My memories of  being a supporter of one of the lower league football teams in the 1970’s are not all good ones. Following the Mighty Millers (the irony was lost on me at the time) both home and away, there were many days when it seemed that as a fan of Rotherham United, I had drawn one of life’s short straws.

There were good days of course, like when we got promotion one year and when we won….erm…the BBC Kop choir competition in about 1972, defeating the genuinely mighty Liverpool in the process, but these were mere titbits, thrown at us by a mischievous fate to stop us losing interest, or committing suicide…or worse. For the most part, it was grim.

I lost count of the number of times I was almost crushed to death in a stadium (I use the term in jest) which seemed to have been designed to imperil all those who entered. No seats in those day of course, and so when anything of note happened – which wasn’t often to be honest – the resulting crowd surge saw you splattered against the nearest metal barrier or concrete wall. You knew you had to stay on your feet though, because if you went down, a face-full of warm urine or cold pie was the very best you could expect.

Football violence was a regular feature of practically every game. Nobody bothered to segregate the fans at Rotherham, and the half dozen geriatric coppers on duty were no match for two groups of opposing hooligans,  bored stiff by football which more properly belonged on the local park, and hell bent on creating their own entertainment. A large part of every game was spent nervously eyeing the opposing fans for signs of an attack. This is not a place a pre-pubescent youth should be, but somehow I was.

The home games were bad enough, but going away was worse. I’m pretty confident that some of my fastest sprinting was done while fleeing  marauding bands of thugs, and I remember putting all the bobbing and weaving techniques I’d learned from watching Joe Frazier in the Thrilla In Manila  to good effect, while trying to avoid  the flailing Doc Martin boots and fists of a gang of Scunthorpe fans. All of this happened inside the ground, and in some stadiums, there were even bigger dangers.

The Shay at Halifax was a particularly perilous place to visit for opposing fans. Hard as it might be to believe today, one end of the ground was an unmade bank,  littered with broken bricks and stones. There was no terracing at all for a while. I remember a third division game in  the early 1970’s, not for the result, but rather for one of the most terrifying afternoons of my life as the home fans (who had judiciously positioned themselves on the aforementioned bank) rained stones and bricks down on us. No need to take weapons into a match in those days, the club provided them for you!

Even if you avoided being crushed, beaten up or stoned to death, the experience was rarely comfortable. The terraces were windswept, the food and drink primitive, and the sanitary facilities of a standard which would cast shame on an African village. I’m not sure at what point I decided that this wasn’t for me any more, but I did. After years of never missing a game, I just stopped going – and I stayed stopped for about 30 years.  Aside from the odd foray into a private box at more prestigious venues,  I didn’t go near a football match again. That was until last weekend, when I decided  I ought to give it  another try.

You see, at the beginning of last season, the Millers moved into the  brand new £20 Million New York Stadium. (It’s a long story – don’t ask!)  The New York is geographically a stones throw from Millmoor,  (the old place) but a world apart in every other sense. I pass it every day on the way to work, and it looks like a miniature Old Trafford. I was curious to see how the experience would differ from the one I remember. It was Saturday afternoon,  I had nothing else to do and there was a home game. Time to find out.

The early signs were not  promising.  I parked up, and rounded a corner near the ground  to see three blokes trying to throw another bloke in the canal. But it was all fairly good-natured and he only got his feet wet, unlike the old days when it would have been for real and they’d have tried to drown him. Next, a very strange thing happened – a coach pulled up in the middle of the Rotherham fans .  It was  full of Carlisle fans – and they just got off and nothing happened. One of them even started a conversation with me that didn’t include any threats of violence. It was most odd.

I was just reeling from this culture shock when I got to the ticket office. This was even more strange. Back in the day, the battle to get into the ground was horrific – far worse than any Rugby scrum when the crowd exceeded about fifty six. I still have flashbacks to  an FA Cup tie against Leeds United in 1971,  having my arms pinned at my sides,  being carried along by the crowd, totally powerless and with no control over where I might end up. I’ve suffered from claustrophobia ever since. But here there was a polite queue…you know, like you get at the cinema… marshalled by stewards. People were paying with credit cards.

