As a student in the late-80’s I was regularly asked, “What do you see in football?” This was before aspiring middle class liberals ‘did’ football – not surprisingly as attending a match carried a reasonable if outside chance of you ending up in hospital after encountering drunken, racist, sexist thugs. After trying to explain, I’d usually either pursuade them to come to a game or judge them and move on. Judging everything and everyone was really popular amongst student liberals even back then…
If I was asked today, I’d take them to watch Aldershot Town v Wrexham in the English National Conference. But as no-one has asked me that since Euro ’96, I’m taking myself and writing about why here instead.
Two very different similar clubs
As places, Wrexham and Aldershot don’t on paper have much in common- one a medium sized northern industrial / market town with a long proud history of non-conformity and things like trade unionism, where recent memory mostly prompt words like ‘struggling’, ‘decline’ or ‘grants’ and ‘redevelopment’; the other in Surrey’s Conservative commuter belt where 3 bed semi’s sell for about as much as a decent Championship midfielder.
But scratch a bit deeper and similarities emerge. Apart from both having shitty stations near the ground, both towns have lost or are losing their place in the world. Aldershot was the headquarters of the UK’s armed forces – something that meant it was busy and properous on weekdays when the stockbrokers were out of town. Now most of the regiments have disbanded and Aldershot’s a bit quiet and confused. Whilst Wrexham is also home to more commuters. In the 70’s, it was said more people passed through and out of Wrexham on their way to football matches in Liverpool or Manchester than those who watched at the Racecourse Ground. Now the same is almost true about the daily journey for work.
In these circumstances, the respective football clubs take on new social importance. The football club’s help give the town’s a sense of identity and place – one that bridges the past towards the dreams, hopes and aspirations of their town’s emerging generation.
About the only time either place is mentioned in a positive context is still when the tele announce the football team have scored a goal. The clubs feed and sustain these town’s sense of place…and people need a sense of place.
All this has always been thus and never more evident than at this time of year and the magic of football at Christmas. Like Church, football is big at Christmas when occasional once or twice a year visitors join the regular masses in attending games.
Often it’ll encompass the full ritual – the older generation briefing the youngsters on the hymns and chants; all putting on their matchday best colours; and bonding around a sense of community, faith and optimism.
That’s especially true and important for small town clubs like Wrexham and Aldershot. Most of these kids will (often like the elders) have another team…one in the Premiership and back pages of the newspapers every week. Their Christmas list will have a Salah or Kane or Sanchez away shirt and it was long before their lifetime that Chelsea got promoted with 3 ex-Wrexham players in their team.
But they don’t go to United, City, Anfield, Wembley or Stamford Bridge. Even in Aldershot their folks can’t afford it – not regularly. And even if occasionally they do, they support these clubs…they don’t share a deeper sense of belonging to the place like their town’s club.
But Wrexham and Aldershot fans also have a deeper linked connection that flows from this sense of community which is why today’s game has special symbolic resonance and merit to represent the spirit of football.
Phoenix clubs
Football uses the term ‘club’ quite widely but, certainly in the UK professional game, reality rarely reflects the common meaning of the term – ie a sense of shared ownership, participation and belonging.
Football’s mission is to feed hopes, dreams and aspirations. It is fuelled at all levels by chasing ‘the dream’. However irrational ‘the dream’ maybe. Fans abdicate direct engagement in the complicated stuff, entrusting that to usually wealthy owners who (whilst using the clubs as a front for tax avoidance, money laundering and/or advertising their own businesses) maintain an income stream by selling their own commitment to ‘the dream’ back to the fan.
It’s not always that cynical – often the owners will themselves be successful members of the congregation who themselves fervently believe in ‘the dream’ and see doing what they can to chase it as part of their communal duty. That can lead the clubs into dangerous territory.
When ‘the dream’ fails to materialise or the money runs out and the owners money stops the fans tend to become ever more emotional, desperate and irrational and give their club over to faithless charlatans with with no loyalty to them or their ‘club’. That tends to be when things go very badly wrong.
Wrexham and Aldershot’s faithful know this too well. In the recent past both clubs fell out of the League, battered and broke. Getting back needed more money than they had – not just for players but modernising their grounds to meet new regulations. In bitter, circumstances both clubs effectively died.
Then they rose again – re-born… phoenix’s rising out of the ashes. Not yet back to their previous on-field heights but at least onto a field at a credible level in front of a few thousand paying fans each week, keeping their communities name amongst the Saturday Final Scores – Wrexham and Aldershot Town are both very much alive and kicking.
Both rose not because of miracles but because of the love, determination and hard work of the faithful. They rose by fans taking back control of THEIR CLUB – in Wrexham’s case literally becoming a fan owned co-operative.
This makes winning harder. Despite Wrexham having bigger crowds now than when they played two divisions higher as recently as 2005, and a regional sponsorship draw, their budget is about 1/2 some other teams in their division where Wrexham’s away following can almost outnumber home fans – clubs where the owner is still funding ‘the dream’ from deep pockets.
Wrexham can’t make a loss. The CEO can’t overspend as it isn’t their money. And the club’s fans, though still dreaming, know the nightmare of nearly losing the club and will never be prepared to go there again.
Aldershot Town’s fans have also been to football’s hell and are gradually making their way back with more volunteers and fan oversight – preaching the dream but a more pragmatic version of the faith grounded in their community work…living the faith.
Both Aldershot Town and Wrexham are now proper clubs in the true sense. That’s why I can’t think of a better place to experience the true sense of football this December.
LOOKING UP! 