Monday May 8th, 2023: to Burnley, for a meaningless football match between the home team and Cardiff City. Meaningless, that is, in a really nice way because the home team, which I support, were already promoted to the Premier League and confirmed as champions of the English Football League and, for that matter, the opposition had succeeded in remaining in the Championship. So the day was more about the pub lunch at noon, the entertainment before the match and the presentations afterwards than it was about the football. But, for the record, the team did the decent thing and won 3-0.

The oral evidence suggests that I first went to Turf Moor to watch the Clarets in 1953 which makes me seventy years a Claret. Nobody could deny that it has been a very extreme experience. Nine times down and nine times up. We share with Wolverhampton Wanderers the achievement of having won championships at four different levels – three at second tier level and one each at first, third and fourth. (A bit of pedantry: there are three other teams which make similar claims. They are Preston North End, Portsmouth and Sheffield United. But those three did not achieve the feat when there were actually four tiers. For example, Preston only won the “top” tier in the nineteenth century when it was the only tier.) Uniquely, Burnley have been top of the whole football pyramid during my time and rock bottom, 92nd. The former occurred several times in the early 1960s and the latter in May 1987.

So the highs have been very high and the lows very low. No doubt about the extreme low: it was walking out of Gresty Road, Crewe, on a summer evening in 1987 having lost 0-1 to the home side, resting 92nd in the Football League leaving the club in a position when it would be expelled from the Football League if several things did not happen. Fortunately they did, but nothing will expunge the memory of walking out of those Gresty Road terraces stepping around prostrate, weeping adults; I had two small boys to get home. The high should be being champions of England in 1960 and I do remember celebrating, in a boarding school bathroom, as news came through of our 2-1 victory over Manchester City which clinched the title. But I was an arrogant teenager then who knew nothing of adversity and I thought winning was just the way things were. Strangely, my most glorious memories are of winning the Fourth Division title in 1991-2. It was the most games I ever went to, a whole season of cathedrals and pubs and obscure football grounds shared with three sons and a brother-in-law – and every ticket, pie and pint paid for by Ladbrokes because I put a wadge on at 16-1. That was the victory that meant the graph had bottomed, that we weren’t doomed to endless failure, that we were on our way back.

At this point I must revert to academic mode and explain that there are two entirely different models for organising a professional team sport in the age of television. The first is the Major League model. The sport is run by a central directorate who limit and license the clubs involved. Salaries and registrations are also centrally regulated to ensure continuity and financial viability and television contracts benefit all. The alternative model is the pyramid: independent clubs form leagues which are then organised into a hierarchy in which clubs which do well rise into a higher league and those which do badly fall into a lower league. American sport is all along the Major League model and so is most cricket and rugby. European football is almost entirely pyramid in shape.

Undeniably, Major League is the rational way to organise a modern sport because you can plan for the future and ensure financial viability while generating constant high-level games between reasonably matched teams. No wonder it is what most rugby club owners want and even in football some of the biggest clubs in Europe want a “European Super League” which recognises the historic grandeur of some clubs and is thus at least a hybrid version of major league in thin disguise. The immediate motivation is that even a giant like Real Madrid has difficulty in competing with clubs in England and France that are effectively funded by foreign states.

By comparison the pyramid is madness, a world of mismatches and the ever-present threats of bankruptcy, administration and oblivion. Financial planning is not possible when your income might be fractionalised by a run of injuries and/or a ball hitting a bar rather than a net. Most people who run sport would therefore prefer major league to the pyramid. So would many of the armchair fans whose experience of football is watching the game at the highest level on television, the sort of “fans” who have never actually been to the location of the team they support. As Florentino Perez, president of Real Madrid, points out they want to see Real play Liverpool, which happens occasionally and randomly, rather than Real playing Elche with the result almost a foregone conclusion.

But the madness is exciting and absorbing; the uncertainties are real and limitless. It’s not just about, “We had one of our better seasons this year” or “A bit disappointing”. It’s about survival and wild dreams. In 1987 we thought we might be bankrupt and disappearing into the mists of history with Third Lanark. Right now the redoubtable Mr. Vincent Kompany, our manager and a man who ticks boxes other people don’t even know exist, is telling us that there might be no limit to our aspirations. It’s not just an endless story, it’s a story where the entire context shifts. In 1987 rumour had it that we were going to go to the wall with debts of a million pounds. Now that’s a good deal less than we pick up for a week’s television rights.

Because the latest twist to the tale is surely one that nobody would have anticipated or dared to include in a fictional version of the story. In the Manichean struggle between Major League and the Pyramid it is now being recognised on an unprecedented scale that the Pyramid is more interesting. That involves the recognition of a paradox that some things are more entertaining than that which is designed as entertainment. The long term part of that is the sheer persistence of support for teams which will never win anything “major” and will probably never even compete at the highest level. When Burnley were in the Fourth Division my mother used to ask me, in a kindly and rational way, why I didn’t support a team which was closer to home and much better, specifically Coventry City. But like hundreds of thousands of us I took the view that the team chose me not the other way round. I hadn’t trekked to see Burnley play at eighty or so different grounds (only a few of which would qualify as a “stadium” in order to abandon them because they weren’t very good.

And since 2020 the word has spread in an unexpected way. An American and a Canadian actor, Rob McIlheney and Ryan Reynolds, bought Wrexham FC and made a documentary about their experience, Welcome to Wrexham. The global attention they have gained for a fifth tier club winning a mighty struggle to be a fourth tier club has revealed an important truth: it isn’t the level of sport that makes it interesting, but the plot and the drama and the allegiance. In racing watching the nag with your bet on it that wins some old selling plate plate by a neck is a good deal more interesting than than watching the best thoroughbred around win by ten lengths. Wrexham will have an unprecedented following in next year’s Fourth Division which will, again paradoxically, be because it has a following from some loyal folk who have stuck with the cause through some very lean years.

It reminds me of some of the later years of my academic career when the discussion of “globalisation” was high on the agenda. One sub-theme was that intensified localisation was an important reaction to globalisation – or was it that localisation was part of globalisation. So when, in the 2023-24 season we sit in the Miners’ Welfare Club with a pint of beer and perhaps a Bene chaser to guard against the cold we might just be joined by Mr. J..J. Watt, distinguished American Footballer, and his wife, an international “soccer” player brought into the club by our (American) chairman to raise our American profile. Why not have the benefits of a continuing local tradition and a money-spinning global profile?

Anyway on June 15th it all starts again in that we learn the new fixtures and contact friends and relations about whether and how we can go to which games. It’s like having a “familiar”, a mysterious alter ego, an extra part of the self that is shared with others. Can’t wait.

Lincoln Allison May 2023