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    I sympathise with that statement. It cannot be easy to accept that the club you’ve invested however many years in is all but dead and the place you visited every fortnight is no longer in use. It’s not even like the club is on life support, it’s dead but I suppose it comes down to being able to accept that what you knew is gone.

    It also cannot be easy to start supporting a Phoenix club because while it might look like your club and many of the faces you knew are there, while it’s playing away from it’s spiritual home, it must feel strange. I suppose you’re never going to get a 100% buy-in to anything. You see it with Supporters Trusts and I suppose Phoenix clubs will be the same. Some fans will fall by the wayside, others will be stubborn and refuse to acknowledge the new entity but many will get behind it.

    That said, they’ve ruined it a bit with that last paragraph and final sentence.

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      I'm not sure why Forever Bury can't just accept that Bury AFC is now "the real Bury" club and transfer the history and allegiance accordingly, as fans of numerous other clubs have done (Darlington being a good comparison, I think).

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        It also cannot be easy to start supporting a Phoenix club because while it might look like your club and many of the faces you knew are there, while it’s playing away from it’s spiritual home, it must feel strange.
        You are literally in a conversation with people who have already done this and, in the case of others on this thread, substantially more than that.

        It's not easy, but Forever Bury have been around for years and should know better than this. They're facilitating a schism, the only benefit of which will be to the vampires that put the club in this position in the first place.
        Last edited by My Name Is Ian; 08-08-2020, 11:49.

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          Originally posted by Jumbo McGinnis View Post

          That said, they’ve ruined it a bit with that last paragraph and final sentence.
          There's a typo in the last para which combined with the repetitiveness makes me think it was left in from the first draft accidentally.

          I dont really believe the "spiritual home" stuff but then the club I support moved to a new stadium. The history came with us.

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            Originally posted by My Name Is Ian View Post

            You are literally in a conversation with people who have already done this and, in the case of others on this thread, substantially more than that.

            It's not easy, but Forever Bury have been around for years and should know better than this. They're facilitating a schism, the only benefit of which will be to the vampires that put the club in this position in the first place.
            So it wasn’t strange for these people at the start then?

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              There is a difference though isn't there, between the way AFC Wimbledon and FCUM came into existence and the way Bury AFC have.

              For all the comprehensively sound arguments of supporting AFC Wimbledon over the franchise in MK, the fact that the other option was 100 miles away will have made it easier to recognise which is the continuation of the club you supported. And with FCUM, it's very clear what the club was founded for and why it is different to Manchester United. With Bury it's going to be less clear cut for a lot of fans. You've got a phoenix club starting at the near bottom and playing in a different town, against the possibility (yes we know it's a faint one) of seeing a club with the same name play in the same ground you've always watched them in.

              I, like probably all on OTF, would go phoenix club no problem. But many wouldn't. And having a previously very credible supporters group like Forever Bury champion the non-phoenix option, will ensure a lot of fans trust that as the way to go. And I say that from having seen how blindly Doncaster's supporters co-op jumped on board Willie McKay's 'experiment' at Rovers nine years ago. The inevitable outcome, especially in an age that seemingly no longer allows for greyness, is a schism between different fan groups. Which is exactly what happened at Doncaster at that time.

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                Don't get me wrong, I completely get it from the point of view of the supporters as individuals, even if I don't agree with it. The emotional pull is real, and can manifest itself in different ways. It's not like everyone who decides to is A Bad Person, or anything. EIM walked away from FC United, and back to Big United, for example. I don't agree with it but I respect it, they were principled reasons. And anyway, you can't dictate to individual people, especially not over something which is ultimately a decision of the heart.
                ​​​
                From a personal perspective, I could take my kids to see Lewes of a Saturday. They're run the right way. But I don't, because Worthing FC is a ten minute walk from my house. They've been monied, they've got a plastic pitch (and I just can't get on with these new pitches, though I completely understand why clubs get them installed), but we still go there rather than take two trains to Lewes, which is about 40 minutes on the train.

                But I'm talking a long standing supporters trust as a body, here, and it's precisely *not* their job to do be doing this.

                I'd have thought the trust's aim would be something like a trust/community-owned football club representing Bury, playing at Gigg Lane. There are two parts to that. The first is happening, and can happen more quickly if the trust fall in behind the new club. At the moment this schism is happening, and it's doing no-one any good apart from the likes of Steve Dale. The in-fighting is a waste of time, energy, and resources towards getting Bury supporters as close to what I thought they wanted as possible.

