Current state of the game

This article just about sums it up :'(



The Premiership has become a cancer
By Tony Kleanthous
Last Updated: 1:49am BST 30/05/2007


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I bought Barnet Football Club in December 1994 and, at 28, became the then youngest chairman in the Football League. I was fortunate enough to have had a successful business career and when my telecoms company bought Ryman, the stationers, I started to look around for a fresh challenge - and buying a football club seemed a good idea at the time!

Barnet FC had come into the Football League just a couple of years earlier and, after going into administration and being told all their players could leave on free transfers - something which has never been forced on any other League club - they had reached breaking point.

There were some much bigger clubs for sale requiring less time and money, but when I saw the sorry state Barnet were in I felt I had to do something. I relished the challenge of turning this little club around but I now know that I was foolish not to take into account the changing landscape of the industry and the vested interests that lie behind our national pastime.

I love football as a sport but, after 13 years' experience at the sharp end, I have some serious reservations about the future of the game. Have no doubt, the Premiership clubs now control everything in football but I have yet to see them take any decision that can be construed as being for the good of the game as a whole. The small clubs are just there to prop up the football pyramid and are considered as no more than an irrelevance.

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It is not so long since Oldham and Notts County were in the old First Division and, on any given Saturday, no result was a foregone conclusion. Sadly, I don't think we can say that any longer about the top tier.

In my opinion, the Premiership has become a cancer, slowly devouring the purists in the game and seeking to consume everything in its path by wielding a huge wallet which divides its clubs from the rest of football.

Do we really want to see the same four clubs competing for the title each year? Do we really want to measure a successful season by a club's ability to stay up? Do we want clubs going bankrupt and losing all their players the moment they get relegated?

The competition now benefits a privileged few while the rest of football wait for scraps off their table. In the boardrooms of the Football League and Conference I find some of the most dedicated football supporters, chairmen and directors who, week after week, put a fortune of their own money into the coffers. But we are now all tainted by the adverse publicity generated by those at the top and some of their ridiculously highly-paid staff, so when things go wrong we get the grief.

Until 1992, the relatively small amount of TV money the game received was shared equally among the 92 clubs by the Football League. Today, the Premiership gets about 90 per cent, seven per cent goes to the Championship and the remaining three per cent is shared between Leagues One and Two.

Everything is disproportionate and a good example of this is the introduction of parachute payments. If ever there was a case of two wrongs failing to make a right, it was when they came up with this silly idea.

Now, if a club drop out of the Premiership they receive £20 million, over two years, as compensation. How are their Championship rivals, who are earning £1 million a year from television, meant to compete? It's no accident that the clubs that are relegated generally get promoted again, maintaining the yo-yo effect between the divisions.

Of course, this payment was devised so that the public would not have to witness misfortunes such as the one which befell Leeds United, who could not sustain their cost base in the Championship when their TV income fell of the side of a cliff. A sensible solution to this would be to ensure a more equitable share of income through the Leagues.

This is all a recipe for disaster for an industry that has survived for over a hundred years, and which now has more income than anyone could have imagined, yet is in danger of failing in the long-term.

The Premiership clubs have a duty, as the new guardians of our national game, to protect its long-term future, but by taking advantage of the quick buck offered by TV they are behaving like spivs.

So come on chaps: next year you will have an extra few hundred million to spend, so help the sport, help the industry and do something good for a change.

Because of the money involved at the highest level, the fear factor is strangling the entertainment out of the game - witness the FA Cup final - and unless somebody does something about it soon, the game I fell in love with will die.

 

Yup , I agree mate

It DOES sum it up . (shakrhead)

 

But lower league clubs can still afford to throw away money!

Crewe pay &pound;10Ktransfer fee for no reason.</p>

http://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/display.var.1432883.0..php</p>

 

RE: But lower league clubs can still afford to throw away money!

Don't think Crewe will be all that bothered after receiving £2m from Charlton for Luke Varney. 10k is about a weeks interest!

