George Elek: Two Years In A Bear Pit

Longing to belong in the Championship, Oxford United fans are struggling to come to terms with whacking their head on the ceiling.

Saturday 18th May 2024

The sight of Josh Murphy scampering onto Ruben Rodrigues’ pass and making it 2-0 to Oxford.

The explosion of sound when the final whistle blew, to confirm that we were heading back to the Championship.

The beery stench of Boxpark afterwards, with the taste of cold liquid from plastic glasses and the feel of many, many embraces with kindred-strangers in the hazy hours following promotion at Wembley.

Everything about that day is now etched into the very fabric of my being. That might sound performative, but it’s how I feel. There was nothing anti-climactic about the final step in the club I love’s 14-year quest from the near-abyss of non-league to being ‘back where we belong’.

But do we belong there?

Recent evidence would suggest maybe not.

Not now at least.

I write this the week of a humbling 3-0 home defeat against Norwich, where Oxford went behind within a minute and then barely laid a glove. This makes it four home games without scoring a goal, and brings the prospect of a return to League One into sharper focus.

Back in May 2024 the celebrations weren’t just about the innate jubilation of winning, but also the anticipation of what was to come. A group of fans who could remember travelling, and losing, to Histon, Ebbsfleet and Grays Athletic were heading to Leeds, to Burnley, to West Brom, clubs who spent our wilderness years in the Premier League.

Please excuse the navel-gazing. There is a point to this beyond the ramblings of a football fan coming to terms with a likely relegation, and it’s simply to ask whether those delirious heady moments are worth the painful struggle that will often follow?

Last season, despite the low moments, was a huge success for Oxford, and in some ways more improbable than the promotion. We managed to stay up, and did so before the final game of the season.

It all started with a dominant win over Norwich. An opening day when a dream became reality. I’m just about old enough to remember watching Oxford in the second tier, but for a huge swathe of younger fans this was their first time seeing us at the level.

For those glorious 90 minutes, we did look like we belonged, and I’m not just talking about the players’ performance. It was the hottest ticket in town, and the lucky ones who were there announced our return in style.

Compare that to yesterday, Norwich’s next league visit to Oxford’s stadium, where the only swathes were of empty seats. Yes it was a dank Tuesday night in February, but it was also Oxford’s biggest home game of the season so far.

Where were the rest of the Wembley 30,000 who celebrated long into the night not even two years ago?

The ticket exchange - where fans can buy unwanted season tickets for individual games - launched in anticipation of Oxford’s return to the big time, and was initially buzzing with business. Now it has the look of a cafe that you can’t quite tell is open or closed when you walk past. There’s certainly nobody in there.

None of the above is a huge surprise. A team who gets promoted into a league where they become a small fish will eventually get eaten by bigger ones. It’s been happening in football, and all sports, since forever.

And this is the core of the issue. Oxford United, in its current guise, will get relegated eventually. But why would any fan accept that harsh reality when it’s an affront to what supporting a team is all about? We demand that our players give 100%, that our owners pump whatever money they can into the club and that our manager does the job they were hired to do. So how can we also accept relegation as gravity at work?

In Oxford’s case, we are a team who can barely monetise matchdays as we don’t own our stadium, don’t get 10,000 home fans for Championship games and whose record signing is just £2.5m. That is not sustainable for a second tier outfit. 22nd-placed Blackburn have spent roughly that much on four different players since last summer. The three promoted League One teams from last season aren’t far off £80m spent on fees since coming up.

There are different circumstances in each case, but the wider point is the same with Rotherham, Wycombe, Blackpool, Plymouth and Peterborough. There is a divide between being a top League One club and a sustainable Championship one and without the infrastructure to bridge it, you’re merely circling the drain until you return.

A season of any of these clubs staying up in the Championship is a huge success story for which all involved deserve immense credit, but for many fans it’s seen as the bare minimum. It cannot be conducive to a happy football club environment when expectations are set to such a high level with no real reason for them to be achieved beyond it just being the target.

Look at Plymouth Argyle’s recent history. Simon Hallett was lauded as one of the best owners in English football after their promotion to the Championship, but as gravity inevitably took hold the narrative changed very quickly.

Now it’s important to mention that mistakes were of course made (Hello, Mr. Rooney). But how do we get from a situation where someone, seen as a hero for delivering promotion, becomes a villain for not progressing once more, when progression was near impossible without spending far beyond their means?

Luton somehow managed to glide from non-league to the Premier League in 10 seasons. They didn’t so much fly too close to the sun but straight into the middle of it. Rather than follow Icarus to oblivion, back-to-back relegations find them in the purgatory of League One. The Kenny’s rocking euphoria quickly made way for the in-fighting and negativity that such a demise will bring.

Joy that breeds toxicity. It’s a novel concept but hard to see how the latter isn’t a direct cause of the former.

I want Oxford to stay up with every fibre of my being, but this week is the first time I’ve really confronted the idea of relegation and what that would mean, and how I’d feel about it beyond the initial sadness.

I’d be proud of the scalps we have picked up. All three relegated Premier League teams from last season, including Ipswich live on Sky. Both Sheffield United and Sunderland in the run-in last season when we needed points most, weeks before they played each other in the Richest Game In Football™.

I will be devastated that we weren’t able to have more just good enough days at the level. Those regulation home wins against poorer teams in the division have been weirdly elusive, and I’ll certainly look at some decisions that have been made around team selection and systems that I wish were different which, in my mind, might have given us a better chance.

The prospect of dropping down a league and going into every game on a more level playing field, winning more games and scoring more goals, isn’t without appeal, even if it would be depressing to be back at some of the grounds we had briefly left behind.

But I’m most sad thinking about the hope that united Oxford fans shared on that day in May 2024 versus the harsh reality. Should Oxford be a Championship side in the coming seasons, playing in our own shiny new stadium, closer to the city and its transport links, then we might have more of a chance of sticking around. But I can’t help feeling that the emotions will be different.

It’s hard to celebrate a return to a bear pit, and this is the case up and down the pyramid. If and when Sheffield United return to the Premier League, the scar tissue will be in full view during the celebrations. If Bromley and Lincoln pull off their promotions this season, won’t they just be the latest exceptionally run clubs who end up paying the price for hitting their ceiling?

I hope we pull off a great escape, and there will be a dose of that Wembley euphoria if we do, but I can’t shift the feeling that being a bottom-budget Championship side is an almost-impossible place for a football club to thrive and can quickly extinguish the joyous unity that promotion brings.

But to answer my own question from above, of course those moments are worth what comes next. Our day at Wembley. Argyle beating Ipswich to the League One title. Luton’s penalty shoot-out win over Coventry in mind-bendingly emotional circumstances. It’s these moments that we live for.

But, when Oxford fans are looking for who to blame and who is the next head that should roll, it’s maybe just worth appreciating how tough the assignment is. Three teams have to go down, and the dice are against us.

We should demand that everyone at the club we support strains every sinew to give us the best chance of staying up. But there’s no reason to see failure as anything other than being the latest club who can’t compete with the vast majority in the league, eventually paying the price of being what they are.