As I waited  my turn in the queue, I had a stroke of luck. A very nice chap approached me…was I on my own?…did I want to get in for half price?…he had his son’s season ticket going spare. I didn’t need asking twice, and was delighted to find that he had prime seats, up behind, and to the left of the  goal. Almost exactly the position I used to stand  all those years ago at the old ground!

I look my seat and looked around. The stadium is  indeed impressive – comfortable seats with plenty of leg room and a great view. Clean and tidy too.  The pitch had some green stuff on it. I think it was grass, a material which was in very short supply in the 70’s when pitches were primarily made up of mud, sand and broken bones.

It was all very civilised. There were even cheerleaders, albeit ones that really should be  sponsored by Pukka Pies if they aren’t already. I didn’t sample the toilets, but at this point was imagining something akin to an upmarket hotel with little white towels and Moulton Brown soaps. I’d arrived quite early though, and as kick-off approached, it became clear that not everything has changed.

As the bulk of the crowd turned up, I noticed that they had brought beer, and to avoid the hassle of trying to smuggle it in, they’d brought it all inside them. The familiar aroma of second hand John Smith’s soon filled the air, as did the crudity and obscenity which often accompanies it. Just a couple of hours earlier I’d tried to persuade my daughter to come with me, but now I was glad she hadn’t. I doubt she’d have benefited much from learning about the bloke in fronts recent visit to the “f**king shi**er” (his words, not mine) , the quality of his mates recent session of onanism, or the alleged sexual preferences of the goalkeepers wife. (which one particularly obnoxious scroat a couple of rows away deemed fit to yell at the top of his voice whenever there was a lull in proceedings.)

I soon realised that I was surrounded by exactly the same people who were there over a quarter of a century before. Only the faces had changed. The surroundings and environment had changed beyond recognition; the people had not.  And that’s what’s really interesting.

You can go through huge technological and environmental change – and we’ve certainly done that over the past 25 years – but people don’t change at anything like the same pace. They remain fundamentally the same,  with the same underlying wants, needs, pre-dispositions, strengths and weaknesses. They behave the same way in football grounds too.

That’s bad news if you’d like to enjoy a match without someone yelling vile obscenities in your ear, but great news if you’re in the business of trying to manage, manipulate, influence, interest and engage people. Why? Because the fundamental means of doing those things don’t change either. What worked a quarter of a century, half a century,  or even longer ago, will still work today with minimal adaptation.

So while people working in practically every sphere of life have been forced to adapt to huge ongoing change, those in the business of influence and persuasion have not. The tools of the trade have changed of course, but the methods that work have not. Things change; people don’t, and there’s something very reassuring about that.

If there’s one skill that it’s worth learning at an early age – one that you can be confident will be useful and relevant until the day you draw your last breath – it’s the psychology of human behaviour and how that can be used to influence, motivate and manage. And the great news is that not only is it something you can use for life, it’s something you can use to transform your life. There are few things achieved of note, which don’t require us to influence others at some point.

Underlying pre-dispositions don’t change because people are sitting down with a warmer pie, and they don’t change because they have access to technology which could only be dreamed of twenty or thirty years ago. They respond in the same way to the same stimuli, and I for one, am very grateful for that.

Think I might try the family stand next time though!

 

* Footnote:  When I ran the spellchecker across this piece, It didn’t like the word Pukka in Pukka Pies and suggested   I change it for ‘puke’. Who says computers aren’t intelligent?

My latest book ‘Why Didn’t They Tell Me? – 99 Shameless Success Secrets They Don’t Teach You At Eton, Harrow Or Even The Classiest Comprehensive’ is now published. Go to www.streetwisenews.com/why for full details.