Daniel Storey has been nominated for Writer of the Year at the Football Supporters’ Association Awards 2024. You can cast your vote here.
When people leave Ewood Park’s Riverside Stand early, it is more obvious than anywhere else in English football. Due to topographical constraints, there is a large walkway between the front of the stand and the pitch. As a player, you can see your congregation casting their judgement with their feet: a long grumpy procession of Lowry-a-likes muttering their resentment under their breath.
This Wednesday evening provides the perfect conditions for huffing off. Blackburn are poor throughout and miss the chances they do create. Stoke City’s away support are sent delirious by Million Manhoef’s opening goal, but it’s the penalty on 85 minutes that really sparks the exodus. Penalties are particular accelerants because you see the bad news coming: “If this goes in, shall we just leave?”
The only caveat to a mass walkout is that the Riverside was barely 20 per cent full at the start. The top tiers of both ends at Ewood are closed entirely. The attendance, including a healthy number from Stoke, is just 13,144 in a stadium that holds (we should probably say “could hold” now) comfortably more than double that. Last season, this was the only Championship stadium with more empty seats than spectators. For those of us who remember Ewood in the 1990s and 2000s, it is a comparatively depressing experience to come here now.
Earlier this season, Blackburn’s Chief Operating Officer, Suhail Pasha, expressed disappointment at the club’s season ticket sales: Rovers had sold only 4,104 adult season tickets. They had been banking upon at least 10 per cent more after prices had been reduced by £30 to mark the 30-year anniversary of the Premier League title win.
In hindsight, reminding them of glorious history under previous owners may not have been the perfect marketing campaign. It is twelve-and-a-half years since Blackburn were relegated after 11 straight Premier League seasons that included two top-six finishes, six domestic cup semi-finals and one major trophy. They have not even managed a top-six finish in the Championship since. A club fell into dormancy.
You probably know the Venky’s story by now. They arrived in England 14 years ago this month with ambitions of Champions League football and apparent intentions to sign global stars such as Ronaldinho. They answered a call for investment to take his beloved club onwards and led them only into disarray. Blackburn had effectively been up for sale for three years and few other parties seemed willing to pay the asking price.
Venky’s listened to the wrong people and took their advice too readily. They replaced Sam Allardyce with Steve Kean, signed a crop of Portuguese signings who almost all failed and an agent’s son who never played and that agent happened to be the guy who helped broker their takeover. Kean was also a client. On day one, chairperson Anuradha Desai got the PR dynamic all wrong – “I feel that the Venky’s brand will get an immediate recognition if we take over this club, and that is the main reason why we are doing this” – and it didn’t get much better thereafter.
For balance, Venky’s have continued to support Blackburn financially although they have not attended a match in person for more than a decade and Pasha recently stated that that situation is unlikely to change. They show little appetite to sell the club and annual losses of the parent company were £20.9m at the last count. However the blame should be apportioned, Blackburn’s decline offers persuasive evidence that they inadvertently wrote a blueprint for how not to run a football club.
The problem with losing match-going supporters is that it’s very hard to get them back without systemic change. Nobody wants to stop watching their football club, or wants to allow their loyalty to be eroded layer by layer until you’re left half-checking the results on a Saturday teatime and can’t name all the players in the team photo. But when it has happened, the reverse process is just as tricky.
It’s certainly not going to happen if Blackburn are stuck in inertia. It’s so easy to succumb to it that it feels virtually inevitable: you miss out on immediate promotion back, you lose the parachute payments, you get a transfer embargo which persuades you that you must be more parsimonious but being more parsimonious just makes you worse on the pitch and your revenue decreases so that your spending power decreases to address that on-pitch decline.
Time is an odd concept at Blackburn Rovers for the outsider who visits infrequently. In one sense it seems to fly by: it is unfathomable that it is 13 years since the Venky’s protests in the Premier League, with the chicken thrown onto the pitch. But because everything seems to exist in the same futile mini-cycle of brief ambition and eventual disappointment all wrapped up in vague resentment from those who watch about how they got here at all, years can feel very long indeed.
A case in point: the night I arrive is Rovers vs Stoke City which, 10 months ago, was John Eustace’s first match after being appointed. Blackburn had just sold Adam Wharton to Crystal Palace, who has since become an England international. Sammie Szmodics scored that night, who has since been sold to the Premier League.
Eustace has experienced a run of nine winless Championship games and nine without defeat. He has led Blackburn away from relegation trouble, started a season in promotion form and lost his fifth match in seven against Stoke. So much happens here and yet nothing really happens at all. It’s hard to describe and far harder to experience when it’s your club.
One constant has at least appeared: Blackburn losing their best players to clubs higher up the pyramid. Szmodics to Ipswich, Adam Armstrong to Southampton, Ashley Phillips to Tottenham, Thomas Kaminski to Luton Town, Wharton to Crystal Palace; you see their faces on TV and you remember when you called them your own. Phillips was back here with Stoke, on loan from Tottenham at 19 and labelled a “greedy bastard” throughout. It seems pretty harsh on a teenager.
This is how clubs must operate without parachute payments to aim for greater financial sustainability, but praise for the model comes with a few caveats: 1) the fee for Wharton, given his immediate progression into the England squad for the European Championship, now looks foolishly low; 2) little of the money has been reinvested, instead merely covering losses; and 3) that’s because too many assets left Rovers on free transfers (Darragh Lenihan, Joe Rothwell, Ryan Nyambe, Ben Brereton Díaz).
