I'm very tempted to just ignore Man City and *that story* completely.
I mean, yesterday, Stenhousemuir beat the team that poached their manager in summer and went 8 (eight) whole points clear at the top of Scotland's second flight.
If we had a sane relationship with football, the headlines would go a bit like this:
"Now Sports News with Steven:
In Scotland, the unlikely Stenny revolution gains momentum as the part-timers down Ayr at Somerset Park Meanwhile, in England, some boring shite about balance sheets that no one in their right mind cares about."
That's obviously a wilfully naive position to take. I like naive though. I was naive as a child and in many ways, I wish I could be a child again again and routinely see the world with curiosity and wonder. Sadly, I can't and we all know, as football fans, that the balance sheet shite matters whether we want it to or not.
It's precisely why we celebrate the likes of Stenny (or whatever unlikely team upsets the financial scales every now and again.) - Such stories give us all (those of us who don't support one of 3 or 4 teams that actually win stuff) belief, that despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that one day, we too will be selling our kidneys, auctioning off our families into hard labour and trekking across Europe to experience the singular thrill of Champions League final level police brutality combined with UEFA level appalling organisation.
The dream maybe just a dream, but whilst Celtic or Rangers vs Stenhousemuir at Ochilview is a genuine possibility we can never quite give up on it. If Cape Verde can hold Argentina to a draw then....
Football serves up just enough romance, just often enough to keep us hooked.
Stenhousemuir is (on the surface at least, which as far as I've delved) a heart-warming story of a club nearly going to the wall, a supporters trust rescue and a plan to run the club on sound principles and improve its off the pitch standing and business. If gets them into the top flight then it will be a day to celebrate. A genuine part-time side breaking through against full time opposition with more money than them.
Money is behind most unlikely success to some degree and what happens next is often a bit grim when the money runs out. 'Plucky Leicester' spent a lot of money - it was a lot less than their peers and their title was astonishing - but their club was in the early stages of international ownership by a family with a lot of money. Regardless of the relative spend, there was still a lot of money spent. Now they're in the third tier. Nottingham Forest's incredible achievements of the late 70s/early 80s left the club in a financial hole it arguably never really recovered from until their current (multi-club) ownership arrived. Gretna pulled off an even more unlikely feat than Stenny - but when the money ran out (and the owner died) they plummeted back to where they'd come from leaving only a curious entry into the record books to be puzzled over in future years - 'Gretna, Scottish Cup finalists? Is that true or is it a typo?'
We can wag our fingers admonishingly at over-spending or at those clubs who tied their fortunes to the mast of a single unstable source of cash - it's very tempting to shake our heads sadly and say 'well, you have to say, the fans have got what they deserved - that was never going to be sustainable' - but here's the thing...
... if nothing ever really changed (i.e, lets, for the sake of the thought exercise, imagine Forest had been prevented from signing Peter Shilton and Trevor Francis because *money* or that someone had intervened at Gretna to point out the obvious) then would football be better or worse?
Would it have been been 'better' if it wasn't Forest's name on the European Cup - but that of a more established side that had a healthier long term bank balance? Would the Scottish Cup be more of less interesting to look back upon if, instead of Gretna, Hearts had played Celtic or Rangers in 2006?
We can, of course, argue about the impact in the longer term on clubs - but if we take a view of the game as a whole, it seems inarguable that unpredictability and change makes the game more exciting. For every winner, there's a loser, the winners go up, the losers go down. Blackpool were one of the elite in a period spanning from the 40s to the early 60s and provided England teams with superstar names, now, bizarely we've got *checks notes* Brentford and Bournemouth buying players from all over the world and outbidding giants of world football. Shit changes and change is good - if there wasn't *change* then we'd have got bored of this a long time ago.
So - if we agree that change is good but we also kind of like what we have too, then we've got a conundrum to solve. How do we make sure things can change, but also, guard against anyone changing things so much that everything is changed forever.
Here we bring in the spectre of Chelsea. It's practically law, when trying to dissect the history of football finance to cite Abramovich as the turning point - and he probably was - but it's not so much a story of him and his club - he just happened to be the inevitable product of a system set up in such a way that sooner or later someone would recognise that with enough money, they could do whatever they wanted to - and that's exactly what he did. It doesn't really matter what that money was, where it came from or why he spent it - the personal and moral details are irrelevant to the bigger point, the football point - at that point, you could basically spend whatever you wanted so someone came in and did just that.
The early Premier League was dominated by Manchester United and Arsenal - arguably the biggest club in the country and the biggest club in the country's capital. They had spotted the potential of the Premier League, got on the marketing train, flogged shirts and opened stadium tours and all of that. They both understood the value of 'maximising off field revenues,' understood that they had 'fans' in other countries who watched them on the telly and that, in this brave new world, it wasn't enough just to take a fiver off some scruffy urchins at the turnstile and let them pick a place on the terraces. That wasn't just an outdated view of what football could be, it was serious failure to 'optimise the cashflow by creating a customer experience that attracts affluence'
At the point Abramovich arrived, Arsenal were carefully planning a stadium development that would bring their corporate facilities in line with the best in the world and therefore close the gap with Manchester United. The way forward appeared to be - big club, makes itself bigger by modernising and globalising. If you weren't a big club, it would be hard to keep up with this trend, because the scale of investment required to turn yourself into a global entity (it's an expensive business, creating a stadium fit for the middle class day out/city bankers jolly in a prime urban location)
Up until that point, their commercial advantages had translated easily onto the pitch - the Sky deal gave them, for the first time, money that represented what they believed to be 'the value' of their product and it also gave them a reach around the world. The wider world wanted Man Utd shirts - but it didn't so much want Ipswich, Bolton and so on. The Champions League cash was a virtuous circle - qualify, get more money, qualify again - all without overstretching - they earned more money, so they had more money to spend and had more international exposure and therefore sold more merchandise to more people - 'This is perfect,' thought those big clubs - 'as long as some sort of shady oligarch character doesn't ruin it all for us...'
Chelsea put it up 'em without any question. They unleashed a level and pace of spending that was unprecedented. They opened questions in those 'big clubs' about sustainability. Suddenly, talk of spending hundreds of millions in a single summer was normalised. Roman opened his pipeline of exotic money and the assumptions of the big few were blown out of the window. Now, to compete, football required 'investment' and 'investment' in football basically means 'setting fire to big piles of cash in return for some potential glory for which their is absolutely no guarantee' - which, if you are running a previously relatively solvent business, isn't a wholly welcome development.
Directors have always 'put their hands in their pockets' and funded clubs. The stories of Clough berating his board in search of more money (directors knew nothing about football when they wouldn't stump up the cash for ol' Bighead to spend on football) or the 'look the other way' payments of the maximum wage era, or even the 'jobs' (note the inverted commas) provided in factories and mills by club owners to star players before the ban on professionalism ended are all proof of this. Jack Walker is the poster child of glory associated with one man's benevolent tendencies.
What we now had however, was an issue of scale. The cash flowing into Chelsea was, unlike Jack Walker's money (or the Nottingham Forest board's wallets, or say, Dave Whelan's inflation of Wigan's potential) seemingly limitless. It had the power to change, not only who was competitive this season, but the next and the next after that and so on. It didn't 'nudge' up prices and wages, it sent them sky rocketing and that put up costs for everyone, the big clubs included.
Chelsea's position was enhanced - they were suddenly buying global superstars. That attracted global interest. Those new global fans were rather less sniffy about Chelsea than some in England - they were never really a 'big club' over the history of the game in England but who cares about the 1980s if you're from Ivory Coast watching Drogba on telly. They had a 'box office' manager, perfect for whipping up media attention. They were slap bang in the heart of 'fashionable London' - the perfect destination for players, but also an ideal place to attract affluent supporters from affluent London (and far, far beyond). They could, therefore, begin to flog shirts and corporate events and suchlike on a greater scale. They could enjoy the Champions League money.
In short, they spent shit loads of money - but they could also earn shit loads of money. From the outset, the Premier League structures were set up to reward this - you earn more money for finishing higher, so money begats money and the deeper the pockets you have, the longer you can stay on the roulette wheel.
What we then saw over the next decade, was a flight of 'old' ownership - we'll get to Man City in a minute, don't worry - but as Chelsea impact, we hit a point in time where the previous generation of owners all start to realise that this isn't the same game anymore. The notion of 'custodianship' and a board of local directors is now outdated - occasionally dipping into the family coffers to fund a player can't compete with occasionally dipping into the resources created by the corrupt liquidation of one of the world's most vast empires ever seen. The old boards were business people on a local or sometimes national level, Abramovich basically had the utilities of the Soviet Union to fight them with.
Off go the Edwards, the Halls, the Walkers, the Haywoods, the Moores, the Hill-Woods and their ilk. Even eventually, clubs like Burnley, (for so long the epitome of 'a well run club' (and very much 'a local club for local people, we'll not have any trouble here sort of club')) sell the shop at a point where things appeared to be pretty rosy for them. They cashed in, got out whilst the going was good... In come all sorts of different characters, attracted, essentially by the promise that if they put enough money down on lottery tickets, their numbers will come in.
