United fans have long staged protests against the Glazers. Arnautovic? No? Frenkie de Jong? How about Casemiro? At what point does a healthy engagement with your supporters’ opinions shade into an unhealthy fixation? But as United’s interest in umpteen different players has emerged into the public domain this summer, it has been hard not to wonder, as Alan Shearer did on Match of the Day, if a club whose media CEO has publicly spoken of analysing “fan sentiment graphs” might, on some level, be floating these names into the digiverse and gauging the response. The Arnautovic reverse-ferret was ultimately the right outcome. It’s hard to find anything objectionable in any of these examples, not least because sometimes it is nice to be reminded that actually, in some cases, clubs do care about what their fans think.Īnd yet there is a fine line between being mindful of the wishes of your supporters, and ceding on occasion to their moral custodianship, and running a football club by focus group. Last year, Tottenham Hotspur’s fans seemed to impel the club to pull the plug on their courtship of Gennaro Gattuso, the Italian manager, owing to discriminatory comments that he was alleged to have made. This summer, a protest by Atletico Madrid supporters put the kibosh on any intention the club might have had of signing Cristiano Ronaldo. Barnsley’s fans have just forced the club to ditch a sponsorship deal with a shadowy cryptocurrency firm after flagging up homophobic tweets by individuals connected with the company. This sort of thing is happening more often. United had taken an interest in striker Arnautovic. A few days later, United let it be known that they had abandoned their pursuit. Almost as soon as the news broke, the backlash began, with supporters registering their displeasure at the prospect of signing a 33-year-old who was accused by an opponent of racial abuse (subsequently unproven) during his time with Twente. Last week, for example, Manchester United were reported to have taken an interest in signing Marko Arnautovic, the former Stoke City striker, from Bologna. And it’s not just the wisdom of the crowd that is influential, but also their approval. On the other hand, fan sentiment, measured, monitored and amplified via the mass medium of the internet, has morphed from something nebulous and intangible to a force with currency and power. The individual supporter is in many ways disenfranchised: at the mercy of rising season-ticket prices and inhospitable kick-off times, terrible trains and a kaleidoscopic blizzard of new and expensive kits. This is a strange time for the power dynamic of football fandom. It’s an interesting mini-parable of modern football, where public opinion has never been so accessible, and the virtual hive mind is a resource to be tapped. The player values which appear on the German website Transfermarkt, a publicly updated mine of football data, are hugely influential: they often form the starting point for transfer negotiations and are even mentioned in official club brochures and prospectuses, but they are essentially nothing more than crowdsourced estimates from the website’s contributors.
What if the transfer valuations of footballers were determined by public opinion? As the New York Times’s Rory Smith reported in a brilliant piece last year, that might not be so far from the truth.
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