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ROGAN TAYLOR: DOING A 'GEOFFREY'

4:30pm Thursday, 25th February 2010

This week we were regaled by a chap calling for a 'boycott' of Man Utd by its growingly troubled fans. It wasn't some firebrand on a soap-box haranguing the Old Trafford faithful either; it emanated from somewhere higher up the feeding chain. No less than Keith Harris, in fact, one-time Chairman of the Football League, and current chairman of stockbrokers, Seymour Pearce.

Harris is not inexperienced at arranging football take-over's, he was involved in the purchase of Aston Villa by Randy Lerner. But this time he's leading a 'fans' buy-out' and warning the Man Utd scarf wearers that it will take more than turning up in the 'symbolic' gold and green ones to hurt the much despised American owners of the Club. Quoted in the Mail, he advised:

'The green and gold protest is fabulous....But that won't force the Glazers to sell to us. However, if enough people - and I am talking about thousands - stop turning up to matches and do not renew their tickets, then that does it. The supporters have to hurt the Glazers in their pockets.'

Any chance of a boycott like this coming together? Could 'doing a Geoffrey' do the trick?

Despite the common slang, of course it wasn't the cricketer, Geoffrey Boycott, who gave his name to this most popular activity. It was first used in 1880, with reference to the concerted efforts of the tenants of one, Captain Charles Boycott, a particularly nasty English landlord in County Mayo, Ireland, and supposedly first coined by the local priest; Father O'Mally. The 'boycott' was pretty effective too. Within a year, the Captain and his family had retreated back to the Home Counties.

Sporting boycotts have worked in the past too - perhaps most famously (and laudably) in the case of changing apartheid South Africa - but many fail, or rather they succeed in making a point but don't in reality change much. There is a precedent at Man Utd. In 1930, local taxi-driver, George Greenough - who had formed the first Man Utd Supporters' Club a few years earlier - called for a general boycott of Old Trafford, after a run of poor results. He actually did stand on a soap-box imploring the fans not to enter the ground, with some success. Only 23,000 went in for the Arsenal game and subsequent gates dropped below 10,000. But the Club bought him off and gave him a job. In 1934, we read '...Greenough has travelled extensively with the Club (where) he now holds an official post.'

The Football Association went in for boycotts too. The FA was always deeply disturbed by FIFA's very existence (for a start the French had invented it). The English boycotted the World Cups between the World Wars claiming, prior to the 1938 competition, there was a 'lack of interest amongst the populace', and notoriously never entered the World Cup until 1950. It didn't seem to make much difference to the progress of football's global governing body.

Some would argue that the lasting boycott of the Sun by Liverpool people in general has hurt the newspaper - and they say it has never recovered the lost readership, with 3.3 million copies sold nationwide, it reputedly shifts only 12,000 in Liverpool. But the paper is still a big beast roaming the jungle. The Hillsborough Justice Campaign organised a one-off boycott of an LFC away match at Sheffield Wednesday in 1998, reducing the expected travelling fans from the usual 7,000 plus, to a rump of just over a thousand. The Brighton fans' boycotts of their Chairman's 'Focus' DIY store in 2004 (and subsequently the businesses who bought space in the retail park that replaced their old ground, including ASDA) had an effect but couldn't hold back the tide.

Then you get the just plain silly ones like the Bayern Munich fans' threats to boycott the movie, 'The Day the Earth Stood Still' because it featured the cosmic destruction of their much vaunted Arena stadium in the trailer for the film. (Many of us joined them in the boycott without realising it.) The Sunderland fans threatened 'Sugar Puffs' with retaliation for their sponsorship of Newcastle; and then there was the 'cappuccino war' in Italy, after Lazio's purchase of Vieri was immediately followed by rises in the local price of milk. The Roma fans thought Lazio's, President (and owner of a huge food chain) was making them pay for the big striker who'd signed for their hated rivals. So they stopped drinking the milky stuff.

But asking fans not to go to games has rarely worked; it's a bit like asking opium smokers not to take the next puff. But times change and fans are much more effectively organised - and knowledgeable about the realities of the game's finances - than ever they were before. Many of them feel physically revolted by the debt based acquisitions of their clubs and the lack of empathy of their owners. And being revolted can lead to revolting.

It may even lead to joint demonstrations against their separate owners, involving both Liverpool and Man Utd fans at the Old Trafford match between the two clubs on 21st March. If that could happen in a well-organised and collegiate atmosphere, it really would be a first.

If it does, perhaps anything is possible?

Dr Rogan Taylor is the Director of the Football Industry Group at the University of Liverpool. He is also a writer and broadcaster, with five football books and numerous radio and TV contributions. He has acted as a special adviser to The FA, The Premier League and Premier League Clubs.

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