Why Nothing Seems Like Ours Anymore

I was properly upset when Chelsea’s owners sacked José Mourinho the first time. I remember it like a bad smell in a good pub. It felt like treason. Not because Mourinho was royalty, but because the club was supposed to be about history and loyalty.

This New Year Chelsea binned Enzo Maresca. The dominant emotion, at least in my living room, was a shrug. That’s five managers in four seasons. The club will talk about ‘objectives’ and ‘performance’. All the corporate nouns used to disguise the only truth that matters. This is shareholder football now, where loyalty is a revenue stream, not a virtue, and the supporters are just the soundtrack.

That is when it hit me. It is not just Chelsea or even what we used to call the ‘First Division’. It is the whole drift of modern life. The things that used to be local, personal, stubborn, full of character, are being quietly swapped out for something smoother, blander, easier to franchise. Our football clubs. Our high streets. Our local papers. Hell, even the local vicar.

Which is why a football sacking, of all things, has me thinking this new year about the things that used to be local. Once you have watched a proud institution learn to shrug at itself, you start noticing the same shrug turning up everywhere else.

Which is why Chelsea FC’s silly petulant act has got under my skin as we look forward to 2026. As it becomes ‘business as usual’, it becomes hard to ignore the same hollowing out in the rest of the things we were told to love. If our football club can learn to shrug at its own soul, it is hardly shocking that everything else is now run with the same blank managerial stare.

Our GP was not a locum or ‘practice partner’. He or she was a person who knew your name, your mum’s knees, and the fact you went funny when you saw blood. Our bank manager was not a call centre in another hemisphere. He was a man in a tie who knew whether your business was sound or whether you were a chancer. Our MP was not some Westminster product on a messaging grid. He or she was the chap or chappess you could collar between the tombola and the tea tent and demand answers. Even the landlord, if you had one, tended to live within booing distance.

Football was like that too. The club was not content, it was community. The badge was not a logo, it was a belonging. Saturdays were not ‘fixtures’, they were the week’s ritual.

Today our club is no longer a local institution that happens to employ footballers. It is an international asset that happens to play football.

The players are no longer local lads living the dream. They are itinerant professionals, assembled like a hedge fund portfolio and moved on when the asset value increases.

Which is why the great one-club men now feel like artefacts from a vanished civilisation. Where are the John Terrys and the Tony Adamses? The Bobby Moores and the Bobby Charltons? The kind of player who, if you cut him, his blood would be the colour of the shirt.

Today the supporters become the only constant and even that constancy is monetised. We are the gullible fools funding a casino.

Chelsea’s owners have spent staggering sums assembling a squad the way a child assembles a Lego Death Star: by buying every piece in sight and then wondering why it still does not fly. Reports put their player spending since the 2022 takeover at roughly €1.7 billion.

Chelsea are just the current loudest symptom. Football has drifted from being a civic religion to an investment class. We, the congregation, are just a noisy inconvenience. In the Premier League alone, revenues are now measured in billions, about £6.3 billion in 2023-24, with broadcast money around £3.3 billion. That is not a sport anymore. It is a global content factory with studs. Sorry, cleats!

Once football becomes content, owners stop behaving like custodians and start behaving like brand managers. The Arabs use it as a reputation laundering service, a soft power side hustle that has its own nickname – ‘sportswashing’. Celebrities buying clubs are the modern equivalent of aristocrats collecting racehorses – except now the racehorse has a streaming deal. Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney turned Wrexham into a worldwide entertainment property, then sold a slice to private equity.

Meanwhile the FA and other governing bodies, the supposed guardians of the game, have spent decades acting like the fans are a resource to be gouged. England has now gone as far as creating an Independent Football Regulator, precisely because the existing system kept failing to stop bad ownership, financial recklessness and contempt for supporters. When you need Parliament to step in and remind football not to behave like a dodgy timeshare, there is clearly something rotten in Derby.

Now, if all this sounds like the bitter speech of a man who misses mud, Bovril and centre halves who looked like they had just clocked off from the docks and fancied a scrap, I will concede something. The game itself is better. The technical level is absurdly high. The athleticism is relentless. Even the women’s game is improving fast and deserves the crowds it is now pulling.

Progress is real. But so is the cost.

Football used to be the workers’ game. One of the few places left where a town could feel like a tribe without needing to hate anyone. Now it is the elites’ commodity exchange. It is traded across borders by people who see supporters as ‘engagement’ and clubs as ‘platforms’.

So if you yearn for old school community, you will not find it in the Premier League. The EPL is a playground for foreign investors, global broadcasters, private equity and sovereign wealth. It is brilliant entertainment, but it is not yours in the old sense.

Here is the wider point, and yes, it is depressing. Local life has been hollowed out. Not by villains twirling moustaches, but by spreadsheets, KPIs and people who think ‘community’ is something you optimise.

If we are going to keep our community identity, it has to be built from the bottom up. It cannot be purchased. It cannot be delegated. It certainly cannot be outsourced to the Premier League.

This is where minority communities often put the Anglo-Saxon majority to shame. Many Jewish and Muslim communities are good at community because they practise it religiously. They build institutions and show up. They create thick local networks of obligation, ritual and social life. It does not happen by accident. It happens because they choose it, week after week.

So what is the non-creepy way for the Anglo-Saxons to talk about belonging, inheritance and place, without sounding like they have a flag collection and a list of grievances? If they want tradition and continuity, without turning it into a blood and soil pantomime?

We can do what the English have always done when we are at our best. Build civic culture. Build associations. Build habits. Celebrate England’s green and pleasant lands.

Start with the boring stuff that need not be boring at all. Parish councils. Residents’ groups. Volunteer at local care homes. Start local history societies. Start school governor networks, youth clubs, sports clubs, choirs, community pubs, allotments, litter picks, food banks, town festivals and ‘Remembrance Events’. The quiet machinery of mutual responsibility.

Don’t tell The Archbishopess of Canterbury: even if we do not believe a word of it, churches can still act like village glue. A building and activities full of neighbours, not customers.

The good news is there are still regions where Anglo-Saxon culture is thick. Where people still talk about ‘us’ with a straight face. Where being British is still said like it means something, not like it needs a disclaimer.

Think Yorkshire market towns and villages, where ‘Yorkshire’ is practically a citizenship. Think Norfolk and Suffolk, where the village still runs on favours, faces and memory, not receipts. Where village life is still an ecosystem, not a marketplace.

Cornwall, Clackmannanshire and Caerphilly are the outliers. More Celtic than Anglo-Saxon, but they prove the point. Strong identity survives where local institutions and local pride survive and thrive. Even after, or perhaps because of, being invaded by metropolitan elites who think tradition is a charming backdrop for their weekend house, not the operating system of the people who actually live there. The same metropolitan elites who think  ‘diversity’ means importing their own opinions into someone else’s town and calling it progress.

Do not mistake the cure for nostalgia. It is not ‘going back’. It is going local. Intentionally.

The age of the local club being our tribe is fading, but the age of the local community being our tribe can still be built. With neighbours, schools, pubs, halls. Whatever still belongs to the place.

But only if we stop waiting for billionaires, hedge funds, party apparatchiks, comms people and the parachuted-in experts.

They are not custodians. You cannot outsource belonging, and you cannot buy it back later.

Clive Pinder is a recovering global executive, former elected ornament, accidental columnist and mildly repentant political provocateur. He writes about hypocrisy, hubris and the small matter of wresting power back from the elites on Substack.