Rome Wasn't Built in a Day, Chapter 15: Who do they think they are?
A tale of two halves, the 1990s. On the one hand, the richest got richer. On the other, poorer clubs found themselves fighting speculators and accumulators.
With the formation of the Premier League in 1992, the story of football in England began to bifurcate. The pyramid remained in place. It remained theoretically possible for a football club at the very bottom of the English league system to rise to the very top. But in a practical sense, there are two stories of football in England since the Premier League came into being, one of growing wealth and globalisation, and the other of increasing struggle just to keep heads above water in the face of individuals who increasingly seemed to view football clubs as something to be asset-stripped for personal gain.
This change is reflected in changing supporter attitudes. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, it became increasingly difficult to remain a passive consumer of the game. As financial crisis after crisis tore through the game, the sight of buckets being shaked outside grounds became increasingly familiar, with fans expected to put their hands into their pockets to try and save clubs which had found themselves in serious trouble. This was really nothing more than an act of desperation, fire-fighting to try and cover immediately due financial liabilities, but throughout these two decades supporters became more aware of the state of a lot of our clubs.
And the fans found that they could make a difference. When the newspaper proprietor (and, as things turned out, colossal fraudster) Robert Maxwell tried to merge Oxford United and Reading under the name of Thames Valley Royals in 1983, there were widespread protests at both clubs. Maxwell insisted that "nothing short of the end of the Earth" would prevent the takeover - a bold claim, given that broader geopolitical relations were in their worst state for twenty years, making “the end of the Earth” a distinct possibility - but the merger eventually ran aground when investigation found that the Reading directors who had approved the merger didn’t have the controlling stake in the club which they claimed to have. The local press, the other directors of the club and the fans themselves had collectively forced the plans to be scrapped.
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