July 9, 2009

Where’s my football club gone?

Here we are in high summer with the Ashes starting and my thoughts have turned to football. And all because my local paper, the East Anglian Daily Times has seen fit once again to print some spurious nonsense from the chief executive of the club I used to support - Ipswich Town.
You might think the preening petulance and serial cheating of Ronaldo or the ludicrous imbalance of the Premier League symbolises everything that is wrong with football – the answer to most real football fans lies much closer to home with their own club. Ipswich are surely the current league champions of how not to run a football club.

It used to be oh-so very different. Ipswich stood for everything that was good about a football club. It was well run, produced outstanding, well-adjusted players for decades. It even found time to nurture two of the finest managers England has ever produced, Alf Ramsey and Sir Bobby Robson. Ipswich even showed every football club and supporter in the land what could be achieved by winning the league at the first attempt, the FA Cup (when people cared) and even triumphed in Europe.

It was as they say, quite a roller coaster ride. But after all the dizzying ups has come a sickening nose dive. The club over-reached itself financially with startling ineptitude and went belly-up.

After a period of relative austerity in administration (not to mention reneging on debts), the club emerged from administration with the begging bowl firmly extended to supporters. Worthless shares were offered and bought to keep the club afloat. And all the time the same people who steered Ipswich Town so unerringly on to the rocks were allowed to pilot the club towards oblivion.

Until the big sell out. Administration left the major debt on two new stands still unpaid. This was neatly sidestepped by selling the debt on the cheap to a mysterious investor with a fairly iffy reputation. This was all the more mysterious because he has never been photographed, despite allegedly making a fortune in the surreal world of conferences and hospitality.

So now my football club is an offshore investment for an invisible man, fronting a company with a distinctly iffy reputation, run by a jargon spouter called Simon Clegg, who seems to have spent his life talking jargon on Olympic committees – yet now has a job about as far removed from the Olympian ideal as you can get. And do you know what? The tragedy is nobody cares. Nouveau fans delight in the money and glorify in ‘success’ bought with somebody else’s money – and disillusioned people like me find something else to do with their time – and money.