'Where's The Money Gone?'

An introduction

When you start writing a book, you imagine that you’ve got a clear plan of what you want to say, but the further you get into it, the more your original thoughts have to be re-evaluated and clarified. That’s not a problem; it’s just the process.

I’ve got to the point now where I think I’ve nailed my overall vision for this thing, although I know that in reality it will probably change again. Anyway, here’s my latest attempt at an ‘Introduction’ which as well as hopefully being a good read, is invaluable in helping me focus my thoughts for the finished version. All constructive feedback welcome.

It’s 12 minutes past eight on a gusty night at 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 breath 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 exactly Wordsworth or Keats, I’ll admit, but simple and effective.  A direct blast of anger at the absentee landlord in charge at West Brom. 

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 mid 1980s 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. 

The game’s administrators talked airily about “natural wastage”, a euphemism for allowing clubs to die, and never mind that most of them were situated in communities already battered by recession and mass unemployment.

By way of response, I created ‘Off The Ball’, a homemade football magazine, hoping it would provide a rallying point for dissent and help foster a spirit of righteous rebellion, just as the original punk fanzine ’Sniffin’ Glue’ had done a decade earlier.

It was an era when, as a Baggies fan, I donated to bucket collections to help save our local rivals Wolves, who’d fallen into the clutches of the Bhatti Brothers, two hapless Manchester-based property developers.

The Bhattis rumoured links to the Saudi royal family were never translated into hard cash, and they allowed the Molineux stadium to fall into such a state of disrepair that only two sides remained open.

Around this time, another West Midlands side, Walsall, were threatened with eviction from their Fellow Park ground by owner Ken Wheldon, who was promoting a groundshare at Birmingham City.

It didn’t seem to matter to the FA or Football League that Wheldon had a financial interest in both clubs, in brazen defiance of the rules.

Walsall fans feared the 12 mile shift from the Black Country to Brum would have sounded the death knell for a ‘minnow’ overshadowed by three significantly larger local rivals. 

Wheldon was a scrap metal magnate.  No doubt he was keen to recycle Walsall’s home into a shopping mall or housing estate.  

Meanwhile down in West London, property developer David Bulstrode connived at football’s version of a forced marriage by seeking to merge Fulham and QPR, ignoring years of mutual antipathy.

He wanted to flog Fulham’s historic Craven Cottage ground for riverside apartments. 

Media tycoon Robert Maxwell was up to the same sneaky trick at Oxford and Reading.  

Maxwell wanted to bolt these bitter rivals together to create a football Frankenstein called Thames Valley Royals.

His plan even had the backing of Jack Dunnett, then President of the Football League.

No surprise there.  As Chairman of Brentford FC, Dunnett himself had sought a similar merger a few years earlier with QPR citing low attendances.

In most of these cases, the fans who were directly affected rose up in anger, but across the game as a whole, there was apathy.  Who cared if a few clubs went to the wall?? 

Not the papers, not the FA, not politicians.  

That, at least, was how it seemed.

The 80s 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.  Not after witnessing Leeds supporters toppling the fence in the away end at The Hawthorns and rioting after a defeat in 1982 which all but consigned them to relegation.

I was there when Millwall kicked off at The Hawthorns during a League Cup game the following year and was grateful to get home in one piece. 

On another occasion a Villa fan smacked me in the mouth and nicked my Baggies scarf outside the Holte End after I’d watched a testimonial match for one of their players.

Matchday aggro was real and scary, but too easily ignored then - and often forgotten now - was the epidemic of street violence in 1980s Britain, which was liable to erupt anywhere. 

I was randomly set upon twice while walking the streets of Birmingham at night - once with my girlfriend. Pub fights were routine. 

Punch ups at gigs were so common, I was able to make an hour long BBC radio documentary about it.  We could have made a series.

This was an angry, violent time; Britain was an angry, violent place.  Football was just another outlet for that routine aggression.

What nobody seemed to be railing against with equal vigour - certainly no mainstream journalist or MP -  were football’s ‘hooligans in the boardroom’ who, it seemed to me, were hellbent on destroying the traditions of the game.

These were the directors and administrators who talked up football’s problems and talked down its loyal followers.

I wanted to challenge the idea that business interests should be allowed to trump supporters’ wishes.

The sense that a football club had intrinsic value was something I instinctively believed, especially at a time when the working classes were losing so much of the industry that had otherwise 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, and we feared he might never work again.

Manufacturing had been the bedrock of West Midlands employment.  Now, the nuts and bolts of our economy were being literally shipped abroad.

Elsewhere, the coal mines and steel works were disappearing.  And they wanted to destroy our Saturday afternoons too?  Come off it.

This was the pre-internet age, when we relied on the press and radio for our football information.

These outlets sometimes carried stories about football’s boardroom machinations, but their reporters conveyed little of the anger that inspired me to start bashing at a typewriter.

Quite the opposite.  The papers in particular, both local and national, were generally hardline Thatcherites, embracing the notion that money talked loudest and other voices should be ignored or even silenced.

One of Maxwell’s papers, the ill-fated ‘Today’, 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’ a game that had been a pillar of English society for more than a century.

She seemed oblivious to football’s social and cultural value.  She only saw it as a law and order issue.  Unruly supporter could be put down with the same force as striking miners or print workers.

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 at my club.  

Were they incompetent?  Maybe.  Corrupt? Never.

In 1986, we lustily sang “Sack The Board” as Albion sank 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, trapped in the quicksand of failure, we slipped to the third tier of English football for the first time.  

Baggies fans paraded a coffin around Shrewsbury Town’s Gay Meadow symbolising the ‘death’ of our club.

At this point, we remained outside the top flight for an unprecedented 16 years, but our owners were well meaning throughout.  They were fans.  They cared.

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

As performances deteriorated and troubling details of our accounts emerged, it became clear that something was going very wrong.  

Instead of investing, our owners were taking money out of the club to prop up their ailing businesses elsewhere.

They were having to borrow substantial sums at eye watering rates of interest just to pay the monthly bills.

This was all leading to an existential crisis.  The Baggies had debts and outgoings that were simply unsustainable. Going bust was a real possibility.

Nor was this a one-off event confined to the industrial West Midlands.

Albion weren’t the victims of a single rogue operator who had somehow tricked his way into a game that was otherwise well regulated.

Our plight was replicated throughout the country and was symptomatic of professional football as a whole.

Bury and Macclesfield had gone bust.  Plenty of others - Portsmouth, Derby County, Reading, Wigan, Bolton - had staved off liquidation only to be hobbled for years by the disastrous consequences of overspending.

Desperate for the riches of the Premier League, numerous clubs had become locked into a financial arms race that, for most of them, was bound to end in tears.

At the top level, the threat of a breakaway European Superleague which would have guaranteed its founder clubs a permanent place without the threat of relegation, only confirmed what many of us already knew. 

That football was a game increasingly controlled by, and for, mega rich owners rather than the supporters and communities who had sustained it for generations.

There was a ferocious backlash from fans who took to the streets in protest and forced a speedy retreat from the Superleague plan.

But it was a moment which crystallised the question - who now is football for?  And what is its primary purpose?

Does it exist to advance the interests of hedge funds, oligarchs and oil states?  

Or is it an extension of community and neighbourhood, an exemplar of civic virtue as well as a source of local pride?

Seeing fans metaphorically square up to the suits carried echoes of the mid 1980s, even though in many ways football has been transformed since in the decades since then.

One key difference was the response of politicians.  At the time of the Superleague plot, instead of siding with big business, the government promised to introduce an independent regulator to curb the excesses of the game’s directors.

This reflected how football had gone mainstream and become respectable.  Politicians were keen to bask in its reflected glory.

The breathless hype of Sky’s Premier League coverage told us we were watching the greatest games in the best competition in the world.

Live attendances were on an almost continuous upward curve.  Those who went to games were more likely to be women and/or come from an ethnically diverse background. 

The LGBT community was celebrated, not mocked.

There were record amounts of cash being generated from broadcasting rights, too.

All in all, football was a success story, a money making global export and a hugely effective expression of British soft power abroad.

Yet this only highlighted the absurdity of the acute financial distress my club and many others found themselves in. 

Football had never been wealthier or more popular; yet it was stalked by the spectre of financial ruin.

As a supporter, I wanted to protest at this state of affairs.  As a journalist, I wanted to discover how it had happened.

To answer those questions, I’m on a personal odyssey through English football, 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?”

Listen here to to the ‘Where’s The Money Gone?’ podcast with me and Charlie Methven.