Punk Football at White Hart Lane

Will Spurs ever be owned by the fans? Could the club ever become the Barcelona of north London? The answer, certainly in the immediate future, would seem to be no. Spurs are one of a handful of clubs that appear to be beyond the reaches of punk football (the sobriquet adopted by the supporter ownership movement). Like United, Arsenal and Chelsea the costs involved mean that the idea that the fans will one day make the transition from the terraces to the boardroom is as likely as Arsenal winning the Champions League.

Since the emergence of the first supporters trust at Northampton Town back in 1992, the concept of supporter ownership has slowly gathered momentum in English football. Examples of share-ownership now scatter the leagues, and there are even some trusts that have managed that rarest of feats, majority control.

But none of them are in the Premier League. In fact, if you want to find examples of majority ownership then you have to travel all the way down to League Two, where the likes of Exeter City, Portsmouth and AFC Wimbledon have established supporter utopias. Higher up the pyramid, majority control has proven elusive. Although there is a smattering of shareholding trusts, these are few in number and their stakes tend to be small. In the top-flight last season, there were only three clubs that possessed share-holding supporters trusts at all, Norwich, Swansea and Arsenal. With Norwich now gone, that just leaves two.

Part of our collective hesitancy in embracing punk football can be attributed to a degree of cultural catch-up. Unlike in parts of continental Europe, for many years in this country, the idea of the fans having any say in how the club was run has been alien. From the professional game’s inception back in the 1880s and well into the 1980s, fans were seen primarily as customers, there to pay at the gate but without any right to dictate how the clubs should be run. Surprisingly though, this was not just the view of those in charge. Supporters at the time also held this view too.

This perspective first began to change during the 1980s. The rise of fanzines, which could be mercilessly critical of the board, was part of this trend. As too was the creation of campaign organisations, such as the Football Supporters Association, which sought to represent the views of fans. Combined, these changes signalled that a new kind of supporter had arrived, one more willing to get involved.

Then, during the 1990s, this nascent politicisation became more sophisticated. Independent Supporters Associations (ISA), democratically structured organisations that operated at a club level sprang up across football, campaigning on the manifold problems that were evident within the sport.

But it was the creation of the supporters trusts that would really illustrate just how far the notion of fandom had travelled, asserting that fans had the right to own the club. As a concept it’s probably as far away from the idea of being ‘customers alone’ as it is possible to be.

But although more of us have come around to the idea of supporter ownership, a stubborn degree of hesitancy persists. And two big reasons for this are the costs involved in takeovers (as mentioned earlier) and also the absence of a level playing field once the fans have taken control.

[linequote]In an age when our national game has never been more commercialised, as fans we should take comfort from the fact that even in the Premier League there are supporters who refuse to simply be viewed as customers[/linequote]

This is specifically a problem at the top. When it comes to clubs like Spurs, the idea that the fans could ever unite to take control seems remote because it would it would take thousands to each invest thousands to do so; something that has never taken place in world football. Once in control, those same thousands of fans would also have to support the club financially, keeping it competitive against rivals backed by deep-pocketed owners, which could very well lead to stagnation or decline.

So does this mean that punk football has no real place in the Premier League and that trusts are meaningless?

Although ownership is now seen as the apex for supporter engagement, that doesn’t mean that without it fans and trusts are powerless or without purpose. Here at Spurs, since it was founded a few years ago, the trust has sought to become an effective medium through which a strong relationship can be forged between the club and the fans.

The trust meets with the board to represent the fans’ views, has campaigned upon issues such as the creation of safe standing areas and worked on community projects with the Tottenham Hotspur Foundation, as well as implementing its own projects.

In an age when our national game has never been more commercialised, as fans we should take comfort from the fact that even in the Premier League there are supporters who refuse to simply be viewed as customers.

At the moment, supporter activism is still young and the supporter trust movement a mere infant. Football has changed beyond recognition over the past twenty years and as supporters many of us are still trying to adjust to the new reality. The Trust movement is a reaction to these changes and for many fans their way of attempting to redefine what is means to be a supporter in the modern game.

There will undoubtedly be success and failures and times when the struggle appears futile, but as fans, whether we follow a Premier League giant like Spurs or a minnow plying their trade in the Conference, if we care about our game and about how our club is run, then it makes sense to get involved. And in the long-term you never know what could happen. With enough members and enough momentum, football supporters are capable of achieving just about anything.

Buy Punk Football: the rise of fan ownership in English football here.