Plus, if supporters understand that the selling club model is the right one, it’s hard to feel enthused by it when you are going through the entire process with the ultimate intention – at best – of getting back to where you started when the owners took over. Time slips away again.
The model’s success depends upon the direction of the club as a whole, and that has been a little blurry. As Scott Sumner, editor of the 4,000 Holes fanzine, explains, there exists a cycle within a cycle where Blackburn seem to gear up for grand ambition and then fall back to safety-first measures when that doesn’t work out. Blackburn came mighty close to relegation to League One last season.
“Things looked hugely positive in the summer of 2022 with the introduction of a Director of Football model, with the well-respected Gregg Broughton overseeing operations,” says Sumner. “An exciting progressive coach in Jon Dahl Tomasson was appointed and all the talk was of a ‘project’ to get the club back into the Premier League over his three-year contract.”
“Broughton’s two years will be remembered for administrative issues which resulted in the collapse of three transfers – most significantly Lewis O’Brien and Duncan McGuire. Meanwhile, Tomasson created friction with the board, shown by frequent subtle digs at unpopular CEO Steve Waggott, who tempered expectations by stating that staying in the Championship was the priority.
“We now feel like we’re back to the ‘stability’ mode of the Tony Mowbray era – John Eustace is a safe pair of hands but he’s unlikely to be backed extensively with transfers nor kick up a fuss to upset his employers. There’s also been the peculiar appointment of the inexperienced Rudy Gestede as ‘Head of Football Operations’.”
Blackburn Rovers 0-2 Stoke City (Wednesday 6 November)
- Game no.: 34/92
- Miles: 242
- Cumulative miles: 5,655
- Total goals seen: 102
- The one thing I’ll remember in May: The home fans crowding in front of a previously only partly-full Riverside Stand as they left before the game had ended
You see the point: two years on from an apparent new age, Director of Football Broughton has left, manager Tomasson has left, relegation was avoided but only through appointing a steady manager in Eustace who has done a fine job in the circumstances but, logic suggests, will suffer soon or eventually from a small squad with a number of recruitment gambles and resources stretched.
One antidote to apathy is a prolific academy system, and it’s something of which Blackburn should be rightly proud. Even with injuries to first-team regulars Hayden Carter and Scott Wharton on the night I visited, the matchday squad contained six academy graduates including the captain and striker Igor Tyjon, who is part of England’s Under-17 setup. Blackburn have routinely promoted from within; that is one of the positive spins of a small-ish first-team squad.
“It’s hugely satisfying to see the Jack Walker legacy still operating via our excellent academy,” says Sumner. “We’ve produced a significant number of lads who have proven to be decent Championship players.
“But there’s an inevitability that the cream will be sold if the club doesn’t get promoted. An exceptional talent like Adam Wharton will only emerge once in a generation so it’s a shame we only saw him in a Rovers shirt for 18 months. The question remains whether we maximised the potential income on him by selling at the right time or not.”
This week may provide an added complication that Blackburn could do without. A court case that has been postponed multiple times is due to commence on Wednesday in which Venky’s are appealing against a judgement by the Indian government that requires them to match every pound of funding to Blackburn with a personal guarantee due to investigations into their operations. Venky’s hope to remove this requirement when the case is heard, but it is a headache.
As you sit high up in the Jack Walker Stand looking down on everything he helped to create, it’s impossible to escape the feeling that this football club is just beset by an awful lot of baggage for which a now long-term owner is responsible for. In February,, Blackburn fans threw tennis balls onto the pitch, causing a delay to their FA Cup tie against Newcastle. The protest marked 14 years of Venky’s ownership; Walker’s name – before and after his death in 2000 – was only here for 19. It is unthinkable that they are closing in on his length of service.
There is a train of thought that Venky’s ownership is not so bad, made more popular when Blackburn were pushing for the playoffs in 2023. If mediocrity reigns, is that not better than calamity? Look at the clubs in Blackburn’s wider environs for horror stories: Bolton, Wigan, Macclesfield, Bury. They are at least continuing to fund.
But those diminished expectations offer their own damning indictment. If it could be worse, one day in the past, before they came, far better than this was the norm. If there aren’t people queueing up to take Rovers off this family who are no longer an active presence, that is largely because they have made it all seem so unappealing.
“Lack of visibility, communication and engagement from the owners have been the constant themes during their ownership,” says Sumner, who has lived through them more than most. “Throw in court dramas, lack of clear ambition, poor investment and transfer failures; and it appears that nothing much has changed since the earliest days of the Venky’s ownership. The now familiar sight of a half-empty Ewood Park is perhaps the clearest consequence of the Venky’s ownership.”
That’s it, isn’t it – it all goes back to those seats. I stared at them before the game started and then again 20 minutes into a dull first half, because I couldn’t believe how many there were at a ground that I once associated with something entirely different. This club left the Premier League because their owners got everything wrong and, almost overnight, 10,000 match-going supporters just stopped coming. They have never returned.
Each of those seats represents an individual, or someone part of a group, who chose not to come to watch their team anymore. Maybe the money had to be spent elsewhere, maybe they simply lost touch, maybe they vowed that they would not return until the Venky’s left and stubbornness routinely acts as a roadblock standing in the way of love. But the longer time passes, the less likely they are to return. A new generation of Blackburnian will not think to come here. Each of those empty seats is a mini-tragedy of its own.
Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here
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