                A single club would carry so much more weight with difficult negotiations (should they want to get back into Gigg Lane) ahead. From an infrastructural perspective, all they'd need would be the keys to the ground. It would just have an extra A in the name.

                So that's the club - the ground is the second part. My best understanding is that Gigg Lane has an ACV and a restrictive covenant on it, but also that it's heavily mortgaged, likely an absolute financial shambles. These restrictions, however toothless they may be, may make the seller, whether a liquidator, the charge holders, Dale himself or whoever, more open to settlement offers. It'll be really tough, but it may be achievable. ​​​​​I think time may be of the essence, though. The longer it sits unused, the stronger the case for demolishing it will get.

                But trusts occasionally make staggeringly bad decisions. It happened at Notts County in... 2009? Their supporters trust gave the club to a front for a convicted criminal under the fake promise of a metric fuckton of money that didn't exist. Fell apart in weeks, and ten years later they're playing non-league football. Founder members of the Football League. Fucks sake.

                Bury's close to the home of the co-operative movement, isn't it?
                Last edited by My Name Is Ian; 08-08-2020, 14:26.

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                  Yes, I believe Rochdale was the very first.

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                    That it should happening there.

                    I mean, I'm open to hearing about how Forever Bury are doing the right thing. Do they believe they can take control, clear all the debts and own the ground that way? Is there some master plan above and beyond "get playing again and hope for the best" of which I'm unaware?

                    The club has no players. No management team. No coaching staff. Do they have any actual paid staff at the moment? How do they get out of their unsecured debts? How do they get out of their secured debts? Have they got an amazing deal for the supporters, and if so, what is it?

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                      I don't think the Daily Mail cared a tinker's cuss about Supporters Direct, but the Premier League definitely did.

                      Forever Bury were always a very strange beast. They seemed to want to organise beer festivals much more than agitate to represent fans. They quickly fell into acting 'just' like a traditional supporters' club, as did an awful lot of trusts.

                      I've thought on about lots of those types of trusts, and the big thing I come back to every time is - I'm trying to choose my words carefully, and might fail - is that the biggest predictor of whether a trust might succeed or not seemed to be about having enough people who had enough educational experience to have the self-regard to see themselves as being more than terrace fodder.

                      If the club had a relatively large fanbase, then this was possible; you could create a group with enough people involved at the heart of it who could stay aligned with the core mission (though whether there was enough of a market for what they were selling in the wider fanbase remained a moot point).

                      But at smaller club, there either needed to be a breakthrough moment which in a sense politicised the fanbase to the extent that they realised where the approach of accepting that they were terrace fodder was ruinous to the club; even if they themselves could stomach being treated like shit, they saw that it let absolute wankers take the club to the very brink of existence, or there needed to be a sociological quirk in the demographics (eg, a York City being a relatively affluent town with a University, a Wimbledon being the club for blow-ins into London and having the highest graduate proportion of the capital's clubs etc).

                      If you didn't have that, then that sense of aspiration for your fandom was always tending to pull trusts back to taking an attitude of Baldrick in Black Adder - knowing he's been treated like shit for generations and having no sense of how things could and should and would be better if they started to act in a certain way.

                      I think part of it has deeper roots; many of the clubs are in places that were part of the 'Red Wall' and are 'Left Behind' places, and it relates to how the British working class movements fundamentally failed at politicising their members in their heyday between the wars and saw their football as a distraction, an entertainment and a bit of escapist fun, rather than some place to continue the battles of the working week.

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                        Very interesting indeed and a thesis worthy of a dissertation

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                          I've been doing a lot of history stuff recently, and the lack of politics in football throughout the 1920s and 1930s was striking. There were trade union and Jewish group protests before England played Germany at White Hart Lane in 1934, but it's otherwise almost completely absent from, you know, the era that brought the Wall Street Crash, the Great Depression, the rise of Fascism, and Stalin arriving on the scene. It's definitely weird, how apolitical it was.

                          Its not absent. I'm pretty sure some Northern League clubs (and possibly pro players) were involved in the Jarrow march, for example, while there seems to have been a more communitarian spirit in a general sense. I'm here to be shot down with by the exceptions to this, but I'd long presumed it to have been a part of the hangover from the trauma of WW1.

                          I think you get a bit of a glimpse of the national psyche with the adoption of Abide With Me before the FA Cup final in 1927. It was brought in - a hymn written by a priest who was dying of tuberculosis, so maybe not an obvious choice - as a crowd control measure, but pretty soon became an "annual tradition." There doesn't seem to have been much protest at the shenanigans that did go on at clubs (and there was a lot), anywhere.

