I am increasingly convinced that the people whose opinions count in our game are out and out idiots. Two recent examples have served to confirm this feeling.
Joker number one
Firstly, I nearly choked on my cornflakes the other Sunday when I read an article by David Moffett, Chief Executive of Sport England no less, in the Observer. This fine thinker had taken a long, hard look at our game and concluded that what was really wrong was that sides can go down as well as up. In a flash he had the answer. Simple, really, and you have to wonder how we managed to overlook it in the last hundred years or so: abolish promotion and relegation! I checked the date on the paper, but it was indeed 8 September and not 1 April, so I can only presume that the guy was actually serious. I assume he was trying to push the envelope, think outside the box, etc, but I was forced to conclude that the only clear blue sky he’d found was the bit between his ears. I can’t imagine what he was on, but it may well have a street value.
Thank heavens that Dave Muppet took such pains to stress that these views were merely his own, and not those of the important and influential body Sport England, although if I was with Sport England, I might get worried. What next? Hurdling without the hurdles?
Sport England, by the way, is responsible for developing and maintaining the infrastructure of sport in England, and for distributing National Lottery funds. They’re also, according to the website, “working on issues including... the new English National Stadium at Wembley.” So, not much work to be getting on with there, clearly, and plenty of time for day-dreaming.
Fortunately the rest of us inhabit the real world and Moffett’s pipe dream was quickly dismissed, having encouraged derision rather than the anticipated discussion. Thought-provoking it may have been, but most thoughts were along the lines of ‘is this bloke taking the piss or what?’. People quickly grasped that promotion and relegation are fundamental to the structure of our game, and without the competition they provide, the game would lose much of its meaning. Promotion and relegation are what makes the season matter, and what keeps people coming through the turnstiles.
But, should you doubt, be assured by Moffett that closed leagues operate successfully in several spheres. There’s the Super 12s, for example (whatever the hell they are), rounders in America and, the clincher, penalty rugby’s Six Nations championship for braying middle class wankers in pubs. QED.
Quite how he intended to freeze the game and stop the clock Moffett never detailed. Would the clubs who just happen to be in the Premier League right now have lucked onto an eternal gravy train? Good news for West Brom, clearly, but rather hard cheese for Derby, you might feel. Or would a new Premier League be constituted on some kind of criteria unrelated to current actual merit? Let them in – they’ve got a big catchment area and a nice ground? At last Wolves might see a way to reaching that long-denied promised land. If they have to go the trouble of getting promoted through something as old-fashioned as winning more football matches than anyone else, they might be waiting forever. And then there’s that exciting, thrusting new Milton Keynes franchise. It’s a big town. Surely they deserve a place?
The problem is not that sides go up and down, but that relegation has financially catastrophic consequences. This is what we need to address. Sides relegated to the Football League suffer because player contracts are too generous and the loss of income is too severe. It is also hard for clubs to survive in the Premier League after promotion - but it’s not impossible. Half of the current Premier League’s membership have been promoted into it, and that includes some big clubs such as Newcastle and Sunderland.
Let’s take Sunderland as an example. They could easily go back down, and if they do they will face a financial emergency. But the solution to this surely can’t be to keep Sunderland in the Premier League forever. If they have a bad side and are poorly managed, they deserve to get relegated, and someone else deserves the chance to take their place. The issue is not the fact of promotion and relegation, but the high costs clubs take on and the financial gap between the Premier League and the rest. There are also clubs in the First Division which face financial problems not caused by relegation from the Premier League – there’s Grimsby, for example, and Millwall – and us. Most clubs in the First Division are struggling, and I’m pretty sure they haven’t all been in the Premier League. How would the absence of promotion and relegation help Burnley out right now?
Oh dear, it’s almost too easy to demolish this castle in the air. It is tempting to dismiss this Moffett geezer as a bit of a naïve sap – oh, go on then – but promotion and relegation must be safeguarded. There are doubtless those in the Premier League who would be delighted to limit relegation, and if not eliminate it altogether then at least reduce the numbers. They shouldn’t be encouraged. Careless talk adds fuel to the fire. It is dangerous. It is therefore irresponsible for someone with a senior position in English sport to spout off so carelessly.
Joker number two
Which brings us to our second grand leader idly pondering. Yes, step forward – if your wallet isn’t weighing you down, that is – Mr Gordon Taylor, leader of the world’s most privileged union.
Taylor has spotted that quite a few clubs in the Football League are short of a few bob, had a bit of a think about it and put together a cunning plan. Why can’t the Football League just sell a promotion place to the Premier League? Brilliant! After all, why should the man who speaks for professional footballers be concerned with piddling issues such as the importance of promotion and relegation to our game?
I’m starting to get déjà vu here. First Moffett, then Taylor. This is how it happens, you know. This is how an unacceptable idea is advanced onto the agenda.
