Why are Leicester City fans starting to protest? Take a look at our “matchday experience”
If you want to get a feel for fan sentiment on a matchday, you don’t need a repetitive ‘Tell Us About Your Matchday Experience’ email or endless surveys.
Walk amongst them. Down Raw Dykes Road. Or Saffron Lane. Or up Tigers Way on the traipse back to the train station. You’ll get a palpable sense of the mood and overhear snippets of debates and discussions that you’d never be able to fit on a PowerPoint slide in a boardroom.
Walking away from the King Power Stadium on Saturday, as we passed the away end, I heard a Fulham fan ask with enthusiasm to what I assume was his young son: “Did you enjoy that, then?” The excitable answer came back. “Yeah!”
It’s becoming a stadium at which away fans make memories. Where young fans of teams without a fox on their shirt deepen their enthusiasm for the game and their club. While young fans of our team often can’t get through the door.
Did I enjoy that, then? It got me thinking…
You get to the stadium and you’re greeted by queues. Queues to be frisked within an inch of your life by a Showsec steward. Queues because this overzealous security was brought in on a whim, or because people can’t get through the couple of turnstiles with the digital tickets the club has forced upon them. If you’re one of the many who objected, you swipe the piece of plastic that the club charged you £25 for, which is actually no different to the piece of plastic the club gave you for free the year before, and you’re into a soulless concourse.
You might need the toilet. If so, you squeeze your way into toilets that haven’t changed for 20 years and which would not look out of place in a prison. You pass up the concourse catering because it’s of no creativity and little quality, or because you’ve taken a vow not to spend this season after the £25 ‘Loyalty Tax’ in the summer.
By being in the ‘stadium bowl’ as the club like to call it, you’re actually one of the privileged ones. Either you have a season ticket, or you’ve paid for an expensive membership and extortionate one-off matchday prices. Or you might be a ‘friend’ of an existing season ticket holder and they’ve bought one for you. Hardly a great ticketing policy for bringing in the next generation or ensuring the underprivileged community of Leicester can get through the turnstile.
At least they can get a sense of what it means to be a fan and see their heroes they only ever get to see on television, or on their Playstation, at those meet and greet sessions the club puts on during school holidays though, right? Wrong, there’s a £10 wealth filter applied to those as well.
Anyway, now you’re in, you’ve got that light show. Or some black boxes that shoot out flames. A spectacle to which no one reacts and which no one ever asked for. Those boxes of fire don’t come for free, in the same way the army of Showsec stewards don’t either. It’s also a spectacle that plays out to largely empty stands as everyone is still trying to get through the frisking outside.
The teams are out and the new stadium announcer - the one who really wants you to appreciate the wonder of ‘Number 16, Victor Kristiansen’ and emphasises every syllable - As. If. He’s. Announcing. The. Heavyweight. Bout. Of. The. Century! – is doing his thing. The one who replaced the old guy who’d been there years because he got a little over-enthusiastic in his questioning of Jamie Vardy about his contract at the trophy parade at the end of last season. The one announced with minimal notice and three buses of Thai influencers and hangers-on. The ones who’d been on the pitch with those Showsec stewards guard en masse after the Blackburn match.
The team getting ready to start on the pitch aren’t wearing the same shirts as those few kids in the crowd who have been able to get into a stadium where the clientele have gone stale because of the club’s ticketing policy. Why not? Well, that would be because the club opted for a cryptocurrency gambling partner on the front of the shirts.
When the billboards aren’t encouraging us to retire in Thailand or drink the horrid Chang beer we’re subjected to in the concourses, they tell us BC Game’s message is ‘Stay Untamed’. Reading about their financial struggles and claims of not paying winning customers online will tell you that BC Game very much live by their mantra of being ‘untamed’.
A quick wave of your ‘Honesty Flag’ – you know, the ones you see people walking away from the ground with down the numerous roads away from the stadium – and we’re ready to start the match. Again, those ‘Honesty Flags’ don’t grow on trees – no one asked for them and they’ve contributed nothing to the atmosphere.
