Stop Exploiting Loyalty: Standing Up For Fan Culture

Following on from events over the weekend here are my thoughts.

I do not like Liverpool, I don’t like the team, I don’t like the manager, I do not like the ground, I don’t like the kit and I certainly don’t like the fans.

It is something that has been ingrained in me since I was little kid, consciously and unconsciously my contempt for them has made me form opinions and make decisions that any rational person would never make.

I have walked through Stanley Park on a match day and experienced that uneasy quiet, I was there the day they chucking cups of shit at us and tried to turn over Alan Smiths ambulance, I can still remember my mates face after they smashed his cheekbone in after the league cup final in 03 and have sat on freezing cold coaches after scallies have done the windows in.

So, let’s talk about Sunday.

On the pitch it’s got a proper United day about it, we are shit and they are imperious.

It is the type of occasion when we live for an Amad toe poke may have us buzzing for weeks when another seven nil is more likely.

However, there is something happening that is more important than United’s potential climb from 14^th to 13^th in the league.

Members of the FC58 group will stand side by side with members of Liverpools support to promote the #StopExploitingLoyalty  campaign.

How can you stand with them some will cry.

People will be outraged.

Tweets will resurface when in its fledging days the 1958 group said exactly that, outraged themselves that another arm of the Manchester United support did just that.

But let’s be adult about this for a moment, let’s look at the reason it is happening.

We all now what Jim Ratcliffe and his entourage have done and have planned for Uniteds ticket pricing and while everyone is weirdly getting excited about relegation, there is no away ticket cap in the championship.

The famous Manchester United coming to town will be a small clubs chairman’s dream and we will get fleeced.

One of the lesser publicised revelations to come out of the club this week is apparently for the last 20 years the club has been paying David Gill a million pound a year and now in the short term we are expected to pick up the bill with our £66 tickets.

Longer term we, as in the current match going fans are not wanted as the American model will take a game that has already gone from the working classes to the middle classes all the way up to the top of the tree as owner after owner will milk every penny.

That’s our problem but Liverpool are feeling the pinch as well.

The Anfield expansion has not gone as they had planned and just like City, they face the reality that they have become everything they’ve mocked us for over the years.

Then there are other clubs, Wolves have been hit hard with increases, so have Forest, Villa get in the Champions League and rather than celebrate it, they put admission prices up to nearly one hundred pound a game.

Bloody Tamworth have decided to charge forty odd pounds for their cup game against Spurs next week.

United, City, Wolves, Forest even Tamworth every support is different other than the basic fact that we are all football fans than love our respective teams.

If normal working class football fans do not put their differences on ice to fight this, there will be no normal working class football fans anymore.

Coming back from Spurs in a minibus just before Xmas, two lads sat behind me were having a sing about Hillsboro, to me its odd behaviour coming out of an embarrassing night at Spurs and singing songs about people they didn’t know, who died over thirty years ago but it happens, right or wrong. Just like wherever Liverpool play there will be dickheads singing about Munich.

The people holding the banner outside Anfield on Sunday will not be scallies with Stanley Knives or weird old men handing kids half bricks to throw at coaches.

They will be scarfers, shirt wearers, semi rational people who like us are under threat of being priced out of Football.