Not Called 'Pay Up Pompey'

When I was just a little boy,

I asked my mother: ‘What should I be?

Should I be Pompey? Should I be Saints?’

Here’s what she said to me:

This is where I originally planned to list all of the areas where Southampton Football Club is superior to Portsmouth Football Club. I intended wittily describe their slide to the bottom of England’s second tier, whilst occasionally mentioning that the Saints occupy a position quite different to theirs – the polar opposite of, or ‘antithesis’, if you will. (1^st).

But I’m not going to do that, it would be gloating. Plus it would take hours. The above paragraph is all the gloating you will get out of me, not just because Southampton are by no means guaranteed promotion and Portsmouth relegation, not just because it would be excruciating to read and reflect badly on my character, but because, really, its just not funny. 

Instead I intend to qualify the following comments: Portsmouth FC deserves everything that is happening to it. Some of their fans deserve it, too. Sympathy should be reserved for what is probably a small sub-section of their support.

Yesterday I watched Adam Lallana notch two goals in a routine win against Barnsley. He’s the star player in a team with Premier League aspirations, but when I first saw him break into the side in 2008 things were very different at St. Mary’s. Southampton were in complete turmoil; overspending post-relegation meant that a very questionable management pairing had to cobble together a very questionable team from free transfers and a few largely untested youth players. Lallana was one of the bright sparks in a thoroughly depressing season that culminated in relegation and administration – the cost-cutting measures had only postponed the inevitable.

But there were cost-cutting measures. They led to short-term misery for supporters, consigned to watch a team of kids and has-beens being battered and bullied by Championship opponents, but at least the club did something to try to allay their financial troubles. The same cannot be said for Portsmouth.

While Southampton were approaching their lowest ebb in 2008, Pompey were celebrating an FA Cup win at Wembley. But I can’t have been the only one looking at their team sheet around that time and wondering: ‘How?’ Peter Crouch cost £11m (eleven million pounds). David Nugent (who has subsequently found his level at Leicester City) cost another £6m. ‘How is it’, I wondered to myself, ‘that Portsmouth Football Club, with their small attendances and diminutive stature, can afford the likes of David James, Sol Campbell, Glen Johnson and Jermain Defoe?’ The correct answer is the obvious one: they couldn’t.

No ‘benevolent benefactor’ is benevolent enough to bankroll that kind of business plan. In 2010, they became the one and only club to enter administration while in the ultra-lucrative Premier League. Several owners came and went, none with any real intention to rid the club of its crippling and escalating debts. They were relegated and required stabilisation in the Championship.

However, at the beginning of the 2011/12 season, once again I found myself perplexed by their transfer strategy. While Southampton made do with likes of Paul Wotton on a free to stave off financial disaster, Portsmouth spent £2m on Erik Huseklepp. Six months later they are back in administration and find themselves desperately loaning out their high-earners (including Huseklepp) to reduce the club’s running costs, scrabbling for every extra week to find an owner willing to take on what is clearly a monumental task.

The truth is that the club deserves to be at the bottom of the Championship. It deserves to go down to League One, and it probably deserves to spend a good few years down there, too. Like a criminal sent to prison for taking something that was not his, Portsmouth FC should be banished to League One for winning the FA Cup with players it had no business in signing.

But what is a football club without its fans? How sorry should I feel for them?

Pompey are on the verge of liquidation, just as Southampton were in 2009. I remember that looming fear: that my Saturday afternoons might be empty – no football. That prospect presents an unspeakable horror, I’m sure you will agree, to any football fan. Whether or not a Portsmouth supporter deserves to be faced with the possibility of switching allegiances to AFC Portsmouth depends, I suspect, upon the manner in which they received their success in the years just described.

I feel for those supporters who tempered their celebrations while the plaudits were rolling in as little as three years ago. They must have recognised that the unprecedented spending would eventually catch up with them. Many of the occupants of Fratton Park are probably very decent people who recognise that inter-club rivalry should extend no further than the football field.

But I don’t feel for those who revelled in every step of the Saints’ misfortune, on and off the pitch, from 2005-2009. I still remember their haunting chants as they contributed to our relegation in 2005 and their poisonous vitriol as they celebrated at Wembley in 2008 while we fought for our future. Those fans need to take the rough in the same manner as they took the smooth. Those fans lauded over their neighbours as the good times rolled in, and they can’t now turn around and condemn the running of the club that brought them that success. They need to accept that what has happened was an obvious consequence of a short-sighted strategy endorsed by their smugly exuberant support.

Southampton FC would be diminished as an entity without the prospect of a ferocious South Coast derby. Every failure and every success would be less intense without the thought of our South Coast neighbours looking on. I hope they survive to do their time in League One, the South Coast derby preserved, the natural order restored.