What is 'Popular Football'?
What is ‘popular football’?
Popular football is a movement spreading across world football that seeks to return the game that billions of people cherish back to its roots; back to providing affordable, supporter-owned, community-focused football for supporters.
We believe football clubs should be more than just another revenue source in someone’s investment portfolio.
We stand against modern football’s constant pursuit of further riches at the expense of the very people who built the clubs that have become so profitable for oligarchs, sheikhs, and distant billionaires.
But what’s so bad about ‘Modern Football’?
To answer that question, I’ve collected a few stories that I hope will make my point.
It’s the night of May 25, 1967. Celtic Football Club have just pulled off a European Cup win to become the first British champions of Europe. The best part of the triumph was that all but two of the 15 man squad were born within 10 miles of Celtic Park in Glasgow. The furthest was born just 30 miles away in Saltcoats. They were truly hometown heroes.
While that story seems like a fairy tale today, it was almost ordinary 56 years ago. The runner-up that day, Inter Milan, fielded a team who had all been born in northern Italy. Furthermore, half of the 20 teams that had participated in a European Cup final by 1968 were entirely domestic squads. In contrast, only ONE of Real Madrid’s starting players was Spanish when they defeated Liverpool in the 2022 Champions League final.
Not so long ago football clubs were able to be successful and represent their communities at the highest levels of the game.
Fast forward 36 years. In that short amount of time, the record transfer fee paid for a football player had gone from £300,000 (£5.3M today) to £46,600,000 (£78.9M today). The all-mighty dollar (pound?) had taken over and it was about to claim its first victim.
In September 2003, Kjell Inge Røkke and Bjørn Rune Gjelsten, Norwegian businessmen and owners of First Division side Wimbledon F.C., announced that they were relocating the 114 year-old club 56 miles north to Milton Keynes. To add insult to injury, the club’s long-time ground, Plough Lane, would be sold to real estate developers. The club was butchered and their beloved stadium was bulldozed to make room for a new supermarket despite desperate protest from its fans.
The idea of a football club being a part of the local identity and social fabric of a community rather than just another business had been thought to be immutable. Something that transcended even the most sacred parts of the game. Yet, in the new world of business football even it had a price tag.
The year is 2021. The record transfer fee is now £198,000,000 (£241.4M today); an increase of over £9M per year since we last checked in. For comparison, it had only risen at a rate of roughly £2M per year from 1967 to 2003. If money had been out of control 20 years earlier, football was now a greed-fueled free-for-all.
After 14 years of owning Newcastle United F.C., Mike Ashley had finally found a buyer to take the historic club off his hands. Fans rejoiced at the idea of finally being free of an owner they had wanted out for so long. After all, who could possibly be worse than him?
As it turned out, Ashley ended up selling the club to a consortium that included Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund as its primary investor. In other words, one of England’s greatest footballing institutions is now owned by a branch of the same government that has been accused of committing war crimes in Yemen.
It is not an exaggeration to claim that every dime earned by Newcastle through ticket sales, international TV deals, and transfer fees directly supports everything the Saudi government does—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Even I have some level of responsibility in all of this as someone who pays to watch Premier League games***.
Genuine moral dilemmas have been laid upon anyone who so much as watches a match from their couch thanks to the people who have been allowed to fund modern football.
No one should ever have to feel bad because of who owns their football club.
But commercialism isn’t just an English problem. When the Singaporean billionaire Peter Lim bought the Spanish giant Valencia CF in 2014, he brought a truckload of promises, ambition, and cash to the table.
Five years later, it all seemed to be going well. Los Che finally had their hands back on a major trophy, the squad was full of future superstars, and their infamously unfinished stadium was supposedly being completed. The future looked nothing but bright.
