What We're Up Against

Good point - what now is the exact point of teams such as Stoke, Baggies etc ? Just to tread water mid table and keep getting the cheque each season. Woopee - fcking-doo.

Let the 'big' 6 leave, and let's have a league based on meritocracy more than cash.

 

Back when Bolton were wanting to pull up the trapdoor of the Premier league and scrap relegation I was dead against it. It would kill all hope for teams like us. As things have gone on I think I've got to the point where it wouldn't bother me. The rest could go about setting up a league that is more balanced (hopefully). Even if they had pulled up the trapdoor they would still have been stitched up by the big clubs who would want to swap games against Stoke and Bolton as it was then for games with Milan and Bayern. They'd eventually have been cast aside and come crawling back to the rest of us or died a slow death as their fans lost all hope of being able to compete.

 

I don't mind watching Sky footie on my phone, for free, but I'd NEVER pay what those robdogs are asking for to get Sky sports on my tv. NEVER.
If the big 6 decided to go and do a superleague thing then let them, I don't really care.
But would the revised prem league consist of 14 teams or would they make up the missing 6 by promoting from below?

 

How about this for a scenario?
The Football League or EPL or whatever the hell it's called now actually did something for the good of the game along these lines:-
Cut all ties with the Premier League.
Instituted some FFP regulations that actually have teeth. Not to completely remove the advantages of bigger clubs but to ensure that a reasonable level of competition is maintained and that no club is financially disenfranchised.
Invited all members of the Premier League to join under those criteria with the understanding that any who refuse to do so would, at a future date when the big six dump them, have to apply for membership of the Football League ans start from at least the fourth division.
Oh...and we could go back to calling the top division Division One too. Bonus.

 

I have a mate up near Harrogate. Both he and his son are "big" Liverpool fans despite never having visited Anfield.

Nice blokes the pair of them, but texting me when they have won, or just when we have lost seems fair game to them. I sometimes find it annoying, as it means much more to me.

They are part of what's wrong with football and it's disparity. Grown ups picking a top team to "follow" when clubs much closer are struggling to make ends meet.

I'm very proud to support the reds and to have introduced my son to it at an early age. It means a heck of a lot to us. It's something that the TV fan will never appreciate.

 

Yep, £130 a month. I've tried discussing it, not that it's any of my business, but it was like discussing the right to bear arms in the USA. I got nowhere. The stock answer is "How can you think that £130 a month is a lot, when you spend a similar amount (on average) per month watching Barnsley?"

Anyway, I think you're a complete t£$£$"£$%"£^"****t.

 

You have made me cry.

 

I'm truly sorry.

 

Good. Brought back a lot of unhappy memories. Hope you feel guilty.

 

Shame the then big clubs didn't create massive barriers to entry and strangle the life out of the likes of Newton Heath, Ardwick, Chelsea, Spurs etc at birth back in the 1890s/1900s.

 

Whilst the money is ridiculous.

If our club was to fluke another promotion, even if we were then immediately relegated, we'd be set.

 

Agreed but doesn't that just show how daft the entire system is? An entire spectator sport financed by people who never go near the locations where the sport is played!

 

Why do you think that?

 

Well making the assumption that everything else remains exactly how it is now, just considering the large sum we'd receive just for one season in the Premier league in TV money. As I say, assuming everything else remains the same, so not spending £50 million on new players like Huddersfield have.

 

You have summarised why I asked the question.

Fans are fans and they are not going to be happy to go into the top league and failing to compete. They will want a new team that at least gives us a shout at staying up, and the Huddersfield example is of a team giving it a shout. So they spend the money, they pay competitive wages or the players do not come and the players demand long term contracts for taking a risk on a team that is not established. The players, the fans, the directors, they all want to push the boat out. I know that there was less money when we were there before, but the principles are the same, and it was those principles that led us to Administration within 5 years of promotion. We thought that we were big time, and we were nothing of the sort. As I say, the money is more, but there are more players, more agents and more people with their hands out, waiting for a share, and human nature never changes.

 

Just reading David Conn's excellent book "The Fall of the House of FIFA", there's a interesting section aboit the founding principles of the Football League back in 1888. Describes the polar opposite of what the game has become, especially in the last 30 years.

"The English Football League, the world’s first, was formed in 1888, a more brass tacks business held at the Royal Hotel, Manchester, than the public school old boys’ recreational rule-setting in London twenty-five years earlier. For a competition which would inspire similar leagues all over the world and create such enduring glories, the league’s founding motivation was basic: to provide regular fixtures for clubs which now had the financial commitment of paying players and catering to supporters.

