Ross County chairman Roy MacGregor insists fans' needs should be put first

[RANGERRAB 3,260]

His club certainly benefits from the money the bigger clubs attract and bring into the game, but I wouldn't necessarily agree that they rely on us. Small, but well run clubs like Ross County will always try to live within their means. If they have less money, they will spend less money. It's a simple common sense logic that recent & current custodians of our own Club appear to not understand.

 

A number of years ago Donald Findlay warned that Scottish football should have one professional league and that would be all.Frankly if Scottish football is ever to prosper again then we would need to head in that direction and set up a single league containing the biggest clubs with no relegation from that league for a number of years. Clubs like Ross County and Hamilton Accies wouldn't be in it. To me they're barely compatible with Conference clubs down south in terms of size.

[Zappa 0]

A number of years ago Donald Findlay warned that Scottish football should have one professional league and that would be all.Frankly if Scottish football is ever to prosper again then we would need to head in that direction and set up a single league containing the biggest clubs with no relegation from that league for a number of years. Clubs like Ross County and Hamilton Accies wouldn't be in it. To me they're barely compatible with Conference clubs down south in terms of size.

 

When they were doing the SPL/SFL merger and reconstruction they should have set up Scottish football with just 2 large leagues of either 20 & 22 or 18 & 24. They could even have gone a bit more radical and opted for a pyramid system with an 18-team top flight and two 12-team regional leagues beneath in parallel. Now that would have been interesting!

 

Can't say I agree with your comments about Ross County and Hamilton Accies though. Teams should be in the leagues based on their performance and if a team like Ross County or Accies perform well enough to get into the top flight and manage to stay there, then they deserve to be there. Accies went through some very troubled times as a club, but they're one of Scotland's oldest clubs and have a good history despite their financial problems. A number of ex-Rangers players played for the Accies too btw!

 

I should probably add that I don't like Les Gray, but that's another matter.

[Rangersitis 0]

Some comments will go down well in certain quarters. I'd say that doing his stuff for a club like Inverness CT is a touch different from doing it for Rangers. Even though some of the basics should hold true for all.

 

Thanks for your input, Merlin.

[Rangersitis 0]

He has it right to a certain extent, but as long as those running the show see fans as customers and clubs as brands they are never going to understand why the Scottish game is in such massive decline.

 

They need to stop looking at what Manchester City and the EPL are doing as they are in a different stratosphere and concentrate on attracting back the type of fan who managed to fill Cappielow to capacity all those years ago. The ones who liked a pie and a pint - not a prawn sandwich and a G&T.

 

The customer is always right!

[aweebluesoandso 290]

Football is the only business in this country where the customer is ignored, bypassed and marginalised. The product is poor and the match day experience is generally woeful, the only thing football has is customer loyalty, although that is diminishing. At the moment going to a game for the fans, is the equivalent of one of the big Supermarket charging you £20 for driving into one of their car parks. keeping you there for an hour, whilst the wee trolley guy with the limp berates you for having the radio on loud (sash bash) with the windows down, then the Supermarket gives you a punnet of out of date Strawberries on the way out.

[Rangersitis 0]

Am I the only football supporter who detests football?

 

By Alex Proud

8:44AM BST 02 Jun 2014

 

Alex Proud is a loyal Arsenal supporter, but still finds football the grubbiest, most disgusting business in the world outside arms trading

 

I can’t believe I’ve started to enjoy Rugby Union more than football.

 

This sentence will likely lose me a lot of friends - and make me persona non grata in Islington (much as I am in Shoreditch). Also, I doubt I’ll replace the football friends I’ve lost with new rugby mates as, from what I’ve seen, the stereotype of beefy, braying hoorays is pretty much on the money.

 

On the surface of things, it’s an odd time for me to be questioning my feelings about the beautiful game. A few weeks back, my beloved Arsenal won the FA Cup for the first time in nearly a decade. I got caught up in the victory parade with my kids – and it made me think of quite how much of my life football has touched.

