by Ian Salmon // 9 July 2016 //
I RECEIVED an email this morning. Some of you may have received the same email. If not, you may have possibly noticed it mentioned in passing on Twitter. To be honest, I found out about it from Twitter before I saw the email. Donāt check my emails that often at the moment, they only ever seem to be trying to sell me something.
Ironic, that. Really. F***ing. Ironic.
The tweet came from Mathilde Delamotte. Youāll find her on @Delamotte_m. I donāt know Mathilde, Iāve never met her. I follow her on Twitter, although I didnāt realise that I did until I saw the tweet.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Delamotte_M/status/751764709058150400?ref_src=twsrc%5EtfwI was prepared to knee-jerk. Iām quite happy to knee jerk. Ask anyone. I held back; thought: āWell, thereās no confirmation and stories like this keep doing the rounds.ā
I tweeted back: āAre they selling them? Thought theyād all been skipped the day after. Iād have happily bought mine on the day.ā Then I decided to do some digging. Surely an idea this ludicrous could only be scaremongering. Like the anti-Brexit arguments. EXACTLY like the anti-Brexit arguments, if you get my drift.
I found an image. An image of a seat in a box. A red seat in a box. A seat with the number 134 on it. Not sure how many people sat in seat 134. Loads of them. How many rows were there in the Main Stand? Iāve no idea whose seat 134 this was. Nor do the club. Itās just a seat, isnāt it?
And you can own this seat. This fairly random seat 134 in its nice black presentation box. This ālimited edition productā in its āIconic Presentation boxā with its āCertificate of authenticityā and a āMain Stand history bookletā which will be āDespatched in a protective delivery sleeve via DPD (UK) with the āProduct to be despatched from week commencing 15 Augustā.
The product. The f**king product.
The price should be Ā£225 but the āSeason Ticket Holders & Members Priceā is Ā£200. Which is nice. Saving Ā£25 there.
The last home game of the season. Remember the last home game of the season? Iāve got to be honest, if you had asked me about it I couldnāt have told you what it was. Had to check the closing chapters of my book (They Say Our Days Are Numbered out August 14). And, yes, I do understand the utter irony/hypocrisy of me getting in a plug for my book while Iām about to rail, and I mean really RAIL against unbridled commercialism, greed and lack of consideration for the human spirit but sod it, I need the money a hell of a lot more than Liverpool FC does).
Chelsea. 1-1. Canāt really remember the game, canāt be bothered checking. Itās not important. Whatās important is this: It was the last day of the old Main Stand.
We knew this. It might not have received the worldwide coverage that the last day of the āstoriedā Boleyn Ground garnered but, God knows, it saw a hell of a lot more glory.
Weād waited for announcements all season. Weād had our chance to pick our new seats and, if desiring, remain as close to our current location as possible. I desired to, I did. Some of us were lucky. We thought there may be a chance that we may be able to buy our seats. Take them home with us. Display them, cherish them, keep our memories.
We thought that the club may have the foresight/sense/wisdom to sell the seats to us. Let us pay in advance and reserve our seats to be collected. OUR seats. Not just seats but OUR seats. The actual seats that we sat in, that our hearts belonged to. OUR part of Anfield. We thought the club may charge, sayā¦.Ā£50, donate all proceeds to Alder Hey or some other, club-linked, charity. No. Nothing. No word at all.
As the game ended, you heard the noise start. A cracking. A splintering. The sound of those who had chosen to take their seats. You may have seen the newspaper coverage the next day, the next week. West Ham fans had āsought souvenirs from the Boleyn Groundā in as romantic a manner as possible. Us? Thieving Scouse Bas**rds as per normal, thanks.
The announcement came. āThis is a public service announcement for all supporters in the Main Stand. Unauthorised removal of club property is theft and you may be arrested.ā
Theft. So the club agree with the Daily Mail on that one. The ones further back were undeterred. Seat backs vanished into jackets and wended their way through Stanley Park to a permanent home. Iāll be honest, if Iād been more prepared Iād have had a tool kit with me to help disassemble my seat. I wasnāt. I didnāt. And the steward standing 10 feet from me and staring at all around made my mind up. Still, I hopped over the seat back and flexed my knee against it. Just to see if there was any give. Any subtle give. There wasnāt.
