Tomorrow, a large proportion of the heroes of Leicester City’s 2015/16 season will take to the field for a charity match marking the ten-year anniversary of the greatest sporting story of all time.
If, as I stood and watched those players lift the Premier League trophy in 2016, someone had tapped me on the shoulder and told me that in ten years, I’d have no interest in attending a charity match to celebrate this staggering achievement by and for my football club, I wouldn’t have believed them. I couldn’t have believed them.
I would have thought of different scenarios whereby this could possibly be true.
Would I be seriously ill? (Thankfully not.)
Would I have fallen out of love with football? (Maybe a little bit, but not really.)
Would Donald Trump win the presidency of the United States of America six months later and bring the world to the brink of nuclear war ten years on? (Heh, funny story…)
On one level, for all of us choosing not to attend tomorrow, it’s a simple decision about going to a football match. But really, without wanting to sound like a Hollywood film trailer, this is about the balance between the past, present and future to influence our decision-making.
The timing may not be ideal. Yet if Leicester were flying high, this would have sold out in days. The glacially slow ticket sales are a commentary on the disconnect between club and supporters.
It is arguably a truer boycott than the West Bromwich Albion home game in January, because that was an evening game played in poor weather during a busy period. This is a one-time-only celebration, the weather’s been great and there hasn’t been another game for weeks. There was, of course, no call for a boycott this time, but there didn’t need to be. This is thousands of individual decisions playing out against a backdrop of general disharmony.
Until something happens to alter the club’s current course, that disharmony will fester. There has been no communication of meaningful change in the direction or strategy of the football club, and therefore practically anything it does at present is still linked to the failure and lethargy of those in charge.
The absolute onslaught of digital marketing tactics surrounding the charity match has been particularly notable. Even while writing this, another email has landed in my inbox telling me “I was there” in 2015/16. It’s true. I attended every game and will be eternally grateful for the fact.
The reason I won’t be there tomorrow is because of what’s happened more recently. At least yesterday, charity match promotional emails (1) were outnumbered by emails telling me they made a mistake with their direct debit messaging (2).
Most damningly, the deluge of digital marketing is in such contrast to the club’s inability to communicate regularly with supporters on the matters we care about.
For the avoidance of doubt, of more than 4,000 fans surveyed by the Foxes Trust, 90% described the club’s approach to communicating with supporters as ineffective and 91% supported the idea of regular communication from the CEO about the club’s long-term vision.
It’s hard to know how you could answer that survey differently at the moment, with similar results for practically all areas of the club:
- 94% said the club are ineffective at managing player contracts and wages
- 93% are dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with Jon Rudkin’s promotion to Chief Football Officer
- 92% rate the performance of the club’s ownership as poor or very poor
- 91% are not confident in the club’s future financial security
- 90% rated the club’s player recruitment as poor or very poor
- 85% rated the financial management of the club as 1 on a scale of 1 to 5
- 82% feel disconnected from the club
- 82% think season tickets should be reduced in price after relegation
When completing the survey, it did begin to feel slightly tiresome selecting Strongly Disagree for everything. But it’s important to tell the truth, and it’s hard to find an area of the club that is performing well. Anger didn’t get in the way of honesty. When asked to rate the pricing of women’s first team home matches, which has been fair and affordable, 76% were unsure and the 17% rating it as fair vastly outweighed the 2% rating it as unfair.
One thing that seems difficult to get wrong is the pricing of a charity football match. Even if priced expensively, if the money’s going to charity then it would just feel like a generous donation on behalf of the purchaser.
But faced with the prospect of an embarrassingly sparse attendance tomorrow, it appears the club have suddenly started dishing out free tickets, with some fans suggesting they have been reimbursed in order to receive a free ticket instead. This is perhaps the most bizarre ticketing policy of all time, but we’ve become so numb to unfathomable decision-making that it barely registers these days.
Unfortunately, the collateral damage in this scenario is the heroic team of 2015/16, who deserve a bright note to end on.
Scrolling through Instagram has been like a fever dream in the past week. Come and see Charlie Daniels play for Tony Pulis’s All-Star XI! Watch Leicester City Women dance onto a seven-a-side pitch one by one, five days after getting relegated! League One Leicester linked with Lyndon Dykes on a free transfer!
Amid all of this, the algorithm vomited up a post by an American sports account ranking the biggest sporting shocks of all time. Leicester 2016 sat at the top alongside the so-called “Miracle on Ice” when the USA beat the Soviet Union at the 1980 Winter Olympics.
If you think even those two aren’t really comparable, you’d be right. The comments section was full of Americans asking for context of Leicester’s achievement and even fuller of more Americans responding with the idea of various small American Football college teams winning the Super Bowl, an event that is literally impossible and still the closest parallel they could draw.
And something about all these people thousands of miles away still talking in reverential, disbelieving tones about events we experienced each week on our doorstep ten years ago hit me.
Maybe it was the heat, or maybe it had finally, finally sunk in. Just in time to move on.
The Fosse Way 