What's a football club?

The Game Room
1

Every once in a while, I hear something about “Manchester United” or another “football club”. I’ve always been confused by this, and Wikipedia doesn’t do a very good job of clarifying the difference between a “football club”, a “football team”, and a “sports club”.

I’m American.

For the longest time, I thought Manchester United was a “club”, like a bar, that fans visited for alcohol and dancing. Obviously that’s not the case. Then I thought it was just a regular sports team, kinda like how the San Francisco 49ers are a team that play the other football. Is that what a “football club” is? Or is it something like an college sports club, meaning a loosely affiliated bunch of people who just like to play together, but not necessarily as a formal team? Or is it a collection of teams that play together? Or something else entirely?

Sorry for this basic question, but Wikipedia and Google really aren’t answering it in a way I can understand.

2

They are a HUUUUGGE sports team. They play football in the English Premier League and various other cup competitions. Their supporters are legion… and tasteless!

All the professional football teams are referred to in this way in England

Manchester United Football Club
Liverpool Football Club
Bolton Wanderers Football Club

and so on

3

At the level you are talking about a football club is, strictly speaking, a company, either private or public. It is in the business of selling tickets, sporting paraphenalia, advertising in stadiums and on jerseys and all the other ways that sports teams make money. The company does that by producing a successful sporting team. Successful team means that people will pay to watch them, and to buy crap with the team name. Advertisers then follow.

The club isn’t the team, but it’s very closely tied to it, both financially and in the public’s mind. So when someone refers to “Manchester United Football Club”, they may be referring to the company or the team. You just have to divine which from context.

Football clubs started out as just plain clubs, like pretty much any other club. Think about any of the clubs you were in at school, or the local Rotary or Lions, but on larger scale. There was a president, secretary, treasurer etc and, of course, and members. Most football clubs are still like that: small affairs in small towns with maybe a couple of dozen members. At that level most of the club members will be players, or their famies. The point of the club is to play football. The club organises matches against other teams. It organises the team membership at various grades or appoints coaches and captains to do so. It raises money for upkeep of the training fields and clubhouse and to purchase equipment and uniforms. All the things needed so that a couple of dozen men can play football for a couple of hours on the weekend.

Some of the clubs associated with the more successful teams grew so much, had such high membership and made so much money that it became necessary to transform from clubs into companies. But they kept the name of “Football Club” because that is what the public knew. But they are no longer actual clubs in any sense of the word.

The actual supporters are usually still members of clubs, but now that is membership of the club supporter’s club, affiliated with the company-called-a-club. So, for example, Manchester United Football Club is a company, and has no actual members. It sponsors Manchester United Supporters Club, which normal people can join. But that club doesn’t have anything to do with playing football. It’s effectively just a fan club.

I’m not sure if that clarified it or made it worse.

4

It’s the main football team plus the sub-teams (like the youth team) and all the sundries like groundskeepers, accountants and, yes, bar staff (because there’s usually a bar).

5

The term “club” as a synonym for “professional sports team” isn’t entirely unknown in the US - it’s often found in reference to baseball teams.

6

Most professional football clubs, in Britain at least, are limited companies with the nominal purpose of running a football team or teams so as to make a profit for their owners. In practice most top flight English football teams do not make a profit, the expenditure on staff (including very expensive top players), grounds, servicing debt, etc. exceeds the income from tickets, merchentising and (most important) TV rights. So you end up with wealthy owners coming in an bankrolling the club as a vanity purchase :dubious:

I think this is wrong, in most of the cases they became companies because they were about to go bankrupt and need cash. They got from local businessmen who coughed up in return for a share in the new company. I’m pretty sure that was the case at Man U back at the end of the 19th century.

There are probably others but the one obvious example of a major football club that is still a club is Barcelona FC with 170000 members.

7

Basically, it’s like a men’s club, a social gathering place for the males to imbibe, eat greasy “meat” pies and hurl verbal abuse at the players and officials on the pitch, as well as the opposing fans while wearing the colours associated with their particular team.

I wonder what the OP thinks the Pony Club is?

8

The word “club” in the context of football and rugby makes sense. The league structure, at least in Britain, is continuous from rank amateur teams all the way up to the big professional leagues that draw in millions of pounds of TV revenue, with promotion and relegation between all the leagues. At the bottom of the league hierarchy, football and rugby clubs are little more drinking societies that sometimes take to the field, and have a strong social element, with the clubhouse being used by family members and former players every weekend for events, both in and out of season (there’s, I’d estimate, about 30 amateur teams in Edinburgh, for instance), usually with some form of subscription or fund raising drive to maintain the clubhouse and ground.

