Not for the first time in post-mortems conducted by writers and readers of the Guardian following the English football season’s conclusion, the loan system was earmarked as one of many areas in need of urgent reform.
The annual consensus: it is ostensibly a good thing that is in dire need of overhaul because some clubs are taking liberties, milking the system so ravenously they have turned it into a lucrative source of revenue. Good luck to them – if there are no rules in place to break, it would be extremely churlish to criticise clubs for doing anything wrong.
When I’m in charge of football, a sorry state of affairs that has come to look less implausible with every recent arrest and revelation, the loan system will immediately be whipped into shape. With so much Premier League television revenue sloshing around their coffers, top-flight clubs will be forbidden from borrowing players because there’s no earthly reason why they should need to do so.
Furthermore, Premier League clubs wanting to get squad players off their wage bills and into somebody else’s first team would be forced to loan them out to clubs further down the divisions. And for the coup de grâce, in a novel twist to an innovative new wheeze that would almost certainly collapse under the slightest scrutiny, the new loan system would also apply to fans.
It is a plan so harebrained and crazy that it just might work … except it almost certainly won’t work. Take Arsenal, for example. Despite being purveyors of the world’s most expensive season tickets, unconfirmed reports suggest the waiting list at the Emirates is somewhere in the region of 45,000 people, most of whom will have to kick their heels for up to six years before being offered a seat. Then they will be able to sit largely in silence reading overpriced programmes, eating overpriced hotdogs and sipping overpriced beverages, pausing occasionally to whoop exultantly at another Alexis Sánchez wonder-strike or jeer Arsène Wenger for not buying a holding midfielder.
Meanwhile, at the Hive Stadium, home of Barnet, capacity is capped at 5,176 supporters for a small north London club that drew crowds of more than half that number to just two out of 23 home league games last season as the team battled their way to the top of the Conference and won promotion back to League Two. With victories likely to be a lot harder to come by as they attempt to consolidate their position in the Football League next season, the manager, Martin Allen, and his players will need all the encouragement they can get from the stands. The solution seems obvious: send 2,000 Arsenal fans on a season-long loan to Barnet.
Everybody benefits. The Bees will enjoy the rare luxury of playing their every home game in a packed stadium, while the extra couple of thousand fans sent their way by Arsenal get to attend a season’s worth of league fixtures that is tantalisingly beyond their reach at the Emirates. And much like young and inexperienced Premier League players out on loan at lower-league clubs, these cosseted Gooners on the fringes of acceptance into their own club’s season-ticket scheme would, through a decent run of matches, become accustomed to the realities of regular match-going in the rough-and-tumble, take-no-prisoners environment of the Football League basement.
Whether it is Arsenal fans on loan at Barnet, five or six thousand Chelsea loyalists taking the bare look off Leyton Orient’s Brisbane Road or various Manchester United fans being spared no end of travel expenses by being farmed out to Southend for a campaign, their parent clubs are also likely to profit as their season-ticket holders of the future learn that for the majority of football fans, an overbearing sense of entitlement, £60 tickets, selfie sticks and the stockpiling of £50m midfielders and shiny trophies is the very least of their daily concerns.
Emergency loans will also be permitted in this brave new world. Sparsely attended lower-league clubs with minute silences or the imminent departure of long-serving club legends pending would be entitled to go cap in hand to any Premier League club boasting supporters with a reputation for excessive mawkishness and borrow several thousand of them in order to tailor their matchday atmosphere accordingly.
In a similar vein, dissatisfied and aggrieved fans could have their ranks bolstered by like-minded recruits from clubs further up the food chain, although here our plan falls flat on its face, as the notion of Blackpool’s chairman sanctioning the additional abuse of several thousand Geordies armed with derogatory “Oyston out!” bedsheets is fanciful in the extreme.
There are other potential snags, but just as on-loan players are forced to sit out fixtures pitting their parent clubs against those with whom they are actually lining up each week, loanee supporters would also be excused from matches in which their loyalties might similarly be questioned.
Scoff if you will, but in a football world where the loan system allows one top-flight club to send almost 30 players to play for other clubs, the notion of doing the same with their followers is not as ridiculous as it sounds. What is faintly preposterous is the irony that despite the apparently insatiable appetite of lower-league clubs for their surfeit of footballers, the club in question might struggle to farm out their surplus fans.