Then, just a few months later, the team’s manager and sporting director, the architects of the club’s success, were fired after the former publicly criticized Lim’s decisions one time too many. Within the next year, the club chose to quickly offload its most valuable players at a discount to save money during the pandemic. Then, the club announced the new stadium would only half the size as originally advertised. Since then things have only gotten worse. A Twitter post from earlier this week sums it all up pretty well:
"I quit. After 35 years. Mentiron (Lim-liar), here's my shirt. Do what you want. Sorry dad, sorry grandpa. My heart will always be black and white"
Everything has turned sour and generations of supporters are powerless to save the club they’ve loved so deeply. It’s a tragic story that is only getting more and more common across the world.
Now I want to tell one last story. But, this one doesn’t involve any sleezy billionaires or former titans of European football. It’s just about a small club who existed for eight brilliant years.
In 1999, Quique Pina, a seemingly unnoteworthy former Real Murcia player, founded CF Ciudad de Murcia with the help of local businesses and ‘influential friendships’. In just 5 years, the little club from southern Spain had pulled off an unlikely rise to the dizzying heights of the second division. In the 2005/06 season, Ciudad even managed to solidify themselves as the highest placed Murcian club in Spanish football. It was yet another fairytale from the greatest game on Earth. Then—as you’ve probably guessed by now—it all went wrong.
In June 2007, Pina ‘betrayed’ the club by suddenly selling it to an investor from Grenada. Ciudad was almost immediately moved 172 miles away and renamed ‘Granada 74 CF’.
As bad as that name is, it’s not the worst part of this tale. Due to registration issues and gross mismanagement, the club never played a professional match again. In 2010, it officially died along with all of the pride and joy of Ciudad’s local, loyal supporters who had managed to produce the best football in town for a few moments.
Not even the humblest of projects is safe in modern football.
What was all of that supposed to mean?
In short, those stories are meant to show the sickness that has infected modern football. Slow at first, but now all-consuming, the endless amounts of money that have been pumped into football have corrupted even the game’s most well defended principles.
Clubs no longer represent their communities or fans. TV companies have more influence than any supporter group and fans are little more than customers. Not even a club’s location is guaranteed in the world that ‘business football’ has built.
Though modern football may deliver unparalleled greatness to a handful of the richest clubs in the world, it has cost the game too much.
Okay, but what’s so great about popular football?
Well, I’ll put it like this. When I asked some fans of Poli Almeria, one of Spain’s oldest club de fútbol popular—who also run the incredible Informe PIRRI podcast—why they loved popular football so much they said this:
“For us it is a very different experience. We are not customers who just go to the stadium. Being able to participate makes you feel like it's YOUR club.”
“There is also a lot of closeness with the players. Every game is almost like a family reunion.”
“For us it is to recover the essence of football: fans who pool effort and resources to compete through a team by which they feel represented, identity, belonging and community. In this type of football they are more present.”
Popular football provides an opportunity for people who truly love the game to be a part of it again. It allows for supporters to put as much as themselves as they’d like into their favorite club without fear of betrayal.
Though a popular football club will never win the Champions League outside of Football Manager, it will also never be separated from the people who love it the most.
In Conclusion
If you’ve made it this far, I cannot thank you enough for reading my ramblings and I really hope you enjoyed what I had to say! Hopefully it wasn’t too cynical or self-righteous…
If you’ve never heard of popular football before, I hope I was able to convey why I believe world football needs it so much.
If you’re a die-hard fan of a popular football club, I hope I was able to capture the reason why you have fallen in love with the movement and the people behind it.
*** To be clear, I do not put any blame on the fans, players, or (most) staff who work for football clubs owned by morally bankrupt owners. I put all the blame on the executives and other decision makers who have dragged innocent people into being associated with ‘dirty’ money.
I discovered popular football on a trip to Italy last November. With much of local football shut down for the World Cup, I found Palermo Calcio Popolare and later discovered the wider movement of Calcio Popolare. While I lived and coached in Ireland and in the Pacific, I'm now in Canada and have been involved in the local and provincial football association. I'd love to explore the lessons of popular football for the North American context. Let me know if you're willing to make contact.
Me again. Please let me know if you're willing to speak about this in more detail. I've already talked to those managing www.calciopopolare.com/. I've asked around to see if any Canadian clubs would be appropriate for your list and might follow up with the American teams you mention. Best wishes.