And I thought: āThis was my dadās. This seat was my dadās. This season ticket was my dadās. He wanted me to have this and I have it. Iām not losing my dadās season ticket for a piece of wood.ā
So I took a photo of the seat and I took a photo of the view from the seat, because the view next season will be slightly different, and I headed to a traffic jam leading to a recording of The Pink. Iād half-thought that I would enter the studio with a seat in my hands as a conversation starter. I didnāt. We spoke about Eden Hazardās goal instead. I didnāt get my dadās seat.
Main Stand. Turnstile U or V 1-4 Block M8 Row 6 Seat 92. My dadās seat. Iāve told this story before (
http://www.theanfieldwrap.com/2014/11/well-meet-wall-match/ ) but for those who didnāt read it, Iāll recap. We lost our dad in November 2013. Heād attended his last game some time before. West Brom. Hoped for the Real game, hoped for the Chelsea game. Couldnāt do them.
When he saw his last game he didnāt know it was his last game. He thought heād seen his last game the season before. He wasnāt well and his eyesight was going. He considered not renewing his season ticket but he kept it. He kept it in the hope that I could continue it. Because thatās important isnāt it? That legacy, that passing on of the torch, that instillment of passion? Thatās what weāre about, isnāt it?
And I kept it. I sat in it all last season. My first season as a season-ticket holder in my own name being the last season that seat would be there. I found something quite poetic in that, something that spoke of transition while retaining history.
And you know what? Anfield were brilliant. To be precise, the Anfield ticket office were brilliant. There were stories that warned that you shouldnāt admit to the ticket change, that you should keep your mouth shut and just keep going, that there were people in the Main Stand who were still miraculously match-going at the age of 125. But the light on the ticket thing at the gates? Flashed amber instead of green. So I rang the club. I rang them in January and it took them until August but they did it. They changed the ticket into my name. It didnāt go to a tour company, it didnāt pass on to somebody different each week, it passed on to me. As it should, as he wanted.
I donāt know how many times the Main Stand has been redeveloped since the early fifties when my dad started his lifetime pilgrimage to Anfield, I donāt know how many times he moved seats. I know that he sat in this seat for as long as I can currently remember. I know that the grooves on the edge of the seat back come from his back along with the feet of whoever sat beside him. I know that the seat held his weight. I know that he sat in it, rose from it, sat in it, rose from it, acclaimed glory and endured defeat for decades.
Taking that seat home would be taking a part of my dad home. And there are lots of parts of my dad here. His photo is to my left, I have his watch, his ties, some of his books, a suitcase he used for holidays before I was born. I have him. I always have him. But the seat? The seat was a link. It was a link to Liverpool and to what we shared. Specifically, what we shared. We shared that view and that seat and the camaraderie of those who sat near us. And I know that those who sat near us have the same stories. I know that pretty much every season-ticket holder has a similar story. Every single seat has a story. Every single seat is personal.
Donāt get me wrong here. Anfield are capable of doing fine things. Sorting my season ticket obviously but the stones in the new walkway? Theyāre great. The stones are great. Iād hoped that the club would do something along those lines from the day that my wife organised her fatherās stone at Goodison ā itās genuinely a beautiful thing to have. Buying the stone was obvious. And the message our kid decided should go on it? Magnificent.
This though? This selling of āa piece of LFC historyā? Itās disgusting. Itās a new low from a club that I thought couldnāt show itself more insensitive to the fansā feelings than it did over the ticket price fiasco. This is worse. To me, this is much, much worse. This is a disgrace. This is a sign that there is somebody in the clubās commercial department that doesnāt get it. Or, that there is simply ABSOLUTELY NOBODY who DOES get it.
Thereās a lack of understanding here that is staggering in its depth. Thereās a lack of empathy to what this club actually MEANS to the fans who have paid for season tickets for decades. There appears to be nobody at the club who has had the foresight to realise that the seats have value to the fans who have sat in them. All they have seen is that these seats, these generic seats, this f**king PRODUCT has generic āvalueā. There is money to be made here. Thereās no place for sentiment. Thereās money to be made. Itās as wrong-headed as business ever gets. Itās as lacking in humanity as commerce manages.
