The Hun also like a good invasion....Belgium, France, Poland.
oh dear. You’re so right of course.
I was thinking earlier when someone mentioned kidnapping the stewards or something along those lines that maybe we could hem in the media who sit at the back of the CBL1 for half an hour or so and they would miss their deadlines. ;-)
Yes, I did. Did you? I had a great few days away - a night in Düsseldorf followed by 2 nights in Istanbul. Were you on Nevizade Street?
GUEST POST: Manchester City Football Club soils itself in public againManchester City have announced season ticket price increases AGAIN, and it's all kinds of wrong
Now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s dive into the issue of ticket pricing. Specifically, let’s discuss Manchester City’s actions, attitude towards fans and what that tells us about both the club we support and the wider issue of ticket prices. Thanks for reading Totally Wired! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. You all know the headlines by now – City have put up season card prices yet again with many people seeing another rise of £50 or more. This is bad, obviously, and it’s interesting to note that the number of City fans defending price rises has dropped off a cliff. While not scientific by any means, the generalised feelings of outrage suggest the commercial geniuses at City are on the edge of going too far, if they haven’t already. The price rises tell us two things about the club. The first is with regard to how they communicate with us. Or more accurately, how they don’t. No matter what you think of the price rises, you cannot deny that City have decided not to explain, justify or even really provide the fans with any information about them. There was no meaningful dialogue beyond telling City Matters that they were going to put them up. That is, the fan committee that is designed by the club, and has acted under previous leadership as a rubber stamping committee for anything City want. That group has now been pushed too far and come out against the rises, with the notable exception of the member for season cards, who chose not to sign the open letter for reasons best known to themselves. I largely have developed more respect for City Matters in recent months. They are in a fairly impossible position, stuck between fans and club, but the current committee is more independent minded than ever before – a good thing. However, they cannot compel the club to do anything (indeed, if they could, the club would not engage with them). The club has no meaningful oversight from fans and it shows. That the club could post record profits (doubled to £80m) and record annual revenue (more than £712m), yet still put prices up for season card holders without even thinking they should bother to explain or justify it speaks of nothing more than contempt for the fans. It reeks of arrogance; it stinks of disregard. One the one hand, they tell us how much they love the fans and acknowledge that our support through the dark years was the only thing keeping the club afloat. On the other, they make more money than ever before but still feel the need to dip into our pockets without even giving us the courtesy of saying why. The hypocritical, cynical, outright greed is disgusting, and it shows us that loyalty only goes one way as far as the people who make high level decisions at City are concerned. That’s because, to them, these rises don’t need justification – they serve the goals of revenue and growth, so therefore make perfect sense. If season card holders leave because of the changes, it doesn’t matter to them because their goal is not to cultivate a football club, it is to increase revenue growth. The second is that the club is, at the very least, comfortable with the idea of reducing the number of season card holders and taking active steps which make this outcome more likely It has the feeling of a conspiracy theory, but it is increasingly hard to read the club’s actions any other way. We know that City has an unusually high proportion of season card holders for a “big club” (please read “big club” in a squeaky, mocking voice. You know the one.). We know that season card holders pay less per season than if that ticket was sold individually 19 times a year. For data on that, please see the club’s official touting vehicle, the ticket exchange, and see how much the club makes when you trade that ticket in. We know that if a season card holder gives it up, the club can multiply the income they make out of that seat in years to come. We know that the additional 6,000 seats in the Family Stand extension will include no new season tickets. We know that City have not released new season cards for years. With all that in mind, what would you do if your entire worldview, job description and thought process was defined by the following question: “How can I make more money, and how can I make more money we faster than I made it last year?” I can feel you thinking that football is about more than money, but for now you can take out the sentimental aspect. People who live in the world of pure commercialism don’t think like you or I in that regard. They see football entirely as a business proposition, the beautiful game as a spreadsheet management task. From this perspective, the obvious thing to do is raise season card prices as much as possible to “maximise revenue” (again, please read in the high pitched mocking voice) – because if people pay it then great! If they give up their season cards due to rising prices that is an even better outcome. I would urge – strongly urge – City fans to view the club’s actions through this prism. The people who make commercial decisions at City are not like you and I. They are not football executives – they are simply executives like any other and do not see football as different, because they have a specific kind of mental illness shared by all rich, executive class people. They do not want enough money to run the club. They do not want a solution that finds a balance between a healthy turnover and happy fanbase. They do not want lots and lots of money. They want all of the money in the world, and they want that money coming in faster than it did last year so it makes the line on the graph go up faster. They are not concerned with matters of the soul, or of emotion. Fundamentally broken, commercially minded executives do not think the way we do. It’s the sort of thing which leads to mad