Club loyalties in football have never been stronger

Mauricio Pochettino, Tottenham Hotspurs’ manager, hailed the “all-English” Champions League final against Liverpool in Madrid as “amazing”. Perhaps it is. Certainly, the semi-finals in which both Liverpool and Spurs came from well-behind to snatch victory from all-but-certain defeat were wonderfully thrilling. They may give substance to the claim that the English Premiership is the strongest league in the world. It’s true that, except in an exceptional season, we know that there are no more than half-a-dozen clubs with a chance of winning the title, and that these are – of course – the richest clubs. Nevertheless, half-a-dozen is two or three more than have a chance of winning other major leagues in Europe – or even less major ones like the Scottish Premiership which Celtic have just won for the eighth season in succession.

Ah Celtic… the first club in Britain to win the European Cup, now more than half a century ago.

There’s not much chance – to be honest there’s really no chance – of them doing so again. Celtic may be the Big Fish in Scotland, but in European terms, the club is now a Poor Relation, a maiden aunt sitting at the dinner-table on sufferance…

Money has changed everything, and one consequence is that this “all-English” clash in Madrid is, well, not very English. To be sure, both clubs are still based in England and most of the supporters who attend their home matches are still likely to be English or at least British. Their support is whole-hearted, and there is no doubt that many of the fans identify themselves with the club to an extraordinary degree.

But if many of the fans are local and Spurs still play in London and Liverpool in Liverpool, that’s about the sum of it. The teams themselves are multi-national and one manager is Argentinian, the other German. Remarkably – or perhaps not so remarkably – no club with an English manager has won the Premiership since it came into being in 1992. Evidently the money-men who own all the big clubs now believe that no Englishman is up to the job.

The Celtic players who won the European Cup in Lisbon so long ago were all born in Glasgow or the West of Scotland within thirty or forty miles of Celtic Park. Consequently, despite the bitter sectarian divide in the West of Scotland, Scots who weren’t Celtic supporters (or, it should be added, supporters of their great rival, Rangers) enthusiastically supported Celtic that Lisbon night and regarded their victory as a victory for Scotland. Even the most fervent of English Nationalists would surely feel silly if he draped himself in the flag of St George to cheer on either Spurs or Liverpool. One might add that if Celtic were by some miracle able to reach the later stages of next year’s Champions Cup, Scottish supporters of other clubs would be less likely than they were half a century back to regard it as a Scottish triumph.

Yet club loyalties and identification with your chosen club’s fortunes are at least as strong as ever. It doesn’t matter to the fans where the players – or the manager – have come from. It doesn’t matter that deep down they must mostly recognize that when a player kisses the club badge or proclaims his love for the club, he is playing the role assigned to him and is no more sincere than any actor speaking his lines. No doubt players do often come to be grateful to their fans and develop a true affection for the club where they have been granted heroic status. It’s not all an act. But if the player falls out of favour with the manager, he will probably be eager to transfer his “undying loyalty” to another club – if the terms and the money are approved by his agent – while the true fan is bound to the cause for life.

Of course, some fans blow in the wind. Unlike the true believer their loyalty is conditional on continued success. If their club slips down the league, into the relegation zone and beyond, they defect. In contrast there are the diehards, those who remain loyal no matter how bad things are. Their loyalty often finds bitter and ironic expression, taking a certain masochistic pleasure in failure.

I’ve thought of such fans this week as Liverpool and Tottenham supporters wake up happily rubbing their eyes while struggling to take in the full measure of their club’s extraordinary ability to turn what looked like certain defeat into glorious victory.

What about Notts County fans, the faithful remnant of the oldest professional football club in England – indeed in the world?

Notts County, in trouble for years and threatened with bankruptcy several times, have just slid out of the Football League Division Two and into what is still sometimes called non-League football (though of course it takes place in leagues). Even though they haven’t been a top-flight club for a very long time, it’s a sad come-down, and I don’t know how many fans have stayed loyal. No doubt a fair number have, because, perversely, there is something deeply satisfying in supporting a team which you recognize as useless. On the one hand a deep-rooted pessimism may find satisfaction. On the other, there’s a certain pride in being one of the surviving loyalists – “the fewer men, the greater share of honour”, as Henry V encouragingly remarked on the eve of Agincourt.

In 1947, Notts County, even then in the lower depths of the old Third Division South, attracted attention when they signed the England centre-forward Tommy Lawton a then record fee of  £20,000 – the equivalent of some three-quarters of a million today – which probably wouldn’t get you an 18 year-old starlet fresh from an academy. I suppose signing Lawton then would be like Notts County signing Tottenham and England’s Harry Kane today. Not much chance of that. It was a different world in almost every way. At Notts County in 1947 members of the club directors’ families – and perhaps directors’ girl-friends – used to expect free travel to away matches on the team bus. Of course, petrol was still rationed then.

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