I’ve done a couple of
things I’m not proud of this month. I’ve handed over money for
service I won’t boast about. And the worst thing is that, I know,
I’ll go back.
I’ve bought Forever
Bristol membership, and I’ve bought a ticket to Hillsbrough for the
opening game of the season. While neither of these are shameful,
precisely, both of them have left me at the very edge of my moral
comfort zone.
Second things first.
The ticket for Sheffield Wednesday cost me £39. Which, undeniably,
is a hell of a lot; enough for a lot of people, very reasonably, to
decide that it’s not worth the candle. And the Supporters’ Club
and Trust have gone further, and announced that they’re not going
to attend. They’ve stopped short of calling a boycott because some
people have already booked travel, but they’ve made it very clear
that this is the next best thing.
They are, of course,
absolutely right. Exploitative pricing is a major issue in football
at the moment, especially in the revoltingly rich upper divisions of
the English game. Fans prize loyalty above any other trait, but the
clubs upon which they bestow this prized characteristic strip-mine it
for money. It’s a bad, bad business, and City fans are right to
stand up to it.
But. This was the game
I looked for when the results came out. This is the game which my
friend Dave the big Sheffield Wednesday fan were planning to organise
a night out around. And there it was, first game of the season,
barely a month after the fixtures came out. It was too perfect not
to.
So I'm going up on
Saturday; I've held my nose, not looked at the bank account, and
bought a ticket. I'll send
some money Sheffield FC's way, but I won't be able to pretend
that's any better than giving a quid to one homeless guy in every
twenty as an assuaging of the conscience. I'm looking forward to the
first game of the season, looking forward more to the evening out in
a lovely city – but don't get me wrong, if the SC&T had
announced a full boycott I'd have fallen in line. I'd never break a
boycott. I'm all too aware I'm using a semantic distinction as
justification; but it has to be enough.
Before I even bought
that ticket, though, I'd caved and bought Forever Bristol membership
– and that really stuck in the craw. I dislike the concept of
Forever Bristol immensely. It's the Speedy Boarding of the football
world – an opportunity for the seller to monetise, rather than the
provision of a service, the non-removal of an already existing
service. If you don't offer Speedy Boarding, everyone gets the same
chance to board the plane – as soon as you do, you take away that
first chance from passengers who don't pay the premium. Forever
Bristol is precisely the same. If it didn't exist, everyone would
have the same chance to buy tickets. Introduce it, and suddenly you
create a second tier of fans, which we all have to pay £20 to avoid
joining. The club has to do nothing – literally nothing – extra,
except stick out a virtual hand and extract a crispy purple note from
fans who'll be buying tickets anyway.
The only way this can
work, of course, is by frightening people into joining the upper
tier. After all, if nobody bought Speedy Boarding, nobody else would
feel they had to. There would no longer be a queue to jump. And all
last season the club's website yelled at us that we had to become FB
members if we wanted to see the games. This reached a particular
nadir after the FA Cup draw pitting us against West Ham when a
Forever Bristol membership ad, rather than news of the fixture
itself, took pride of place on the website.
The West Ham game still
didn't sell out to members, mind; I think only the last game of the
season did. Which must have provoked sighs of relief from the
accounts department. A Cup game hadn't, the game where we sealed the
title hadn't; thank God that at the very last minute they showed the
fans that without paying the premium you risked getting bupkis.
Hang on... now I think
of it, it's odd that a match didn't sell out to members until the
last possible opportunity for one to do so...
...and after some more
attractive games had failed to. You don't think...?
Surely not...?
No. I'm sure it was all
above board and honest.
Now I'm not an idiot
and I understand that scarcity = demand = increased pricing. I get
that. But we seem to have the worst of both here – increased prices
this season and a
membership fee if you actually want the opportunity to pay any of
them.
And
yet I know all this, and I complain about it, but once again I have
the wallet out. Why? Why have I chosen willingly to be exploited,
once by my own club, once by a bunch of Yorkshire blue-and-whites to
whom I have no allegiance?
As
ever, the answer at its most reductionist is: because football. But
that won't quite do. The simple action of walloping a ball into a net
can be exciting, sure, but it's hard to believe it's exciting enough
to mesmerise us all into agreeing to this mechanised asset-stripping.
Football
isn't just football for most of us. It's not the 'bunch of lads
kicking a ball around' of repute. It's a weird bundle of connections
in our mind, pre-season most of all – echoes of triumph ringing
around the brain, the chemical memory of those endorphin rushes,
those odd moments when everything aligns in a wonderful, natural
high. It's the friendships it's connected with, the old friends I
most often see at Ashton Gate now, the new friendships the game
throws our way, the sharing of something mutually beloved. And more
than that it's the primal sense of identity, of belonging; as humans
we congregate, if not at football games then music festivals,
airshows, comic book conventions, whatever you like. For everyone
reading this, football provides something – several somethings –
that I think drive us as animals. Great swathes of Maslow's
Hierarchy of Needs can be fulfilled at your local Championship
ground, 3pm every other winter Saturday.
That's
why advertisers are so desperate to stick Ray Winstone's stupid face
into the Champion's League; why David Fishwick Minibus Sales hangs on
to that prime location at Turf Moor; why Manchester United have an
Official Office Equipment Partner. Everyone knows that – but it's
indirect. “When football strips away their higher brain functions”
runs the commercial logic, “we'll step in and shove our tat right
down their pleasure centres”.
What
I've been paying for is the real thing. The direct hit. Liquid
football. And like anyone who comes back for more when they know they
shouldn't, who spends money they don't really have, who has an order
of priority they probably won't admit to anybody, I'm far too
tarnished to start pretending my hands aren't dirty.
And
I can't wait for the season to start, so that my millions of
fellow-sufferers and I can debase ourselves once again.