For some of them, thee money is an illusion and there's a long, long list of clubs who've been seduced by a sweet talking benefactor, only to find the promised land is in fact a mirage For others, money is very much not an illusion - and the type of money that has an impact is the sort of money that is difficult to conceptualise, let alone understand. As Abramovich brought the proceeds of the post Soviet firesale, it's natural that to compete with finances of that scale, we'd need to see petrochemical billions, the resources of nation states and venture capital.
When you are competing against resources on the scale of Gazprom, then Terry's Carpets or Dave's Dogfood isn't going to cut it. You need BIG money with a capital (pun intended) B.I.G.
In and out go the first set of Americans at Liverpool, in and out go yer Randy Lerners and the fella at City who came before this lot. Money is spent, money isn't recouped - it's a problem of scale. You need to SPEND A SHIT FUCK TON OF MONEY to get to the glory. There's no two ways about this.
Lets cut to the chase now. Enter Manchester City and their cash (and perhaps latterly, we could also think of the Saudi cash at Newcastle) - this is possibly the ultimate trump card in the casino. The world runs on oil. This is essentially an oil state buying a football club. It's Manchester City, it's Moss Side, it's shambolic, it's Steve Lomas and Alan Ball and all of that - but it isn't any more, it's a slick, driven, futuristic vision of generational redevelopment of decaying post industrial infrastructure and global connections to an international world of commerce and media and it's basically the entire heart of Barcelona, transplanted into the club, the sexiest football, the most one for the older ladies stylish football manager on earth, the vision of a kind of football purity, City as the soul of football, a very un-English soul at that, Cruyff, the guardian angel of all that is good and all that explains why the continentals were way ahead of our POMO and grit, embodied here, now, in our league. We are blessed. We are so so blessed.
Man City, of course, took a bit of time to fully manifest that vision. It was a journey. The charges relate to the outset the journey and come from an era when the Premier League finally begin to wrestle with the question of 'how do we deal with the fact someone could feasibly just buy their way to success using their own money and therefore push out the most reliable and popular brands within our global entertainment product?'
As a body, essentially regulated by its own membership, the Premier League is also vulnerable entity. It can't really act 'unilaterally' and make a decision 'for the good of the game' - because if that decision angers the membership, then the membership can do something about it.
The competing interests are clear. There's clubs who would probably benefit from being allowed to invest and there's clubs for whom investment by others is a threat. It's kind of a no win situation - if we prevent investment from outside, then Manchester United (and by this point in time, Chelsea), Arsenal etc are probably quite happy. They're creaming it in on the global marketplace, they're pulling in increasing money from Europe, global tours and their grounds are rammed and increasingly rammed with 'soccer tourists'
There's other clubs who have ambition to break into that 'elite' who view controls on their spending as unfair - and, if we're really honest about what football is, why not? Ambition is essential to football. If a club sets out with 'the ambition to finish 20th out of 20' then it's not providing very much to a competition. It's like someone not running in a race or an F1 driver just sitting on the grid. It's pointless. There would be no spectacle in tennis if one player didn't try. Every club should have the ambition to improve on the last season, the ambition to win as many games as possible. It's literally the point of sport.
Lets remember where we are here. After 92-93, no one regulated the way certain clubs exploited their existing positions of power and the luck they had in terms of being where they were at that exact point. (For example, in an alternative world, the Premier League starts in 74-75 and Manchester United are locked out, doomed to forever float around the edges as someone else exploits the opportunity they took in 92-93) - Noone dealt with the cycle of cash that fed them more cash every time they spent cash that they had but others didn't. The Premier League was alight with the possibility of money, more money and that precluded the idea of regulation - that was something dusty and old and for a bygone era. Regulation had *held back* the true potential of the game as a money earning exercise so lets rid ourselves of such outdated thinking...
Initially, the Premier League is a local affair on a global scale. Walker Steel Money vs Martin Edwards vs Sir John Hall and so on. It's not a level playing field - but it's not one where your friendly local multi-millionaire is locked out. It's not yet gated and protected by a finger print scanner that only admits those with three or more mega yachts and genuine influence on global geopolitics. Therefore, it's quite good fun watching the (in retrospect, quaintly small piles of) money burn and Blackburn win something, Keegan's swashbucklers, United's kids and all of that. It seems like a more innocent age - but ultimately, it was the foundation of what comes next. The 'product' is marketed widely, it's clearly attractive to investment and sooner or later, investment would come.
Abramovich upped the spending to level where no club (even the biggest) could really conceive of sustainability without spending money they hadn't actually earned. His impact was only dealt with after the fact - restrictions and rules limiting his spending only come to apply after he's got Chelsea into 'the elite' - which is a little bit like banning someone from the casino, but after they've cleared it out and saying 'you can keep your winnings and go to the casino next door'
Again, lets not tie ourselves up in hemp sweater, very interesting broccoli recipe, yoga class Guardian-reader concerns about ethics and murder and stuff (I mean, yeah, on balance lets do that cos some ethics and less murder would be grand overall - but right now, it just distracts from that actual point). If Jack Walker could make some cash and buy the title and if we're now a global league for global people and Russians in general can make some cash and buy half of London and if it's perfectly legit for Abramovich spend his money in Tesco if he wants to buy some cup-a-soup and a packet of L+B, then why, by the logic of the day, shouldn't he be allowed spend it on footballers, football stadiums and all of that.
Eventually, time passes and we come around to some more stringent regulations and at this point we can probably introduce Manchester City and their cash properly: This is a club with possibly the ultimate trump card in the casino. The world runs on oil. This is essentially an oil state buying a football club. It's Manchester City, it's Moss Side, it's shambolic, it's Steve Lomas and Alan Ball and all of that - but it isn't any more, it's a slick, driven, futuristic vision of generational redevelopment of decaying post industrial infrastructure and global connections to an international world of commerce and media and it's basically the entire heart of Barcelona, transplanted into the club, the sexiest football, the most one for the older ladies stylish football manager on earth, the vision of a kind of football purity, City as the soul of football, a very un-English soul at that, Cruyff, the guardian angel of all that is good and all that explains why the continentals were way ahead of our POMO and grit, embodied here, now, in our league. We are blessed. We are so so blessed.
Man City, of course, took a bit of time to fully manifest that vision. It was a journey. The charges relate to the outset the journey and come from an era when the Premier League finally begin to wrestle with the question of 'how do we deal with the fact someone could feasibly just buy their way to success using their own money and therefore push out the most reliable and popular brands within our global entertainment product?'
The answer is basically, to close the stable door after the Roman horse has bolted - and to start to regulate things with more vigour - The precise elements of the regulation change quite often - various clubs get in trouble, fines and deductions seem very inconsistently applied - but the gist is basically - you not supposed to just chuck cash at it if you haven't earned that cash as a football club. That, naturally, creates a problem for Manchester City (and latterly Newcastle) - in they have the cash, but they can't spend all of it (legally) until their revenues say they can. I don't want to dissect the precise elements of Man City and their breach of regulations - It's boring and it's pointless and seems to basically consist of boosting their revenue to allow them to spend by presenting 'illegal' spending as 'within the boundaries of the regulatory framework'. They clearly broke rules, there's no doubt about that - but were those rules actually fair?
We've established that no one cared as Manchester United slowly turned into a (seemingly) unassailable global behemoth because they were doing so within the rules (or, at the time, within a lack of rules). Similarly, we've accepted that Chelsea benefited from the same lack of rules in a different way.
We're going to digress a little now - but we'll come back to the point shortly
What we've thus far ignored is, that whilst Manchester United (and others) soaked up the new money, in the divisions below the top flight, the money didn't flow anywhere near as freely.
Lets look it like this - A club like Everton (never really done anything in particular in the Premier League) would have earned literally billions of pounds in revenue that a club who played in the championship had no access to if both clubs competed at their respective levels for the life of the Premier League.
What that creates is therefore a deep rift between the resources of Everton and the resources of a.n.other hypothetical Championship club. That applies to every facet of their organisation, from their ability to develop a stadium to earn revenue, their youth facilities, their ability to pay wages to players and their ability to pay transfer fees.
If that club finally makes it to the Premier League, it's likely they feel as if, to compete, they probably need to spend a lot of money. If they don't, they're likely to go down - so thereby losing access to the money they need to sustain themselves. Parachute payments soften that issue - but just move the same problem further down - A club in League 1 is less likely to have spent time in the Premier League recently and thus without parachute money, they're faced with the same issue if wanting to compete when promoted to the Championship.
The point here isn't to cry pity for my club (stuck in League 1) - it's to make the point that, in a way, we're all Man City in waiting. All of us who support a side who are 'on the outside looking in' would face a version of the same barriers that Manchester City pushed through when they broke the rules - i.e. the sense that regulation is there to restrict us - it might be intended to 'save us from ourselves' but it also saves others from being threatened by us as we can't catch up with their investment, even if we want to and have great big filthy piles of cash lying there just begging to be spend on sexy football and sexy footballers.
We know that to get to the top, we're unlikely to achieve that through 'sensible custodianship' - to achieve it, we'll have to do something radical. We'll have to spend money on every facet of our club, we'll have to buy players for big money, create youth facilities of world class quality, up our salaries tenfold to retain the players we develop and probably see our grounds turned into something very different than they currently are.
Many aspects of the above might sit uncomfortably with us. We might value the way things are, the sense of 'reality' and the far more communal nature supporting a lower league club - but the dream of 'winning the league' is what drives football on. It's a simple fact - we go to support a team, we want them to win games. Anyone who attends football matches but is genuinely ambivalent about the results is very, very, very much an exception.
