When Sir Bob Murray, who made his fortune in kitchens and bathrooms, became chairman of Sunderland in 1986, he replaced Tom Cowie, who owned a car dealership. For the five years that followed he was involved in a legal dispute over the acquisition of Cowie’s shares with another board member, Barry Batey, a local estate agent. They may at times have been bitterly opposed, but all three men were Sunderland fans. That’s how football used to be.
By the time Murray sold up 20 years later, to the Niall Quinn-fronted Irish consortium Drumaville, Roman Abramovich was installed at Chelsea and the era of oligarchs, states and private equity was under way. The ramifications of that change were profound and have not stopped rumbling yet.
It would be naive to think the fan-owners were all in it for the good of their club or the region it represented but, whatever self-interest drove them, they at least had an awareness of and need to satisfy fan expectations. Until 1981, dividends had been capped at 7.5% and no director was permitted to draw a salary. There was little sense a club should seek to make a profit: they existed to win matches, a mentality that took time to change.
Idyllic as that may sound in this commercial age, the reality was a lack of investment in grounds, most of which were crumbling and some of which turned out to be death traps. The year before Murray became chairman there were riots at Chelsea and Luton and the tragedies at Bradford and Heysel. He knew change was needed, even though that would mean Sunderland leaving Roker Park. “It was time for a reset,” he tells me. “Grounds needed to be modernised and made safer.”
It took Hillsborough and the Taylor report to make that clear to English football as a whole, but the result was the wave of new grounds in the 90s, including the Stadium of Light, which opened in 1997. Sunderland, frankly, had a lucky escape when Nissan, having initially been supportive, withdrew its backing for a site near the carmaker’s factory on the A19. With the club having found a more central location on the old Monkwearmouth colliery the Stadium of Light was regarded as such an exemplary project that Murray was brought in to advise as the Wembley rebuild threatened to spin out of control.
“Within a couple of seasons,” he says, “we had the youngest average age season-ticket holders and the highest number of female season-ticket holders.” Attendances doubled from the final season at Roker Park.
The average crowd in the top flight in 1989 was 20,553; by 1999 it was 30,581. Other divisions had similar increases. This was the period of the great gentrification of English football. The temptation at this remove is to see the coming of the Premier League (and Champions League) as central to that, a necessary step to move away from the violence and danger of the 80s. Murray, though, is scathing of the “greed” of the Premier League chairmen; for him it was a coincidence that the Premier League happened at the same time as satellite television’s advent. “The technology would have transformed football regardless,” he says. “The revolution in football would have still happened.”
The needless effect of that revolution for him was the “gentle incline” of the pyramid becoming “a great cliff”, so that only a handful of elite clubs can compete and the “fairytale promotions” that were once “part of the magic of the game” are gone.
From the moment Match of the Day launched in 1964, television began to dilute the bonds that tied a club to its local community: you no longer needed to make a trip to the ground to see your team. That process accelerated as more and more games became available to watch and especially after the satellite revolution took the Premier League across the globe, so elite teams could boast fans in every country in the world.
Premier League clubs have benefitted in terms of increased resources, which drew a different category of owner, but the consequence has been a diminution of the sense that has existed almost from the moment supporters paid to watch teams that a club represented their region.
That sense, Murray is clear, gave clubs a responsibility to their communities. In 2001, he launched the Foundation of Light to rationalise the various strands of Sunderland’s charity work. It aims to improve “the education, health, wellbeing and happiness” of people in the north-east. He is still chairman and has donated all proceeds of his recent autobiography to the foundation.
After the 2008 financial crash forced Drumaville to sell to a private equity fund managed by the US billionaire Ellis Short, Murray found the club less willing to work with the foundation. What did Texan private equity, after all, care about improving the lives of the people of Sunderland?
There are enlightened examples – or those who see branding opportunities – but why would non-local owners care about the good the clubs they own can do for their immediate communities? And why, for that matter, would one of the burgeoning cohort of global fans care: what is a food bank in Islington to an Arsenal fan from Lagos or Los Angeles?
“I’ve always believed that where possible football should try to use its power to do good,” says Murray. He regarded the boardroom on match days as a lobbying opportunity not only for the club but also the region, inviting influential guests and making connections. The foundation and now the Beacon of Light are about more direct action. “We can get people to turn their lives around,” he says.
That’s why he is uneasy about the future, about modern owners whose motivations are profit or propaganda, who have no understanding of or emotional attachment to football’s traditions. In his 20 years as chairman, Murray witnessed the transformation of the game from what the Sunday Times in 1985 described as “a slum sport played in slum stadiums and increasingly watched by slum people” to a plaything for oligarchs.
But Murray thinks the change is only accelerating. “I’m really worried that the whole fabric of football will disappear completely,” he says. “This isn’t going to stop here. You’ve seen nothing yet.”