The same can be said of the clappers the club still produces in volume every home game. The ones you see strewn over the roads and pavements as you walk away from the ground which somehow comply with the club’s sustainability policy which doesn’t allow the handing out of leaflets that signpost supporters to Mental Health support charities during World Mental Health Awareness Week.
You know this because the atmosphere once the game gets going is patchy. And it emanates from two sections where there are no honesty flags but heaps of authenticity. The two sections that stand and sing, which at many other clubs would have been encouraged into one combined safe standing block, do so in what one could now assume to be ‘unsafe standing’. No safe standing at Leicester City though, because the club has been reluctant to take any meaningful position on safe standing for years.
The treatment given to those in Union FS who operate with a mantra of ‘Leicester helping Leicester’ and run charity fundraisers and foodbank collections for the local community as well as putting on tifos that inspire civic pride? Spurious bans, handed out for minor indiscretions. Contemptuous and suspicious communication from club suits - if they engage at all, that is.
Down on the pitch, it’s a squad of players that just isn’t quite good enough. A team managed by a man trying his best to undo the terrible work of the man who preceded him. Who prioritised Premier League experience over ability and resale value or the ability to grow with the club. We’re treated to the declining days of Jordan Ayew and Bobby Decordova-Reid.
Halfway through the game, as the team emerges for the second half and prepares to commence a second half where another away section is likely to rejoice until the 90th minute, we’re treated to a mini video on the screen of past glories.
Again, a video no one asked for, which has no positive impact on anything and is seemingly just the result of a few overpaid and out of touch people sitting round a table scratching their head about how to drive second half atmospheres. “They seem to like that pre-match video, why don’t we just do like a short version of that?”
Up in the director’s box is where the finger of blame should be, and finally is, pointing.
A director of football who cannot sell a player for money but can buy one like Oliver Skipp at £20million. A director of football in such deference to an owner, whose attendance at games is sporadic at best, that he daren’t sit on the front row of the director’s box without him there. A director of football who has handed long and bloated contracts to the likes of Jannik Vestergaard, Danny Ward, Hamza Choudhury and Decordova-Reid that will choke us financially for years.
A chief executive who we can’t be entirely sure is still there. Last heard of in 2016 and whose approach to communicating with the club’s fans (sorry, customers) seems to be: “Don’t ask questions. Just trust me, bro”. An equal partner in the supposed ‘internal review’ that happened after the most avoidable and disgraceful Premier League relegation, but which delivered no discernible change. She will, at least, attend the Fan Advisory Board meetings, however, to stay tapped into fans’ concerns. The problem with that? The control the club exerted over the FAB selection process to temper any difficult voices getting onto it.
And ultimately, an owner who has overseen the failings of both of these people. An owner who, if judged on his record from the day he took control, rather than based on the goodwill afforded to ‘the family’ or ‘the owners’ because of his dad, would be shown to be woefully short of the standard expected. An owner who, even in the aftermath of that disgraceful relegation, could only muster a letter (and I know it was likely written by the communications director, but he still must have signed it off) that essentially said: “Stop being mean to me”.
The tide is turning. The fans are stirring. The Foxes Trust has doubled in membership. There are protests being mooted for prior to the Arsenal game. The chants are getting louder and changing from just being about Jon Rudkin, to ‘the Board’ (for Board, see Aiyawatt, Whelan and Rudkin).
This is not entitlement as casual observers might try to characterise it. This is a culmination of years of bad decisions, of being treated like rubbish and with contempt by our club.
On Sunday, the organiser of the pre-Arsenal protest explained that they had done so under the anonymity of a username and using a VPN. They were fearful that the club may ban them but still wanted to mobilise something to show the discontent amongst the fanbase. At first it sounds absurd to need to do that, but then you hear about the taps on the shoulder fans get from the communications director about criticism of the club online.
I’m writing this piece under the cover of anonymity as well, for the same reasons. But then again, why should the club care? I’m just a number. Unfortunately for them, the numbers are slowly, but surely, finding their voice, getting together and getting organised.
