Liverpool, Spurs backtracked on coronavirus furloughs because, for once, fans have a say in soccer
Soccer remains the most important of all the unimportant things.
That lack of importance was reinforced by the public outcry when several rich Premier League teams tried to opt into a British government program to cover 80 percent of the salaries of furloughed employees to avoid the kind of soaring unemployment we’re seeing stateside.
Without soccer, life has gone on. Not quite as interestingly on the weekends, perhaps, but we’ve chugged along regardless. Soccer, then, is inessential. And inessential things shouldn’t be bailed out by the taxpayer if they can afford to cover the shortfall themselves. The sport is not a public good.
And the Premier League teams have themselves to thank for that reality check.
The clubs in the Premier League decided not to be a public good anymore when they got together and decided they could all make more money by breaking away from England’s Football League and selling TV rights to subscription channels, excluding a large part of the population. They hardly acted in the public interest when they slowly raised season ticket prices to the point where it takes a considerable disposable income to afford them — running as high as $17,000 at Arsenal for one person. And they weren’t that bothered about the common man, the bedrock of their fanbase, when they allowed the cost of replica jerseys to rise well above $100 a pop.
Which is why it rankled the public when Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur announced that they would be opting into the so-called coronavirus job retention scheme. Because they did so in spite of posting healthy operating profits last season – about $50 million for Liverpool; some $120 million for Spurs. They are owned by billionaires. They disregarded their own previous greed at the expense of the very taxpayers they felt should essentially bail them out. Both clubs generate revenues of more than half a billion dollars per year and are profitable to the point that they could tide over their payroll without running deficits for several months, even if no money is coming in.
Liverpool backtracked after two days and confessed publicly that it came to “the wrong conclusion” and was “truly sorry for that.”
It took Spurs until Monday to be pressured into a reversal, pushed largely by its own fans. “We are acutely aware that many supporters were against the decision we made,” Tottenham said in a statement. “Indeed we have seen opposition from fans to fellow Premier League clubs accessing the CJRS too. This once again underlines that we bear different pressures to other businesses. […] In view of supporter sentiment regarding the scheme, it is now not our intention to make use of the current CJRS that runs until the end of May.”
Spurs added that it would convert its stadium parking lot into a COVID-19 testing center.
Other teams may have toyed with the idea of using the government program but wisely decided against it. Manchester City and Manchester United publicly announced that they would not seek public funds to cover payroll. But clubs like Newcastle United, Norwich City and Bournemouth have used the CJRS program nonetheless, in spite of their own rich owners, in spite of TV revenue that amounts to at least $150 million per season — even if some of that money may have to be returned to the networks.
It’s a rare thing that fans genuinely having something to say in how the business of soccer is conducted. In most places where the clubs aren’t fan-owned, their interests haven’t been represented adequately in decades.
But this time around, the balance of power was reversed. The fans weren’t merely the customers, they were the financiers. Which is how they were able to ramp up public pressure for the clubs to do the right thing.
They were there to remind the soccer clubs that, after spending decades making themselves inaccessible to common people, they had also forfeited the right to turn to them for money when their riches temporarily dried up.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is a Yahoo Sports soccer columnist and a sports communication lecturer at Marist College. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.
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