And, again, donāt get me wrong. Thirty years in retail. I know how to sell stuff. Iām bloody good at selling stuff. I understand that weāre viewed as customers by the men who run the business. Not fans; customers. And Iām genuinely okay with that idea. Iāve defended the club on that concept quite a few times. āWe should be told whatās going on behind the scenes.ā Why? Why should we be told? Because weāre fans, because we give them money? Justin Bieber fans will claim the same allegiance to their love as we to ours. And, yes, theyāre completely bloody different because theirs isnāt going to transcend the ephemeral and enter history while ours has, but we still have no say over how the business is run, how the money is spent, who gets the top jobs.
And Iām fine with that.
These seats arenāt about commerce though. These seats are about having the chance to show that the club can do the right thing for the fans. They did the right thing for me with my season ticket, I applaud them for that, I make sure ā in my own little way ā that people know that they did that; that theyāre not as heartless as theyāre often painted.
This was a chance for them to show that on a large scale. Ā£50 for the seat? Money to Alder Hey? Sound, where do I sign? Will cash do? Sorted. How beautiful gesture would that be?
Ā£225 for A seat. Capital A. A seat. Just A generic seat, one of thousands. A seat in a box with a booklet. Hideous.
And there are people on Twitter who agree with this viewpoint. And there are those that donāt.
I donāt know if it breaks down by location, Iāve not looked. Iām not going to, Iām not interested in us vs them, Scouse vs Wools ā Iām not here for that. There are those who say āwhy do you want it?ā I hope Iāve explained that. I hope Iāve explained it on behalf of a lot of us because I know, I bloody KNOW, Iām not alone. There are those who say ābut youāre just renting that seatā, that you have no ownership. There are those that point out that weāre being asked to pay Ā£225 for a seat that weāve already paid thousands for but itās not even that.
Weāre not being asked to pay for THAT seat, weāre being asked to pay for A seat. For SOMEBODYās seat. Not ours. There are those who think FSG are appalling. I donāt agree with that, I think theyāve got this very, very wrong and I donāt think thereās any way out of it. And thereās the old āif you donāt like it, donāt buy itā. And thatās also not the point.
The point is this: seat 92. Show me a seat 92. Show me one of the, what, 70, 80, 90, seat 92s? I reckon I could pick mine out. But you canāt. Itās in an iconic presentation box in a warehouse.
Seat 134. That seat youāre using to advertise this whole bloody thing? Whose seat 134 was that? Which row was it in? Who sat in it? Who was his favourite player? What was the best match he ever saw? Was his name ever called on the tannoy? Did he ever have to leave the ground for a birth or an illness? Did he stand on it for St Etienne or Chelsea or Dortmund? Did he slump on it against Arsenal? What did he feel? What did he see? What did he remember? You have no idea, do you? On every conceivable level you have no bloody idea.
Weāll sell you a seat. You can buy a piece of history. And itās not like selling the bricks from the Kop. Iām not having that one. And I didnāt want a brick from the Kop. I didnāt stand on the bricks, I didnāt touch the bricks. Each brick was one of thousands. Millions. Many. Each seat wasnāt. Each seat was worn down by us, by our loved ones, each seat held the magic. And you pulled them apart and threw them on the ground and you put them in storage and then you placed them in iconic presentation boxes and called them product. Theyāre not f**king product. Theyāre peopleās lives and hopes and memories. Theyāre the moments that they loved and everything that they gave to the game and the game gave to them.
So, the season ticket holders and the members get the first chance to buy A seat from the Main Stand. And you can get my seat and I can get his seat and he can their seat and somebody who is a member but hasnāt been lucky enough to get to the game yet (and thereās nothing wrong with that, thatās all tied into not having the foresight to go big in the nineties) can have your seat.
But thatās okay, isnāt it? Because theyāre all just seats. Theyāre all just product.
I love my club. I adore Liverpool FC. Iāve never been as disgusted by anything that the business of Liverpool has done as I am right now.
They just donāt get it do they?
http://www.theanfieldwrap.com/2016/07/liverpool-main-stand-seat-sell-off-club-got-wrong/