Transfers, PSR and the Death of the Terrace Hero

Does the crushing financial realism of the modern transfer market undercut our ability to emote with the sport we love?

I’m going to start this blog with a hypothesis.

I believe the modern transfer market is corroding one of the great joys of following football: the ability to emote, connect with and build narratives around heroic players.

Let me try and explain.

I’m a fervent West Bromwich Albion supporter. Unsurprisingly, it was yet another disappointing campaign in B71 last season, with Albion bottling a chance to finish in the top six after dropping off a cliff in the last part of the season.

So much for the Tony Mowbray bounce I wrote about back in January.

However, despite the way in which the season petered out, there were two significant bright sparks – specifically in the arrival of two of the most exciting players I’ve seen don the blue and white stripes in recent years.

First there was the breakout season of academy graduate Tom Fellows, a flying 21-year-old winger who not only finished the season as the leading assist maker in the Championship, but wowed the Hawthorns crowd with his direct dribbling and seemingly undefendable stepover.

The other was Torbjørn Heggem, a previously unknown Norwegian defender who was signed by Albion for a little less than £500,000 in the summer. He has rapidly become a fan favourite for his serene performances at both centre half and left back.

Fellows and Heggem make quite the pair.

A locally-born academy kid who spends every weekend terrorising the unsuspecting veteran fullbacks of the Championship. An understated giant plucked from Scandinavian obscurity to marshal and lead our backline.

These are two players who ooze cult hero potential.

If football support is a phenomenon primarily sustained by the intergenerational transmission of stories about the heroic deeds of club legends, Fellows and Heggem feel like two potential pillars around which Albion fans can start building the next generation of myths around.

But if one takes a temperature check of Albion group chats and fan forums – there is little in the way of hagiographical tribute to our new star men.

Rather, with the off-season rumour mill in full swing, Albion fans are debating just how much these two star men will be worth to the Baggies in cold, hard transfer income.

Let’s be clear – transfers have long been part and parcel of English football. Record breaking transfer fees, journeymen careers and player trading have been a central feature of English football since the post-war period.

Equally, it is entirely natural that a financially vulnerable club like Albion would find the vultures circling their star players over the course of a summer transfer window. After all, the current Albion regime are juggling the seemingly incompatible tasks of desperately trying to clear significant debts after a decade of rogue ownership and meeting PSR restrictions, all whilst trying to build a competitive team on the pitch.

Equally, I don’t know many Albion supporters who would begrudge Fellows or Heggem the dream moves they are currently being linked with¹. There is a widespread fatalistic recognition that both Fellows and Heggem are two players who will play in the higher echelons of the game eventually, why not net Albion a tidy profit in the process?

However, what I do feel is a novel and particularly corrosive phenomenon is the way in both Heggem are being talked about as walking, talking financial assets.

It seems to me that supporters have stopped conceptualising players as potential protagonists in the wider narrative tapestries that make their support of a football club meaningful.

Their value lies less in the way they can spark the imagination of supporters, and more in how potentially help clubs pass financial fair play regulations.

In short, it seems to me that players are no longer primarily valued as local legends or cult heroes. They are sentient entries on a balance sheet.

It’s getting to the point where I’m increasingly seeing supporters actively repressing their child-like urges to forge emotional connections with specific players. In a Whatsapp group chat I’m part of, I’ve seen supporters actively admonished for being “naïve” or “sentimental” just for expressing their disappointment at the prospect of losing two such valuable and popular members of our squad.

To hell with the possibility of creating new club legends. Out with the idea of forging and celebrating a genuine bond between players and supporters that might last a decade.

Sentimentality is for the foolhardy in this new financialised, data-driven universe of player trading. Bow before our spreadsheet masters and (transfer) market overlords.

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I am – of course – being a smidgin melodramatic. But I hope that the reader recognises the wider point I’m trying to make here.

I often talk about football – especially English football – as a neoliberal hellscape.

There is perhaps nowhere that one can so obviously observe the radical neoliberalisation of football than in the very way us supporters think and talk about the game.

In the context of contemporary football there is little room for narrative, myth or connection. Rather, players are re-imagined as assets. They are talked as though they are (extremely well renumerated) cattle, to be bought and sold like property in a particularly perverse game of monopoly.

It’s a state of affairs that I find troubling, frustrating and potentially existential for football – or at least football as I believe it can and should be.

As a scholar of heritage and researcher of the cultural meaning of football supporting cultures, I am a passionate believer that narrative, stories and genuine human connection are the forces that make football meaningful.

So much of what made football special to me when I was growing up was being immersed in stories of Astle, Brown, the Three Degrees. I was reared on the tales of Albion’s famous ’68 cup winning team, the famous night under the lights at the Hawthorns when Bomber put Mario Kempes’ Valencia to the sword.

More than that, I was also afforded the opportunity as a youngster to watch the careers of bona fide club legends unfold before my eyes.

As I watched the heroic Zoltan Gera inspire Albion to their Great Escape in 2005, or the metronomic James Morrison commit over a decade of their lives to serving our club – I wasn’t thinking of the potential transfer fees they could command if we sold them to European giants. I never leapt out of my seat watching Chris Brunt curl a free kick into the top corner because it would add another million to our PSR balance.

Rather, I was totally enraptured – albeit unconsciously - in the ways these heroes which were actively creating moments, stories and memories that would go into the annals of Albion history. These would be the stories that made my support of the Baggies meaningful, the stories that I could pass on to my (unfortunate) Albion supporting kids. And so the cycle would continue.

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My worry is this.

In a contemporary footballing context marked by gaping financial inequality, the need to meet profit and sustainability quotas and unprecedented – verging on pornographic - supporter interest in the transfer market, I fear we’re losing sight of what makes football meaningful in the first place.

When the hardiest of supporters - and I count myself amongst them - think twice about emotionally investing in a potential cult hero like Torbjørn Heggem, then simply, football has lost a sense of its priorities.

I recognise the fiscal realities of Albion’s situation. But it is an absolute crying shame that I exist in a supporter community which admonishes emotional connection and encourages cold-headed financial realism.

It’s time we reintroduce a little bit of character, narrative and heroism into the way we relate to our players. Or I fear the very story-making character that makes football so special to us supporters may be sacrificed at the altar of capital.

1. I do not claim to be in the know with these transfers. This story is merely written in response to strong rumours linking Tom Fellows with a move to Southampton, and Heggem with a transfer to Bologna.