“TODAY has cost me two hundred pounds. I have followed this club up hill and down dale and don’t you dare say that we are complacent”.
Meet Ena, a fabulously feisty Manchester City supporter calling in to Radio 5 Live on Saturday evening in response to the latest media bearbaiting of a widely castigated fan-base. Ena should be on cloud nine right now. After all she has just left Wembley Stadium after seeing her team reach a FA Cup final. Instead her voice is tremulous with indignation. She is very clearly upset.
In the studio Kirsty Gallacher laughs. She actually giggles and it’s all too easy to imagine the divvying up of roles before the show between herself and Robbie Savage. You defend them; I’ll get them phoning in furious. For Kirsty Gallacher it’s a game and this caller’s distress amounts to a job well done. She is very clearly delighted.
FULL-TIME: Man City 1-0 Brighton
A third minute header from Gabriel Jesus guarantees us a place in the FA Cup final. #mancity pic.twitter.com/PQp1Ni2wRL
— WeAreMCFC™ (@WeAreMCFC) April 6, 2019
“I knew we’d be cannon fodder today because of the empty seats but you all need to understand why that is,” Ena continues. “Four games in London over a three week period. People just simply can’t afford it”.
Gallacher ignores the reasonable reasoning and only hears the agitation. She laughs again highly amused. The hoi polloi struggling to make ends meet. What a jolly jape. It’s a staggering clip, it truly is.
It is tempting to see this nauseating vignette – that went semi-viral soon after so the BBC will be pleased with that – as a perfect illustration of the complete disconnect presently between the media and football supporters. Here we have a privileged daughter of a multimillionaire who has presumably paid to attend sporting events out of her own pocket a mere handful of times in her life openly taunting to the point of laughter a loyal fan who shells out fortunes to travel the length and breadth of the country supporting her team. It is worth noting too that Ena pays Kirsty Gallacher's wages.
It is tempting to see this as a perfect illustration, but then you acknowledge that it only stood out because it was filmed. It wasn’t typed behind a computer screen. It wasn’t bantered about off-air. The disdain and disrespect was there for all to see on this occasion, that’s all.
Kirsty Gallacher laughing at her shows how out of touch she is the fucking wet lettuce.
She will never have a clue what it’s like to be a working class fan. Everything the #mcfc fan says is spot on. pic.twitter.com/NGfAMYM2Hu
— Joshua Jones (@joshuapsjones) April 6, 2019
Another week has heralded yet another sustained and extensive attack on the twelfth best supported club in Europe, this time for having the temerity to not use up their full allocation of tickets for a FA Cup semi-final.
The entirely valid reasons for this have been well documented elsewhere so won’t be repeated here but Gallacher is advised to check them out if she fancies a good chuckle at how modern day football has stretched fans’ finances to breaking point.
Suffice to say the crime of City taking 28,500 fans to London instead of 30,000 was deemed reprehensible enough to warrant a week-long conversation that dominated social media and then, with a depressing inevitability the media at large who whipped up the non-story into a story for cheap, easy clicks.
This is hardly the first time either that City fans have been placed under unique scrutiny and held to such unique standards. Indeed 2018/19 has been open season on a fan-base traditionally known for its humour, loyalty and – ironically – its likability with examples from recent months alone including being mocked obsessively by Talksport for empty blue seats while across other platforms they have been called everything under the sun from ‘complacent’ to ‘entitled’ to disrespectful’.
They’ve been criticised for booing the Champions League anthem. They’ve been lambasted for defending their club against the FFP allegations. Incidentally, when a fan-base so well-known for being imbued with pessimism is called entitled you know that something very seriously is afoot.
Man City have billionaire owners, an absolutely mint team, trophies galore & manage to have largely the same fan base as in League 1. Sounds great to me. Exactly how I would want it. Some empty seats, who cares ? Better than a million tourists pretending to be fans. #mcfc
— poc (@peteoconn) April 5, 2019
It needs saying at this point that Manchester City fans have done nothing wrong. That is such a strange sentence to write but it is necessary nonetheless. The unrelenting miasma of negative coverage of them leaves a residual feeling that they have done something wrong. They haven’t. A good deal of them follow their team home and away. Others watch the games on Sky or BT Sport. They defend their club’s name when it comes under attack. And that’s it: the whole story. In short, they are fans, no different at all to any other club’s fans.
It also needs saying – and this cannot be stated strongly enough – that widespread and sustained castigation of a fan-base is simply not normal. Sure we may see the occasional three-day cycle of Arsenal fans being laid into for a poor atmosphere at the Emirates but for one fan-base to be rounded on time and time again from so many quarters is unprecedented. Usually that treatment is levelled at high-profile managers or players. Usually the fans are off-limits.
It is however only unprecedented in the Premier League era. In the eighties with hooliganism rife, fans were subjected to sweeping reproach and it stuns to think that City supporters are getting similar coverage now for having to prioritise which games they can afford to attend. Even the language compares. In 1985 The Times declared that football was ‘a slum sport watched by slum people’. Late last year a Times writer suggested City fans were ‘vicious rats’ when Blues insisted they would still support their club despite the press highlighting their owner’s human rights record.
We won’t forget all of this. City supporters are tired and sick and sick and tired of being treated so appallingly and with absolutely zero civility and no matter how much the fan-base grows in years to come – thus creating a much larger audience that the media will eventually pander to – we won’t forget and we won’t forgive.
