Cod Almighty | Diary
Who pays the Ferryman?
30 May 2025
It’s not Grimsby Town’s fault that life has been made too hard to live well. It’s not Grimsby Town’s fault that bills are rising. It’s not Grimsby Town’s fault that the roads are full of potholes, or that there aren’t enough nurses, doctors, teachers or soldiers. It’s not Grimsby Town’s fault that Only Fans paid more income tax in the UK than the fishing industry. It’s not Grimsby Town’s fault that Amazon doesn’t pay their share of tax. Ditto Google, Starbucks, Apple, Meta. It’s not Grimsby Town’s fault that political parties refuse to be honest about the cost of running the country and make fanciful, patronising promises that they can’t ever deliver. And it’s not Grimsby Town’s fault that we expect and accept this behaviour.
Yes, from the cost of the NHS and defence to price of a Freddo, tax avoidance to the profits of porn over poisson production, we greet these pieces of news with shrugs and what-can-you-do, with imaginings of cloth-cutting and belt-tightening and realities of debt-raising and fanciful-promise-making.
But there’s a sure topic sure to raise some last-straw passion: football. Much of the exasperations over the miseries of society are expressed by making a particular villain of football. Too many it has always been true that football has been the worst breeding ground of the kind of scum that ruins an otherwise perfectly content society – it is the dystopia ruining the utopia. It's the most violent, the most discriminatory, the worst role model, the most exploitative, and, of course, the most expensive.
Some of the financial comments are fair. Your A46 Diary has spent many years listening to and joining in with criticisms about the abuse of money in the game: too many fans make unrealistic demands; too many clubs risk too much money; too many owners want a significant financial return on their investments. The game as we recognise it today has a finite existence and it’s the money that’s forming the noose.
But complaints about the obscenity of money in football are incongruently pointed and loud: nurses, soldiers, teachers should be celebrated, not those overpaid, privileged, pampered prima donnas. Football and the money involved is held up again and again as a model of immorality.
Much of this is styled around the Premier League and its oceans of wealth from TV and sponsorships. For these guys, the tickets themselves are a significant but relatively small part of their income. For Grimsby Town, the money from tickets is make or break, yet to hear some of the comments this week about how our owners are a penny-pinching, parsimonious pair desperate to drive faithful Pontoonites into a pit of penury, you’d be forgiven for thinking that there is untaxed Amazon-style money sloshing around Blundell Park, simply waiting to be gathered by a fair-minded tax collector whose only purpose is the fair redistribution of wealth. Socialism is not alive or well in society as a whole, however, and the electorate have rejected it in every election bar one, so why it’s football that gets it in the neck for rejecting these principles and not the Googles and Metas of this world is baffling.
Except it’s not. The reasons are obvious and often repeated: no act of love or kindness or loyalty ever goes unpunished and the exploitation of football fans’ love and loyalty goes on apace, but in the mad month of May, with nothing else to occupy our time, we lash out at our overlords, these footballing barons who can rely on the loyalty of their serfs for 11 months of the year, and we express our feelings of betrayal. Perhaps our current owners have dug a hole for themselves by insisting that they want to be seen as custodians rather than owners, as benevolent communicators rather than autocratic overseers. That kind of talk coupled with poor communication over pricing intentions and 1878 memberships only highlights the improbability of running a football club in a sustainable, communal way and raises the sense of bad faith.
None of this is Grimsby Town’s fault, but they are part of the problem. And so are we, of course. Until we break this idea of absolute commitment, we’re trapped in this relationship. Some might call it abusive. Some might take the vote-with-your-feet approach. Some will have no choice. But a loaf of bread has risen 145% (57p to £1.40 source: Office for National Statistics) in the last 23 years and Grimsby Town have raised their prices by less than 60% (a Pontoon ticket was £247 in 2002 and £390 now) in that time. It's not ideal, it’s not an excuse and it’s not a call to arms, just a way of saying that it’s not football’s or Grimsby Town’s fault that life is so expensive. In the annual cost of simply living, it's not Grimsby Town who are ripping us off.