On the eve of the home match against Crystal Palace last weekend, the players and staff of Leicester City interrupted their final training session to stand in a circle and observe a minute’s silence in memory of King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand, whose 70-year reign had ended with his death a few days earlier. The following day, on the pitch at their stadium, they posed for a rather unusual pre-match team picture. Front and centre, held by their captain, Wes Morgan, was a large gold‑framed photograph of the monarch. The players were wearing black armbands. It was one of the strangest images in the history of English football – and, coming in the week of the first signs of a threat to the prosperity of the Premier League, perhaps one of the most significant.
In the six years since the Bangkok‑based duty-free magnate Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha bought the club, Leicester have gone from the lower reaches of the Championship to the Champions League, while acquiring a substantial following in Thailand. This is a great success story and probably not a single fan will begrudge the chairman’s decision to put himself – rather than, say, Claudio Ranieri – on the cover of the programme for their first Champions League match, or question the team’s public show of mourning for the late Thai king. To anyone outside the Leicester ranks, however, it might look a bit odd, even a bit uncomfortable, to see a 132-year-old English football club acknowledging its new allegiance so explicitly.
The widespread takeover of English football clubs by foreign owners over the past 20 years has resulted in many outcomes. Leicester’s story has been a happy one, as has the partnership of Manchester City and Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi, whose infinite riches bankrolled not just a Premier League‑winning all-star squad but a new campus in east Manchester. The first of the new generation of foreign owners was Mohamed Al Fayed, who took Fulham from the third tier to a solid existence in the top flight and a European final during his 16 years of flamboyant stewardship. At Watford the Pozzo family assumed control in 2012 and, despite getting through managers at an indecent rate, succeeded in returning the club to the Premier League.
For others the experience has been rather different. Massimo Cellino at Leeds United, Fawaz al-Hasawi at Nottingham Forest and Roland Duchâtelet at Charlton Athletic have enraged their supporters with quixotic and sometimes downright ignorant decisions and have demonstrated little sense of responsibility towards the stewardship of historic and much cherished institutions. Shahid Khan, to whom Fayed sold Fulham in 2013, has shown nothing of his predecessor’s ability to listen to and act on the right advice.
It is important to recognise that supporters never revolt against success. The protests in 2010 against the Glazer family’s financial stewardship of Manchester United, symbolised by the wearing of green and yellow Newton Heath FC scarves, quickly died away. But in a wider and more profound sense the ownership of clubs rooted in their communities by foreign entities, whether as investment vehicles or trophy purchases, may be having the effect of disengaging the emotions of the domestic football fan base from the game as a whole. In the phrase currently fashionable in political debate, it is “hollowing out” the feeling that fans have for their sport.
What is to be made of the situation in the West Midlands, a virtual petri dish for the ownership of English football clubs by Chinese businessmen, with Guochuan Lai at West Brom, Paul Suen Cho Hung at Birmingham City, Tony Xia at Aston Villa and Guo Guangchang at Wolves? If any of those owners were to bring real success to their clubs, they would receive the grateful adoration of their season-ticket holders. But the suspicion that they are not in it simply for the pleasure of owning a football club, or even for the local prestige that motivated the chairmen of earlier eras, is seeping like a slow-acting poison into the body of the league.
Perhaps it helps to explain the recently announced decline in TV viewing figures for live matches transmitted by Sky and BT this season. No doubt several factors are in play, including the feeling that the introduction of the regular Friday night match has finally created a surfeit of live football. The rebranding of the unloved League Cup as the EFL Cup has succeeding in making the competition even more of an irritating irrelevance, cluttering up the fixture list in a way that no major American sport would permit. And there may also be a growing boredom with the domination of the narrative by the small group of celebrity managers – Mourinho, Guardiola, Klopp, Wenger, Conte, Pochettino – at the top clubs, created and fuelled by the media.
By other measurements, the Premier League is as healthy as it is wealthy. TV income continues to enrich many participants, deserving and otherwise. Stadiums remain full because fans are committed to their individual clubs. For the television audience, however, there seems to be a growing resistance to the relentless hysteria of the promotional buildup. When every Sunday is a Super Sunday, no Sunday is really super.
But if there is indeed a gathering indifference rather than just a statistical blip, the withering of emotional identification and deeper engagement with the game – an underlying cynicism far more profound than a distaste for Louis Vuitton washbags, pimped Range Rovers and giant earphones – may be the biggest problem, because it is hard to reverse.
Not only West Ham’s supporters felt a sense of cultural loss when their owners cut a deal to turn Upton Park into luxury apartments while luring them to a wholly unsuitable new home. Swansea City’s fans were not alone in feeling betrayed when the local men, whose vision, hard work and investment saved the club from ruin a few years ago, announced the decision to cash in their shareholding.
Perhaps Huw Jenkins and his colleagues could not be blamed for taking the opportunity to make millions for themselves by selling Swansea to an American consortium, against the wishes of the supporters’ trust with whom they had collaborated on the original rescue operation. But in providing yet another example of the willingness to exploit a football club as a means to self-enrichment, the decision added a further drop or two to the reservoir of cynicism and resentment that may be destroying the foundations of a global entertainment phenomenon all too willing to treat its set of core identities as transferable assets.
