Supporters tire of being taken for granted

On The Premiership:'In some ways I admire football fans. In what other business can you serve up crap and then have people come back for more?"

This sounds like a line spouted by Alan Sugar, the prickly, bristle-bound star of The Apprentice and, in a former life, the chairman of Tottenham Hotspur.

As it happens, it isn't. It was delivered by Simon Jordan, the brightly-coloured owner of Crystal Palace and a Sugar Lite for the lower leagues: all gob and no gumption.

Jordan is the sort of man people cross continents to avoid, but his puffed-up proclamations often carry a whiff of truth. It is one of the reasons he manages to upset the great and good, despite his club's lowly status. On this occasion, however, he is horribly wrong: for the first time since the dark, dismal days of the 1980s, the fans are in revolt. And this time, their disenchantment may be terminal.

In the past two weeks alone, we have seen England's players subjected to abuse which made even the most hardened tabloid hacks quiver, a host of managers being shoved to the brink of unemployment by restless natives and - most worryingly - travelling fans finally losing patience with lumpen foreign police forces and fighting back on the terraces of Rome and Seville.

And all this set against a gloomy backdrop of falling crowds and rising ticket prices.

Football supporters used to wear their unwavering, unrelenting loyalty as badges of honour. Their devotion defied the laws of physics, growing stronger and more unquestioning even as the fortunes of their respective clubs plummeted to hitherto uncharted depths.

When Manchester City were relegated to the third tier of English football for the first time in their history in 1999, crowds at Maine Road actually went up.

The same was true for Nottingham Forest, who are currently rubbing grubby shoulders with League One's down-and-outs.

In the absence of trophies, such unflinching fidelity was a decent consolation prize - something to be paraded under the noses of more successful rivals.

Now, the opposite is true, with fans apparently seeking to out-do each other in the ancient art of spleen-venting.

Is this shocking? Not particularly. In fact, the only surprise is that the mood of the masses has not curdled sooner. Football is in many ways a deeply unlikable industry, populated - for the most part - by preening, posturing idiots.

The sport's ravenous commercial appetite has devoured whatever Corinthian values it still possessed and with more cash set to flood in next season, courtesy of a new television rights deal, there is no suggestion they are likely to return.

Supporters, quite understandably, have lost patience and the flames of hostility are being fanned most vigorously among the traditional diehards.

No club has seen their average attendance dip more alarmingly this season than Manchester City, with over 6,000 regulars drifting away from Eastlands stadium, while Newcastle - the club who reinvented the concept of football brand loyalty by renaming their fan-base the "Toon Army" - are far from confident of filling their redesigned 60,000-seat stadium.

It says it all that Freddie Shepherd, the chairman, spent more time last week waxing lyrical on St James' Park's improved conference facilities than on building the country's third-biggest league ground.

Fans have every right to feel disenfranchised. The gulf between the working man in the stands and the Luis Vuitton man-bag-toting prima donna on the pitch has never been greater.

Club owners, meanwhile, have never been so out of touch, a point proved with accidental eloquence by Eggert Magnusson last week when he made the laughable claim claimed that the average West Ham supporter earns £60,000-a-year.

Presumably the census was conducted by Magnusson over vol-au-vents in the Upton Park boardroom.

Yet fans must never feel that they are powerless. If crowds continue to dwindle and apathy takes an even tighter grip, the game's power-brokers will have no option but to act.

Empty stadiums make for bad broadcasts, as the organisers of cricket's World Cup are discovering, and Sky will not keep forking out record sums if "the most exciting league in the world" is backed by nothing more than upturned seats.

The plain truth is that football needs its fans - needs their backing, needs their noise, needs their money. Need proof?

Look no further than the official Crystal Palace website, which last week posted an article headed "We Want You!", where Chairman Jordan pleaded desperately for supporters to turn out for the club's last three, meaningless home matches.

Needless to say, they didn't get the required response - the crowd at yesterday's game with Preston North End was Palace's lowest of the season.

Maybe the Palace "faithful" just got tired of all the crap.