Rochdale: We've been here before, so don't you dare act surprised
When a football club is in trouble, a familiar dance takes place. All that changes is the ending.
When a football club finds itself in deep financial bother, and extremely familiar pas de deux starts to take place. First comes a statement, in which the extent of the problems are laid bare and giving an amount of money which need to be raised and a timespan for it to be raised by that sounds unreachable.
Then comes the social media, a slow procession of tweets imploring the great and the good of the game to do something, anything, even if it only means sharing posts to raise awareness of the club’s plight, complete replies of praying hands and good luck messages. Gary Neville! Gary Lineker! ARE YOU LISTENING?
The Athletic may send somebody round to interview the backroom staff and maybe a fan or two, although they may be a sideshow compared to all the important stuff like which billionaires will spend the summer from which other billionaires, with some chilling details about the extent of the problems.
There’ll be comments underneath, a mixture of foreign fans who didn’t sign up to read about these weaklings and replies from Proper Football Fans castigating them for not understanding our culture of letting smaller clubs wither on the vine while hand-wringing about it.
There’ll be rumour and counter-rumour on forums and other social media, and possibly the emergence of a tyre-kicker who’s spotted an opportunity to self-publicise by sending cryptic messages indicating that not only could they save the club, but could reinvent it by building it a new stadium on the Moon.
Some fans, desperate for something to cling to, will become cheerleaders for them. Others will see them for what they are, resulting in an online civil war. Kieran Maguire will be called by BBC local radio at 7.20 in the morning to again explain the intricacies of it all in no more than four or five minutes.
Then a revelation will emerge that was hiding in plain sight all along, that the tyre-kicker has multiple convictions for puppy-strangling, or that they own a puppy strangling factory. Some will insist that it doesn’t matter, so long as they promise to build this stadium on the Moon and rescue the club. Others will complain that they don’t want their club to be associated with puppy-strangling and will be labelled as ‘snowflakes’ as a result. Usually, though not quite always, the tyre-kickers will melt back into the background again.
A GoFundMe will be set up to pay the players’ wages and buckets will be shaken outside the next home match. The league will issue a statement saying that they are “monitoring the situation”. The local MP will call for local businesses to come together to save the club. They may raise the matter in Parliament. They may even turn up at a home match wearing a suspiciously new looking scarf. They’re tyre-kickers themselves, in their own way,
The Football Supporters Association and Fair Game will issue withering statements castigating everybody who could have done something weeks, months or years ago. More detailed financial statements will be released, detailing that the initial amount of money in that first club statement was actually something like one-fifth the amount of money required to maintain this club as something like a functioning business.
There will be talk, so much talk, because talk requires nobody whatsoever to stick their hands into their actual goddam pockets. Supporters of local rivals will start with rasping laughter because supporters of the club in trouble now responded with rasping laughter when their club was in a smiliar position several years ago. But as the cut-off date approaches this will change. They may even arrange a fundraiser of their own because ‘we’re all football fans at the end of the day, aren’t we?’
As Day Zero approaches, it will start to feel as though this little football club’s plight it finally getting the attention it deserves. Trimmed down versions of the story will start to appear in the tabloid press, simplified for those who usually primarily trouble themselves with transfer gossip.
The local newspaper will launch a campaign to save the club. Their local beat reporter will come under the spotlight, under constant examination in the hope that they will be able to deliver some sort of good news about negotiations that have been taking place far from the gaze of the madding crowd.
There will be further talk of a consortium of local businesses. There will be ITKs, cryptically spreading rumours. The bucket-rattling will get louder and louder. Fans will start asking what happens when a club enters into administration. There’ll be talk of players going unpaid and further statements from the league.
The name of legal companies with names made up of two or three surnames will start to come into view, as insolvency approaches. Local television will send reporters to interview somebody who named their oldest child after the 1983 promotion-winning team, or their tearful oldest supporter, who’s 104 years old and hasn’t missed a home match since the Great Depression.
Shirts and flags will be tied to the gates of the ground. Tearful fans, inside the ground, thousand-yard staring out onto a pitch that may never see the presence of footballers again. We’ll all look at each other, shocked at the fact that this has been allowed to happen again. And then, a couple of years down the line, the whole thing will be allowed to happen again.
So much to cover at the moment Ian, Torquay another. I'm expecting a few more in the next 8 weeks, this is the tip of the iceberg for me sadly.
Hugely resonant, this. We were reputed to be 30 mins from folding when the Supporters Trust bought YCFC from Asset Stripper John Batchelor, to give him his full name. Although there wasn’t social media then the rest of this absolutely rings true