Liverpool’s u-turn on furloughing workers is another win for public pressure

Encouraging news from the United Kingdom: We don’t know when the Covid-19 lockdown is going to end, we don’t know if we’re going to be allowed to go for a walk, and we don’t know if the virus is going to carry away the literal, actual prime minister.

But we do know that if enough people tell a football club to sort itself out and stop acting the prick, that football club might listen. A win’s a win.

On Saturday, April 4, Liverpool announced they would be furloughing around 200 of their non-playing staff, to take advantage of a governmental scheme whereby furloughed workers are paid 80 percent of their salaries from public funds. Liverpool would then pay the other 20 percent. The club were, of course, perfectly within their rights to do this: the scheme is open to all British businesses, even those owned by a billionaire-led consortium.

However, the fact they are owned by a billionaire-led consortium raised a lot of questions, most of which boiled down to more or less polite versions of “What the hell are you playing at? You announced more than £40m in profits last month. You have a turnover of more than £500m. You don’t need that. Put it back. Put it back.”

Eventually, after two days of miserable PR, Liverpool reversed their decision. Chairman Peter Moore sent an email to fans:

We believe we came to the wrong conclusion last week to announce that we intended to apply to the coronavirus retention scheme and furlough staff due to the suspension of the Premier League football calendar, and are truly sorry for that.

In this case, the whole row was exacerbated by the strange phenomenon of Liverpool Exceptionalism. “This Means More,” proclaimed the advertising boards at Anfield back when they were switched on. It’s a slogan with a force to it, a force that is at least partly moral: it insists on a superiority that goes beyond mere sporting strength. It says that Liverpool’s wins, when they come, aren’t just the consequence of good scouting, clever coaching, and hard work. They are not merely a brilliant football team. Other sides win and they get three points. Liverpool win and the world, somehow, becomes a better place.

Whether Liverpool fans actually do think their club is inherently better at being a football club than others — in a way that transcends and overcomes “prettiest wife” syndrome, so making their club better at being better — will probably vary from fan to fan. But Liverpool-adjacent marketing departments and mythology-makers are happy to run with it, and that makes for problems when the club does something that makes them look, well, ordinary. Grubby, even. On the same team as Mike Ashley.

It would be easy to characterise this as evidence of the extreme gullibility of football fans: Ho, ho, ho. You rubes thought your club was special. Surprise! But perhaps something slightly more interesting is going on here. By seeking to take advantage of the furlough scheme, Liverpool’s owners took a perfectly rational, perfectly legal, extremely business-appropriate action …

… which was immediately identified as being not football club-appropriate. At least, not very, very rich football club-appropriate. Two different ideas of how a football club should be behaving came into conflict, and the one that suggested “Hey, maybe do the absolute bare minimum here?” won out.

Even if the idea of Liverpool as something that means more wasn’t respected by the club’s owners, except as a useful and profitable slogan, it was still a resonant idea among some Liverpool fans and, in a general sense, in plenty of other football fans around the country. It appears the reduction of football clubs to vehicles of their owner’s self-interest, which requires fans only as loyal customers, and also as an unpaid auxiliary force of volunteer propagandists, has yet to take hold entirely outside the boardrooms.

Whether this will catch on outside football remains to be seen. It’s easier to insist that a football club owes something to the fabric of society than, say, an airline. Easyjet doesn’t sell itself as contingent on, and created from, the dedication of its fans; there is no Spirit of Stelios group to hold them to account.

And it should probably be noted that while every football club means more to somebody, not all of them are in the same financial position as Liverpool. Start to look lower in the leagues, and the balance sheets of England’s football clubs get very dicey indeed. There will be clubs that need this scheme to stay afloat. Some of those clubs will have spent a lot on transfers.

Liverpool’s change of heart is absolutely a PR move: it’s a response to a PR disaster. In all probability, John W. Henry doesn’t give any more of a shit about anything this week than he did last week. But still, even if we can’t stop billionaires doing whatever the hell they want, we can at least, on occasion, embarrass them into pretending they care enough to do something else.

Now, let’s all go and shout at Spurs.