The dream has always been the dream. It's the reason we developed a cup and subsequently a league in the first place - to give context to individual games, to fit wins and losses into a structure - to build, if you like, a narrative arc for each game to live within and string together meaning that would take us from week to week.
The dream in the minds of a football fan might have been a bit different in the 1920s (or even as late as the 1980s) - it probably felt a lot more 'Roy of the Rovers'-esque - a local boy done good, who shoots his hitherto unsuccessful club to glory, the twin towers of Wembley in the background as he lifts the cup bedecked in the colours of [insert name of the team you support]
That dream is still, in a sense, the same - but now, lurking in the psyche of every football fan, behind the heroic player in question, is a Sheik, a tycoon, a leader of global enterprise. It's common to see fans of Grimsby, Stevenage, Rochdale or whoever joking about 'Elon Musk buying the club' - because every football fan knows that in this era of the game, Billy's magic boots alone are nowhere near enough to take you to glory and that Roy Race would never have got through the Melchester Rovers academy as he'd have been poached at the age of 12 by one of the clubs with the money to run an elite system that hoover up 95% of the real potential in youth football and keep it amongst a much smaller group of teams.
I'm not sure how well Man City's owner will take such a decision and whether, their sense of injustice might be the motivation for some disruptive actions.
Lets remind ourselves again of the relative power of English football clubs - both in terms of their status in the global game and their ownership's relative power. It's unparalleled. When Rangers were relegated for a broadly similar reason (i.e. yeah, it was different but it was still basically 'financial stuff'), the chance of Rangers 'breaking away' and creating something else was minimal. There's only Celtic of any global interest aside from them and neither Celtic nor Rangers have any great financial clout in a global context. A wronged Rangers have very little choice but to lick their wounds and go and play East Fife and Elgin City because ringing up Barcelona and asking them if they fancy starting a league isn't really an option as Rangers aren't bringing all that much to the party compared to Barcelona. Historically speaking, that's ridiculous but ultimately, financially there's not a huge amount between Rangers and Queens Park Rangers and I doubt the latter will be in the 'premium' breakaway league if breakaway leagues ever happens.
For Manchester City, there's a different paradigm. There's all the money in the world, there's status, a global brand and a lot of relative power. Perhaps, therefore their ownership wonder if spending loads on trips to Burton Albion and whoever the new Shaun Goater is, wouldn't actually be that great of an investment compared to some alternative courses of action...
If Manchester City do aim to simply get back to where they were, they'll then find themselves much diminished when they do - revenue inevitably drops outside the Premier League, Champions League and World Club Cups - even if they maintain all their sponsorship (which seems a bit unlikely) and flog Haaland for loads (which seems more likely), they lose multiple hundreds of millions of pounds every season from simply losing competition revenue. If it's a Rangers style relegation, that could add up to billions.
For all their prior glory, they're then locked into a situation where someone else has been taking in all the money they were previously taking in for four or five years. They, like say, Aston Villa, are then in a situation where, they can't spend with impunity, even if they're relatively successful, because, like Villa, they're coming 'from the outside' and don't have the bank of riches that prior success brings to bankroll further success.
I have no idea what City's ownership will do. Perhaps they have fallen head over heels in love with Ardwick and Cheetham Hill and Manchester's grimy grey skies. Maybe they are truly 'City till they die' and will respect the rules of the game and take the punishment, however large it is.
Maybe, there's also a possibility, that to them, Manchester City were just the right club at the right time in the right place. Maybe City means nothing - maybe the global brand is more important and maybe it's time to diversify, to reallocate funds, to refocus. Yes, there's investment to lose, but an Etihad Campus here and there is small change to wealth of this scale.
Maybe the risk of constant litigation from every club under the sun isn't worth it. Everyone club who has been within 10 miles of Manchester in the last 18 years could make an argument that, because of City's actions, they've lost out on revenue, prize money, been relegated, knocked out of Cups and so on. Is that an enticing prospect for an ownership who, lets remember, have literally nothing else to win. They've done it all. Doing it again but better might motivate them, but does playing Rotherham and fighting endless legal battles have the same allure?
Maybe they'll wonder if, instead, it's time to try and change the power balance of European or perhaps global football by taking money to a league who will welcome it. I mean, they already own a multiclub network and frankly, the 'City' name can be appended to any city. Maybe, just maybe, it's time to get on the phone and speak to other people who might be interested in a project such as that. Newcastle's owners seem to be losing interest in what they're doing in Newcastle. Manchester United can't seem to sell themselves properly because people with the money to really turn Manchester United into the dream Manchester United has of itself are put off by the fact they can't just turn up and spend all the money so weird Jim is just tinkering around the edges instead...The Chinese played with English football for a bit, before getting bored and realising quickly it was a dead end so going home and ignoring it thereafter. There's lots of people who *might* think that something else which was basically like the Premier League but with rules more suited to their agenda could be a good idea. I mean, we've literally been down this exact chain of thinking before...
Without question, the money is there to create a 'product' that could seriously damage the standing of the Premier League and potentially the Champions League too. FIFA and UEFA are in open warfare. Manchester City hate UEFA (and will hate the EPL too). We've a quasi super league invented by FIFA and all sorts of money put behind it.
It doesn't seem beyond the bounds of possibility that across the world, with a little shove in the right direction, some extremely wealthy people might question why 'the English League' has a god given right to such power and influence, especially given that so little of the money in 'the English League' is actually English - who knows, that might include others in the 'English' game...
To come back round to the beginning - if, as I proposed earlier, Nottingham Forest had been prevented from signing players in 1978, it seems extremely unlikely that their board would have even considered thinking 'oh, then, if you don't want our money, we'll put it into another club, in another league' because that's simply not how it worked. It IS how it works now and the fact it works like that is precisely because for a long time, the Premier League has been 'intensely relaxed' about how much money is flowing into it, from where and to whom.
It is precisely the fact that from the start, the rules and structures of the Premier League made it inevitable that a day like this would arrive. It's not really the fault of Manchester City for trying to win things - that's like blaming a dog for barking - it's the fault of a structure that from day one was set up to reward riches with riches and has subsequently embraced a level of inflation that rivals interwar Germany pushing costs up and up and up and up and therefore leaving anyone wishing to compete to actually win the thing needing to put in sums of money into single clubs equivalent to what it probably cost to run the entire football pyramid 50 years ago. Who'd have thought that circumstance might have created financial irregularities?
The talk of legal wrangling has already started. Breathless predictions of sueing and counter sueing. Who knows if clubs perhaps choose to pursue Manchester City or the failings of the league itself in allowing City to do what they did. What we do know is that phone-ins, newspapers and punditry will be interminable, depressing and utterly joyless.
The beautiful game, reduced to litigation and legal technicality. The most important of the least important things stripped of magic and love and passion and rendered in byzantine arguments about arcane black and white text in some rule book from 15 years ago.
This will be the story and it will go on and on and on. Well done everyone.
Football, not quite literally, but very much metaphorically, eating itself.
In such a context, I'd remind you, (as, after writing all of this, I need to remind myself) that Stenhousemuir exist.
(Instead of a picture, just have a look at this link. It's a different game but it's brilliant evocation of watching football outside of the elite, in approaching dusk)
They beat Ayr Utd last night. They went 8 clear at the top of the Scottish Championship. There were at most a few hundred Stenny fans there. It must have felt magnificent as Ayr had stolen their manager over the summer. No one probably cares very much other than them. It might not get better than this (they've never actually got out of the league they're in) - but under the tin shed roof at Somerset Park under a dark Ayrshire sky, the whole world was the floodlit football pitch in front of them and in that illuminated green rectangle their team won a game that mattered and no one can ask for more than that from football.
I don't know or care what happens to Manchester City. I hope they still exist - there's barely any clubs in the world I'd want to go out of existence, I'm sure they will continue just fine and relegation, even to the furthest flung parts of the pyramid would just be more history in the long run. I care even less what happens to the Premier League because whatever happens in the next decade and however the face of English football is impacted (or not) by things I've speculated about (and things I haven't) the game is demeaned and made smaller the bigger it gets.
Whatever ever City's owners do or the Premier League do, there'll almost certainly be a team in sky blue shirts playing football against another team in a different colour shirt somewhere in some league and therefore, people who want to go and watch that team can.
No one died because Man City fiddled their books, the world kept turning and football is just football - fuck balance sheets, fuck pathetic governing bodies, fuck the leeches that attach themselves to our game, fuck Pep and his pathetic career of managing the best teams in the best circumstances and then who knew, being the best, fuck rules that force clubs to turn out long term fans in favour of tourist spend because what else can you do when the costs keep rising, fuck TV deals and TV pundits who can't seem to say anything other than how interesting everything is all the time, fuck this, that and the other and fuck us all for accepting it all and watching it turn from the best game in the world into a bloated beast that disgusts as much as it delights
Onward
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| Nothing about the current City story is remotely as interesting as the fact their old ground had a train running through it |
I mean, yesterday, Stenhousemuir beat the team that poached their manager in summer and went 8 (eight) whole points clear at the top of Scotland's second flight.