9

Yeah, I’m surprised the OP has never heard it. Baseball commentators and athletes often use the term as a synonym for team, the same way they use “franchise.”

Actually, professional baseball began with men’s social clubs. Many of the earliest teams were formed by social clubs.

In fact, the Oakland Athletics have their name because they began as the “Athletic Club of Philadelphia.”

Other early professional baseball teams –

Centenniel Club of Philadelphia
Resolute Club of Elizabeth
Maryland Club of Baltimore
Lord Baltimore Club
Mansfield Club of Middletown
Mutual Club of New York
Knickerbocker Club of New York
Olympic Club of Washington
National Club of Washington
Forest City Club of Cleveland
Forest City Club of Rockford (duplicate names were accepted back then)
Kekionga Club of Fort Wayne
Western Club of Keokuk
Atlantic Club of Brooklyn
Eckford Club of Brooklyn
Excelsior Club of Brooklyn
Union Club of Morrisania
Elm City Club of New Haven

Contemporary references sometimes reverse these names to modern style – Brooklyn Atlantics, New York Mutuals – but those are anachronisms.

10

I’ve alwasy felt the term ‘club’ has changed in meaning a little since when these organisations were created (maybe 120-130 years ago). I think in the mid-late Victorian era ‘club’ probably meant what we now term ‘community’ or even ‘mutual’.

11

It appears, for example, that the full legal name of the entity that fields an American football team under the name “Dallas Cowboys” is Dallas Cowboys Football Club, Ltd..

I think this is reasonably common in the US, but apparently not universal. That page I linked contains (for me) links to “related companies” including:[ul]
[li]Kansas City Chiefs Football Club, Inc.[/li][li]San Francisco Forty Niners, Ltd.[/li][li]The Oakland Raiders, A California Limited Partnership[/li][li]New York Football Giants, Inc.[/li][li]Philadelphia Eagles Limited Partnership[/li][li]Buffalo Bills, Inc.[/li][/ul]

12

It’s simple really, a football club (like any other ‘single sport’ sports club) represents a collective group of teams that all play for the same, well, club. So Manchester United (or for that matter Lower Bottom Cricket Club) will have a number of teams, such as the first team, second team, women’s team, youth team, all playing under the name ‘Manchester United’. They’ll also have a clubhouse, management board, ground staff etc etc.

So when you hear ‘the team’, it’s probably in reference to the men’s first team, whereas ‘The Club’ refers to the collective, and could refer to management decisions or anything really, such as ‘The Club has decided to sell its training ground’.

13

Good answers so far. I am a member of a RFC (Rugby Football Club) in Massachusetts, and can say that our Club (formed in 1979) follows the British model described upthread. It’s a social club with a mission statement to support the rugby team, where most of the members are players or past players.

14

Moved to the Game Room.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

15

Is there an organization like the NFL that supervises all of the rugby clubs? Or do these clubs just arrange games and schedules with other clubs?

16

Professional rugby clubs in England started forming leagues in the 1980s. I think. Before that, it was believed that forming leagues would make the game “dirty.” I believe the top leagues are the English Premiership for rugby union and the Super League for rugby league.

Each form of rugby actually has a governing body as well, which is not what the National Football League does in the United States. The N.F.L. isn’t a governing body. It’s a commercial entity that operates a particular league.

17

Yes and no. There are two types of rugby - Rugby League and Rugby Union. But don’t be misled by the terms - they’re there for historical reasons. There are ‘leagues’ (no capital letter) for both Rugby League and Rugby Union.

Rugby League, at least in the UK, does have governing bodies - here’s url=http://www.englandrl.co.uk/]the English one which arranges games and rankings and so on and enforces rules.

Rugby Union does too.

Rugby League has the Six Nations cup (which is the most famous one), Rugby Union has Four Nations.

TBH, I find it all a little confusing, but suffice to say, yes, both the main types of rugby do have leagues and national governing bodies.

18

t’other way round.

19

There has always been leagues, at every level of the game. I think you’re confusing ‘leagues’ with the game code of ‘Rugby Union’ turning professional in 1995. It was the idea of paying players which was deemed distasteful/‘not the done thing’ up to that point, in fact that’s the reason for Rugby League forming a breakaway code in the 1890s, over the argument of amateur vs professionalism.

20

There are two, as others have noted (a result of the historical row over payment of players).

Rugby Union is governed at a national level by the RFU, and at an international level by the IRB. Each country has its own national governing body.

Rugby League (which varies slightly in its game rules, eg it has 13 rather than 15 players per side) by the RFL, and by the IRLB at international level.