Why a Blades-Owls merger makes sense to people who hate beautiful things

An open letter to all sides of the city as talk of a Sheffield Football merger raises its head again.

Words: Sam Parry

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As capitalist ideology, a Blades/Owls merger is wonderful.

As art, it would be horrific.

Look, I don’t want to turn this place into something overtly political. The Pinch isn’t that. But what springs to mind when talk arises of a Sheffield United/Sheffield Wednesday merger is Margaret Thatcher selling off utilities, albeit with one unsubtle difference.

People don’t tend to care where their water or gas comes from as long as the water runs and the radiators work. People don’t tend to care that Yorkshire Water is owned by some Hong Kong investment firm, or that their gas is supplied by Électricité de France — you know, EDF, that state-run energy supplier.

From the moment Thatcher and successive governments sold off public utilities, their new private owners relied on one critical factor: the public not caring.

For the longest time, people didn’t really care. At least, there was no popular consensus that we should return to a state-run model. Fair enough.

But what has shifted the dial somewhat is that people do care when the privately owned Thames Water pumps turds into the sea, or when the privately owned energy companies record profits while people freeze in their homes, or when the privately owned rail companies cancel trains and hike ticket prices, or when the privately owned care-home firms extract dividends while understaffing wards, or when the privately owned bus companies scrap rural routes because they aren’t profitable, or when privately owned EVERYTHINGS borrow billions only to pay themselves bonuses instead of fixing stuff.

At some point, the pattern stops looking like bad luck and starts looking like the model itself is the problem. It took some time though, didn’t it?

That’s the unsubtle difference between the free market generally and the free market in football terms. All things can be bought by the highest bidder in both. However, one of the reasons I love football is that it retains a canny and critical constituency. A loud, proud mob. Give them a name: fans.

Fans who care about the badge above the door.

Fans who don’t want a merger.

Fans who don’t believe Sheffield needs to be a one-city club.

But, sorry to say so, it will happen.

It’s a bit like the nuclear bomb. Whilst there are nuclear weapons in the world, there remains a greater than zero per cent chance of the earth being blown to smithereens. And between now and a million years time, whilst ever that chance remains above zero per cent, we are almost guaranteed that the galaxy loses a planet.

I raise this for a simple reason. If you agree with me that there is a greater than zero per cent chance of a Sheffield club merger, then one day – maybe not for centuries – it will happen.

I hope I’m not around to see it. Because Sheffield United Football Club, to me, is a beautiful and complex thing. And, as much as I don’t like them, Sheffield Wednesday fans reserve the right to see their club in the same way.

So let’s not kid ourselves that the merger won’t happen. It makes too much sense to people who hate beautiful things. There is a cold “logic” to Sheffield becoming a one-city club. There is great “potential” in that nascent club. The “customers” scale neatly.

You can almost hear the press release: “There are efficiencies to drive, modernisations to deliver, accountability to restore. And hang on, there’s a bloody huge profit to extract from the ashes of history.”

The rationale is simple, stable and seductive… to people who want to make money out of football.

I say all this to both my fellow sufferers of United and the discontents across the city because there is a huge contradiction at play here. We’ve got to stop the madness of constantly wanting more. Or at the very least, we’ve got to recognise that within our aspiration for more — be it money, trophies or players — we are inviting the vampires over the threshold, the kinds of people for whom a merger makes total sense.

Put another way: If you want rich owners, part of you wants a merger.