Money Loves Football Culture. But It Hates The People Shaping It.

Three stories show what money really thinks about the folks who built football culture.

Photo: Zach Rowlandson, Unsplash

Manchester City just announced a £300 million expansion of the Etihad. Not to create more spaces for season ticket holders. No. To make room for more tourists and VIPs. It's Disneyland for day-trippers. Meanwhile, lifelong fans, the ones who stuck around when City were playing Grimsby Town, are left begging for scraps.

In Germany, Fredi Bobic once again doubled down on his dismissal of Ultras. Talking to Kicker magazine, he said the growing influence of Ultras is “a danger for German football.” His argument? Ultras don't want investors. They don't want football clubs treated like hedge funds. In Bobic's world, that kind of thinking is backwards. Dangerous. An obstacle to “growth.”

And then, a while back, there was the cabal behind the Super League endeavors. Geniuses who think of die-hard supporters as “legacy fans”. Very revealing language: In their book, legacy fans are nothing more than a “fixed revenue stream”, a nuisance on retainer, while they actually have their eyes on the “fans of the future”. As the Athletic put it: “It is a deliberate “othering” of fans. It reduces who and what are the lifeblood of a club to something trivial, a box on a spreadsheet (...) club hierarchies have nothing to be afraid of in screwing them over.”

The disdain of the higher ups for fans is almost funny, if it wasn't so utterly predictable.

Because football culture – real culture, the thing that makes clubs bigger than just corporate logos – wasn't created in boardrooms. It wasn't brainstormed in marketing departments. It wasn't the result of investor decks and quarterly growth projections.

It was made by said legacy fans.

Made by working-class kids on concrete terraces. Built by Ultras who spend thousands of unpaid hours painting banners, choreographing displays, organising away trips. Created by season ticket holders who passed down their seats like family heirlooms. Manufactured by the old heads in their battle vests and scarf skirts. Supported by the people who keep the local pub alive because they watch every away game on the crap old tele in the corner.

It was built by people who stuck around when their clubs gave them nothing but heartbreak. When the floodlights failed, the team played like crap, and the only thing that made it bearable was the bloke next to you, singing the same hopeless songs.

Legacy fans built this. Not money.

Football clubs, ultimately, might be the only true Love Brands. Something marketing departments dream off. Nothing a marketing department can create out of thin air.

But in the past decades, the organisations running football have been creating a hostile environment.

Kick-off times spread out over a weekend to make room for more TV coverage, making attendance less and less accessible for regulars.

Ticket prices skyrocketing, locking families and low-income fans out.

Four or more expensive kits per team per season, in addition to multiple merch drops. Nice, if you’re into footy fashion like myself, but too much financial pressure for many fans.

Increasingly sterile and exclusionary club culture catering to suits and celebrities.

Case in point: The German football association reserved a whopping 20% of Olympiastadion’s capacity at the DFB cup final for sponsors and VIPs. Absolutely unreasonable, or rather: outright classist, as one disappointed fan on Bsky pointed out.

I am not saying this has all been part of a sprawling conspiracy to push legacy fans out. But the sum of it all contributes to fans feeling less and less welcome in the sport they love.

What the money forgets:

It’s the legacy fans that helped make football an attractive investment in the first place. Alienate football’s core support and you risk hurting your investment.

Without the old boys and girls with their battle vests and scarf skirts, without the season ticket holders, without the Ultras, many, many stadiums in Europe would be dead.

Atmosphere? Gone.

Loyalty? Gone.

Identity? Gone.

And the influence of legacy fans goes beyond song and Tifo. They hold their clubs accountable. They get involved in their communities. And they put societal issues front and center of their support. Especially the much maligned Ultras.

Sure, legacy fans aren't perfect. There's violence. There's exclusion. Even some legacy fans question whether, sometimes, the Ultra’s dominance on the terraces is just a tad too much. Whether there is, actually, something like too organized when it comes to support.

There's still too much toxicity. Even in 2025, Sexism, Racism and Queerphobia are an issue. Sometimes it gets real ugly. Especially among fan groups affiliated with the far right. And yes, that’s something we need to talk about – but it’s a separate discussion.

Ironically, these are not the reasons the money guys want to keep legacy fans out. For them, Ultras and others are a problem because they stand between them and a bigger profit margin.

Without legacy fans, football would be a sterile, globalised content farm. Another entertainment product. A place to grab a selfie before heading back to the food court.

The suits love the noise, the flags, the Tifos. They love to slap it into marketing videos, to show the “authentic football experience” to sponsors. Investors are happy to go all parasitic over legacy fans for the purposes of “brand building”.

But the people who create that atmosphere – they see them as a nuisance. As a threat.

City's expansion plan isn't about making the club better for supporters. It's about creating a better “visitor experience.” It's about turning a living, breathing football club into a shopping centre with a pitch attached.

