The new home of football
Words: Tom Reed
Cover image: Sam Wainwright
England, known as the home of football, that codified the rules of the jumpers for the goalposts sport.
That was then, this is now, and while this little island picked the sport up, drop kicked it out, we’ve gone to shit in possession.
And somehow, it’s Germany, the country demonised for its World Cup 90 diving, that have stood up to be counted and managed to cradle what’s left of the soul’s sport, like a pint of beer knocked off a counter and caught in one fell swoop. A little moment of heroism.
They are the home of football now.
It was shown in the protests against outside investment in their football league, the DFL, in which German supporters from clubs at all levels, refused assassination by a puncture wound of commercialisation that would nick an artery and see football bleed out.
There comes a time where you either stand up and fight or suffer the humiliating fate of English supporters in our constant whining that the “game’s gone”, that soul-destroying drip drip that’s probably worse than a cataclysmic event that kills the sport off.
German supporters weren’t particularly sophisticated about how they said “nein” to the proposed DFL investor by a “private equity partner” that was quite obviously going to open the floodgates to all sorts of commercialist bullshit.
In England we say if you give an inch they’ll take a mile and in Germany “if you give a finger they’ll take your hand” and German fans aren’t prepared to lose a limb to simpering corporatists who suck up to the Premier League, despite its obvious flaws
They sent remote control cars onto the pitch, loaded with smoke bombs, billowing their hazy payload, they threw tennis balls and sweets onto the playing surface and stuck bike locks to the posts with the combination code 50+1 in a nod to the fan-ownership model which holds everything together.
It wasn’t so much a message but a visual truism that despite a small number of people making large amounts from football that there is no football without the go-ahead of supporters.
They’d have to build an actual walls to shut up the Yellow Wall of Dortmund but then they’d only try and cover that with advertisements.
German supporters were in a Wealdstone Raider type of mood, saying “do you want some?” and giving it to the DFL and having enough beers to fight our fight as well as their own.
In the groundhopping community there’s a joke that there will always be a German no matter where you are and you’ll find thousands of Germans making weekly pilgrimages to England and rubbing their brows how we have let our game get to where it is.
Clubs like Newcastle, owned by a Saudi Public Investment Fund, where fans were known for their football knowledge and the city its industrial strength but having to bat off human rights accusations of the country of their new owners
©Stuart Roy Clarke. www.homesoffootball.co.uk
The ticket pricing that sees poor and working class supporters locked out of the game.
A continual trickle of clubs in crisis, including Rochdale AFC and Torquay United currently, with proud Everton fans aiming to show the top tier for what it is.
Nuneaton Borough FC, where football goes back to 1899, is on the verge of liquidation and locked out of their ground, showing that the sport here can’t protect the pitches where football is played let alone the historic teams.
Meanwhile, the Football Supporters Association put out forlorn tweets about matches being moved for television at the detriment for travelling supporters, as they have done for years.
At Crystal Palace, the London club where the Holmesdale Fanatics make probably the best atmosphere in England and take time to look at issues that effect others as well as themselves, the ultras there seem to have had their banners removed to make way for flashing advertisement hoardings.
It’s not as if many English football fans can’t see what’s happening to us and the slow creep to an American sports production, where the half-time piss, pie and pint will be replaced with a bowl of nachos and 20 minute set by Craig David featuring some Love Island bangerz.
Yet, the “I’m alright Jack” individualism of the Thatcher years, weighs everything down, the “sign on chants” to Liverpool fans despite the whole country being skint, the laughter when clubs go to the wall because they once had a dodgy penalty against you.
Thatcher, the woman who couldn’t give two shits about football or its fans and whose legacy is writ large on the minimum wage economy that means football is out of reach for so many and right to buy property price inflation, which sees clubs with big fuck-off football pitches targeted for their land values by people who couldn’t run a provincial branch of Halfords.
And then, a Chelsea fan shows stickers saying “Maggie Thatcher, she’s not dead, she’s the leader of the shed”.
So take the “home of football” title German supporters, you deserve it. Make the game as it should be, we’ve had a mare, blatantly.
Tom is Terrace Edition Editor and can be found on Twitter: @tomreedwriting
