Each week, I will be discussing a number of different factors regarding football. Let me lay out a few things before I get started. First, I’m not a tactician. Don’t look here for a sophisticated analysis of formations, tactics, or breakdowns of mistakes that lead to goals or any of that sort of thing. Hell, I stopped about a third of the way through Inverting the Pyramid, so know that if I do go there, I know that I don’t really know what I’m talking about.
I’m also not an expert on finance, transfers, scouting, journalism, coaching, or YouTube compilations. You may be left wondering then what exactly I’m doing here. Frankly, I’m not sure. Just lucky, I guess. I will tell you what I do know a little bit about, and that’s fans. I’ve studied fans and spectators for over a decade now in various settings. So a lot of what I’ll talk about in this space revolves around fans, though I reserve the right to delve into other issues that I know less about.
I want to talk a little bit about fandom and authenticity, and why I think “plastics,” or bandwagon fans are potentially useful for a club’s hardcore supporters. I’ll lay out the thesis up front, and I’ll try to forge a coherent path to it following on. Basically, bandwagon fans are necessary because they hold ownership’s feet to the fire in ways that loyal supporters can’t. In a sports environment that adheres to a capitalistic model, “plastics,” are fluent in ownership’s language. Let me explain.
Of all the various supposed ills brought on by “modern football,” one of the most significant is the shift away from a fan model and toward a consumer model. Fans, especially match-going spectators, are valued for their disposable income, rather than for their passion and dedication. This is largely because sport teams and clubs are now seen as profit centres, rather than as vanity projects. It wasn’t that long ago that billionaires were comfortable with owning sports teams even if they regularly lost money. They were either viewed as status symbols or as passion projects.
The explosion of TV and sponsorship revenues altered the sporting landscape, and sports teams began to be run on purely capitalistic logic if an owner so chose. The business model changed, but the supporter model – in large part – didn’t. This produced a sense of alienation (in the classical Marxist sense of the word… separation) between clubs and fans. Ticket prices rose in response to simple supply and demand economics, and many working class fans – the spine of clubs’ support for decades – found themselves on the outside looking in, quite literally in many cases, as they could no longer afford to go to the grounds to watch a match.
Naturally, supporters bristle at this change in the model, because there is no place for them in it unless they have means. Protests ensue, fan groups emerge, and the conflict generally runs in circles, with fans chasing an ownership to listen to their concerns, and ownership who really just wants everyone to shut up and give them their cash. Modern capitalist owners don’t care how long you’ve been a fan, how many generations your fandom stretches back, nor how much you care about your club. They do, however, care if your credit card clears, and how often.
This is why I find the model of the in-stadium protest so puzzling, and where I find the usefulness of the dilettante, the flaneur (to borrow a phrase from eminent football scholar Richard Giulianotti), the plastic. This is the bandwagon fan, the fan that’s prominent and supportive when the team do well, and who disappears at the first sign of struggle to find another, more appealing (read: successful) team to support for a time. They are football consumers par excellence, and they are the greatest weapon a fan base has in fighting a capitalist owner because they speak the same language. Owners care little about the in-stadium protest because they’ve already got your money. Complaining about ticket prices when you’ve already paid them, and when there are 10,000 others waiting to pay if you refuse is, to say the least, counter-productive.
Owners do not worry about hardcore supporters because there is little to no risk of alienating them so completely that they leave the club. Throw a couple of coaches their way for an away match or some other token (and generally inexpensive) gesture and they’ll stick around. High-loyalty consumers are a businessman’s wet dream. They have us right where they want us, and only in the most extreme situations will hardcore supporters truly revolt, such as the creation of FC United of Manchester, and we can see how much that has hurt United and City.
Owners do not fear the hardcore supporter revolt, but they do fear the consumer revolt. Not to be pedantic, but that’s how capitalism works. A modern capitalist football owner will respond only to fluctuations in the market, which are driven more and more by fans who act more like consumers than loyal supporters are able to. When the demand from consumers wanes, then and only then will owners respond in ways that are meaningful to both consumers and supporters.
It leaves us with an interesting conundrum then, doesn’t it? Assuming that you still despise the “plastic” fan, we’re forced to ask ourselves: do we continue to attack the bandwagon fan as a plague on modern football, or do we attempt to undermine the model that allows the consumer fan such power in the first place? The former attacks only a symptom. The latter, while far more significant and difficult to attack, at least gets to the root cause of the problem. Only when sport teams are viewed more along the lines of community partners and public trusts and less along the lines of revenue generators will we start to see the needs of the hardcore fans addressed in any meaningful way.
The irony is that the loyalty of the supporter is their downfall. If you as a fan really want to attack the consumers posing as fans while the club is successful, then you must attack the very system that has produced them, which also happens to be the system that has allowed Arsenal to purchase players such as Alexis Sanchez and Mesut Özil. That’s a lot more daunting than just calling someone a plastic c***, isn’t it?
