A family dilemma: Why the Leicester legacy isn’t guaranteed for the next generation
If digesting that Millwall game wasn’t enough, Tony Barnard has a family dilemma. What should determine your football supporting loyalties? And don’t clubs, Leicester City included, have an obligation to make it easy for the next generation to not only attend games, but to care enough to?
Can I confide in you? Can I trust you? Trust you not to castigate or deride me, or to play down this dilemma?
I am devastated that this situation has arisen a second time and I don’t know how to respond. My 7 year old grandson has informed me that he is (and I shudder at the mere thought of it) …. a Man Utd fan.
This is not the first time it has happened, as some 30 years ago my own son, having been taken on a tour of Old Trafford on a school friend’s birthday treat, returned home and proudly stuck on his bedroom door a plaque featuring a picture of Eric Cantona and the words “Man Utd supporter’s bedroom”.
I was shocked. I believe that I am quite a liberal minded person, but this was intolerable, my own son joining the glory-hunting hordes of people across the globe affiliating themselves to possibly the most successful team in the world, merely on the basis that the club won more trophies than any other.
Now, I am very much an old school football supporter and share a belief in the principles expounded by the esteemed journalist and writer Hunter Davies who says there are only two sound reasons for following a football team: family links or place of residence.
As far as I am concerned, no other choice is acceptable, if you were born or live in Coventry, you are condemned to support Coventry (Editor’s note: Sacrilege! As somebody living in Coventry, I am definitely not changing alliances!). Or move house.
You can admire another team’s style of play, appreciate or be secretly envious of their success, but you CANNOT support them. As far as my son’s choice was concerned, it also opened old wounds, old feelings re-awakened of primary school playground bullying by the group of “popular” boys who all professed fandom of Man Utd, and couldn’t wait, on a Monday morning, to goad me with the weekend’s results if Man Utd had won and my team had lost.
My team, you ask? Oh yes …. the glorious Tottenham Hotspur. That may come as a shock to some of you, but I hope you will bear with me when I explain that my family was from North London, paternal grandparents at the time still living in Tottenham, close enough to hear the White Hart Lane matchday crowd roar and my grandfather having been on Spurs’ books as a semi-professional (he went on to play for Gillingham and Brentford).
We were living in Bishop’s Stortford, on the direct train line to White Hart Lane, much, much closer to Tottenham than to Manchester, and therefore the closest Football League club to follow, thereby fulfilling both of Hunter Davies’ criteria for football fandom: family links and proximity.
Fast forward again 30 years to the dilemma presented by my son, what to do about his football loyalties? As far as him following in the family tradition was concerned, we were living 100 miles north of Tottenham and the likelihood of me being able to take him to games was not far off zero, so it had to be a case of supporting his local team and turning up at Filbert Street every now and again to enjoy and endure in equal measure the ups and downs of the city of his birth: Leicester City.
The Cantona plaque soon came off his bedroom door, to be replaced with Filbert Fox and bedroom walls emblazoned with other LCFC-related merchandise.
On pretty much his first season of attending matches we got the opportunity to attend the Coca-Cola Cup Final replay at Hillsborough, as a family friend and season ticket holder was unable to attend, so, having queued round Filbert Street from silly-o’clock in the morning before work, and using his borrowed season tickets, we were able to get two replay tickets in the upper tier of the Leppings Lane stand.
Not a bad introduction to football fandom, particularly when I recall the final triumphant whistle and an older gentleman behind my son telling him he’d waited 30 years for that moment, so take it all in. For the sake of brevity, the rest is history. My son and I became season ticket holders when the Walkers opened and have been ever since.
I liken my affiliation to both Spurs and Leicester to relationships first with mother and then with wife, you are born into one and then the other chooses you, both retaining relative significance throughout your life. Extend that analogy at your own risk.
Returning to my present quandary, I feel torn between letting my grandson get on with it (his parents are not football fans) or starting on the long road to conversion back to the city of his birth.
It took commitment to help my son turn to Leicester, but do I have the energy to tread the same path with my grandson, a boy we have already taken to a home match (Huddersfield 4-1) and dressed in the full LCFC kit? Will it be as rewarding for him as it has been for me and my son?
Will it then be something he will be able to sustain on his own as previous generations have done, whilst the club systematically excludes young people and individuals by their ticketing and pricing policy? Would he be better off following Man Utd who he could watch every week on the TV at no additional expense?
So, is it worth swapping seats to the family stand and buying my grandson a guest ticket if he has to watch an embargoed and bankrupt team fail in the Premier League (or worst case, the Championship)? Is it even my place to do anything? Will it be worth all that effort in order for him to be recognised only as another paying customer, just one more source of income, an undervalued and over-exploited unit on the corporate spreadsheet?
Is there anything that can change the direction the club appears to be heading off the pitch? Are they open to meaningful fan representation and engagement, would it make a difference and is the Foxes Trust the means of achieving it?
Can my grandson be saved, or should his parents move with him to Coventry?
Join the Foxes Trust for £10: https://foxestrust.co.uk/membership