statements which don’t make sense to human beings, but do if you live in the world of the executive class. For example, imagine Ferran Soriano ALLEGEDLY saying to the City OSC group that season card price rises are good because if they don’t go up City fans will feel their ticket is devalued compared to fans of other clubs who have seen price rises. Does that make sense to you? Of course not! I’m not saying that happened of course, and I definitely wouldn’t be able to back that up in a court of law – but if it was said (which I can’t confirm or deny!!) then it would be a really good example of how money-brain logic sounds when introduced into the real world. If it was said of course! Which it might not have been! What does all this mean? It means that, as above, these people don’t understand football, or football clubs, or the idea of a community and a fanbase with history. Putting on the wank hat for a minute: These are people who do not feel the radical happiness that football generates better than anything else in the world can. By radical happiness I mean joy, shared collectively in a communal way, by a community of people united in common purpose and a shared understanding or perspective. It is happiness, experienced with other people in a way that is opposed to societal notions of individuality – hence, radical. Your friend and mine, Richard The Burns, has said for many years that he thinks what he felt when Agüero banged in that goal against QPR was a unique emotion. It was, of course. Everything is felt very slightly differently by every person, and so the nature of consciousness and perception means that emotion was unique and unlike anything else before or since. What football does is allow us to experience our unique emotions collectively. Experiencing something so indescribable with other people – and knowing that they understand and share your experience on a fundamental level – is what makes football such a beautiful, immortal thing. We become something more than ourselves and touch the face of god for a moment, all together. Now, removing the wank hat again: But in practical terms, what does this mean for us? It means that appeals to emotion won’t work with the people who run Manchester City Football Club. They will not reduce prices due to sentimentality, or respect for the fans, or out of any sense of loyalty – they do not possess any of those things. They cannot be made to understand them. Conclusion 1: Appealing to them and expecting loyalty will not work. Nothing we can do, no amount of loyalty displayed towards the club, will move the dial. Conclusion 2: Trying to demonstrate loyalty by defending the club when they take actions which are unarguably against the interest of fans is not only ill advised scab behaviour, it is also directly detrimental to your own interests. Conclusion 3: Fans must stand up for themselves in a way which City will listen to. As established, the people who make these decisions do not speak our language and do not play on the same board as we do. That means moving to their board and affecting things they do care about. Unfortunately, this will require thinking in a way that City fans really don’t want to, and doing things that many instinctively do not wish to do. It means taking actions which could be viewed as being “anti City” or which might make us look “disloyal to the club”. Defending City and preserving what makes the club so special, however, means standing up for ourselves. We are the club, Manchester City Football Club belongs to us – we have been there through the crap years and our children will be there in the future. Standing up for ourselves, means standing up to the decision makers at the club who have demonstrated that:
That means doing any, some or all of the following:
Finally, that promised positive note. I understand how hard this all is. We’re all City fans and the club means the world to everyone in our own ways, and together. After years of shite we’re winning lots now and it’s nice. It is, there’s no denying it. However, the people making commercial decisions at the club have shown us their hand repeatedly in recent years. They have shown us who they are, what they want and what they are willing to do to achieve their goals of growth. We would be foolish to ignore what they are openly telling us. But for the first time, it feels like a glimmer of hope can be seen. Speaking personally, in my time with Typical City and latterly with MCFC Fans Foodbank Support, I have been railing against ticket price rises for many years. My standpoint has always been that the club doesn’t need more money out of our pockets, and that money in our pockets means a lot more to fans than to the club which earns so much that they wouldn’t even notice. Quite frankly, saying this has led to me getting pilloried by City fans over and over again for a long time. However, that now seems to have ended. The critical mass of opinion is now going the other way and saying that City are going too far. This is good. The main fan groups for City – the OSC, 1894, City Matters and others including the foodbank group – have all unanimously come out against the latest rises. This united (lol) front is unprecedented and shows how things have changed. It also follows the successful boycott of this season’s Community Shield led by the 1894 Group, which was the first major fan action of this type in modern City history. As well as raising a huge amount of money for foodbanks, it showed the club and other fans that there was in fact an alternative, and that we don’t have to take what we are given. I suspect that this will be looked back on as the first break in the dam. Because if we did it once – why not again when other injustices are presented to us? There’s lots to think about, and getting organised to stand up for ourselves is going to be a long process. It will be difficult and likely heart-wrenching at times, as well as surely subject to much disagreement and debate. But – we are all Blues, we are all on the same side. The more of us that realise this, the more we can stand up for ourselves against anyone. Even the people making commercial decisions at the club if need be. Because as mentioned above – they’re not the club. We are. It’s ours today, tomorrow and in a hundred years’ time. We can’t afford to be distracted any further. We need to get real, because the commercial side of the club certainly have. Thanks for your time! |
