal thing:) Fuck-all to do with money. They'll still find a way to cause trouble whether it's at the match or in a bar later on (as seen by the Liverpool fan in Bulgaria). An early match report from the days of 'flat-caps-and-braces' gives a hint to fans motivation...football, it stated, gave the masses a way to let off steam after a heavy working week (6 till 6 - half-day Sat'day ... is why 3pm kick-off became a 'tradition'). In a sense, it still applies, though those days are long gone - along with the flat caps:) - but many people still go to vent personal frustrations on a hapless referee or a hated opposition player. Reading manager, Steve Coppell made the astute observation that trouble on the terraces at matches wasn't exclusively a football problem, neither is it solely a government problem --- it is a social problem. It applies to us all.
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