Bobic's comments aren't about safeguarding football. They're about making it safer for investors. Easier to monetise. Less messy, less noisy, less human.

Humanity – real, unpredictable humanity – is bad for business.

They want “passionate” fans. But not too passionate. Not the kind who protest ticket prices. Not the kind who make banners against ownership. Not the kind who remember that football is supposed to be about community, not just “content.”

Modern football's elite love football culture the way the East India Company loved spices. They love what it adds to the product. They love how it smells, how it looks. But they have no interest in respecting the people who made it. They’d rather extract it, bottle it, sell it – and move on.

This isn't a new fight. But it feels like a fight that's reaching its endgame.

When legacy fans are demonised for caring too much, for being "anti-progress," for insisting that football isn't just another financial vehicle – that's not a coincidence. It's a strategy.

You can't have corporate football without silencing the people who remind you what football used to be: messy, noisy, human.

Cue the Athletic: “Clubs can dress up ‘the fans of the future’ as this enigmatic and thrilling untapped market all they like, all they are are hypotheticals. They might also deem their real fans (...) as financially disposable, but they are still their cultural lifeblood, and always will be.”

Without the core fanbase, football is just another Netflix series. Something you stream while half-scrolling through your phone.

If you make it artificial – sterilised, pre-approved – you lose the thing that makes football powerful. You lose the rawness. The belonging. The heartbreak. The transcendence.

You can't fake that.

You can't buy it in a consultancy workshop.

You can’t synthesize football culture and its meaning for us.

Philipp Köster, Editor-in-chief of 11 Freunde, puts it so beautifully in his Zeit interview: “I'm looking for community, solidarity, and love. I want to be devastated when [my club] Arminia loses in the relegation playoffs yet again, and I want to be drenched in flying beer cups when we get promoted again next year. I want my weekends ruined and to demand the coach be fired – only to call for his contract to be extended when Arminia snatches a last-minute win. That's my football world, which of course doesn't have much to do with the realm of the big clubs.”

I, for one, can relate to that. Football culture is an organism that lives through its fans.

As Philipp Köster says: “Fans have to realise that they are an indispensable part of the game. It doesn't work without them. There’s no stadium experience without them.”

The higher ups should be listening. Money loves football culture. But if it keeps driving out the people who created it, there won't be any culture left to love.

So let’s talk business: It’s time to view legacy fans as vital stakeholders in the money making machine that is football. Involve us.

“The clubs and leagues that win will be the ones who build for people”, writes Jordan Wise.

To be clear: I am not rejecting every modern development per se. As I detail in the editorial vision of this Substack, there are loads of things I love about modern football. Things I don’t want to miss. Similarly, it’s great we got rid of a lot of things from the olden days. It’s not like the 70s, 80s or 90s were perfect. Far from it.

I’m a reasonable man. I understand the need for professional teams to explore opportunities, unlock new markets, tap into new audiences. You can’t run a business on nostalgia alone. I get that.

What I – and many others – reject, is the dismantling of traditional football culture, throwing existing fans under the bus in the process, for the sake of increased profit margins. And when capitalism tries to displace legacy fans, that’s all this is about. They want the culture. They don’t want the people indigenous to this culture.

But here's the kicker: Pushing legacy fans out will lose them money.

Because tourists don't create loyalty. Corporate “fans” don't sing through the rain. Customers don't stick around after five straight years of midtable mediocrity. Don’t bank on them sticking around when the circus (ie. that one star player doubling as celebrity influencer) moves on.

Or as the Athletic puts it: ​​”Fans persist, because they unwaveringly love their club, and that is priceless. Clearly, these clubs view this not as a reciprocal relationship to celebrate, but the platonic ideal of brand loyalty to squeeze. Surely there is still more substance to the bond between fan and club than brand loyalty, even accounting for football’s rampant commercialism in 2021?”

Now, obviously, the elite clubs – PSG, Bayern, City, Arsenal, Barça, Madrid, many UCL regulars – will survive with fewer legacy fans. There will probably always be enough tourists to break even on match day.

But the clubs outside of that prestigious circle should beware of following this dangerous precedent. These clubs need their legacy fans as much as they have to make themselves future proof.

I’m a hopeless romantic. But I can be pragmatic. Of course football needs new faces. Tourists are welcome. One-game-per-season-visitors are welcome. The only-here-for-big-games-audience is welcome, too. Them and us legacy fans can co-exist. Because football culture, above all, is about community.

Just don’t shut us out. You can squeeze more revenue per seat with tourists. For a while. But when the soul goes, the tourists follow. Because what they came for – the magic, the mythology, the feeling that this means something – will have died.

You can buy a club and its culture, but it will never belong to you. You just have it on loan from the people that shaped it.

---

Read more at Unmodern Football: