Where's The Money Gone

The Intro...third or fourth draft

Want to know more about my forthcoming book ‘Where’s The Money Gone?’ This is the third or fourth (and hopefully near final) draft of my opening chapter. Let me know what you think - and please support my work by taking out a paid subscription of you can.

It’s 12 minutes past eight on a gusty night at The Hawthorns, 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 tentacles 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, waving the torchlights from their mobile phones.

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 Lai, Fuck Goo-chan Lai Fuck Goochuan Lai, Fuck Goo-chan Lai, Fuck Goochan Lai”.

Not exactly Wordsworth or Keats, but simple and effective. A direct blast of anger at the absentee landlord guiding West Brom to oblivion.

Supporters across the land will recognise our plight. Financial desperation has become one of English football’s recurring themes - an annoying wasp with a deadly sting that keeps coming back no matter how many times you try to swat it.

I’d seen similar scenes elsewhere, on many occasions.

One of the principal reasons I got into journalism in the mid 80s was anger at the apathy shown - by the media, by the game’s regulators, by the government - towards the threat of extinction faced by many of our traditional football clubs.

By way of response, I created ‘Off The Ball’, a homemade football fanzine, inspired by the DIY culture of punk, hoping it would provide a rallying point for dissent against soccer’s status quo.

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

Their Molineux stadium fell into such a state of disrepair that only two sides remained open.

It was a local example of a national trend. Football in the 80s was riddled with rogues and chancers.

At various points during the decade, supporters of Walsall, Fulham, QPR, and Reading all rose up in protest, fearing the demise of their Saturday afternoon refuge.

Among those who ran the game, the response was worse than apathetic.

The Football League had a policy of “natural wastage”, encouraging the idea that there were too many professional clubs . This meant that if one went bust, it wouldn’t be replaced.

It seemed as though the existence of 92 professional teams spanning the length and breadth of the nation, was cause for embarrassment, rather than a source of pride.

Administrators, whether at the FA or the Football League, were in thrall to Margaret Thatcher’s Darwinian economics.

Like many in parliament and the media, they talked blithely about “the survival of the fittest” - just as they did with foundries and steel works - regarding clubs purely as units of commercial value, rather than community assets.

The people who followed the sport were viewed with equal contempt.

It didn’t help that news headlines were dominated by stories of football hooliganism - a genuine problem, to be sure, but one which led politicians, journalists and the game’s administrators to view ALL fans as violent scum.

How else can the twin disasters of Bradford and Hillsborough be explained? 151 fans died in two separate incidents just four years apart in the 1980s as a result of serious safety failures.

These followed the Ibrox Tragedy when 66 people died at an Old Firm derby in 1971, close to Stairway 13 where there had been three serious incidents in the previous decade - including two fatalities.

After the Bradford City fire in 1985, which killed 56 fans, The Sunday Times described football as, ‘a slum sport played in slum stadiums increasingly watched by slum people, who deter decent folk from turning up’.

Instead of stigmatising the innocent, the paper should have been calling out the local authority for ignoring previous warnings and the failure of Bradford City’s reckless owners, who padlocked emergency exits.

The reality is that contrary to the Sunday Times insinuation, there were plenty of ‘decent folk’ inside Valley Parade that day.

They were let down by the ‘slum people’ in charge of their safety, as evidenced by the ruling of Deputy High Court Judge Joseph Cantley in 1987.

After hearing two test cases bought by relatives of the victims, Cantley said: "In my view, the continuing negligence of the club and the continued inaction or indifference of the County Council…after it had been alerted to the existence of the danger, were concurrent causes of this disaster, and I hold both of them liable”.

No one was ever convicted for the failings that led to the disaster.

In similar vein, many other besuited ‘hooligans’ were given an easy ride by the mainstream press in the years that followed, despite appearing hellbent on destroying football’s heritage.

Their ranks included property speculators who wanted to cash in on prime locations housing historic teams; and City spivs who wanted to make a buck fast by smashing the solidarity of the Football League.

These directors and their accomplices in the media talked up football’s problems and talked down the millions of non-hooligan supporters who relished this precious communal activity.

Growing up on a council estate in Northfield in South Birmingham in the 70s and 80s, I instinctively understood that football clubs had an intrinsic worth; a value that couldn’t be measured on a balance sheet.

Most of the kids and adults around me (or at least the boys and men) had a club they followed - mostly Aston Villa or Birmingham City. Some attended games regularly, others less so, but it was always part of the conversation.

At the local newsagents on Saturday evenings, there would be queues for the ‘Sports Argus’ - a traditional ‘pink’ paper containing all the day’s results.

It was the same when we moved around the outer wheel of the city to another working class estate, Druids Heath.

Live attendances were falling dramatically at the time, but identification with a football team remained strong, even as so much of the industry that gave the West Midlands its identity was in decline.

My Dad had been made redundant at the turn of the 80s when the hardware company he worked for was closed down.

We seriously feared he might never work again. For a time, I walked 45 minutes there and back to school to save on bus fares.

Fortunately, he did eventually get another job, and was able to work through until retirement, before that factory also closed down.

Manufacturing had been the bedrock of local employment. As overseas predators eyed up our failing manufacturing sector, the nuts and bolts of our economy were being literally shipped abroad.

Elsewhere in the UK, coal mines and shipyards were disappearing.

On top of all this, it looked to me as though they were coming for our precious Saturday afternoons at the match, too. A line had to be drawn.

