"Where's The Money Gone?"

An introduction

If you’re a regular reader of these posts, you’ll know that I’m writing a book called ‘Where’s The Money Gone? A Football Finance Odyssey”. In this latest draft extract from the book, I explain why I’m doing it.

It’s 12 minutes past eight on a gusty night The Hawthorns, the home of West Bromwich Albion.

In the deserted streets outside, paper bags are playing kiss chase; inside I’m shivering in my usual seat, high up behind the goal in the Birmingham Road End.

It’s only the start of November, but as the winds howl, it’s impossible to avoid the icy intimations of winter.  Long johns and thermals haven’t done the trick, and I’m hugging myself to fend off the cold.

But here’s something to warm me up; and it’s not out there on the pitch where The Baggies are tentatively embracing new coach Carlos Corberan’s tactical sophistication.

What’s thrilling me is the sight, in every stand, of supporters standing arms aloft and waving the torchlight from their mobile phone.It’s like the encore of a rock gig, but you know you’re not watching Bruce Springsteen or Coldplay because in the next moment, a different kind of song erupts. 

Thousands of voices in earthy shades of West Midlands accent join in unison: “Fuck Goo-chan Lie, Fuck Goo-chan Lie, Fuck Goochuan Lie, Fuck Goo-chan Lie, Fuck Goochan Lie”

Not the kind of verse that won Dylan the Nobel Laureate, I’ll admit, but simple and effective.  A direct blast of anger at the Baggies controlling shareholder.

(WBA fans protest against controlling shareholder Guochuan Lai)

We’ve been here before, of course.  What football fan of my grey haired vintage hasn’t?

One of the reasons I got into journalism in the first place was a righteous anger at what I perceived to be media apathy at the threat of extinction for many of our traditional football clubs.

This was the mid-to-late 80s, and the game was riddled with rogues and chancers.

As a Baggies fan I donated to bucket collections to help save local rivals Wolves, who’d fallen into the clutches of the hapless Bhatti Brothers.  They’d allowed Molineux to fall into such a state of disrepair that only two sides of the ground were open.

In the same era, another West Midlands side, Walsall, were threatened with eviction by their owner Ken Wheldon, who was pushing the idea of a groundshare at Birmingham City, another club where he had a financial interest.

(Off The Ball, May 1986)

Wheldon was a scrap metal magnate.  No doubt he was keen to recycle the Saddlers’ Fellows Park into a shopping mall or housing estate.  Fans feared the 12 mile shift from the Black Country to Brum would have sound the death knell for a club overshadowed by three significantly larger local rivals. 

In West London, property developer David Bulstrode connived at football’s version of a forced marriage by seeking to merge bitter rivals Fulham and QPR.  He wanted to flog off Fulham’s historic Craven Cottage ground for riverside apartments.  Of course he did.

Thousands turned up to protest at Fulham’s Third Division game, ironically against Walsall, in February 1987. I travelled from Birmingham to join in.

Media tycoon Robert Maxwell - aptly nicknamed the “Bouncing Czech” after he was discovered to have rifled the accounts of Mirror Group pensioners - was up to the same dirty trick at Oxford and Reading.  

His proposed mashup of the two clubs, who were to be re-animated as Thames Valley Royals, was another footballing Frankenstein that thankfully had no legs.

(Off The Ball, December 1987)

The plan, astonishingly, had the backing of Jack Dunnett, then President of the Football League.  Dunnett himself had sought a similar merger with QPR a few years earlier when he was Chairman of Brentford.

This was an era when football headlines were dominated by stories of hooligan gangs, kicking lumps out of each other.

Football violence was a real thing, and I would never seek to minimise it.  I was there when Leeds supporters toppled the fence in the away end at The Hawthorns and rioted after a defeat which all but consigned them to relegation.

When Millwall kicked off during a League Cup game, I witnessed that, too, and was grateful to get home in one piece.  I was smacked in the mouth at Villa Park after attending a testimonial match to raise funds for one of their players.

Yet I was also randomly attacked more than once while walking the streets of Birmingham.  I witnessed fighting in pubs.  Punch ups at gigs were so common, I was able to make an hour long BBC documentary about it. 

The 80s in England were an angry, violent time, and football was just another outlet for that routine aggression.

What nobody - no journalists, no politicians - seemed to be railing against were football’s ‘hooligans in the boardroom’ who, it seemed to me, cared nothing for the traditions of the game.

Through my activism with the fledgling Football Supporters Association, and my fanzine Off The Ball, founded in late 1985, I wanted to challenge the idea that business interests should be allowed to trump supporters’ wishes.

The idea of community enshrined by football clubs was something I instinctively felt was important, especially at a time when the working classes were losing so much of the industry that had given them an identity.

I lived on a council estate in South Birmingham.  My Dad was made redundant in the early 80s when the hardware company he worked for was closed down, like so many other manufacturing firms that had been the bedrock of West Midlands employment.

Okay, I thought, you’ve taken our factories and coal mines and steel works.  But now you want to steal our Saturday afternoons, too?

Of course, the papers carried reports about football’s boardroom machinations, but their writers conveyed little of the anger that moved me.  

One of Maxwell’s papers even offered Thames Valley Royals season tickets as the prize in a competition.

It puzzled me that in Margaret Thatcher, we had a Conservative Prime Minister who seemed to care nothing for ‘conserving’ what was precious about the game.  Not being a fan herself, she only seemed interested in football as a law and order issue.

In the context of the time, it should be pointed out that although my own team West Brom were about to slide into an abyss of mediocrity for an entire generation, ‘dodgy’ owners weren’t the problem.  Incompetent?  Yes.  Corrupt? No.

In 1986, we lustily sang “Sack The Board” as Albion slithered into the old Second Division with barely a whimper, registering just four wins in the entire season.  

We were at it again just five years later when John Silk oversaw our decline to the third tier of English football.  Fans paraded a coffin around Shrewsbury Town’s Gay Meadow signalling the ‘death’ of The Baggies.

Albion remained outside the top flight for 16 years, a period unprecedented in our history, but our owners were well meaning throughout.  They were fans.  They cared.

What was happening by the autumn of 2022 felt different. There were fears that the club was controlled by people who had no understanding of our heritage, and no regard for our tradition.  They never even came to our games.

They had been given the benefit of the doubt over many months, but as performances deteriorated and details of our accounts emerged, it became clear that something was going very wrong at West Brom.

As a supporter, I wanted to protest.  As a journalist, I wanted to discover how it had come to this.  

Our situation was far from unique.  It seemed to me that more and more clubs were sailing close to the wind financially, and being primarily run for the benefit of their owners, rather than the fans they served.   We were back in the mid 80s again.

Now, as then, I needed to understand what was going on.

What follows is a personal odyssey, talking to fellow supporters, club directors and others with inside knowledge of the game.  

In the words of a well worn terrace anthem, I want to know:  “Where’s The Money Gone?”