 

I’ve been a lifelong fan and a season ticket holder since the mid '90s. My younger brother and I followed our team around Europe, watched some of the world’s best football, cheered, wept and made some great friends. What’s more, during this period, English football has been reborn. We’ve built soaring new stadiums, cathedrals to sport; we’ve finally eradicated the ugly stain of hooliganism; and, with our new found wealth, we’ve imported some of the world’s greatest players.

 

So, why my beef? What reason could I possibly have for converting to a game popularly associated with people who still go by university drinking club names like “Pickles” and “Squealer”?

 

Well, I’ll kick off with an admission. Rugby and I aren’t exactly strangers. Look at my physique – does it scream centre forward to you? No, I played rugby to university level. For a while, I even thought that loud, doltish songs, stripping in public, lighting farts in bars and all the other things that pass for rugby culture were, if not exactly clever, at least less stupid than they are.

 

In short, I was a big, beery, beefy rugby t--t. But then I moved to London and reinvented myself by dropping the word “rugby” from this description. I also discovered football. Living in north London, we’d wake up hungover on Saturdays and buy tickets to watch on the terraces. At first it was just something we did, but, addictive personality that I am, I was soon a dedicated football fan.

 

Strangely, one of the things I loved the most was the lack of class. It was intoxicating: once your fellow supporters decided you were a true Gooner, no one cared where you came from or what you did: football and Arsenal came first. As an idealistic young adult this sort of stuff really mattered (and it still does). I know I’m hardly the first middle class boy to find a kind of authenticity and community in being a football fan, but just because it’s a bit of cliché doesn’t make it any less real.

 

I was also astounded by the depth of passion for the game. Some of my fellow fans were supporters as their dads and granddads had been – they were born Gooners. In many places football teams were the cornerstones of communities, a force as strong as the church had once been, and a lot more fun at the weekends. Even the people who ran the clubs felt part of it: they were usually local businessmen who rarely made much money (and often lost quite a lot).

 

Of course, there was a downside to this Nick Hornby-esque idyll: many of the clubs were badly run and in dire need of investment. Indeed, even the most unreconstructed fans sort of knew that things couldn’t go on as they were. Football desperately needed modernising. But I doubt what any of those involved had in mind was the cabal of oligarchs, sheiks and arms-length Americans who now call the shots in the Premier League.

 

It’s weird, quaint even, to reflect on how much the clubs once cared about their local fans and how profitability was rarely a serious concern. Now the Premier League has only two real goals. The first is to make stacks of money for the clubs’ owners. The second is to make stacks of money for Sky and line the pockets of Rupert Murdoch, a man who has probably done more than anyone else alive to coarsen and degrade Britain’s culture.

 

These people care little for community and supporters. They show the whole notion of “stakeholders” as the sham for which it is. Speak to any football club marketing executive and within a sentence or two, they’ll probably start calling the fans “units” or a “revenue stream.” To be fair, these executives are just doing their jobs which is to keep their clubs in the Premier League, right where the money is – and for most clubs this is the only thing that really matters.

 

OK, you might say, but football isn’t like food or shelter. However, football fans aren’t like people shopping in B&Q either. For starters, they contribute far more than just their custom to the company in question – and secondly, football is highly addictive and there is no “substitute good” for your team. So football fans are a bit like mutual building society customers – who are buying a kind of wholesome crack, not mortgages. Unlike building societies, though, there’s no recognition of the supporters’ contribution. In fact the attitude is more: “Thanks to you we’re worth a billion pounds. Now we’re going to flog off the stadium, pay ourselves £10m bonuses and raise the price of your season ticket by 19%.”

 

The FA and the Premier League don’t care about any of this either. The reason they don’t care is they’re in on it too. Like so many sporting bodies, they’re been so close to the big money for so long that they’ve absorbed its values by osmosis. It’s a sweet deal for both sides. For the officials it means a gravy-train lifestyle that they could never afford if they did their jobs with integrity. For the average oligarch, handing out sinecures to former officials is a very, very minor cost of doing business. Of course, it’s all legal and above board while being entirely repugnant by any normal standard of decency or humanity.