If we had a sane relationship with football, the headlines would go a bit like this:
"Now Sports News with Steven:
In Scotland, the unlikely Stenny revolution gains momentum as the part-timers down Ayr at Somerset Park Meanwhile, in England, some boring shite about balance sheets that no one in their right mind cares about."
That's obviously a wilfully naive position to take. I like naive though. I was naive as a child and in many ways, I wish I could be a child again again and routinely see the world with curiosity and wonder. Sadly, I can't and we all know, as football fans, that the balance sheet shite matters whether we want it to or not.
It's precisely why we celebrate the likes of Stenny (or whatever unlikely team upsets the financial scales every now and again.) - Such stories give us all (those of us who don't support one of 3 or 4 teams that actually win stuff) belief, that despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that one day, we too will be selling our kidneys, auctioning off our families into hard labour and trekking across Europe to experience the singular thrill of Champions League final level police brutality combined with UEFA level appalling organisation.
The dream maybe just a dream, but whilst Celtic or Rangers vs Stenhousemuir at Ochilview is a genuine possibility we can never quite give up on it. If Cape Verde can hold Argentina to a draw then....
Football serves up just enough romance, just often enough to keep us hooked.
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| A football club that has never, ever finished higher than it is now |
Stenhousemuir is (on the surface at least, which as far as I've delved) a heart-warming story of a club nearly going to the wall, a supporters trust rescue and a plan to run the club on sound principles and improve its off the pitch standing and business. If gets them into the top flight then it will be a day to celebrate. A genuine part-time side breaking through against full time opposition with more money than them.
Money is behind most unlikely success to some degree and what happens next is often a bit grim when the money runs out. 'Plucky Leicester' spent a lot of money - it was a lot less than their peers and their title was astonishing - but their club was in the early stages of international ownership by a family with a lot of money. Regardless of the relative spend, there was still a lot of money spent. Now they're in the third tier. Nottingham Forest's incredible achievements of the late 70s/early 80s left the club in a financial hole it arguably never really recovered from until their current (multi-club) ownership arrived. Gretna pulled off an even more unlikely feat than Stenny - but when the money ran out (and the owner died) they plummeted back to where they'd come from leaving only a curious entry into the record books to be puzzled over in future years - 'Gretna, Scottish Cup finalists? Is that true or is it a typo?'
We can wag our fingers admonishingly at over-spending or at those clubs who tied their fortunes to the mast of a single unstable source of cash - it's very tempting to shake our heads sadly and say 'well, you have to say, the fans have got what they deserved - that was never going to be sustainable' - but here's the thing...
... if nothing ever really changed (i.e, lets, for the sake of the thought exercise, imagine Forest had been prevented from signing Peter Shilton and Trevor Francis because *money* or that someone had intervened at Gretna to point out the obvious) then would football be better or worse?
Would it have been been 'better' if it wasn't Forest's name on the European Cup - but that of a more established side that had a healthier long term bank balance? Would the Scottish Cup be more of less interesting to look back upon if, instead of Gretna, Hearts had played Celtic or Rangers in 2006?
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| The greatest manager, with no exceptions - but he was also genius level at extracting cash from directors who didn't really want to give it to him. |
We can, of course, argue about the impact in the longer term on clubs - but if we take a view of the game as a whole, it seems inarguable that unpredictability and change makes the game more exciting. For every winner, there's a loser, the winners go up, the losers go down. Blackpool were one of the elite in a period spanning from the 40s to the early 60s and provided England teams with superstar names, now, bizarely we've got *checks notes* Brentford and Bournemouth buying players from all over the world and outbidding giants of world football. Shit changes and change is good - if there wasn't *change* then we'd have got bored of this a long time ago.
So - if we agree that change is good but we also kind of like what we have too, then we've got a conundrum to solve. How do we make sure things can change, but also, guard against anyone changing things so much that everything is changed forever.
Here we bring in the spectre of Chelsea. It's practically law, when trying to dissect the history of football finance to cite Abramovich as the turning point - and he probably was - but it's not so much a story of him and his club - he just happened to be the inevitable product of a system set up in such a way that sooner or later someone would recognise that with enough money, they could do whatever they wanted to - and that's exactly what he did. It doesn't really matter what that money was, where it came from or why he spent it - the personal and moral details are irrelevant to the bigger point, the football point - at that point, you could basically spend whatever you wanted so someone came in and did just that.
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| There's no real reason for this photo of Ken Bates other than it makes me nostalgic for when football's villains were just good old fashioned baddies and not global players with evil lairs and probably their own personal stash of nuclear weapons |
The early Premier League was dominated by Manchester United and Arsenal - arguably the biggest club in the country and the biggest club in the country's capital. They had spotted the potential of the Premier League, got on the marketing train, flogged shirts and opened stadium tours and all of that. They both understood the value of 'maximising off field revenues,' understood that they had 'fans' in other countries who watched them on the telly and that, in this brave new world, it wasn't enough just to take a fiver off some scruffy urchins at the turnstile and let them pick a place on the terraces. That wasn't just an outdated view of what football could be, it was serious failure to 'optimise the cashflow by creating a customer experience that attracts affluence'
At the point Abramovich arrived, Arsenal were carefully planning a stadium development that would bring their corporate facilities in line with the best in the world and therefore close the gap with Manchester United. The way forward appeared to be - big club, makes itself bigger by modernising and globalising. If you weren't a big club, it would be hard to keep up with this trend, because the scale of investment required to turn yourself into a global entity (it's an expensive business, creating a stadium fit for the middle class day out/city bankers jolly in a prime urban location)
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| Highbury lacked facilities to satisfy the urbane North London crowd's desire for an experience that encompasses both gastronomic and sporting excellence and therefore was a failure to capitalise on the opportunities presented by the gentrification/social cleansing of football in the 1990s |
Up until that point, their commercial advantages had translated easily onto the pitch - the Sky deal gave them, for the first time, money that represented what they believed to be 'the value' of their product and it also gave them a reach around the world. The wider world wanted Man Utd shirts - but it didn't so much want Ipswich, Bolton and so on. The Champions League cash was a virtuous circle - qualify, get more money, qualify again - all without overstretching - they earned more money, so they had more money to spend and had more international exposure and therefore sold more merchandise to more people - 'This is perfect,' thought those big clubs - 'as long as some sort of shady oligarch character doesn't ruin it all for us...'
Chelsea put it up 'em without any question. They unleashed a level and pace of spending that was unprecedented. They opened questions in those 'big clubs' about sustainability. Suddenly, talk of spending hundreds of millions in a single summer was normalised. Roman opened his pipeline of exotic money and the assumptions of the big few were blown out of the window. Now, to compete, football required 'investment' and 'investment' in football basically means 'setting fire to big piles of cash in return for some potential glory for which their is absolutely no guarantee' - which, if you are running a previously relatively solvent business, isn't a wholly welcome development.
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| Never liked Chelsea that much - but Drogba was fucking sensational |
Directors have always 'put their hands in their pockets' and funded clubs. The stories of Clough berating his board in search of more money (directors knew nothing about football when they wouldn't stump up the cash for ol' Bighead to spend on football) or the 'look the other way' payments of the maximum wage era, or even the 'jobs' (note the inverted commas) provided in factories and mills by club owners to star players before the ban on professionalism ended are all proof of this. Jack Walker is the poster child of glory associated with one man's benevolent tendencies.
What we now had however, was an issue of scale. The cash flowing into Chelsea was, unlike Jack Walker's money (or the Nottingham Forest board's wallets, or say, Dave Whelan's inflation of Wigan's potential) seemingly limitless. It had the power to change, not only who was competitive this season, but the next and the next after that and so on. It didn't 'nudge' up prices and wages, it sent them sky rocketing and that put up costs for everyone, the big clubs included.
Chelsea's position was enhanced - they were suddenly buying global superstars. That attracted global interest. Those new global fans were rather less sniffy about Chelsea than some in England - they were never really a 'big club' over the history of the game in England but who cares about the 1980s if you're from Ivory Coast watching Drogba on telly. They had a 'box office' manager, perfect for whipping up media attention. They were slap bang in the heart of 'fashionable London' - the perfect destination for players, but also an ideal place to attract affluent supporters from affluent London (and far, far beyond). They could, therefore, begin to flog shirts and corporate events and suchlike on a greater scale. They could enjoy the Champions League money.
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| Blackburn remains the last town club to win the league. Why billionaires want to invest in cities like Manchester, Liverpool and London as opposed to small Lancashire mill towns remains a mystery... |
In short, they spent shit loads of money - but they could also earn shit loads of money. From the outset, the Premier League structures were set up to reward this - you earn more money for finishing higher, so money begats money and the deeper the pockets you have, the longer you can stay on the roulette wheel.
What we then saw over the next decade, was a flight of 'old' ownership - we'll get to Man City in a minute, don't worry - but as Chelsea impact, we hit a point in time where the previous generation of owners all start to realise that this isn't the same game anymore. The notion of 'custodianship' and a board of local directors is now outdated - occasionally dipping into the family coffers to fund a player can't compete with occasionally dipping into the resources created by the corrupt liquidation of one of the world's most vast empires ever seen. The old boards were business people on a local or sometimes national level, Abramovich basically had the utilities of the Soviet Union to fight them with.
