The match will be hyped as a colossal contest with decisive implications for the league title and Champions League places and as such the atmosphere should be tense and combative.
Yet at Anfield on Sunday the supporters of Liverpool and Manchester City will link up before kick-off. There will be harmony as well as noise because at the Anfield Road end of the ground, a banner will reach across from home fans to those who have travelled and it will read: £NOUGH IS £NOUGH.
Man City fans have been charged £52 (€71.60) to be at Anfield. Their counterparts in red know all about extortionate prices – Liverpool fans are ‘Category One’ for pricing wherever they travel.
Pricing is a serious issue in a country where the average salary is £26,500 (€36,500). But if ticket pricing is a headline issue, there is a broader theme behind it and that could be described as alienation.
How the game is run – and for whom – has become over 20 years the key fault-line in English, British and indeed global football.
Some argue this is exaggeration, that it is barely a crack in a strong and long pavement and when historians come to review February 2015 and what it tells us about modern football, they are likely to dwell on solidity and prosperity.
This after all is the month when the Premier League’s latest television rights deal – £5.3 billion (€7.3bn) over three years from 2016, with overseas rights to come – was announced, and this is the month when Fifa formally decided that the Qatar World Cup of 2022 will take place in winter.
Rich and powerful
The historian’s desire to seek patterns where none may have existed originally will not look contrived. The game is rich and powerful and feels unstoppable. High politics, the rising trans-border influence of telecommunications companies and the use of football as a tool, this story will require no embellishment to be convincing. It is reality.
Yet beneath the hyper-resourced corporate apparatus are other trends and other realities. £NOUGH IS £NOUGH is just one. It is part of a mentality, an ethos, that sees football from a different angle.
It is from the bottom up, not the top down.
Quietly it beavers away, receiving intermittent attention, but slowly it is succeeding. However, as its success comes in various forms, so does the measure of that success. This is not something that exists solely in accounting terminology. And how do you measure independent spirit?
At Shamrock Rovers and Bohemians, for example, they know of physical progress through hard times but it is the consequence of belief. It is the same at FC United of Manchester. They will move into their own stadium this summer – more physical progress – but when a group of their fans gather on a terrace and hold up a flag saying “Meet The Owners”, they are also unveiling a way of thinking.
It might be called punk or DIY or whatever, it deserves to be acknowledged.
Whereas to Fifa and other official bodies, supporters are the chorus in the big football drama, in this realm they are the actors, the activists. They have made their own futures.
FC United went top of the Northern Premier League this week, which felt like a twin peak alongside news from Glasgow that the Rangers First fan group had secured 2 per cent of shares in Rangers prior to next Friday’s crucial egm. The 1.6 million shares acquired by Rangers First may not seem much when compared with individual or institutional investors but Rangers First are shaping the agenda.
Common ownership
They are not alone. At Hibernian and Motherwell, fans are trying to take control of their club’s ultimate destination, as they are at Hearts. The Tynecastle club has a benevolent facilitator in Ann Budge, who is guaranteeing the club financially, but it is the monthly contributions of some 8,000 fans which will see the club eventually move into common ownership.
Clyde, Clydebank and Stirling Albion are already owned by Supporters’ Trusts, three of 38 clubs in Scotland, England and Wales where fans have taken control – financially, culturally and intellectually.
Enfield Town were the first, in 2001, and are still going. AFC Wimbledon’s story is perhaps the most known but the club is one of four in League Two owned by its fans. Portsmouth, Exeter City and Wycombe Wanderers share the same model.
All four are surviving in the Football League, though it should not be presented as idyllic. This is hard, daily and voluntary work. And, this being football, when results falter, grumbles surface. At Exeter, for one, there has been a debate as to how far the fan model of ownership can go.
Rescued
One answer is: Swansea. Without the sort of fans campaigning at Anfield or Fratton Park, Swansea City would have slid into oblivion. Supporters rescued the club and even now in their fourth season in the Premier League, they still own 20 per cent of the club.
Leigh Dineen
, one of the original fan activists is on the board.
Newcastle United Supporters Trust can only dream of buying their club but that has not stopped them from branching out to support a local credit union to combat a mentality. Similarly at Chelsea, fans might not be able to buy the club from Roman Abramovich, but it is the Chelsea Pitch Owners who have, for now, prevented Chelsea leaving Stamford Bridge.
There are other similar threads weaving a different pattern up and down the country. In a month like this it might feel like the game has left the people, but some are out there reclaiming it. They have done more than say enough is enough. They are being, as someone said, the change they wish to see.
China 2026? Beijing has its eye on winning the World Cup
The Washington Post has broken bigger stories this week but their report from China that football has been placed on the curriculum and that about 20,000 football-themed schools are to be in place by 2017 was an eye-opener.
As always the scale of China is revealed, but so too the love of the game. The origins of football frequently include references to a Chinese form of it more than 1,000 years ago, yet at national level, China, for all its human resources, has been unable to replicate the organized success of either Japan or North or South Korea.
But along comes president Xi Jinping who says that he wants to not only qualify for the World Cup and to host it – surely within China’s capabilities – but to win it. Given a population of 1.4 billion, that too should be achievable. While the world’s focus is on 2022, China might be thinking 2026.
