Welcome Lord Pannick to Manchester City: Goals, Assists, Skills, Cases Won [2023] – HD. He might not score as many goals as Erling Haaland in City blue, but my goodness he might well make a bigger difference to the club’s future. City fan accounts listed his achievements like trophies and Ballons D’Or. Someone in the replies said City should rename one of the stands after him if he was successful and another informed their followers that “this guy is legit”; nobody appeared to be joking.
The only things missing were the announcement video and fans of other clubs calling the high-profile barrister who will be defending the club in their forthcoming legal battle with the Premier League “Pord Pannick the washed advocate”.
So far, and for the foreseeable future, the only impact of Manchester City’s charges are to create a new weapon in the armoury of football tribalism. Rival supporters say that City should be relegated and have their trophies taken off them before any hearing has begun. Many City fans say that this is a corrupt attempt to take them down and that Sheikh Mansour and Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak will prevail. Perhaps this is the only way we know how to react: treat everything like a transfer saga to squabble over with no hope or desire of agreement.
More than that, it proves just how intertwined the operation of a club’s owners and the club itself have become in the eyes of some supporters. We have experienced this twice over the last 12 months. Now, when City fans refuse to even contemplate that those in charge of the club may have done something wrong. At Chelsea, when Roman Abramovich was sanctioned and supporters chanted his name for several weeks at home and away matches.
Wealth is the driver, of course. The desperation is real, not to support a club that best represents your values, that you can be proud of or that you can be confident will still be financially solvent in a decade’s time, but to support one that pursues trophies mercilessly. When that desperation is realised, everything else tends to fall away.
Nobody is expecting total circumspection. Gratitude is understandable and, in most cases, is not unhealthy. You can thank the uber-wealthy owner of your football club when life is good, wins are plenty and controversy is non-existent. You can also choose to ignore if those owners are morally dubious. Each of us draw our moral lines and make peace with them. Following a football team means connecting with a community and meeting friends and those are important too.
But it is exactly those connections that expose the risk of sportswashing, be it by a private individual or a nation state, and why that sportswashing works so well in club football. There has long existed a bond between supporters and their football club which is emphatically familial. You get to criticise them, but outsider criticism is generally unwelcome. As supporters became customers during English football’s rapid commercialisation, the connection should have eroded slightly. If anything, it has grown stronger.
An owner, therefore, does not need to establish their own bond with supporters. They merely need to blur the lines between themselves, the club and the club’s success so that they are one and the same. By association, you receive the same treatment. The club can’t win without you, the supporters are desperate to keep winning, ergo the owner is the driving force of the story. The strength of this relationship has now extended beyond all reason.
Here is the uncomfortable truth: the super-wealthy owner of your “Big Six” club does not love you. They care about you only as consumers with unique devotion. They have raised ticket prices because they know they can. They know that the average spend of a once-a-year matchday attendee is higher than a season-ticket holder. They see you as a unit to be mined for monetary gain. They plotted a European Super League because they wanted to.
You might see nothing fundamentally wrong with this arrangement because it works for you too. You want your club to be successful. You consider it illogical for clubs, as businesses, to ignore principles of supply and demand (even when gate receipts make up a decreasing percentage of the whole). You do not mind your emotions ultimately being determined by the billionaire master puppeteer. And nobody can castigate you for that.
But you do not owe those owners unwavering loyalty; that is beyond the pale. It is not your duty to be a foot soldier for someone you have never met and never will. If you have an emotional responsibility, it is to the club to which you have committed so much time. If the owner, or their associates, have been accused of something that would drag the club’s name through the mud, such as funding the invasion of Ukraine or systemic financial rule-breaking, that must provoke alarm about the potential damage done, not an auto-response to defend them.
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