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| A very big gas plant in a very big country with an awful lot of gas |
Off go the Edwards, the Halls, the Walkers, the Haywoods, the Moores, the Hill-Woods and their ilk. Even eventually, clubs like Burnley, (for so long the epitome of 'a well run club' (and very much 'a local club for local people, we'll not have any trouble here sort of club')) sell the shop at a point where things appeared to be pretty rosy for them. They cashed in, got out whilst the going was good... In come all sorts of different characters, attracted, essentially by the promise that if they put enough money down on lottery tickets, their numbers will come in.
For some of them, thee money is an illusion and there's a long, long list of clubs who've been seduced by a sweet talking benefactor, only to find the promised land is in fact a mirage For others, money is very much not an illusion - and the type of money that has an impact is the sort of money that is difficult to conceptualise, let alone understand. As Abramovich brought the proceeds of the post Soviet firesale, it's natural that to compete with finances of that scale, we'd need to see petrochemical billions, the resources of nation states and venture capital.
When you are competing against resources on the scale of Gazprom, then Terry's Carpets or Dave's Dogfood isn't going to cut it. You need BIG money with a capital (pun intended) B.I.G.
In and out go the first set of Americans at Liverpool, in and out go yer Randy Lerners and the fella at City who came before this lot. Money is spent, money isn't recouped - it's a problem of scale. You need to SPEND A SHIT FUCK TON OF MONEY to get to the glory. There's no two ways about this.
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| Remember these two lovely lads? |
Lets cut to the chase now. Enter Manchester City and their cash (and perhaps latterly, we could also think of the Saudi cash at Newcastle) - this is possibly the ultimate trump card in the casino. The world runs on oil. This is essentially an oil state buying a football club. It's Manchester City, it's Moss Side, it's shambolic, it's Steve Lomas and Alan Ball and all of that - but it isn't any more, it's a slick, driven, futuristic vision of generational redevelopment of decaying post industrial infrastructure and global connections to an international world of commerce and media and it's basically the entire heart of Barcelona, transplanted into the club, the sexiest football, the most one for the older ladies stylish football manager on earth, the vision of a kind of football purity, City as the soul of football, a very un-English soul at that, Cruyff, the guardian angel of all that is good and all that explains why the continentals were way ahead of our POMO and grit, embodied here, now, in our league. We are blessed. We are so so blessed.
Man City, of course, took a bit of time to fully manifest that vision. It was a journey. The charges relate to the outset the journey and come from an era when the Premier League finally begin to wrestle with the question of 'how do we deal with the fact someone could feasibly just buy their way to success using their own money and therefore push out the most reliable and popular brands within our global entertainment product?'
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| Oh Andy Andy, Andy Andy Andy Morrison... (just cos fuck putting pictures of their latter day showponies in when you can put a picture of Andy Morrison instead) |
As a body, essentially regulated by its own membership, the Premier League is also vulnerable entity. It can't really act 'unilaterally' and make a decision 'for the good of the game' - because if that decision angers the membership, then the membership can do something about it.
The competing interests are clear. There's clubs who would probably benefit from being allowed to invest and there's clubs for whom investment by others is a threat. It's kind of a no win situation - if we prevent investment from outside, then Manchester United (and by this point in time, Chelsea), Arsenal etc are probably quite happy. They're creaming it in on the global marketplace, they're pulling in increasing money from Europe, global tours and their grounds are rammed and increasingly rammed with 'soccer tourists'
There's other clubs who have ambition to break into that 'elite' who view controls on their spending as unfair - and, if we're really honest about what football is, why not? Ambition is essential to football. If a club sets out with 'the ambition to finish 20th out of 20' then it's not providing very much to a competition. It's like someone not running in a race or an F1 driver just sitting on the grid. It's pointless. There would be no spectacle in tennis if one player didn't try. Every club should have the ambition to improve on the last season, the ambition to win as many games as possible. It's literally the point of sport.
Lets remember where we are here. After 92-93, no one regulated the way certain clubs exploited their existing positions of power and the luck they had in terms of being where they were at that exact point. (For example, in an alternative world, the Premier League starts in 74-75 and Manchester United are locked out, doomed to forever float around the edges as someone else exploits the opportunity they took in 92-93) - Noone dealt with the cycle of cash that fed them more cash every time they spent cash that they had but others didn't. The Premier League was alight with the possibility of money, more money and that precluded the idea of regulation - that was something dusty and old and for a bygone era. Regulation had *held back* the true potential of the game as a money earning exercise so lets rid ourselves of such outdated thinking...
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| The Metro Centre in Gateshead - it's a very 80s thing for a property bloke to build an out of town shopping centre on old industrial wealth. It's a very 90s thing for him to then pump his money into a local football clubs. It's a very 2000s thing for him to subsequently realise he's no longer rich enough for that to work. |
Initially, the Premier League is a local affair on a global scale. Walker Steel Money vs Martin Edwards vs Sir John Hall and so on. It's not a level playing field - but it's not one where your friendly local multi-millionaire is locked out. It's not yet gated and protected by a finger print scanner that only admits those with three or more mega yachts and genuine influence on global geopolitics. Therefore, it's quite good fun watching the (in retrospect, quaintly small piles of) money burn and Blackburn win something, Keegan's swashbucklers, United's kids and all of that. It seems like a more innocent age - but ultimately, it was the foundation of what comes next. The 'product' is marketed widely, it's clearly attractive to investment and sooner or later, investment would come.
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| Who'd have thought in 1990 it would be possible to draw a direct line between the current situation within English football and decisions taken by Boris Yeltsin? |
Abramovich upped the spending to level where no club (even the biggest) could really conceive of sustainability without spending money they hadn't actually earned. His impact was only dealt with after the fact - restrictions and rules limiting his spending only come to apply after he's got Chelsea into 'the elite' - which is a little bit like banning someone from the casino, but after they've cleared it out and saying 'you can keep your winnings and go to the casino next door'
Again, lets not tie ourselves up in hemp sweater, very interesting broccoli recipe, yoga class Guardian-reader concerns about ethics and murder and stuff (I mean, yeah, on balance lets do that cos some ethics and less murder would be grand overall - but right now, it just distracts from that actual point). If Jack Walker could make some cash and buy the title and if we're now a global league for global people and Russians in general can make some cash and buy half of London and if it's perfectly legit for Abramovich spend his money in Tesco if he wants to buy some cup-a-soup and a packet of L+B, then why, by the logic of the day, shouldn't he be allowed spend it on footballers, football stadiums and all of that.
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| A Tesco in Chelsea |
Eventually, time passes and we come around to some more stringent regulations and at this point we can probably introduce Manchester City and their cash properly: This is a club with possibly the ultimate trump card in the casino. The world runs on oil. This is essentially an oil state buying a football club. It's Manchester City, it's Moss Side, it's shambolic, it's Steve Lomas and Alan Ball and all of that - but it isn't any more, it's a slick, driven, futuristic vision of generational redevelopment of decaying post industrial infrastructure and global connections to an international world of commerce and media and it's basically the entire heart of Barcelona, transplanted into the club, the sexiest football, the most one for the older ladies stylish football manager on earth, the vision of a kind of football purity, City as the soul of football, a very un-English soul at that, Cruyff, the guardian angel of all that is good and all that explains why the continentals were way ahead of our POMO and grit, embodied here, now, in our league. We are blessed. We are so so blessed.
Man City, of course, took a bit of time to fully manifest that vision. It was a journey. The charges relate to the outset the journey and come from an era when the Premier League finally begin to wrestle with the question of 'how do we deal with the fact someone could feasibly just buy their way to success using their own money and therefore push out the most reliable and popular brands within our global entertainment product?'
The answer is basically, to close the stable door after the Roman horse has bolted - and to start to regulate things with more vigour - The precise elements of the regulation change quite often - various clubs get in trouble, fines and deductions seem very inconsistently applied - but the gist is basically - you not supposed to just chuck cash at it if you haven't earned that cash as a football club. That, naturally, creates a problem for Manchester City (and latterly Newcastle) - in they have the cash, but they can't spend all of it (legally) until their revenues say they can. I don't want to dissect the precise elements of Man City and their breach of regulations - It's boring and it's pointless and seems to basically consist of boosting their revenue to allow them to spend by presenting 'illegal' spending as 'within the boundaries of the regulatory framework'. They clearly broke rules, there's no doubt about that - but were those rules actually fair?
We've established that no one cared as Manchester United slowly turned into a (seemingly) unassailable global behemoth because they were doing so within the rules (or, at the time, within a lack of rules). Similarly, we've accepted that Chelsea benefited from the same lack of rules in a different way.
We're going to digress a little now - but we'll come back to the point shortly
What we've thus far ignored is, that whilst Manchester United (and others) soaked up the new money, in the divisions below the top flight, the money didn't flow anywhere near as freely.
Lets look it like this - A club like Everton (never really done anything in particular in the Premier League) would have earned literally billions of pounds in revenue that a club who played in the championship had no access to if both clubs competed at their respective levels for the life of the Premier League.
What that creates is therefore a deep rift between the resources of Everton and the resources of a.n.other hypothetical Championship club. That applies to every facet of their organisation, from their ability to develop a stadium to earn revenue, their youth facilities, their ability to pay wages to players and their ability to pay transfer fees.
