Are we still supporting a 'club'?

[Exeter 77]

I have often thought we no longer support a sporting institution but a company and this is true of almost all professional football clubs. They are also companies which know they can treat their customers (as we now are) with little more than disdain. They know our the primal tribal instincts won't allow us to go anywhere else and we are stuck with them and them with us. I may have described it elsewhere before but a long term football fan's relationship with their club could be equated to someone would in a non-violent abusive relationship. The club will always choose it's mistress, television, over it's long-term partner, the fan.

[brian green]

They do Exeter until the going gets tough then the fans are all the club has left.  The current Premiership champions in liquidation is a classic case in point.  As was the Villa fans being asked to stump up the money for Bruce Rioch from Luton.  If Sky thought they could sell more beer and cars broadcasting tiddlywinks they would dump football in a heartbeat.

[frankmosswasmyuncle]

To briefly answer anton's question - from my point of view I think I am hanging on to us still being a club that we - the fans - are very much a living, breathing part of, whilst reluctantly having to acknowledge that football these days is big business and clubs want our money to help them "work" and our bums on seats because it looks better on TV than empty stadia.

[pauliewalnuts]

At some point in the 1990s we stopped being supporters and became customers. At the behest of the clubs / league.

[Jimbo]

At some point in the 1990s we stopped being supporters and became customers. At the behest of the clubs / league.

Some time in between us being supporters and customers, we were all potential criminals and third-class citizens for a while. I suppose 'customer' was a preferable status for many. Football became a 'legitimate' pastime again, and the fans have paid more than most for that privilege. 

[Dave Javu]

"When I were a lad", etc.

Part of the problem for me is my age (in more ways than one).

I only really became "aware" of my club in 1973/4. As a 8-year old I was taken to Wembley to see us collect the League Cup, then it was just a pretty much continual march to promotion, gradual improvement in Div 1 generally year on year (76/77 in particular was simply wonderful), leading on to becoming champions of England, then Europe.

I lived opposite and down the road from - and regularly talked with - some truly great players. I got taken to the players changing room before a match by a player who my Dad knew, and another time was taken to Bodymoor Heath by the club's leading hero of the time. Now the players live in gated mansions and they are (largely) too "precious" to mix with us "nobodies". I get the impression that we're just an irritant to them now.

When this happens in your formative years, you believe that it will always be this way - onwards and upwards, with the players with their feet on the ground and being "one of us". What actually happened was decades of underperformance and gradual decline (with occasional, and now long-distant blips) while the money grew and grew. The players (even the shit ones) are now richer than the average supporter's wildest dreams and generally have zero time for us, without whom they'd actually have sod all. Once they reach a certain level, it's as if they even get handsomely rewarded for failure. it's all terribly lop-sided.

Psychologically, I am battered by this experience.

See you on (wtf?) Sunday 11th at (blasted) 1.15pm, to see Aston Villa Football Corporation.

Sigh.

[Archbishop Herbert Cockthrottle]

At some point in the 1990s we stopped being supporters and became customers. At the behest of the clubs / league.

Some time in between us being supporters and customers, we were all potential criminals and third-class citizens for a while. I suppose 'customer' was a preferable status for many. Football became a 'legitimate' pastime again, and the fans have paid more than most for that privilege. 

The timeline for that must've been somewhere between Hillsborough and the unveiling of the Arsenal Mural.

[sirlordbaltimore]

Yes. I'm still supporting a football club