The twelve clubs, six from the north, six from the Midlands, which have in their histories that they were the original, founder members of the Football League, were Accrington, Aston Villa (whose chairman, William McGregor, a draper and devout Christian, was the league’s initiator), Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, Burnley, Derby County, Everton, Notts County, Preston North End, Stoke City, West Bromwich Albion and Wolverhampton Wanderers.

At that very first meeting in Manchester, the representatives understood that clubs based in the cities could attract bigger crowds and so make more money than the clubs in the smaller towns. They agreed that, in order to ensure genuine competition between them, clubs should share the attendance money, the only source of income they had then, otherwise the big clubs would make more and therefore pay high wages to the best players, and dominate. So, the fair distribution of money was embedded as a principle in professional football from its very beginning.

A key discovery for me was that the Victorian gentlemen of the Football Association had also sought to restrain the potential for individuals to profit personally from the bristling commercialism of the industrial clubs. The FA allowed the clubs’ founders to form limited companies, to raise money and protect themselves from the liabilities of paying wages and building grounds, but introduced rules to prevent the shareholders making money for themselves. This bargain, between business and football’s founding principles, not perfect, perhaps too amateurish, but insisting on a core sporting purpose, was the basis for the Football League and its clubs’ remarkable growth into and through the twentieth century. It had grown to four divisions after the First World War, included ninety-two clubs throughout England and Wales, and marked an extraordinary 100 years of story-making in 1988.

The big clubs’ breakaway from this and the other essential bases of the sporting constitution came as the amounts of money available, principally from television, grew in the 1980s. In 1992, the First Division clubs broke away, to form the Premier League, so that they would not have to share the bonanza of a new payTV deal with the rest of football. A small group at the head of the FA somehow persuaded themselves that they would become pre-eminent in English football and deliver a blow to a Football League they had come to see as administrative rivals, by backing this big clubs’ breakaway. The FA also allowed the clubs’ shareholders to form holding companies to bypass the old rules limiting the cash they could make out of them, and as the money and exposure of the Premier League soared, the ‘owners’ began to make fortunes by selling the clubs."

 

I've been in Indonesia for 2 weeks and they absolutely love the premiership there. They'll regularly stay up til the small hours watching games, even midweek games. I've no idea how much Indonesian media spend on the rights to beam them to their 260 million odd population, but consider this.

The country in the most part is insanely poor. We were told on Bali that a police officer may get around $400 a month salary. And that was considered a good job. Tips of just a pound were greeted with some of the most appreciative gestures I've ever seen travelling. On Java, as many other places, there are villages without piped running water, they have to go and tap into the ground and create a well, or divert natural springs. Many have to have their own generators without mains lighting (though the main towns and cities very much do).

Its just a starkness of lunacy, where companies pay absolute fortunes for premiership tv rights, people lap it up, yet are placed in countries and places that are destitute in comparison.

This pyramid of ever increasing greed needs to die.

I really can't see how it will as it defies the odds of sanity. You'd think by now there would be more disengagement at the disgusting money paid out to players and agents, yet it seems the more garish and astronomical the amount, the more people pour adulation on these people.

There will be an even bigger league of greed, Barcelonas stance of potentially leaving La Liga may well be a speedy catalyst.

 

Burnley have taken a very different approach. Accepting a relegation sticking with their manager and not spending outside their means.

 

I agree with all the points that you have made in your excellent post, and if we were able to go back in time and restore the level playing field to football, it would please me no end. The problem is that football has become a business. It is a business in which the Premier League competes with the best and richest leagues in the world for the best talent in the world. The leagues beneath our top league are being dragged along the same path by the momentum generated by the Premier League. In the era that you describe, there were practically no footballers from beyond these shores playing in our game. Generally, if you were born in a country, you stayed in that country and you played in that country. There was no exchange of ideas, or systems or of training methods either. That is why it was such a culture shock when the Hungarians beat us so devastatingly at Wembley in 1954. Now, our top league competes for players on the world stage, and if there was not the money to attract those players to England and keep home produced players playing at home, and they went to Italy, Germany or Spain as a result, then our game would not only be poorer because of the reduction of skill levels on show, it would be poorer because the world would not be prepared to buy our TV product because our football has the worlds best players playing the worlds best version of the game. The case for going back in time is not straight forward by any means, but if we confine ourselves to the narrow boundaries of the level playing field, the case is open and shut.

 

But is that model possible at Barnsley.

The abuse that the Cryne family has taken because they are operating a system that makes financial sense suggests not.