Professionalising Clubs
The Corinthian Spirit still has prevalence in the UK. To play sport for the love of the game, to be the best at something, without even trying – the Good Amateur. Terms such as ‘Journeyman’ and ‘Mercenary’ are common within the mass football/sports mass media, which is full of connotations and fables to do with athletes and players participating for the love of the game – an indirect slander about professionalism and the act of making a living from sport, training hard to become better at their job and treating his or her chosen game in the same way that a manual labourer would treat his or her employment. The Corinthian Footballers – an amateur organisation of upper class ‘Gentlemen’ – were fantastic in their day. At one point they provided an entire starting eleven for an England match. As professionalism entered English football, the Corinthians even took strong results in friendlies and test matches against championship and cup winners clubs. This success was based upon a strong sporting background at school and university level, athleticism and inefficiencies (I suspect) from other teams.
As professional clubs started to become stronger and figure out what worked (and what didn’t) the Corinthians started to see a decline in their powers. This is an early, if not the first example, of professionalism overtaking top-drawer amateurs. There has been a steady turning of the tide ever since. Now, if a person wants to get to the top level of many of the mainstream sports, if he or she wants to get to the Olympics, then they need to either be a professional, or have a funding and/or sponsorship scheme, which allows a focusing on training and competition. Treating sports participation and athleticism as a job and approaching it as such, the contracted participant becomes a better athlete and thus the standards of play have improved dramatically.
Men’s football got on board with professionalism and business early doors. Public Limited Companies (PLC’s) where created, or were used to take over football clubs. The board members and directors were then able to make some money for the first time and to also re-invest money back into the club itself. This made the football clubs more profitable and business like and the move towards the entertainment industry had begun. This was unheard of at the time. Up until the 1960’s and 1970’s football clubs were meant to be hobbies for the local ‘Billy Big Bucks’ businessmen to lose money, gain prestige and bolster their egos. This turn to PLC’s helped to move the game forward, in only a few years. Big business helped to improve stadium design (at the behest of the British Court system), created a huge number of new jobs in an ever growing section of the sports industry and used marketing to open the game to a wider new audience. Players (often from the working classes) found their earning potential increase, thus attracting higher quality players over to the English leagues. As the standards rose British football became all the more enjoyable – a better spectacle, a stronger product.
Along the way, something has been lost. As somebody who has grown up in a generation of sports fans that was sold on football through the glitz and the glamour of the English Premier League, I’m not sure exactly what it is, but I’m missing something. The older generations talk and write about a sense of community, a sense of belonging with a group of people that you saw on a regular basis and had a passion for a game similar to your own. I was somebody who couldn’t afford to attend football games on a regular basis, having been priced out of games, I missed out on this. I grew up in London, where the club I followed, a Spurs side that was largely inferior to previous or later incarnations, were charging the same amount as it cost to watch the England national team. This sense of supporting a football club has always seemed foreign to me. It does occur to me that I had chosen to follow the results of a bunch of hired hands and mercenaries. I think that the ethos of support that football fans have been traditionally brought up to believe in and to partake in is similar to what I got when I started playing amateur hockey for small clubs. I desire to be a part of something that can grow and that, along with others, I can call my own – I can say that I was apart of the success and failure of something that I helped to create.
Women’s football poses an interesting development within the sport of football. In England, it has recently turned professional. The Women’s Super League (WSL) has two divisions with a mix of full and part time players at clubs, with central contracts, for international standard players, with the English Football Association. But the players themselves still seem accessible to those who attend matches. Most of the professional athletes can still remember the dark days before the WSL, when they were struggling to get recognition, decent pay and injury rehabilitation. Now the women have the potential to become nationally and internationally recognisable stars and to make a good living. A few years ago Manchester United FC drew criticism for not fielding a team a senior women’s team. Many of the other men’s Premier League clubs had provided greater opportunities for their female players, whilst the Mancunian reds were comparatively slower to join the party, finally entering the WSL second division in 2018. A year or so before this Rachel Brown-Finnis, an ex-England international goalkeeper, wrote an article for BBC Sport criticising the apparent lack of eagerness. She said that the club has a duty to women and girls in sport. This is actually untrue, if only in terms of practicality if not sentiment, and is a failing of this type of business in sport. Manchester United is no longer a football club that purely exists for it’s local community, if that’s what it was in it’s beginning. It is a football club that is run by a PLC, as a business, and is fundamentally a profit making enterprise. This is perhaps not suited for an entity that is culturally, as well as socially, expected to be for its supporter base and used by the community that it is based in.
This begs the question that I would ask of minority and developing sports. If they want to professionalise themselves, how would they want to do it? Do they want to copy the model put forward by English men’s football, or would they fancy an alternative?
Handball, netball and basketball in the UK might all find the templates listed below useful, but as a hockey coach, I particularly had this sport in mind. Hockey, in Britain and much of the world, is still broadly speaking an amateur sport. The majority of club players, even at the top level pay to play for their clubs. There are alternative organisations that a hockey club, or even other types of sports clubs;
1. Co-operative. Fan based ownership
2. Social Enterprise/Community Interest Company (CIC). All profits are reinvested back into the local community that the company is based within
Co-operative. Fan based ownership; Co-operative run, fan owned clubs have started to crop up in the football industry. Supporter based groups have been buying into and/or taking over their local clubs all over the United Kingdom, as well as other countries. In the men’s game Brentford FC (who have recently been promoted to the Premiership), Wycombe Wanderers FC, Exeter City FC, AFC Wimbledon, FC United of Manchester have all shown that the community can run clubs for the community basis. Depending on how much control over the club that the fans have, this can allow the supporters to have varying degrees of control. FC United of Manchester and AFC Wimbledon were both set up in protest in after what the larger local club had done in terms of big business. They have been largely acclaimed at putting a friendly face back on the game of football in England. Football fans no longer have to put up with large co-corporations when engaging with their local football club. They can take back control.
Community Interest Companies (CICs) are businesses that looks to make money, but all of the profits are re-invested into the communities that they are based in and serve. CICs have been described as businesses with a conscience. Employees are paid a salary and can be paid a competitive wage, but no money is given to shareholders, because there aren’t any shareholders, therefore the ethos of the company can be that of what is best for the local area, the staff, the relevant industry. CICs can conduct positive work practices, without worrying about pleasing profit driven shareholders. This is something that I don’t believe has been introduced into sports business at the top end. I am not aware of any sports club that is set up in this manner. It is run at the behest of the local community and even makes money for that community, but is run like a business. I would highly recommended these concepts for hockey and other minority sports. In terms of hockey, a CIC would be set up in a very similar method to how many of the existing amateur clubs are already being organised. They need a chairperson (or a president), a secretary, and a treasurer to keep accurate financial records. It means that business can get involved, professionalism can improve the standard of the organisation and the sport it self, without forgetting about it’s roots.
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