Les Jackson 💙

As someone on Spirit of Shankly pointed out, this is just the original concept for the Premier League being delivered. The vision was to move football up a couple of social classes, which to me means price out the less wealthy and encourage a "better" class of clientele with more disposable income. They focused only on the vast riches the PL would bring and they were right. However that model only works long term with regeneration of new fans. It works if you are never gonna get relegated because the group of die hards whose loyalty and love for the club could not be quantified on a balance sheet, have already left and they are now doing something else with their match days. Most of them likely realise that it's quite useful getting the time back and similar to when you break up with an ex, there is rarely any going back. Without the diehards, who indoctrinated the next generation into being obsessed with the team, where does the next generation of fans come from? Good luck convincing a young person to spend what little they have left after paying their rent and other increasing costs, to allocate a big chunk of what's left for an overpriced season ticket. Not happening, football is not high on the importance scale when you can watch every game on telly. As for the "better" clientele they attracted, they will abandon ship as quickly as they arrived come any form of hard times. What the clubs are doing right now with ticket price rises is simply ensuring that they have no loyal die hard fanbase left in 10-15 years. These changes will be forever. No more capacity crowds for just playing in the PL, owners will be forced to try and actually win stuff. If they don't, goodbye fans. If they do, those fans will demand they do it again. I'm from an era that did not place expectation on clubs, we just handed over our money and went to football, because that is the way it was. I'm still clinging on but with next year being my 50th watching West Ham and having been banned this season for breaching health and safety, I'm pretty sure it will be my last one. Unless the owners who fucked my club up completely, finally get the message and fuck off back to their mansions. The people who own clubs know the square root of fuck all about the generations of fans who helped build that club to be the thing it was before they demolished everything they inherited. They do not comprehend love or loyalty because in their world, those things are cash transactions. Football as we knew it is on life support, but the owners won't realise until one day they look around that vast stadium and see a handful of fans watching the latest pile of average they decided to serve up. #BSOUT