 

The UK government don’t care either. Can you imagine either of our two major parties standing up for the interests of millions of their own citizens ahead of that single American citizen of convenience, Rupert Keith Murdoch?

 

All those involved in this putrefying circus of corruption should hang their heads in shame, but they don’t really know what that is any more, so instead they just prattle on about the what’s best for sport and the realities of modern business. Which leads to things like the World Cup in Qatar. Modern football is probably the grubbiest, most disgusting business in the world outside arms trading (and at least arms traders don’t claim they do it all for the fans).

 

Even the better foreign owners still feel a bit wrong. Abramovich is here to make sure his kids go to right schools and he has a bolthole if Putin turns nasty. The Emiratis have too much money, so when they leave their dull, dusty oil-rich desert kingdoms and get bored of partying and escorts and drugs, they want to buy something a bit glam. The Yanks are businessmen who are astonished at how quickly our sports bodies and elected officials will drop to their knees for any foreigner with money.

 

The fans get no say in any of this. Yet they are the bedrock of the clubs’ billion dollar balance sheets. These are the people who go to watch “their” club in the sleet and snow. These are the people who put up with the start times dictated by Sky (and pay for Sky subscriptions). These are the people who pay the inflation-busting ticket prices and buy the rip-off, ever-changing kids’ strip. They make English football the best in world.

 

Yet the clubs couldn’t care less about them. Will they take out Wonga loans to buy their kids the latest merchandise? Will they skip holidays or even meals to pay for Sky’s latest, greatest package? Will they remortgage for next year’s season ticket? Who cares. Even if they can’t there’s so much money from national and international TV rights that it just doesn’t matter. You can bleed your old, hardcore fans dry and still be certain of next year’s revenues.

 

I say it doesn’t matter – and it doesn’t. Not in the short term, and perhaps not in the medium term (which are the only terms UK business really thinks in). But in the long term it will. In 20 years, when the gleaming modern stadiums are all corporate boxes, middle class arrivistes and empty seats, only then will football discover the downside of the Faustian pact it struck. The atmosphere will go, the community will go, attendances will plummet, TV audiences will dwindle and the clubs won’t be worth anything. Perhaps when England drops out of the World Cup first round, we’ll finally notice, but by then it’ll be too late.

 

Of course, the solutions are right on our doorstep. Three of the world’s top five clubs (Barca, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich) are community owned; and it is notable that they rose in value last year, while Man U (also top five) fell. These clubs have safe standing terraces (and rather fewer corporate boxes); they have cheaper tickets and better atmospheres. Their leagues are run for the national team and finances are regulated so clubs don’t go bankrupt. Unlike us, they even grow most of their own talent.

 

As for the endemic corruption, and behind the scenes dealing, well there’s too much money in football to ever get rid of this. But we might start try shining a light on it. Football attracts more coverage than politics so it would be nice to see the various papers and broadcasters grow a pair and start meaningfully exposing (and campaigning against) the rotten state of football. Obviously the Murdoch press isn’t going to go here, but there are plenty of people who could – and who could get the fans behind them. Enough public outrage and football would have to change.

 

Sadly I’m not sure any of this will happen. The corruption too entrenched and the fans are so used to their abusive, exploitative relationships with the teams that they love, that they just keep on going back for more, insisting this time it will be different. So I’m going to continue with my rugby experiment. Rugby cares about fans and families. It’s well run and this professionalism means the international game is probably more exciting than football now. What’s more, England actually win.

 

Of course, I know it’s not the winning that matters, it’s the taking part that counts. But with football these days, the only way that taking part really counts is towards a multinational’s bottom line.

 

I don't agree with everything that he says, Barcelona and Real are far from the perfect model, but it is a depressing view of what the future holds, and for some of us, it is borne out by the present and the recent past.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/10864778/Am-I-the-only-football-supporter-who-detests-football.html