If that club finally makes it to the Premier League, it's likely they feel as if, to compete, they probably need to spend a lot of money. If they don't, they're likely to go down - so thereby losing access to the money they need to sustain themselves. Parachute payments soften that issue - but just move the same problem further down - A club in League 1 is less likely to have spent time in the Premier League recently and thus without parachute money, they're faced with the same issue if wanting to compete when promoted to the Championship.
The point here isn't to cry pity for my club (stuck in League 1) - it's to make the point that, in a way, we're all Man City in waiting. All of us who support a side who are 'on the outside looking in' would face a version of the same barriers that Manchester City pushed through when they broke the rules - i.e. the sense that regulation is there to restrict us - it might be intended to 'save us from ourselves' but it also saves others from being threatened by us as we can't catch up with their investment, even if we want to and have great big filthy piles of cash lying there just begging to be spend on sexy football and sexy footballers.
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| We did actually win the thing in 1939-40 so I'm not so fussed about doing it again as we held it for 6 years and that's enough for anyone really. |
We know that to get to the top, we're unlikely to achieve that through 'sensible custodianship' - to achieve it, we'll have to do something radical. We'll have to spend money on every facet of our club, we'll have to buy players for big money, create youth facilities of world class quality, up our salaries tenfold to retain the players we develop and probably see our grounds turned into something very different than they currently are.
Many aspects of the above might sit uncomfortably with us. We might value the way things are, the sense of 'reality' and the far more communal nature supporting a lower league club - but the dream of 'winning the league' is what drives football on. It's a simple fact - we go to support a team, we want them to win games. Anyone who attends football matches but is genuinely ambivalent about the results is very, very, very much an exception.
The dream has always been the dream. It's the reason we developed a cup and subsequently a league in the first place - to give context to individual games, to fit wins and losses into a structure - to build, if you like, a narrative arc for each game to live within and string together meaning that would take us from week to week.
The dream in the minds of a football fan might have been a bit different in the 1920s (or even as late as the 1980s) - it probably felt a lot more 'Roy of the Rovers'-esque - a local boy done good, who shoots his hitherto unsuccessful club to glory, the twin towers of Wembley in the background as he lifts the cup bedecked in the colours of [insert name of the team you support]
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| What is football, if not a daydream anyway? |
That dream is still, in a sense, the same - but now, lurking in the psyche of every football fan, behind the heroic player in question, is a Sheik, a tycoon, a leader of global enterprise. It's common to see fans of Grimsby, Stevenage, Rochdale or whoever joking about 'Elon Musk buying the club' - because every football fan knows that in this era of the game, Billy's magic boots alone are nowhere near enough to take you to glory and that Roy Race would never have got through the Melchester Rovers academy as he'd have been poached at the age of 12 by one of the clubs with the money to run an elite system that hoover up 95% of the real potential in youth football and keep it amongst a much smaller group of teams.
We know, that despite the fact we don't care about (or perhaps even care for) the owner lurking in the background of that dream image - they are an absolute structural necessity for success. We might look on at City and hate them, we might find St Pep's keep ball the most mind-numbingly miserable form of the game imaginable, we might get deeply angry about the ethics of Saudi money and Newcastle's fans wilful blindness to it, we might see Jeff Bezos linked with Liverpool and chuckle to ourselves about the so-called 'socialist club' and the self aggrandising Liverpool fans with their self pronounced morality being linked with the most capitalist man in the world ever - but deep down, whether we deny it or not, we know, that for us to live that childlike dream, that image of reflected glory, to roar at the top of our lungs as one of our players lifts the trophy that declares us the best team in the land - we're going to have to see our souls sold for exactly the same silver.
It's not that I feel hugely (or even at all) sorry for Manchester City. They've had nearly 20 years of glory. There's few supporters in the history of the game to have experienced such a run and whether you're a die-hard City fan or someone who has grown up in that era, if you can't see that, actually, on balance, it will probably be good craic to go to Shrewsbury or wherever, then really, you don't get football and you don't get the history and reality of your own club. Most clubs go up and down. Even Rangers, one of the most dominant teams in the history of any league, anywhere, have done so. The size of Rangers relative to everyone else apart from Celtic, and particularly anyone in tier 2, 3 and 4 of Scotland is beyond absurd and actually, Man City probably matches up fine to some league 1 clubs in a lot of ways apart from their ownership so they probably had it worse on balance.
I think the point I'm making is - the hyperbole about Manchester City 'cheating' being worthy of global news, outstripping war, genocide and famine is just that - it's ridiculous hyperbole.
Listening to people discuss it as if it's a serious moral point when the morality of the Premier League has been at best a movable feast and at times, completely non-existent is grating. Talking about the 'integrity of the Premier League' is deeply nonsensical. The Premier League started as an experiment in what happened if free market capital dictated sport as opposed to sporting regulations dictating sport. Money was good was the main rule. When that proved to be bad for the interests of some of the clubs then suddenly money was good, but only if you had the money already. To talk of integrity in a system that doesn't really know what it is and changes its rules constantly to continually try and balance the internal dichotomy at its heart is strange.
The Premier League has been caught in a double bind. It's both a sporting competition and a business within its own right. The Premier League is a product but it's also a competition. Money must be spent to enhance the battle - but at the same time, that money can't threaten the key elements of the product (the reliable global brands that global customers want to see) - that double bind is a very dangerous place to be.
At this point in time, we're seeing clubs like Brighton, Bournemouth and Brentford doing very well for themselves. They're clubs who would have had no chance in an earlier free for all era, where spending was all. They spend, yes, they spend unimaginable sums of money compared to anyone outside of the Premier League - they probably spend more than anyone not in England who isn't Barcalona, Real Madrid or Bayern Munich... but they've done so 'sustainably' - by skillfully and cleverly investing and living within the rules, exploiting the rules, exploiting English football's place in the global game, understanding the opportunity the rules bring. They are, to borrow a phrase from the modern football phrase book, extremely adept at living in the 'half space' that the current regulations create.
Whilst the power of the league has undoubtedly been extremely good for the league (and some clubs have exploited it very adeptly) the fact we've got to this point has come at a potential cost. By opening it's doors to money from anywhere and everywhere, the Premier League itself has become so entwined with power that it is at risk of its members being more powerful than it. We've already talked briefly about hypothetical dreams of Musk buyouts, Jeff Bezos at Liverpool, about Saudi, UAE and American investment funds in reality. These are the entities that set global agendas, control markets and communications networks. They're hand in glove with governments and pan global institutions. These are infinitely more powerful beings than Richard Masters or anyone else. They also, in many cases are operating with shareholders in mind and when clubs are only one part of a larger portfolio then hazy elements like 'the soul of the English game' are secondary considerations.
These are, in short, people who are more used to setting rules, than playing by rules.
If they want to own one of our global brands, if they want to build the next Chelsea, the next Manchester City then the league is a difficult place to do this now. You might think 'ah, I've got a spare billion or two' then go and buy a football club, you might buy a very big football club who are outside the current top flight (lets say, Sheffield Wednesday for sake of argument) and then discover that *because of the rules* you can't compete with Brentford and Brighton right now, even if you get Wednesday into the Premier League - because Brentford and Brighton are x way down the path and have already solidified their revenue and happily complying with the demands of the rules AND dropping 40,50,60 million quid on players. You have to curb your spending and that's problematic.
Is this very satisfying for you as a billionaire who is looking to flout your cash? You might learn that you probably have to spend 5,6,7,8 years, a decade perhaps, building a project that mirrors existing projects, in order to get to point where the league lets you spend the money you've now proved you've earned (even though you already had the money in the first place). If you aren't simply treating the club as a plaything (and thus not getting the instant thrill of displaying your power), but as part of a sporting investment fund - then is it really a great return either? You could buy Sheffield Wednesday and drop 500 million to unlock various revenues over the long run - but if you have to spend that in increments of 80 million over multiple years otherwise you're breaking the rules then, actually, is that a great investment and doesn't that rather undermine your prospects of blowing anyone out of the water? It's like going to war against a tank and being told you have to use a peashooter even though you have a tank because you've not yet beaten the tank.
Essentially, we're very clearly no longer in the free for all phase - clubs are probably better protected as a result - but they're also more restricted.
Unlike Abramovich, every potential follower in his footsteps now has to work out how to make the club pay for itself before working out how they're going to buy Kylian Mpbappe.
In essence, Man City are guilty of saying 'fuck that - you let them do it, so we're going to do it cos if it's good enough for Chelsea (and others) then why should it not be good enough for City - again, fuck you...' Whilst that's something I can kind of understand - if the Premier League is made of anything at all other than jelly and greed, it will say 'well, fuck you, that was against the rules' and deal with them... but if by doing so, we're pretending it's 'cleaning up the soul of the game' then that's a complete delusion. It's cleaning up a mess it's made itself.
Dealing with Manchester City isn't an end in itself. We're left then with no Man City in the Premier League - which is fine, because anyone can be relegated and no competition should ignore rule breaking, but we've also still got the strange spectre of a highly regulated league but that also doesn't really regulate with competition in mind.
We have regulation that restricts spending, but at the same time allows insane levels of spending because some teams are already very rich and therefore have built up their revenue streams. Therefore club A is allowed to be competitive, but club B is punished for unsustainability - even though they're pursuing the same goals. What is protecting clubs from over spending is also, essentially, preventing them from becoming successful. To be able to spend more you have to be successful. It's a vicious circle and one we've already gone over multiple times and furthermore, one that clubs in the 'mid-tier' of the Premier League know well.