Again, just considering the practicalities of the idea makes you realise how wrong it would be. Presumably there would be just one automatic promotion place from the First Division, with the next four sides competing through the play-offs. Whoever finishes second would have been robbed. (Burnley would probably finish sixth.) Whoever finished third from bottom of the Premier League would have been handed the ultimate get out of jail free card. Their status in the Premier League would have been maintained on grounds other than merit. Our competition would have been robbed of meaning, and we would finally know that there was nothing that could not be sold, nothing that does not have a price. What a tawdry sell out it would be. When the very basis of the sport on which you compete is up for sale, what’s left? What’s the point?
Taylor is, of course, pushed into an impossible position by football’s crisis: he cannot admit that his members have caused it. This forces him to find ridiculous arguments to avoid confessing the inevitable – that player wages have to fall quickly and dramatically.
Perhaps, if Taylor cares so deeply about the future of football, he could set an example to his members by taking a cut in his massive salary. The leader of this tiny union stuffed with grotesquely high-earners currently pulls down rather more than the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Getting real
Neither of our two dreamers has addressed the crucial and inescapable fact that player wages have to come down if more than a handful of elite clubs are going to prosper, and if three divisions of Football League clubs are going to survive. It’s as simple as that. TV’s cash has been flushed down the bog, and except for the elite, who will benefit for a while longer from the continuing demand for ‘Champions’ League football, and will seek to exploit through marketing and pay per view the pathetic glory-seekers that attach themselves to top clubs, we’re all in a mess. For almost all clubs, the riches have come or are coming to an end. Football’s boom was brief and the bubble burst quickly. TV riches shot straight through the clubs into the grasping hands of players and agents, and ultimately the only true beneficiaries of the football boom may turn out to have been absurdly overpriced fashion labels, boy racer sportscar dealerships, the builders of mock Tudor mansions in the home counties and bookmakers.
Each new TV deal was supposed to have solved everything, but money was spent with lightning speed, and then we were no better off than before. Remember how even before football-loving ITV washed their hands of their commitments, even when that TV deal was supposed to have secured the future of League football, there was much talk of the ‘Phoenix League’?
Taylor should, but can’t, address the question of the grotesquely inflated wages his players have earned in recent years. They benefited from hyper-inflation. Now television’s largesse is drying up, so naturally must their supply of gravy. Taylor should also address the fact that this summer several hundred professional footballers lost the right to use the first part of that phrase when, against their will, they left the paid game. Why can’t Taylor consider how lower wages would keep greater numbers of players in the game? I’m sure the players who involuntarily retired from football this summer would support this.
Player costs will, of course, come down in the coming years. As contracts expire, they will not be renewed, or new contracts will be offered at much lower rates. New contracts will include clauses to take account of relegation. Contracts will be much shorter, although the fantastically ill-timed imposition of the transfer window (go on, kick us while we’re down) will make that harder. A wage cap would help too. (Note to Moffett – now that’s something that has worked elsewhere. Go and study that.)
Once we get to the point where most clubs are running reasonably sized squads on realistic wages, I think our game will be better for the bursting of the bubble. The trick is in getting through the next two or three very difficult years, when players remain on contracts struck in times of goldrush. It’s going to be – it already is – a bumpy ride, and it is in getting through this time of transition, when players on 30 grand a week line up alongside those playing for nothing to keep a toehold in the game, that football league clubs need help.
Taylor got this much right: what we need right now is a fairer distribution of income, accompanied by a wage cap to stop mistakes being repeated. The wealthy elite have to share with the poor. Shame it’s not going to happen, really. They’re not just going to give the money away.
Ah, does anyone remember the creation of the Premier League? People cynically said it was all about greed. No, we were told, it was for the good of English football. Ten years on, do you feel the Premier League has done us good? Remember, particularly, that the Premier League was intended to benefit the national side. Well haven’t the last ten years been glorious? We’re now at the point where England regulars aren’t fit to play for England at the same time as they turn out for their club side.
As usual, I suspect we’re the mugs who are going to have to keep this whole thing going. The Premier League, founded on greed, is not about to discover the value of philanthropy. The turkeys who still have lucrative professional contracts left are not going to vote for an earlier Christmas. The government, for all New Labour's love of 'footy' photo opportunities, are not about to do something as radical as get their hands dirty meddling in a free market. In the end, it’s going to come down to the supporters, again, to dig deep, rally round, stick together, give their energies and their money and back other clubs as well as their own, until dubious white knights ride in to write a cheque and save the day, at which point we’ll doubtless get told to shove off and concentrate on cheering our teams again.
In the meantime, could the pontificators, claptrappers and bullshitters spare us their gimmicks and flights of fancy? They're just not what we need right now.
