Transcript:
They say you should never send an email when you are angry; but you never hear it said that you should never record a voice note when you are angry, so here goes.
It’s Tuesday afternoon. Season card prices have just dropped for next season…
The brassneck on those brass monkeys…
I find myself staring at the graphic of the ground we love now spilt into zones, not stands. I find myself scrolling back through my notes on season card prices from previous years (yes, of course I have made a note of these – in the notes app – and keep it on my phone.)
I do some quick calculations and am astonished to see how much an adult and a senior renewal will be. And more presciently, how much it has risen over the last three seasons.
We all know the stages. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Yep. All of these. But superseding them, I feel like a total idiot.
I am not a supporter. I am a unit of cost. And if my unit isn’t good enough for them, they will find another unit. They pretty much say this in the accompanying guff – the bit about a long waiting list for a season ticket.
According to Marx, ‘Reification is the process by which human social relations are perceived as inherent attributes of the people involved in them, or attributes of some product of the relation, such as a traded commodity.’ That’s Karl by the way. Nottingham Harpo, or Richard.
Although coming from Harpo, it might be slightly funny were it not so tragically true.
I’m obviously very angry. At everyone. At the club for their obvious greed and for the reasons behind their obvious greed. They will point to how competitive the prices are and how everyone else is doing it and how this is the necessary means if we are going to compete.
Yeah, yeah, whatever. You just keep telling yourselves that so you can sleep easier at night. Meanwhile, we’ll remember the millions squandered on players who contributed nothing, the drop in the ocean that such rises are compared to the tv millions, the fact that you had an opportunity here to stand out from the rest, to do something different, to be the special club we all hoped you are, to acknowledge how football without fans is nothing and acknowledge those twenty odd years of mediocrity watched by so many of us while those who decided on these prices were elsewhere doing other things. We don’t expect a personalised cake, but give us more than a lazy platitude. I hear that rewarding loyalty is big in marketing and the corporate world – give it some consideration, eh?
I’m angry at the body that haven’t held the club’s feet close enough to the fire on this. They should have been challenged before now, but they’ve clearly reached the stage where they feel they can get away with this.
I’m angry at football in general – especially high-level football where exploitation is rampant.
I’m angry at football fans in general for not putting tribalism aside and coming together to take a stand on this and doing more like cross fan protests.
But most of all, listener, I’m angry at myself. Angry for being an obsessed football fan. Angry for having paid so much in the past. Angry for no doubt continuing to pay so much in the future. I wish I wasn’t like this, built this way, was able to take a year out and see how it goes and maybe come back to it all…. but these days, that’s just not possible. And I genuinely wish I could do that.
I’m slightly embarrassed too, for all of the above.
I am reminded of a lyric from a band I like: “They appropriated everything we ever loved. And dressed it up in quotations and fluff” (Los Campesinos!)
The club have taken all that is special and marketed it with quotation, fluff and cold, hard, grubby, extortionate rises in cold, hard cash.
At other clubs, it is possible to pay cost value on a monthly basis, with no interest or admin fee.
Other clubs know what league they will be playing in next season.
Other clubs haven’t been charged with lost points through spending too much money.
And yet, here we are.
Well done, Forest. Well done for making the vast majority of supporters feel like idiots.
Kudos.
The Price of Football