It's kind of the worst of both worlds - because it neither really controls spending nor levels the playing field in any way you could meaningfully interpret that phrase. Lets look at that interpretation briefly:
What are 'the extremes?'
We could have a 'hard cap' for salaries and every club with essentially the same on pitch resources so it's basically about how good your manager/culture/training is
OR
We could a free for all where you live or die by your spending power so anyone can go bust and anyone can go through the leagues if they've got enough cash.
I'd argue that whilst I favour the former, both of those extremes are preferable to a strange mishmash of 'regulation, but not too much so it disrupts the flow of money for particular clubs but does very much disrupt things for others' because both of the above have simplicity to them and sport thrives on simplicity.
You run the race, you get to the end first, you win. You either all drive the same car or you all build your own car but either way, whoever is fastest round the track wins - we might be celebrating the pure skill of the driver alone or the ability of the team to construct the best car - but again, either way, it's clear enough what is going on. Once we get into ever shifting complexities about revenue and spending and percentages therein season on season, then football is in danger of adding financial VAR to actual VAR and actual VAR is bad enough.
How long before, given the stakes at play, clubs are actually celebrating the signing of a new forensic accountant on their social media pages and fans getting excited because 'the lad we've just brought in, he's a genius in compliance regulation - can't wait to see him get to work on next seasons books'
The thought makes me never want to watch another football match.
We're left with a league that has spent 33 years telling us its purpose is to be 'the best league in the world (tm)' It has justified ripping up the centuries old structure of English football because of that singular goal. Yet, it seems quite likely that sooner or later it will have punished with expulsion the club who created probably the best team to ever play in it for doing exactly what other teams within the league did before them (and those clubs who did so originally created the exact conditions that birthed the desire of people like Man City's owners to get involved in the Premier League)
It's not that I feel hugely (or even at all) sorry for Manchester City. They've had nearly 20 years of glory. There's few supporters in the history of the game to have experienced such a run and whether you're a die-hard City fan or someone who has grown up in that era, if you can't see that, actually, on balance, it will probably be good craic to go to Shrewsbury or wherever, then really, you don't get football and you don't get the history and reality of your own club. Most clubs go up and down. Even Rangers, one of the most dominant teams in the history of any league, anywhere, have done so. The size of Rangers relative to everyone else apart from Celtic, and particularly anyone in tier 2, 3 and 4 of Scotland is beyond absurd and actually, Man City probably matches up fine to some league 1 clubs in a lot of ways apart from their ownership so they probably had it worse on balance.
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| Get ye to Shrewsbury - it's a grand day out and there's nothing up with it all. Any fans who consider relegation 'unthinkable' are detached from reality and deserve to be relegated. It's just what happens sometimes and you get to go to different grounds and that's fine. |
I think the point I'm making is - the hyperbole about Manchester City 'cheating' being worthy of global news, outstripping war, genocide and famine is just that - it's ridiculous hyperbole.
Listening to people discuss it as if it's a serious moral point when the morality of the Premier League has been at best a movable feast and at times, completely non-existent is grating. Talking about the 'integrity of the Premier League' is deeply nonsensical. The Premier League started as an experiment in what happened if free market capital dictated sport as opposed to sporting regulations dictating sport. Money was good was the main rule. When that proved to be bad for the interests of some of the clubs then suddenly money was good, but only if you had the money already. To talk of integrity in a system that doesn't really know what it is and changes its rules constantly to continually try and balance the internal dichotomy at its heart is strange.
The Premier League has been caught in a double bind. It's both a sporting competition and a business within its own right. The Premier League is a product but it's also a competition. Money must be spent to enhance the battle - but at the same time, that money can't threaten the key elements of the product (the reliable global brands that global customers want to see) - that double bind is a very dangerous place to be.
At this point in time, we're seeing clubs like Brighton, Bournemouth and Brentford doing very well for themselves. They're clubs who would have had no chance in an earlier free for all era, where spending was all. They spend, yes, they spend unimaginable sums of money compared to anyone outside of the Premier League - they probably spend more than anyone not in England who isn't Barcalona, Real Madrid or Bayern Munich... but they've done so 'sustainably' - by skillfully and cleverly investing and living within the rules, exploiting the rules, exploiting English football's place in the global game, understanding the opportunity the rules bring. They are, to borrow a phrase from the modern football phrase book, extremely adept at living in the 'half space' that the current regulations create.
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| Ajax, one of multiple clubs around the world who, despite being *massive and historic and winning their own league all time* probably can't compete with Bournemouth for a player |
Whilst the power of the league has undoubtedly been extremely good for the league (and some clubs have exploited it very adeptly) the fact we've got to this point has come at a potential cost. By opening it's doors to money from anywhere and everywhere, the Premier League itself has become so entwined with power that it is at risk of its members being more powerful than it. We've already talked briefly about hypothetical dreams of Musk buyouts, Jeff Bezos at Liverpool, about Saudi, UAE and American investment funds in reality. These are the entities that set global agendas, control markets and communications networks. They're hand in glove with governments and pan global institutions. These are infinitely more powerful beings than Richard Masters or anyone else. They also, in many cases are operating with shareholders in mind and when clubs are only one part of a larger portfolio then hazy elements like 'the soul of the English game' are secondary considerations.
These are, in short, people who are more used to setting rules, than playing by rules.
If they want to own one of our global brands, if they want to build the next Chelsea, the next Manchester City then the league is a difficult place to do this now. You might think 'ah, I've got a spare billion or two' then go and buy a football club, you might buy a very big football club who are outside the current top flight (lets say, Sheffield Wednesday for sake of argument) and then discover that *because of the rules* you can't compete with Brentford and Brighton right now, even if you get Wednesday into the Premier League - because Brentford and Brighton are x way down the path and have already solidified their revenue and happily complying with the demands of the rules AND dropping 40,50,60 million quid on players. You have to curb your spending and that's problematic.
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| Imagine spending billions on a bit of a club only to discover you're not as good as *Brentford* |
Is this very satisfying for you as a billionaire who is looking to flout your cash? You might learn that you probably have to spend 5,6,7,8 years, a decade perhaps, building a project that mirrors existing projects, in order to get to point where the league lets you spend the money you've now proved you've earned (even though you already had the money in the first place). If you aren't simply treating the club as a plaything (and thus not getting the instant thrill of displaying your power), but as part of a sporting investment fund - then is it really a great return either? You could buy Sheffield Wednesday and drop 500 million to unlock various revenues over the long run - but if you have to spend that in increments of 80 million over multiple years otherwise you're breaking the rules then, actually, is that a great investment and doesn't that rather undermine your prospects of blowing anyone out of the water? It's like going to war against a tank and being told you have to use a peashooter even though you have a tank because you've not yet beaten the tank.
Essentially, we're very clearly no longer in the free for all phase - clubs are probably better protected as a result - but they're also more restricted.
Unlike Abramovich, every potential follower in his footsteps now has to work out how to make the club pay for itself before working out how they're going to buy Kylian Mpbappe.
In essence, Man City are guilty of saying 'fuck that - you let them do it, so we're going to do it cos if it's good enough for Chelsea (and others) then why should it not be good enough for City - again, fuck you...' Whilst that's something I can kind of understand - if the Premier League is made of anything at all other than jelly and greed, it will say 'well, fuck you, that was against the rules' and deal with them... but if by doing so, we're pretending it's 'cleaning up the soul of the game' then that's a complete delusion. It's cleaning up a mess it's made itself.
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| Man City towards football authorities of any kind with which they've had recent dealings |
Dealing with Manchester City isn't an end in itself. We're left then with no Man City in the Premier League - which is fine, because anyone can be relegated and no competition should ignore rule breaking, but we've also still got the strange spectre of a highly regulated league but that also doesn't really regulate with competition in mind.
We have regulation that restricts spending, but at the same time allows insane levels of spending because some teams are already very rich and therefore have built up their revenue streams. Therefore club A is allowed to be competitive, but club B is punished for unsustainability - even though they're pursuing the same goals. What is protecting clubs from over spending is also, essentially, preventing them from becoming successful. To be able to spend more you have to be successful. It's a vicious circle and one we've already gone over multiple times and furthermore, one that clubs in the 'mid-tier' of the Premier League know well.
It's kind of the worst of both worlds - because it neither really controls spending nor levels the playing field in any way you could meaningfully interpret that phrase. Lets look at that interpretation briefly:
What are 'the extremes?'
We could have a 'hard cap' for salaries and every club with essentially the same on pitch resources so it's basically about how good your manager/culture/training is
OR
We could a free for all where you live or die by your spending power so anyone can go bust and anyone can go through the leagues if they've got enough cash.
I'd argue that whilst I favour the former, both of those extremes are preferable to a strange mishmash of 'regulation, but not too much so it disrupts the flow of money for particular clubs but does very much disrupt things for others' because both of the above have simplicity to them and sport thrives on simplicity.
You run the race, you get to the end first, you win. You either all drive the same car or you all build your own car but either way, whoever is fastest round the track wins - we might be celebrating the pure skill of the driver alone or the ability of the team to construct the best car - but again, either way, it's clear enough what is going on. Once we get into ever shifting complexities about revenue and spending and percentages therein season on season, then football is in danger of adding financial VAR to actual VAR and actual VAR is bad enough.
