Special Feature: Football fans fight their own clubs to preserve identity – Part 3
Such negative responses are set to rock the commercial foundations that the clubs depend on these days. Stephen added by commenting that this season it has been the first time in German football that the 20 Euros mark has been
violated by the club and the fans are not comfortable with this at all. He said that German football supporters all across Bavaria will rise up with their voices regardless of which club they support. Stephen is a Dortmund fan who used to pay 184 Euros to
watch his team’s seventeen home league matches. He emphasized in his interview that Football fans hold great power in their hands, something that they are not always aware of.
Uersfeld went onto say that, football fans are a part of the sport now, part of the economics of a football club as a whole but the owners do not take them seriously enough. He stressed the question of what would happen if fans
boycott all the games and do not make appearances at the stadium. He said that they cannot be replaced by a “fake” audience in any case. In England, fans have boycotted in the past, most famously in the case of Manchester United and Wimbledon. Manchester United
were taken over by the American Owner Malcolm Glazer in 2005 and after the takeover, the English giants have become burdened with unnecessary debt.
Manchester United fans boycotted the club back then and a group of supporters formed their own version of Manchester United F.C and started calling it F.C of United. In Wimbledon’s case, AFC Wimbledon was the fans brainchild as
they set it up after the club moved away from west London to the Milton Keynes area. After their shift to Milton Keynes, Wimbledon renamed themselves to MK Dons; the fans opposed their chief executive Charles Koppel’s decision to move the club out of London
in massive numbers but couldn’t do anything substantive to stop their club from shifting.
While the fans stuck with their own break-away project which they had initiated in order to preserve their once-loved club’s history. AFC Wimbledon’s founding member, Laurence Lowne told the media that Wimbledon Independent Supporters
Association have a total database of 1500 members. Lowne said to the media that Wimbledon’s supporters were quite active in their boycott of their club’s match against Rotherham in 2002. Only 849 Wimbledon fans attended that match, a number that is one of
the lowest in the history of English club football.
Such protests impact football clubs where it hurts the most; one can calculate the effect by only acknowledging the fact that 38 percent of Manchester United’s revenues consist of Match day income, which is mainly generated through
ticket sales. Dave Boyle, who is the chief executive of Supporters Direct in England, an organization whose purpose is to assist fans in their bid to secure the ownership of their own local clubs also spoke to the media with regard to the current financial
situation in football. Protests and demonstrations in England have not been as successful as they have been in Germany as fans have failed to realize the gravity of the fact that their club is no longer actually their “own”.
Dave Boyle told the media that English culture suffers from an “anti-intellectual strain” as many fans hesitate when the time comes to take any collective action. Boyle also said that in England, football holds a different meaning
for fans as people perceive it to be something that can be used to get away from their usual monotonous routine. Dave expressed his own displeasure at the way football was being managed in England; he said that there aren’t many “enlightened” chief executives
when it comes to football in England. He said that men at the top regularly and readily take up the view that says what is the most that can happen if football fans are not taken seriously when it comes to their protests?
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