Fear, fascination, and the 'swelling power' of fans uniting behind players

I stayed out of the transfer window because I didn't fancy being traded against my will and it felt for a month like nobody and nothing was safe. I did touch on it slightly while writing about the Coventry game, summarising my feeling that humanity was forgotten in January. It was replaced by belief that, if a football club in Leeds wanted a player from a club in Southampton, then it was only a matter of emailing enough times offering more and more money until a deal was done. A deal that would then release emotion from the rest of the season like air from a balloon as promotion would be 'guaranteed' and the remaining games just a shrivelled plastic walk in a dreary, easy-easy park.

I had two sort of objections to this. First, this is how Leeds United ended up with Jean-Kevin Augustin, whose highly stylised social media reveal was synonymous, to many fans at the time, with lifting the Championship trophy in January 2020. Secondly, the desire to suck any jeopardy out of the remaining games was making for an ugly combination with rejecting any agency for the footballers being named in these feverish, fantasy trades. Any idea that Cameron Archer might not want to move hundreds of miles north away from his family and friends, to sit and wait — in hope? — for Joel Piroe and Mateo Joseph to get so badly injured they couldn't play, was ignored. But he definitely didn't have to do that, and why should he? I felt likewise about the arguments that, with scouting networks and databases like WYScout available, Leeds should have found someone, anyone they could have bought in January. A sense of entitlement was taking over, a notion that because we are deserving fans then millions of money should be getting spent on a bag of attributes off a spreadsheet and all other discussion, like politely asking the subject of all those Excel filters whether they'd even like to live in Yorkshire, was invalid.

I got a sharper focus on this at the end of the transfer window when, over in the women's game, Manchester City's Chloe Kelly posted on Instagram about her desperation to move away from the club. City manager Gareth Taylor has not been picking the star Lioness this season and, with another Euros this summer coinciding with the end of her contract, Kelly has been trying to get a loan move for the sake of her career. "To be dictated to whom I can and can't join with only four months left of the football season is having a huge impact on not only my career but my mental wellbeing," she wrote. As one of the top players in the Women's Super League, scorer of the iconic winning goal at Euro 2022, there were only a few clubs Kelly could join, and despite her willingness to forego wages, City were determined she would not be going to Manchester United. Eventually they accepted a last minute loan offer from Arsenal, despite them being closer rivals in the WSL, but not quietly. "So disappointed to find out tonight that people at the club are briefing journalists against me," wrote Kelly, on Instagram again. "They've called reporters to assassinate my character and tried to plant negative stories about me in the football media."

The response to Kelly, from fellow players but more significantly from fans, was near unanimous — in support. Support of a kind that I doubt she would receive in men's football. Kelly posted that, "Ultimately I just want to be happy again", and ultimately that's what fans — even of Manchester City — wanted for her too. Even if it meant playing happily for cross-city rivals Manchester United, or trophy-rivals Arsenal, fans who had enjoyed watching Kelly playing wanted to go on watching her playing, whatever club shirt she wore and certainly in an England shirt again.

The idea of cheerfully waving a popular Leeds United men's player over the Pennines' to seek happiness at Old Trafford is obviously anathema to me and most, but the difference is worth exploring. The dismay of someone doing a Cantona — or a Jordan or McQueen — is borne of an upbringing that doesn't only put football clubs above football players but makes clubs extensions of personal and regional pride and culture. We are Leeds and all that. And all that is, for someone who grew up feeling it, brilliant, an unmatched experience of camaraderie that gave a lot of young men, like me, an identity and purpose.

The reason this hasn't translated to clubs in women's football is also fairly obvious. Those same identities and cultures that validated young men have often been actively exclusionary for women, and still are. Manchester United were grudgingly late to having a women's team, and their high profile billionaire owner frequently sounds resentful not only of the relative pennies it costs his business but of having to think about it at all. Women's football fandom is, like men's, built on loyalty, but not loyalty to the football clubs that have, for decades, made them unwelcome. It's loyalty to the footballers with whom young women can identify, players still struggling to thrive within a system that was never made for them. The clubs have never given female fans much more than the minimum and now they're still doing it to Chloe Kelly, and she won the bloody Euros. The financial terror that the fractional expenditure of a women's team gives clubs has also been causing them to only grant players one or two year contracts, a lack of trust that has limited the growth of a transfer market as known in the men's game but also empowered players to negotiate the best for themselves over the organisations that aren't offering secure tenures. It's little wonder that, in the women's game, fans tend to tie their fandoms to individual players more than they do to their favoured clubs.

One article about this last week, by Megan Feringa at The Athletic, ended with this tidbit:

One high-ranking official from a WSL club spoke to The Athletic — anonymously to protect relationships — about the swelling power of The Fan and how there is both fear and fascination for it in the upper echelons. Harnessing it is an obvious win. Yet Kelly’s post and the fallout from it suggests the power is increasingly resting with the players and the fans who champion them.

Which brings me back to men's football, and the future of fandom there, and the concept we learned all about when the European Super League was proposed: legacy fans. And how while WSL clubs might fear the new generation of players-before-clubs fans, 'fear' here being a synonym for 'worried about how to sell club merch and tickets to them', Premier League clubs might be rubbing their hands. Unless they, too, are failing to understand the consequences of their own product and marketing and even their own aims, which I suspect might actually be the case.