                          ​​​QPR and White City, which I've just allowed the ink to dry on, is a decent example of that. They were moved out of their home ground into a completely unsuitable enormodome where the pitch was half a mile away and the 10,000 who turned out were just dotted around the place. But I didn't find any record of protest. People just... stopped going.

                          And when Rangers went back to Loftus Road, the supporters club raised the money to get a new stand built there. But I guess there wasn't the means or space to organise. No online forums, little to no independent media of any sort.

                          They were, still even more class-caste then then we are now too, I guess (or used to be). I know my own grandmother was a maid during the 1920s, for example. She always deferred to her betters. It used to infuriate my mum.

                          So this was still the era of the great and the good, of the FA being able to miss the first three World Cups over broken time payments to amateurs at the Olympics. If you think those motherfuckers are arrogant now....

                          Totally get what you mean about the constitution of trusts. Huddling together on places like this or in our social media near-bubbles, we probably over-estimate the extent to which people care about politics in any sense, still less in a football sense. And, as I've come to realise myself quite a lot this last few years, being 'working class' is pretty deeply ingrained.
                          Last edited by My Name Is Ian; 09-08-2020, 14:00.

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                            Fan politics/activism wasn't a thing in the US, either, notwithstanding our somewhat less rigid class structure.

                            The New Deal barely touched sports in this country (one of the more salient contributions was the construction of several stadia by the Works Progress Administration).

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                              Maybe we should move the politics stuff onto another thread. It's worthy of its own.

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                                Originally posted by Uros Predic View Post
                                the fact that the other option was 100 miles away will have made it easier to recognise which is the continuation of the club you supported
                                We did well at getting "70 miles away" established. As the crow flies it's a bit less, though there are perfectly reasonable routes which are a bit longer.

                                In any event, the franchise played at Selhurst for the 2002-03 and 2003-04 seasons and didn't play their first match in Milton Keynes until September 2003. They were also still calling themselves "Wimbledon FC" for those two seasons.
                                Last edited by DCI Harry Batt; 10-08-2020, 16:50.

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                                  Another statement from Steve Dale:

                                  https://www.buryfc.co.uk/news/latest...-the-chairman/

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                                    Dale seems to have a narcissistic disorder and poor grammar.

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                                      There's a lot of "it's not my fault" playing the victim in that statement.

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                                        "Petri Dish For Vermin" is a decent enough title for my Greatest Hits album.

                                        No idea what he's playing at there, presumably this is some sort of death rattle for the old club.

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                                          I'll be on Danny Kelly's show on TalkSport tonight at about 8.45, talking about the effect of the expulsion on the fans. </self promotion>

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                                            Originally posted by Giggler View Post
                                            I'll be on Danny Kelly's show on TalkSport tonight at about 8.45, talking about the effect of the expulsion on the fans. </self promotion>
                                            Ooh I'll have a listen in to that. Good luck.

                                            I noticed via social media last night that there appears to be some connection between what happened at Bury and what's going on at Charlton. Most of it seemed pretty tenuous and a bit conspiracy theory type stuff but bloody worrying if you were an Addick

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                                              Originally posted by Foot of Astaire's View Post

                                              Ooh I'll have a listen in to that. Good luck.

                                              I noticed via social media last night that there appears to be some connection between what happened at Bury and what's going on at Charlton. Most of it seemed pretty tenuous and a bit conspiracy theory type stuff but bloody worrying if you were an Addick
                                              Yes, Chris Farnell was involved at Bury last year, and his office in Hale was stormed by some Charlton fans in a video which appeared on Twitter. Matt McCarthy is also rumoured to be involved at Charlton after he was at Bury with Steve Dale and Dave Jones, the former Stockport manager, was assisting Dale a year ago too.

                                              My simple feeling surrounding all this is "You're not very good at this football lark, lads. Please stop messing up institutions which fans treasure so much" - unless that's the actual reason they're there, to take them into a managed decline.

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                                                Jones was in the office with Farnell when the Charlton fans went in.

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                                                  Originally posted by Giggler View Post
                                                  unless that's the actual reason they're there, to take them into a managed decline.
                                                  It's not quite my starting assumption, I suppose. But with these people, I always remember that football clubs often own big pieces of land that could bring a tidy profit by having housing built on them.

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                                                    Originally posted by TonTon View Post

                                                    It's not quite my starting assumption, I suppose. But with these people, I always remember that football clubs often own big pieces of land that could bring a tidy profit by having housing built on them.
                                                    Which is the problem Southend have. SUFC have been run terribly over the last 20 years or so but are kept afloat by our chairman and his desire for a large scale property development on Roots Hall

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