Follow the Money

Tottenham Hotspur was the first football club to be floated, in 1983. I asked the FA why it had allowed Spurs to form a holding company. It hadn’t been an issue, I was told. The top clubs’ appetite for money was growing, while the FA, struggling for direction under its old amateur constitution, had lost confidence in its ability to govern the modern game.

West Ham fans tend to think that what happens at their club says something about the state of English football. It’s an illusion born of a summer afternoon 52 years ago when West Ham players provided the four goals and the captaincy that won England the World Cup. But it is not without some truth.

Leading the way in the stock market flotation of clubs is the most profitable, Man United. ‘If you were to make a list of everything that bedevils football and put them in a pile, at the top of that pile would sit Man United. All the greed, all the arrogance, all the desperation to rip football away from its roots, are summed up in Man United,’ Ed Horton writes. But the hard-sell has had astonishing success.

Frankly, it doesn’t much matter if the players don’t know where they are, so long as the fans are there to welcome them. What these new owners want is a club with a clear sense of identity, around which they can construct their own elaborate fantasies. So the supporters still count for something.

I can tell you the exact moment when I decided to hate football for life. It was 11 June 1978 at 6.08 p.m. Scotland were playing Holland in the first stage of the World Cup Finals in Argentina. It happened to be the day of my tenth birthday party.