The Longside Reference

The Heart of Football.

      Burnley FC was born 125 years ago. 120 years ago twelve clubs formed the Football League. Burnley was one of them and is thus at the heart of League football. Today we talk more and more about exactly what makes the heart of football. Has money made it different? Has SKY TV altered it forever? Exactly what is at the centre of football? What is it that makes it the game that it is and draws so many people in? Does it still have heart or is it just a heartless business now dominated by corporate millions, sponsorship and greed?  It’s been put to me that if you have to ask what it is, you can’t be a real and passionate fan. “It’s just something inside, it’s just there. I wouldn’t know where to begin to explain,” said one fan.

     It was at Sheffield Wednesday in August 2006 when something happened that convinced me that football still does have a heart and a soul. Surrounded by the greed of numerous Premiership Clubs, their endless quest to protect their own interests, the obscene salaries paid to so many players, the conceit and arrogance of too many of them – including many who play below Premiership level, it’s all too easy to believe that football has lost something, and that it is no longer what it was. Certainly it is no longer the ‘working man’s game and by ‘working man’ I mean those who slaved in factories five days a week for a pittance and who found their release on a Saturday afternoon. Those were the days when it was not uncommon for players to travel side by side on the bus with supporters to a game, when player and supporter lived side by side in the same terraced street. Today it is corporate finance that rules the game and nothing can illustrate that better than the 2006 World Cup and the influence of the major sponsors on ticket distribution. Today so many players live in gated mansions and converted barns. Contact between them and fans is fleeting.

     But at Sheffield, when the Burnley team came out on the field I had a lump in my throat at the sound of 2000 people letting out such a roar of allegiance that it nearly lifted the roof off. Add to that, the sight of them, mostly in claret, handclapping and waving in unison, as if they were one body, and it was one of those moments when you think, “this is football… this is why we come.”

    Maybe it is just something that’s there, but it has beginnings, it has things that sustain it, there is a motivation to continue to follow, through thick and thin, which sometimes has no rational explanation.

     At Burnley the club nearly lost everything in 1987, never mind its heart and soul. Had the unthinkable happened, and League status lost, then the club might well have folded. All that would have remained would have been memories, newspaper archives, old programmes and the history books. God knows what would have happened to the ground, maybe by now it would be the site of an Asda or a Mothercare. But perhaps the heart and soul of a club came to life that day. Perhaps it became a visible, audible and tangible thing that roared down the terraces in cascades as an inadequate team somehow dug down deep and won. That’s the closest I have ever been, I think, to what the heart of a club really is.

     Can you list what makes up that heart… there’s tradition and history, there’s the bricks and mortar of Turf Moor, it has been there since 1882. Think of the people, past players, the bond between town and club. If a club has heart does it mean courage in adversity, the will to bounce back, a sort of collective guts and bravery? Is it something to do with the ability to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? And if that is the case, it is not just the people at the top who manage the club, it is the support that turns up and rallies and contributes in the way that the supporters of Burnley did when the begging bowls went out as administration approached not too long ago.

     The word ‘collective’ comes up many times. Words like ‘belonging’ and ‘tribal.’ Maybe ‘family’ is another word that defines the group feeling that acts as such a great leveller wherever you travel and whoever you meet. Most of us have probably stopped at a Motorway Station and got out of the car to find ourselves next to another Claret. What do you do? You smile and strike up a conversation automatically. At away games you hold and hug whoever is next to you when you score, you might not have a clue who they are but that doesn’t matter in that moment of jubilation. 

     Maybe too is the idea that at the heart of football is the umbilical cord that binds you to a club, so that if you leave a town and live far away, you still feel that connection with the place, still retain an identity with it, still have memories of your youth and the times spent following that team and of all the experiences that you had and the people you once knew.    

     It’s a mystifying phenomenon. You support your club as an individual, but together, collectively, you give something much more than that. Is it the act of giving? You give yourself, you give your heart, you give your money, you give your time and whether it’s a chairman putting millions into a club to keep it alive, or the fan buying his ticket, each one gives what he can and in that respect there is a connection and a point of contact and we’re all just the same. The efforts that so many people have made to raise funds for Burnley FC Youth development is outstanding. The heart of football is nowhere more evident than in the group of supporters who call their fund raising ‘The Year of the Youth’ and have raised thousands of pounds. 

     What about friendship being at the heart of football? There’s constancy about friendship, about being with the same people week in week out, about travelling with them, or not seeing them through the summer months but then there they are again in August and you pick up where you left off at the final game. For sure, at the heart of football are the memories of the people who used to be with you, sat with you, shared your thoughts and journeys, and then they pass away and all that remains are the football times that you had together. For so many people the images they hold are of fathers or grandfathers with whom they went to games, and now they remember the terraces on which they stood, held hands when they were small, went to their first games and the colour claret seeped into their hearts and souls.

     Maybe it’s the raw emotion that ties us all together. Ecstasy, joy, despondency or gloom, are they the heart of football? No matter how many millions a club might have, no matter how other small clubs might have a tiny budget; all it’s about, at the end of the day, is winning or losing, and the fan of any club feels the same emotions be they rich or poor. The 1 – 0 FA Cup win against Liverpool, the 4 – 0 win against Plymouth that ended that horrendous run of winless games. We saw the joy of winning and the eruption of emotion.

       There’s always this argument that the real heart of football lies only at its grass roots but I’m not sure that’s true if emotion and passion are at its centre. Try telling the Spion Kop at Anfield that there’s no heart of football there. For me, it is essentially people who are at the heart of football. The people who run coach trips, supporters’ clubs, websites, fanzines, run Sunday morning teams, coach children, raise money, travel hundreds of miles, supporters who sit agonisingly by Ceefax waiting for results, shed tears of joy when promotion comes their way, or tears of desolation at relegation, and the chairmen and directors who genuinely love their clubs and work to keep them alive. 

      Jimmy Greaves wrote his book The Heart of Football and tried to get to the bottom of it. In endless newspapers you see articles under the heading ‘the Heart of Football’ but, put a hundred people in one room and they would all come up with different individual answers. It is just the greatest of games and without its people, would simply wither.
                                                        
     One such person was Brian Miller who died in April. If there is such a thing as ‘the football man’ then Brian was that man. He gave most of his life and all of his heart to Burnley Football Club. He was one of that group of players whose names we know off by heart.  They won the Championship in ‘59/60, they reached the Cup Final in ’62 and in between they graced the fields of Europe. Injury brought his career to a close but his association with Burnley as player, coach, assistant manager, manager and chief scout spanned four decades. Every club has its very short list of people who made special contributions. The name Brian Miller is on that list at Turf Moor. I met him several times and he gave so much help with the Harry Potts book, three meetings totalling nearly seven hours. Nothing was too much trouble for him to find out. He was a one club man, and a one town man; a giant of a man who gave every thing that he could in the pursuit of success for Burnley Football Club. It is men such as Brian Miller, modest, unassuming, but constantly giving, who form the heart of football.

    At the heart of football is the fan’s eternal hope that the next game his team might win, that next month they might be a little higher in the table, that next season there might be a title or a promotion. We have a club here that is proud and certain of its past but less certain of its future. If success comes it will not come easy. Yet one more season has ended and at the heart of football are our dreams for the one to come. Roll on August. Let’s start all over again.

(Dave Thomas 2007)