 

They were talking about downscaling their famed academy

due to lack of funds though. Doesn't help budgetting by not knowing the rules.

 

Look at what's happened to some of the clubs who used to be in the premeship

Us, Swinon, Olham, Leeds , Wednesday, Bradford , Forest all struggled trying to obtain that goal again - overstretch themselves and end up in finaciall trouble

 

The other side of the argument

The reason the Premier League started was so that the big clubs could keep more of the TV money. They did this because they were unable to compete with their Italian, Spanish and German rivals for players. This meant that they stood little chance of competing in Europe, and having a reasonable chance of winning the really big money available in the European competitions. Premier League clubs are attractive to foreign investors because of the earnings they can generate. I do not like it any more than anyone else but that is reality.

 

I don't really agree to the "overstretching".....

we apparently budgeted correctly, and the ITV deal is what messed us and a few other clubs up...

If the money came through as it was supposed to covering the time it was supposed to, then we wouldn't really have gone into this...

Theres always a risk in budgeting, that you rely on the fact that you were entitled to some of the money you have accounted for...

Just imagine the scenario...

ITV didn't do what they did, we didn't use the allocated money (ie john dennis not wanting to risk the money not coming in (just incase)), didn't get anywhere (ie the play offs etc, and then we would have all been on JD's back for being a tight arsed sod not spending.

I really wish that the people who really buggered up the game as we see it today (due to the ITV saga) where really brough to account (obvious exceptions apply, ie leeds and p riddy) instead of getting away with what they did.

 

I don't know

Some of those players were on big wages for a club like ours and we suffered for it later on </p>

Sheron etc were on good money - it's no point spending money that's not going to be there next year - eg parachute payments </p>

 

Also

The comment about "only 4 clubs competing for the title every year" - well it wasn't that long ago that we were talking in terms of only 2 sides (Man Utd and Arsenal) being contenders for the title. Also that's nothing new…Liverpool dominated the old 1st Division for about 15 years.
Relegated teams being promoted again - I don't believe that the 3 relegated clubs have all gone straight back up again (it would have been the first time had West Brom won playoffs), and teams yo-yo'd before because, having been in the top division they had attracted, and managed to hold onto, better players.
I see the argument for sharing out the TV revenue more equally, but then again that revenue is being generated by the Premier League clubs, as big an issue to this in my mind was when it was decided to allow home teams to keep all the gate income from league games.

 

RE: I don't know

But we were budgeting based upon an agreed expected income, i.e. the ITV Digital money.

 

"Managing Success"

It just didn't happen in my opinion.

Various clauses should have been entered into players contracts resulting in wages decreases upon relegations; could be wrong but don't think that really happened. We were crippled by silly wages.

 

i know what you mean

but at the time, we were expecting the ITV deal to be about 3Million a season for a couple of seasons (or summat to that effect)...

that would have reflected in the transfer budget and staff wages, and should have been aligned to the expected income (ie 2 or 3 years or whatever it was)...

what happened, we didn't get anything that we should have, but left with the wages...

The game has gone silly, yes, but we keep missing the ITV saga what was a major factor in us being in the situation we was.

 

Wages were in place before that

The likes of sheron were parachute payment money - nobody knew about ITV digital then it wasn't around

 

and what happened to sheron...

I do believe the payments we still got from the Premier was reflected in his contract...

which by all accounts was aligned to the time we were getting premier league payments...

at the point we stopped getting the parachute payments, his contract was up for renewal...


simple budgeting, providing you get the agreed income (parachute payments or ITV)

 

Totally agree

We were writing cheques we couldn't afford

 

Sheron had a 5 year contract nt

.

 

I think we could afford them (temporarily) but there was a complete lack of foresight and contingency.

 

Don't think we can use ITV as an excuse

we were relegated prior to ITV dig going bust therefore would only have received a fraction of the money Championship clubs would have got for the 2002/03 season.