The Owner

Whenever I come across fans' talk about these guys, there's never any sense of what you'd understand by ownership in normal life - complete possession of the thing, unlimited right to control it, deployment of it to turn a profit, etc. Instead it seems to be envisaged as some kind of honorary patrician/custodian role by which The Owner is expected to make a contribution, usually financial. If he does get a benefit from it, beyond free tickets, it's almost by accident when a greater owner comes along and gives him a bag of cash for the privilege.

It's not even entirely wrong, if one still clings to the view that the word 'club' is more than historical accident - it's kind of what directors are envisaged to do in the FA statutes. But I did wonder whether The Owner is actually an entirely recent invention - was there ever one before Jack Walker who did anything as significant? Before then, we'd've been talking about directors, no? Now everyone's got one, and if it's an old-fashioned silent shareholder like Stan Kroenke or a poor one like Bill Kenwright then bad luck, but in an ideal world you can always ditch him and get new owners in.

V good topic. It does feel like the owner dictates the identity and mood of a club. The era of The Manager being the club is gone.

Lots of things to think on but for now I'll just sit and think about Ron Noades being kicked to death by a consortium of fans.

i was going to post something yesterday - i'm assuming the current Allam shenanigans have at least partially informed this thread? - about the hilarity of listening to football fans/pundits wrestling with the difference between legal and moral right

i'm very open to the idea that moral rights don't exist, which is the de facto position re: club ownership i guess: the club's owner has the legal right to do anything they want to with their club, as far as business law and the governing bodies of the various competitions allow. but a club without a competition, or to a lesser extent without supporters, is a far less valuable asset - i won't say valueless because of weirdnesses of non-attending support that we might explore.

so the owner, which is generally a specific, identifiable agent or set of agents, generally has to come to some satisfactory settlement with the fans, an amorphous theoretical blob to some extent, in order to maximize the benefits, financial, status, whatever, of owning the club.

shd've continued: anybody who believes in moral rights might argue that those rights curtail the owner's privilege of treating a club in any way they choose. the problem for punditry on the whole is that this distinction seems to elude people like Ian Wright.

personally i have an "ought" as far as clubs is concerned but fully recognize that my feelings don't describe the situation as it exists now or has ever existed.

i feel sure there must've been owners from the beginning of the Professional era who ran their clubs as private fiefdoms but literally so - as a kind of feudal power rather than a capitalist one; local business magnate running the club for the prestige and probably at no great personal cost for a long time, altho their word wd still be law.

don't know anything about superiors pressuring a Herbert Chapman or a Stan Cullis tbh - those guys seemed to be supreme powers from what i've read

got to say the possibilities for fan resistance irking an Allam enough to drive him away are considerably greater than say the anti-Glazer movement at United, where the situation seems too corporate and lucrative for a few scarves or mean chants to ruffle any feathers

xps Immediate context is him, plus Steve Bruce getting rave reviews for 'demanding talks' in the least forthright manner possible ("If we are Hull City Tigers or we are Hull City, whatever we are, we have got to stay together going forward because we need all the help we can get."). And the comical idea of fans 'getting new owners in'.

But the thing that got me thinking about it is this quote from Bill Shankly: "At a football club, there's a holy trinity - the players, the manager and the supporters. Directors don't come into it. They are only there to sign the cheques." and how The Owner isn't even in it. I might be wrong, but I don't think there was ever any suggestion that a director should cough up his own cash; he was there to administer ours.

The Glazers might be unique in actually behaving as owners as per my first sentence. Everyone else I can think of is to some extent either a benefactor, or the classic silent director type.

i think economically that's probably true-ish altho by the 1970s i can certainly remember stories about the cost of running a club - always essentially a money-losing enterprise - and in the mid-80s Wolves very nearly went out of existence for reasons which revolve around its most notorious owners, the Bhatti brothers.

http://twohundredpercent.net/?p=23076

have to remember that Hull City fans have strong folkloric memories of driving away one undesirable owner, David Lloyd; albeit in a lower stakes division

http://www.wsc.co.uk/the-archive/30-Clubs/6205-hull-on-earth

a lot of fans now are well aware that wealthy owners don't grow on trees tho, and reaction to an Allam is divisive. have to bear in mind that fans never really know how much money an owner has put into or taken out of a club - so much opacity in football finances - so it's not stupid to take with a pinch of salt an owner's protestations as to how much they've thrown at yr club.

The Glazers might be unique in actually behaving as owners as per my first sentence.

Only because it's about the only club you could actually make any money from. I'm sure there would be plenty more leeches out there if the opportunities arose.

I thought of a protoJack Walker - David Murray at Rangers. Did the Agnellis bankroll Juventus, or just give influence? Italy seems to have had the patrician-owner much longer than here.

The current Town chairman Dean Hoyle is a fan owner, sort of like between Walker and Kenwright. He has done a lot of good legacy work like upgrading training facilities, wrangling back our stadium shares from the piece of shit that stole them for 2 quid while we were in admin. I am not into worshipping him, if you have seen one self made multi-millionaire you have seen them all. Imo he has been very good for the club, but I still wouldn't care if he walked out and left us to fend for ourselves. Cos basically I still enjoyed watching them when they were shite and they have been shite for most of my life, apart from the Mick Buxton era and some of the Warnock era was a blast.

When Dean took over the club he did £100 season tickets and put up posters everywhere where he looks like one of these cunts from the ILM oasis/swagger thread, with YOU BUY THE TICKETS, WE WILL BUY THE PLAYERS. This was in the same year when we won FAMILY CLUB OF THE YEAR. Yeah the same year when I stopped renewing my season ticket after explaining to the steward that kept pedantically telling my - at the the time 7 year old son with autism- to sit down, that I would break his fucking nose if he approached my son again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Gregory_(football_chairman)

proto-walker but crude proto-briatore despot also

feel p bad for allan in this instance tbh, stitched up for a dece zing out of context

allam even

Ron gone
http://www.croydonguardian.co.uk/news/10898787.Former_Palace_chairman_Ron_Noades_passes_away/?ref=var_0