Re: "Working class club"

bluer than blues

It always appears to me that the moniker is reserved for clubs that traditionally do worse: Everton, Sheff Utd, Blues etc. Whilst people look at clubs like vile, Liverpool, and Sheff Wed as more middle class.

That's how they started out. Vile was a money-making project from at least 1878, illegally paying under the counter to attract support while other clubs were still pretty much by the members for the members. Liverpool was created by the owner of Anfield because Everton had told him to stuff his rent increase and he bought in a shedload of players from Scotland - where professionalism was still banned.

Sheff Weds was the first Sheffield club to turn pro and they basically ate up every other Sheffield club going. United was created by Yorkshire CCC as Bramall Lane - which had been used by many of the Sheffield clubs - suddenly had no tenants for the winter, so was also somewhat middle-class in origin. Wednesday, in a staggering misjudgment of history, encouraged United into the League in order to create some local competition...

Another middle-class club was Warwick County, set up by Warwicks CCC, with backing from the Ansells brewery, but they were a day late and a dollar short - the fanbase had already chosen.

Also starting off as poshos: Blackburn Rovers, which was the grammar school side in Blackburn, who used superior wealth to dismantle the working-class Olympic, again with under-the-counter payments; and Walsall Town, who merged with the working-class Swifts to form Walsall FC.

That they all of course attract working-class support - which after all is what they were meant to do - does not lessen that the richer strata of society tended to jump on their bandwagons rather than those from the grottier ends of town...

A counter-intuitive one for that is Celtic. The Brother Wilfrid charitable foundation lasted about six months. Then the moneymen noted that east Glasgow was something of a footballing desert, that the population was growing because of the loco works' expansion, took over, and created a superclub by recruiting from all over Scotland. The name Celtic was chosen deliberately NOT to alienate the "local" Scots - it was meant to be an Irish AND Scots club, albeit with Irish-origin players. Indeed they were so 'cosmopolitan' that there was an Irish rebellion from Celtic to form another club in the area - Glasgow Hibernian - but that crashed and burned. (Rangers' sectarianism took off after WW1 - and that turned out to be good business as well...)