For all that football’s tectonic plates have been shifting in real-time in recent days, for all the press releases that were published and tweets that were posted, it is curious that two simple words have imprinted themselves on the minds of many.
The BBC reported that sources close to the European Super League (ESL) had used the term “legacy fans” to describe the 12 breakaway teams’ traditional support base. The sources added that the ESL was a pursuit for “fans of the future” who want superstar names.
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“Legacy fans” was a phrase instantly and widely derided as yet another sign of how out-of-touch the suits on top of football’s pyramid are. Pretentious business jargon that feels alien to how most of us think and talk about football.
But it still struck a chord because it confirms how these clubs — and by extension, many more not included in the 12 — view their supporters: as fixed revenue streams. Legacy implies permanence, irrespective of how poorly fans might be treated. They are banking on fans’ claims to follow their club through thick and thin. How far can they stretch that loyalty, love and obsession? If a legacy fan really is “Club X until I die”, then club hierarchies have nothing to be afraid of in screwing them over.
Using such hollow technocratic language is not an accident. The impersonality of the term feels, incongruously, deeply personal. It is a deliberate “othering” of fans. It reduces who and what are the lifeblood of a club to something trivial, a box on a spreadsheet.
Cynics may, validly, point out that of course they view fans this way. The ESL has not emerged in a vacuum. As many others have argued, it could be considered that the first domino toppled decades ago with the formation of the Premier League and Champions League in the early 1990s, and the custodians in boardrooms have only grown in arrogance and avarice in the interim.
Their insatiable desire has defined every revised format of European competition so that there is more upon more football. The whims of broadcasters hungry for more content to justify inflated subscription fees paved the way for rearranged kick-off times. For years, it has been incremental changes, and there are fair criticisms of all of us who grumbled about such aggressive globalisation but continued to renew our season tickets and TV subscriptions as being complicit in what is happening now.
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But Sunday’s announcement felt like a crossed line. The press release’s brazen allusions to the uncertainty caused by the pandemic suggested they saw an opportunity within the crisis, a chance to profit from disaster; what the writer and activist Naomi Klein calls the “shock doctrine”. If they so shamelessly interpret a well of human suffering and tragedy such as COVID-19 as something to exploit, then it is natural they view fans as nothing more than cash cows.
They increased, and continue to increase, ticket prices. The costs of merchandise and TV subscriptions has also skyrocketed, all while UK wages in real terms have remained virtually stagnant since the 2008 financial crash. But fans persist, because they unwaveringly love their club, and that is priceless. Clearly, these clubs view this not as a reciprocal relationship to celebrate, but the platonic ideal of brand loyalty to squeeze.
Surely there is still more substance to the bond between fan and club than brand loyalty, even accounting for football’s rampant commercialism in 2021? Your devotion to your club is incomparable to ignoring Androids for iPhones or buying from your favourite high street shop.
What happens on the pitch over 90 minutes is the foundation of a more complicated and meaningful relationship. The game itself is only one part of it. How many decades-long friendships have been formed and maintained because of football? How many family relationships are safeguarded by each generation’s shared love for their club? How many people inadvertently find themselves viewing their jobs, art and pop culture, politics, everything and anything that is not football, through the prism of football?
How many, when they are feeling sentimental, can relate to Jean-Paul Sartre’s line, “Football is a metaphor for life”?
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“Legacy fans” understand that football contains multitudes, and the notion that those multitudes are merely a product to be suppressed and repackaged into content is appalling. The ESL is not just a break from traditional approaches to European qualification, promotion and relegation — it is a break from the footballing cultures and heritages that root these clubs. It will make them unrecognisable, eroding those cultural connections that fans have built up season by season, passed on and inherited from one generation to another.
Maybe it is just hopeless idealism to think “legacy fans” can affect change, particularly given the value of match-day revenue for most of these clubs is outweighed by broadcast and sponsorship income. The ESL’s proposed injection of private equity from JP Morgan will overshadow fans’ stake in their clubs even more.
But there has to be a breaking point because the alternative — a world in which fans become nothing other than passive consumers — is too dreadful to think about. Why can this moment not mark that breaking point? Why can there not be a price decisively placed on this betrayal? Clubs can dress up “the fans of the future” as this enigmatic and thrilling untapped market all they like, all they are are hypotheticals. They might also deem their real fans, not legacy fans, as financially disposable, but they are still their cultural lifeblood, and always will be.
Here is hoping they are in for a rude awakening.
(Photo: Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)
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