I wasn’t clever enough to challenge the country’s industrial decline - and in any case, there were plenty of others doing that job, including trade unions and the Labour party.

Football and those who followed it, on the other hand, had precious few defenders in the public realm, and, if it doesn’t sound too pious, I felt a calling.

Someone had to speak up for what I believed to be the majority of peaceful, law-abiding fans, who wanted to protect the game they loved from the hooligans and the speculators. Thus Off The Ball was born.

There was plenty to write about. This was the pre-internet age, when we relied on the traditional press, radio and TV for our news.

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, especially the nationals, generally espoused hardline, free market economics, embracing the notion that money talked loudest. Other voices were ignored or even silenced.

It puzzled me that in Thatcher, the UK had a Conservative Prime Minister who apparently cared nothing for ‘conserving’ a game that had been a pillar of English society for more than a century.

She seemed incapable of viewing football as anything other than a law and order problem. Unruly supporters were classed as “the enemy within” and had to be put down with the same force as striking miners or print workers.

My beloved Albion could not expect to be immune from these wider societal forces.

Although The Baggies had a relatively small hooligan contingent, there were several years when violence was common at both home and away games.

Millwall and Leeds supporters ran riot at The Hawthorns, with the latter spending an entire 90 minutes rocking the perimeter fence at the Smethwick End before finally toppling it and launching a full-scale pitch invasion.

Fear of violence certainly helped drive down attendances - though possibly not as much as the industrial carnage wrought by Thatcherism, which saw industrial towns like West Bromwich wrecked by factory closures.

This helped push The Baggies into an abyss of mediocrity for an entire generation, although to be fair, it should be acknowledged that ‘dodgy’ owners weren’t part of our problem.

Incompetence was an issue, sure, as evidenced by our decline; but greed or corruption? Hardly.

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 quicksands of failure, we slipped into 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.

We remained outside the top flight for an unprecedented 16 years, but our owners were well meaning throughout. They were mostly useless - but they cared.

What was happening by the autumn of 2022, when we held our mobile phones aloft in the ‘Shine A Light’ protest, felt different.

By this stage 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.

Instead of investing, they were taking money out of the club to prop up their ailing businesses elsewhere. Loans were secured against the stadium. Going bust felt like a serious possibility

Nor was this a unique situation. Our plight was being replicated throughout the country and had become symptomatic of English professional football.

Bury and Macclesfield had recently gone bust. Bolton had been a whisker away from liquidation. For much of the time when I was writing this book, it seemed as though Reading would follow.

Plenty of others were hobbled by the disastrous consequences of overspending or mismanagement, including Everton, Portsmouth, Derby County, and Wigan Athletic.

This all went to prove that although hooliganism had (mostly) disappeared, that other scourge of the 80s - rogue owners - had not disappeared. There was still something rotten in the state of football.

As if to prove the point, half a dozen English clubs announced their intention in April 2021 to join a breakaway European Super League (ESL) from which they could never be demoted.

Oh, and by the way, they planned to retain their places in the Premier League, too.

Arrogant? Greedy? Presumptuous? The ESL was all these things - and it was the moment when the mask slipped.

There was no doubt at this point that a cabal of mega rich international owners was now in the driving seat and steering English football towards their own version of El Dorado.

They didn’t give a damn about the game’s traditions; or the communities who had nurtured it over generations.

The backlash was ferocious. Angry supporters of the so-called ‘Big Six’ took to the streets in protest and forced a speedy retreat from the proposed new competition - for now, at least.

It was a moment which crystallised key questions. What is its primary purpose? Who is it for? And where does it go in the years to come?

Does it exist to advance the interests of autocrats, plutocrats and assorted billionaires?

Or is it an extension of civic pride? An anchor of local and personal identity in the shifting seas of modern society?

It seemed that almost four decades after I’d been inspired to take up the fight on behalf of my fellow fans, these key issues remained unresolved.

One key difference this time around was the response of politicians.

In contrast to the 80s, football was now seen as a ‘respectable’ sport. Politicians were keen to bask in its reflected glory.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised to take on the power of the Premier League by creating an independent regulator to curb the game’s excesses.

It was an opportunity to show he was serious about his ‘levelling up’ agenda which tapped into the sense of grievance already felt by many ‘left behind’ communities, especially in football’s Midlands and Northern strongholds.

Ironically, these were areas which were in many cases still recovering from the carnage wrought by one of Johnson’s predecessors, Margaret Thatcher.

Live attendances were on an almost continuous upward curve - and had been so since the early 1990s.

Those who went to games were more likely to be women and/or come from an ethnically diverse background, reflecting the success of the Kick Racism Out Of Football campaign.

The LGBTQ+ community was celebrated with an annual ‘Rainbow Laces’ weekend, not mocked with abusive chants.

Record amounts of cash were being generated from broadcasting rights, too. The breathless hype of Sky’s coverage told us the Premier League was the best competition in the world.

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

Yet these changes only highlighted the absurdity of the acute financial distress many clubs - including the one I supported - found themselves in.

As a supporter, I wanted to protest at this state of affairs. As a journalist, I wanted to discover how it had happened - not just at my club, but at others, too.

How come football was still stalked by the spectre of financial ruin even though it had never been wealthier or more popular?

This is my journey to find out - a personal odyssey if you will - encompassing conversations with fellow supporters, club directors and others with inside knowledge of the game.

I’m on a mission to discover - in the words of a well worn terrace anthem - “Where’s The Money Gone?”