Perhaps after watching Ours, the latest in a series of excellent BT Sport documentaries written and narrated by the author Michael Calvin, like me you will be left wondering quite how, after the convulsive, dizzying year we have just lived through, more English football clubs have not followed the sad fate of Bury and Macclesfield Town. Football can be self-absorbed and avaricious and hard to like at times but my God it is resilient and, as this thought-provoking film confirms, that is thanks more than anything to its supporters.
As we approach a year since fans were locked out of stadiums, Calvin’s analysis of the role fans may play in shaping the game’s future is undoubtedly timely in an era of Project Big Picture, wall-to-wall televised football and artificial crowd noise, when lines have been crossed and myriad uncertainties have been dredged to the surface by the pandemic.
In that context, Calvin decided to seek out clubs that are run by, or heavily influenced by, supporters. Stories of the demise and supporter-led revival, or rebirth, of Bury, Wimbledon, Portsmouth and Rushden & Diamonds are told in all their heart-breaking and inspirational glory. There is a reminder of the ill-fated My Football Club experiment at Ebbsfleet United where, you may recall, an online community of 32,000 people raised £700,000 to have a say in the running of their club. While this is a film that bangs the drum for the fan-ownership model, it does not shy away from highlighting its limitations. And there are insightful visits to Lewes, Leyton Orient and Hashtag United as the film attempts to navigate a future for smaller clubs on an increasingly polarised and digitised landscape.
Orient have used the pandemic to re-assess how they engage with supporters
GEORGE WOOD/GETTY IMAGES
If there is a blind spot, perhaps it is a failure to ask if, at a time when fans — “the game’s power supply, source of heat and light, sound and fury,” as Calvin eloquently observes — have been conspicuous by their absence, they may possess enough leverage to influence elite football. Professor Simon Chadwick sums up the “bleak realism about geopolitical influences and big brand clubs”, and the resignation about the growing gap between the haves and the have nots that permeates the film — which, of course, is the root cause of much of the financial distress in English football. Yet there has never been greater will to explore ways in which that financial gap can be narrowed. And television broadcasters’ recent pay-per-view U-turn is one example of fan power in action at the highest level. As a small group of European clubs continue their attempts to attain more power, money and influence, there is much to fight for.
Greater engagement between clubs and supporters, according to Ashley Brown, the head of supporter engagement and governance at the Football Supporters Association, is one benefit of that can be taken from the past 12 months. Orient are one of several clubs who chose to use the pandemic to fundamentally re-evaluate how they interact with their fans. “We recognised that doing the same thing, in a pandemic, was the definition of stupidity,” Nigel Travis, the Orient chairman, tells The Times. And so in the past 12 months, they have hosted a Fifa video game tournament with 128 clubs from around the world, entered into an innovative shirt sponsorship deal with the Tottenham Hotspur and England captain Harry Kane, who made his professional debut on loan at Orient, and invested in a studio to enhance their streaming service for absent fans, watched by upwards of 3,000 households per game. Orient’s gates at Brisbane Road averaged 5,500, Travis says, so in all likelihood more people are watching Orient than ever.
Orient also entered into a partnership with The Sidemen, a group of Youtubers from east London with 110 million online followers, who use Brisbane Road for filming. “One of the things we said, when we bought the club in 2017, was we wanted to target a lower demographic in terms of age. They obviously identify strongly with the Gen Z generation,” Travis says. “The world is changing. People have shorter attention spans. They watch a lot more games online, want to interact more online, and we see that as a way of creating a fanbase that is involved with the club, not only on match day, but from a distance.”
There is much to learn, Travis says, from the rise of Hashtag United, the football and e-sports club launched in 2016 by YouTube creator Spencer Owen — a club “born on the internet” who, in a form of “reverse engineering”, are now putting down roots in north London while playing in the ninth tier of non-League football.
Hashtag United were launched in 2016 by YouTuber Spencer Owen
Hashtag United began life as a group of friends posting highlights of friendly matches to YouTube. They now have a full-time production team filming training and games and 500 registered players from under-six to mens and women’s reserve teams.
Their online following eclipses most Premier League clubs and drives revenues from commercial partnerships, advertising and merchandise. Many top flight clubs — and players — have been eager to collaborate, to tap into “how we tell our story, how we bring our supporters along for the ride, how we interact with them, how we publish content about the team,” Seb Carmichael-Brown, Owen’s brother and a founding member of the club tells The Times. “I think a lot of clubs are investing more in those media and content teams, realising it’s a different approach.”
Lewes are highlighted as one of a growing number of non-League clubs who have chosen to stand for community and social responsibility rather than “big league principles”. Chadwick, the director of Eurasian sport at Emlyon Business School, uses the analogy of retail — elite clubs as the big chain supermarkets supplanting local grocers and butchers — when charting a future for smaller clubs that can still appeal on a local level, in much the same way as craft breweries and artisan bakeries.
Travis, like Calvin, strikes an optimistic tone in an uplifting conclusion to the film. A few years from now, Travis says, we will look back at the pandemic as a period in history from which football emerged stronger than ever. There will be, he believes, more equitable sharing of media revenues, salary cost controls, a greater use of digital media, more overseas investment, at all levels, particularly from the United States, and for that reason, he predicts a move away from the traditional 3pm kick-off time.
“We’ve got the best game in the world, an EFL leadership fighting for sustainability,” he says. “It’s about capitalising on making football as big as it can be. The drama, and sometimes desperation, of promotion and relegation, is unique. The goal is to get as much money into football as possible, and make sure it is shared down the pyramid. I’m very positive about the future of football.”
● BT Sport will premiere Ours on Tuesday 2nd March on BT Sport 1 at 10.30pm. Ours, the next documentary from the award-winning BT Sport Films series, looks at the role of fans in an uncertain era for the game
