Sports writer Alistair Mason wonders how long fans will put up with the state of football.
Who’d be a football manager?
That’s a question plenty of people were asking after Claudio Ranieri was sacked as Leicester boss just nine months after achieving the impossible and winning the Premier League with the Foxes.
But you could just as easily ask: “Who’d be a football fan?”
The Leicester story is just another example of how fans don’t matter in football any more. They are the ignored masses of the game, at a time when, around the world, the ignored masses are starting to make themselves heard.
In global politics, there’s a popular revolution going on. People who feel they’re neglected and undervalued by a political system run by and for elites are doing strange and unpredictable things.
In the UK, they voted for Brexit. In the US, they voted for Donald Trump. These were anti-establishment votes – statements that the status quo was not good enough any more, that the system was not working for the people.
Whether or not the people voted for something better is a moot point – but they definitely voted for something different.
Nowhere are the people more undervalued than in football. For voters, read fans – and the parallels are difficult to ignore.
Like MPs, football teams are supposed to represent their communities. But both, generally speaking, are becoming ever more distant.
More and more we see Westminster stocked with career politicians, who are often wealthy and can seem totally removed the concerns of the rest of us.
Football teams are now made up of players who have spent most of their lives in academies, were often millionaires in their teens and are actively shielded from the outside world by their clubs.
The elites in politics may be the wealthy donors to the major parties, or the multinational businesses which seek influence at every turn.
In football they are the mega-rich owners, the suits that run the governing bodies – or even the players themselves.
Fans are often criticised for being too quick to boo their own team these days, but it’s perfectly understandable.
They still love their club, but there’s a growing resentment there too.
They resent what the game has become. They resent the owners who see the clubs as nothing more than a business or, worse, a vanity project. Perhaps most of all they resent the players whose extraordinary wages are being funded by the fans’ very ordinary salaries, and who, by and large, don’t seem to truly care about the club or the supporters or the local community.
No wonder, under these circumstances, that players are held to a high standard. No wonder they’re booed for relatively minor transgressions.
Had Ranieri really lost the dressing room? Does it even matter if the players stopped playing for him?
Ultimately, a group of players talented enough to win the league by 10 points one season has played so badly the next that they are in very real danger of relegation less than a year later.
And that catastrophic collective failure has led to one man losing his job.
From here, the players will either improve under a new manager, showing exactly what they haven’t been doing over the last few months – or they’ll continue on their slide towards the second tier.
Either way it will be clear that, one way or another, the fans have been short changed.
Meanwhile, those same fans will continue to turn up week after week. Some will agree with the decision to sack Ranieri, some will disagree.
Some will sing Ranieri’s name when the Foxes face Liverpool on Monday, and some will stay quiet.
And as the season progresses, some will probably boo the heroes that brought them glory and joy last year, because it will seem more and more like the players did not do it for the fans.
If Leicester go down, many of the team’s stars will have done enough last year to persuade some other top-flight club to sign them up, and they can continue to live the dream – whether their dream be playing with and against the best in the world or simply living the luxury lifestyle of a Premier League footballer.
The Premier League will continue in all its filthy rich opulence – it will barely bat an eyelid as the greatest thing that ever happened to it disappears through the trapdoor.
But the Leicester fans will join the supporters of Leeds, Aston Villa, Nottingham Forest and countless other clubs who know that the game is not run for them.
And when the masses become disenchanted, it can be dangerous for those in charge. Just ask David Cameron.
