Sports fans are a demanding lot.
We want success, play in a fashionable style and have marquee players we can look up to.
Football has probably the most demanding supporters in the sports world. Grown men – including yours truly – have lost their senses and sometimes brains when barracking for their club or country.
From the fan on a low income to the high roller in the corporate box, the equaliser is they are all backing their team and hoping they win a cup or championship that they can remember till their dying day.
Perhaps this may explain the shenanigans in Perth where the Glory have been found guilty by the FFA of going over the salary cap by over $400,000.
An owner, a CEO and admin staff were so desperate to bring the good times back to Perth that they experienced in the last years of the NSL, that they scrapped the long term youth plan that previous coach Alastair Edwards had in place and brought star players that would have cost – as now discovered – a pretty penny.
It still amazes me when smart businesspeople who have made smart choices in the corporate world lose all sense of reality when they become involved in a football club.
You would think they saw what happened to clubs in other sports such as Melbourne Storm and Carlton that lessons have been learnt, but unfortunately when you are dealing with people with huge egos and who want to win at any cost, it is amazing this doesn’t happen more often.
In the end it is the supporters that suffer due to the greed and incompetence of people running who, while they want to be the messiah, just end up being a naughty little boy.
About Vaughan Menlove
Obsessed with Richmond, Luton Town, Melbourne Victory and Arsenal. The Dr had a soccer career hampered by the realisation he was crap, but could talk his way around the game. Co host of It's Not Called Soccer podcast
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Is this all new to you Vaughn? Just as well you don’t barrack for Carlton or Essendon, eh?
Tony Sage; Nathan Tinkler; Clive Palmer; Geoffrey Edelsten; Eddy Groves – and to some degree Jack Elliott and Richard Pratt. The problem is not that they DON’T bring the same attitudes and behaviours that they use in business, the problem is that they DO.
Sport doesn’t allow them the same opaque complexities of corporate structures to hide their owerweening greed and legal bullying, and they get found out and humiliated (though its hard to humiliate a sociopath).
You are right that it is the fans that suffer. Players, coaches and corporate staff have more capacity for due diligence, but understandably don’t want to dig too deep for fear of what they will find.
“Whatever it takes” indeed.
Thanks for raising an important issue Vaughan.
Fully agree with you PB. The fact the Australians in general somehow look up to and tolerate the business bastards, then wonder why the same types then ruin sporting clubs always makes me shake my head, and laugh.