True value of fans still discounted by clubs

When you really start to break it all down, it’s worth considering what a football club actually is beyond a name. What lasts from one generation to the next? What makes, say, the Tottenham Hotspur of 2013 the same entity as that of 1963.

Because, ultimately, the players leave, the manager leaves and all the staff eventually depart. The actual team and all around it gradually become completely different. Similarly, just as the very home stadium can change and the club itself be bought, Cardiff City fans have already found that even the kit — which Jerry Seinfeld famously described in one joke as the only thing you end up following — can be altered.

The following, in terms of the fans, however, is the point. The single thing that really stays constant in any club is the support, the collective who embody otherwise intangible and vague notions of an institution’s ‘culture’.