How long before, given the stakes at play, clubs are actually celebrating the signing of a new forensic accountant on their social media pages and fans getting excited because 'the lad we've just brought in, he's a genius in compliance regulation - can't wait to see him get to work on next seasons books'
The thought makes me never want to watch another football match.
 |
| This is AI. It is shit. But I've run out energy to find pictures so I made this, even though it's crap. |
We're left with a league that has spent 33 years telling us its purpose is to be 'the best league in the world (tm)' It has justified ripping up the centuries old structure of English football because of that singular goal. Yet, it seems quite likely that sooner or later it will have punished with expulsion the club who created probably the best team to ever play in it for doing exactly what other teams within the league did before them (and those clubs who did so originally created the exact conditions that birthed the desire of people like Man City's owners to get involved in the Premier League)
I'm not sure how well Man City's owner will take such a decision and whether, their sense of injustice might be the motivation for some disruptive actions.
Lets remind ourselves again of the relative power of English football clubs - both in terms of their status in the global game and their ownership's relative power. It's unparalleled. When Rangers were relegated for a broadly similar reason (i.e. yeah, it was different but it was still basically 'financial stuff'), the chance of Rangers 'breaking away' and creating something else was minimal. There's only Celtic of any global interest aside from them and neither Celtic nor Rangers have any great financial clout in a global context. A wronged Rangers have very little choice but to lick their wounds and go and play East Fife and Elgin City because ringing up Barcelona and asking them if they fancy starting a league isn't really an option as Rangers aren't bringing all that much to the party compared to Barcelona. Historically speaking, that's ridiculous but ultimately, financially there's not a huge amount between Rangers and Queens Park Rangers and I doubt the latter will be in the 'premium' breakaway league if breakaway leagues ever happens.
 |
| I'm talking to Perez and he says 'nah, mate no way - So I says, look, you played the greatest night of your clubs history at Hampden didn't ye, Fitba is MASSIVE, we've got loads of fans and everything, we had Terry Butcher! - and he say to me, listen, no disrespect, but why don't you ring up Malmo or someone in Finland, try that type of thing, cos this ain't happening, and then I kid ye not, he asks me if I've got the number of anyone at Manchester City or Liverpool... |
For Manchester City, there's a different paradigm. There's all the money in the world, there's status, a global brand and a lot of relative power. Perhaps, therefore their ownership wonder if spending loads on trips to Burton Albion and whoever the new Shaun Goater is, wouldn't actually be that great of an investment compared to some alternative courses of action...
If Manchester City do aim to simply get back to where they were, they'll then find themselves much diminished when they do - revenue inevitably drops outside the Premier League, Champions League and World Club Cups - even if they maintain all their sponsorship (which seems a bit unlikely) and flog Haaland for loads (which seems more likely), they lose multiple hundreds of millions of pounds every season from simply losing competition revenue. If it's a Rangers style relegation, that could add up to billions.
For all their prior glory, they're then locked into a situation where someone else has been taking in all the money they were previously taking in for four or five years. They, like say, Aston Villa, are then in a situation where, they can't spend with impunity, even if they're relatively successful, because, like Villa, they're coming 'from the outside' and don't have the bank of riches that prior success brings to bankroll further success.
I have no idea what City's ownership will do. Perhaps they have fallen head over heels in love with Ardwick and Cheetham Hill and Manchester's grimy grey skies. Maybe they are truly 'City till they die' and will respect the rules of the game and take the punishment, however large it is.
Maybe, there's also a possibility, that to them, Manchester City were just the right club at the right time in the right place. Maybe City means nothing - maybe the global brand is more important and maybe it's time to diversify, to reallocate funds, to refocus. Yes, there's investment to lose, but an Etihad Campus here and there is small change to wealth of this scale.
Maybe the risk of constant litigation from every club under the sun isn't worth it. Everyone club who has been within 10 miles of Manchester in the last 18 years could make an argument that, because of City's actions, they've lost out on revenue, prize money, been relegated, knocked out of Cups and so on. Is that an enticing prospect for an ownership who, lets remember, have literally nothing else to win. They've done it all. Doing it again but better might motivate them, but does playing Rotherham and fighting endless legal battles have the same allure?
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| Rotherham vs Man City can only mean one man... |
Maybe they'll wonder if, instead, it's time to try and change the power balance of European or perhaps global football by taking money to a league who will welcome it. I mean, they already own a multiclub network and frankly, the 'City' name can be appended to any city. Maybe, just maybe, it's time to get on the phone and speak to other people who might be interested in a project such as that. Newcastle's owners seem to be losing interest in what they're doing in Newcastle. Manchester United can't seem to sell themselves properly because people with the money to really turn Manchester United into the dream Manchester United has of itself are put off by the fact they can't just turn up and spend all the money so weird Jim is just tinkering around the edges instead...The Chinese played with English football for a bit, before getting bored and realising quickly it was a dead end so going home and ignoring it thereafter. There's lots of people who *might* think that something else which was basically like the Premier League but with rules more suited to their agenda could be a good idea. I mean, we've literally been down this exact chain of thinking before...
Without question, the money is there to create a 'product' that could seriously damage the standing of the Premier League and potentially the Champions League too. FIFA and UEFA are in open warfare. Manchester City hate UEFA (and will hate the EPL too). We've a quasi super league invented by FIFA and all sorts of money put behind it.
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| There's absolutely NOTHING to worry about as the global game is in the inscrutably just and moral hands of someone who has absolutely NO designs on taking more power into his hands and would NEVER exploit a situation like this to further his own agenda |
It doesn't seem beyond the bounds of possibility that across the world, with a little shove in the right direction, some extremely wealthy people might question why 'the English League' has a god given right to such power and influence, especially given that so little of the money in 'the English League' is actually English - who knows, that might include others in the 'English' game...
To come back round to the beginning - if, as I proposed earlier, Nottingham Forest had been prevented from signing players in 1978, it seems extremely unlikely that their board would have even considered thinking 'oh, then, if you don't want our money, we'll put it into another club, in another league' because that's simply not how it worked. It IS how it works now and the fact it works like that is precisely because for a long time, the Premier League has been 'intensely relaxed' about how much money is flowing into it, from where and to whom.
It is precisely the fact that from the start, the rules and structures of the Premier League made it inevitable that a day like this would arrive. It's not really the fault of Manchester City for trying to win things - that's like blaming a dog for barking - it's the fault of a structure that from day one was set up to reward riches with riches and has subsequently embraced a level of inflation that rivals interwar Germany pushing costs up and up and up and up and therefore leaving anyone wishing to compete to actually win the thing needing to put in sums of money into single clubs equivalent to what it probably cost to run the entire football pyramid 50 years ago. Who'd have thought that circumstance might have created financial irregularities?
The talk of legal wrangling has already started. Breathless predictions of sueing and counter sueing. Who knows if clubs perhaps choose to pursue Manchester City or the failings of the league itself in allowing City to do what they did. What we do know is that phone-ins, newspapers and punditry will be interminable, depressing and utterly joyless.
The beautiful game, reduced to litigation and legal technicality. The most important of the least important things stripped of magic and love and passion and rendered in byzantine arguments about arcane black and white text in some rule book from 15 years ago.
This will be the story and it will go on and on and on. Well done everyone.
Football, not quite literally, but very much metaphorically, eating itself.
In such a context, I'd remind you, (as, after writing all of this, I need to remind myself) that Stenhousemuir exist.
(Instead of a picture, just have a look at this link. It's a different game but it's brilliant evocation of watching football outside of the elite, in approaching dusk)
They beat Ayr Utd last night. They went 8 clear at the top of the Scottish Championship. There were at most a few hundred Stenny fans there. It must have felt magnificent as Ayr had stolen their manager over the summer. No one probably cares very much other than them. It might not get better than this (they've never actually got out of the league they're in) - but under the tin shed roof at Somerset Park under a dark Ayrshire sky, the whole world was the floodlit football pitch in front of them and in that illuminated green rectangle their team won a game that mattered and no one can ask for more than that from football.
I don't know or care what happens to Manchester City. I hope they still exist - there's barely any clubs in the world I'd want to go out of existence, I'm sure they will continue just fine and relegation, even to the furthest flung parts of the pyramid would just be more history in the long run. I care even less what happens to the Premier League because whatever happens in the next decade and however the face of English football is impacted (or not) by things I've speculated about (and things I haven't) the game is demeaned and made smaller the bigger it gets.
Whatever ever City's owners do or the Premier League do, there'll almost certainly be a team in sky blue shirts playing football against another team in a different colour shirt somewhere in some league and therefore, people who want to go and watch that team can.
No one died because Man City fiddled their books, the world kept turning and football is just football - fuck balance sheets, fuck pathetic governing bodies, fuck the leeches that attach themselves to our game, fuck Pep and his pathetic career of managing the best teams in the best circumstances and then who knew, being the best, fuck rules that force clubs to turn out long term fans in favour of tourist spend because what else can you do when the costs keep rising, fuck TV deals and TV pundits who can't seem to say anything other than how interesting everything is all the time, fuck this, that and the other and fuck us all for accepting it all and watching it turn from the best game in the world into a bloated beast that disgusts as much as it delights
Onward
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