Owners in England must understand a club is more than a business

Several foreign owners of English clubs are adept in business but fail to grasp the ramifications of the social contract between club and community

Hull City owner Assem Allam looks on before the Premier League match between Hull City and Fulham at the KC Stadium on December 28. Lindsey Parnaby / AFP

What is a football club? In law, in England, it is a business like any other, regulated by the rules of the league in which it plays, and yet there is a very clear sense that it is something more than that.

As more clubs are taken over by foreign owners – by people who lack the nebulous and yet still profound sense that most involved in English football have of what a club should be – the issue becomes increasingly fraught.

Assem Allam, the Egyptian businessman who owns Hull City, seems in no doubt that the club is just another business, one he thinks would be more marketable if they were called Hull Tigers.

Fans, who have spent the past 110 years calling the club Hull City, are generally appalled, and the Football Association is consulting “stakeholders” before deciding whether to ratify the name change ahead of next season.

“No one on earth is allowed to question my business decisions,” Allam said. “I won’t allow it. I can give you my CV to give you comfort for what I do in business, what I have achieved, but for someone to come and question me is not allowed.

“I’m here to save the club and manage the club for the benefit of the community. It will never, never be the other way round – that the community manage it for me. But if the community say go away, I promise to go away within 24 hours.”

Legally, of course, he is right. This is not Germany, where clubs must be majority owned by their members: once somebody owns a club, it is theirs to do with what they want – even, as it turned out in the case of Wimbledon, moving the club to another city.

Cardiff City fans are going through something similar with Vincent Tan, who has changed their traditional blue shirts to red, as well as having sacked a popular manager who seemed to be doing a decent job of keeping them in the Premier League.

Venky’s have made an almighty mess of Blackburn Rovers and now there is panic at Southampton as their chairman, Nicola Cortese, has been stood down after falling out with the owner Katharina Liebherr.

Yet football clubs are not just businesses, something made clear by a statue that stands by the entrance to Sunderland’s Stadium of Light. It depicts a family of the 1930s. Standing behind two children, a mother holds up the arm of a flat-capped father as though she were a boxing referee and he had just won a title bout. His face creased by the hardships of life, he holds aloft a sphere made of three interlocking hoops.

A plaque in the plinth makes the point overtly: “All generations come together at the Stadium of Light,” it reads. “A love of ‘The Lads’ has bonded together supporters for more than 125 years and will for many more years in the future. Supporters who have passed away have their support carried on by today’s fans, just as the supporters of today will have their support continued through family and friends.”

The statue was raised in 1998, shortly after Sunderland moved to the new stadium and was part of a surge of optimism that carried them to promotion in 1999. It makes the point clearly: a football club has a responsibility to its community because for so many it is the focal point of that community. It is not a franchise to be traded and moved and fiddled with; it is in some hard-to-define way an emblem of the region.

Sunderland were owned by Bob Murray, a local businessman, when the statue was erected. Since then, the club has passed through an Irish consortium to the Texas millionaire Ellis Short.

He is better than many, and yet it is doubtful that somebody from Sunderland would ever have appointed Paulo Di Canio as manager, a man whose politics were wholly at odds with those of the city.

The only power fans have to resist owners is not turning up, but even that can feel like a betrayal. At clubs where there is a waiting list for season tickets, it is understandable if those who have been going for years keep going.

The flip side is that most Premier League owners have invested an awful lot of necessary money.

The Liebherrs saved Southampton after relegation to League One, while Allam has invested £75 million (Dh453m) in Hull and Tan’s money got Cardiff promoted. Owners, naturally, feel that gives them the right to do what they want with a thing they own.

You just wish that they realised that when you buy a football club, you are not just buying a football club but also entering a social contract.

There may be no legal obligation, but there is a moral one, which is to protect the values and traditions of an institution that has helped bond a community, in many cases, for more than a century.