I wrote this before the announcement of the proposal by the big Premier League clubs to let the rest of football have some money. On the surface, that seems grand but it's when you discover that all they want in return is to control the game henceforth that it doesn't seem quite the wonderful act of philanthropic kindness.
I suppose you could read this as 'reasons why we probably shouldn't cede even further control to even less people' or 'things the media will probably say when doing a cursory analysis of the situation before returning to the usual catwalk gossip and rumour of the biggest show on earth.
If anything, it's perhaps useful as a way of taking breath and reminding yourself that the big clubs aren't all models of success who we should follow and learn from and the idea of them being some kind of benevolent custodians for the game as a whole is delusional.
Hey hey, it's STILL crisis time. Football was back and then it wasn't. Just like that, the optimism of a slow and steady return to normality vanished, the dawning light was snuffed out and the darkness of night returned where morning should have been.
We've got hacks who spend every waking hour immersed in the gilded world of the Premier League with it's 24 hour rolling glamourthon blinking unsteadily in the glare of the question 'Is football fucked?' and nervously expressing half views about what might help 'the little clubs' out of the hole they find themselves in. The fact that the lower divisions and their day to day existence is something they consider once or twice a year (when a club goes out of existence and when there's an FA Cup shock) is palpably evident in the tentative, half baked replies and shallow analysis.
Very few words I've heard in the last few weeks have convinced me that very many people in the football media really understand either the cause or the solution to the problems we face.
The main take on this seems to be:
Covid (bad) X dodgy owners (bad) = financial ruin
Some money (from Premier League or Gov't) = solution and all go home and carry on the same.
Sprinkle in something about 'it being hard to make ends meet' and 'at the end of the day, the bigger clubs take a bigger share of the pie' and that's about the sum total of attention given to the potential for a collapse of clubs on the scale we've not seen before in the large part of football media.
Whilst it seems that the Premier League might actually offer some cash, it also seems as if that cash might be subject to terms and conditions and it's this humble blog's (i.e. what I think) opinion that it's a pretty minging thing to imagine, a world where the Premier League exerts an even tight grip on the neck of football.
Think of this blog as a primer for reading, listening and responding to the majority of opinion expressed by people who get paid to talk in shallow terms about football. It's an attempt to redress the lack of of insight shown in the majority of reports.
Is it a meme? No. Is it interesting? That depends. Will it take long to read? About 10 minutes I reckon.
First we're going to examine some of the half baked truisms trotted out by hacks and ex pros over the last few weeks:
"Football is a business"
Is football a business? In a lot of ways, yes, it clearly is. Individual clubs are businesses who trade on a market, buy and sell assets, attract customers and turn profits or losses. There's some things that set football apart from a run of the mill business though...
The romantic would cite 'community values' and there's doubtless a value beyond money to football clubs. It's not, however, the potential social value of clubs I want to use to differentiate Aston Villa from Amazon or Burton from Burtons.
It's great to imagine that your football club is some worthy beacon in a world of dark selfishness. There's certainly good that clubs do and some clubs do more than others. I'm not deriding that, I'm, in fact, all for it. And yet... it sticks a little in the craw to have lower league teams reduced to simply 'social institutions' as if they're not professional clubs, committed as the next to trying to win games of football. If we over emphasise the cuddly 'it's a place to meet up and have a pint, go with yer grandad, many generations, it's all the town has got' whimsy and romance as if that's the sum total of what 'teams that aren't in the top 6 at the moment' are, then we're in danger of representing lower league football as some kind of glorified social club. There's nowt wrong with that, but that's not what a professional football club is fundamentally about.
Football clubs in the pyramid are 'elite' level. There's over 38000 registered clubs (over 40,000 by some figures) and these are the top 92, the top 0.02% of all the clubs - yes, of course, they are 'social institutions' but they're also striving to be the best in their sport. If I'm going to argue that standard business thinking doesn't apply, it's not out of a purely sentimental or romantic notion that I do so.
All clubs have a unique relationship with their competitors. They thrive on competition. Big clubs are generally defined by their great rivalries. Think Arsenal and Tottenham are the next thought you have. Everton, Liverpool and so on. It's not just a case of derbies equating to interest, it's always about close fought battles, evenly matched teams attracting the most interest. Liverpool v Newcastle in the 90s, Arsenal vs Utd in the 2000s and Liverpool vs City in the current era, examples of games where closely matched rivals compete to create 'an alluring product'
If the entire high street closed down tomorrow, then Amazon wouldn't weep a tear or suffer in the slightest. In fact, they'd benefit significantly from being the only show in town (as their enormous profits and the state of high streets show already.) It's in Amazon's interests to pursue an aggressive and self interested strategy that sees their competitors wither and die.
Is that same strategy in the interest of football clubs though? I would argue not. The game is at its best when it's close. It's at its best when there's a healthy battle between evenly matched clubs. No one could possibly deny that Arsenal pipping Liverpool at the line in 1990 or Man City's last gasp title victory, or for that matter, Leicester's completely unexpected win, trumps a walkover by 20 or 30 points in terms of sheer drama and engagement.
Last minute winners stick longer in the mind than routine 3-0 victories. Last minute losses feel more painful than routine 3-0 losses. Close competition matters to the health of the game and the interest in clubs. That's very different than the reality of business. The mantra of capitalism might speak of competition pushing enterprise on to greater deeds, but the reality in many sectors is, it's actually much better to just crush the competition into the dust and dominate the market.
If you imagine say, Liverpool, but you strip them of games against their rivals, you strip Liverpool of any meaning. To an extent, Coke is defined by being 'not Pepsi' but should the blue can disappear, the red can won't lose its allure. If (for sake of argument) Liverpool were to achieve an Amazon-like dominance of the Football market and drive Chelsea, Man City, Man United, Everton, Arsenal, Tottenham etc etc out of business it would be a very hollow existence indeed.
Football clubs may be businesses, but football itself is more like a supply chain. Each club is dependent on the next for meaning and purpose. The narrative and drama of any given season is based on conflict and competition.
Whilst of course, it's not Tottenham, Everton, Arsenal who are under threat and Liverpool are hardly likely to be facing Rochdale or Accrington in anger in the near future, it's the presence of clubs such as these that gives Liverpool its prestige. They are big. Size becomes irrelevant if you don't have a reference point. The glamour of winning the league 19 times is somewhat undermined if the league is a piece of piss to win. Finishing first out of 92 has a real cachet, finishing first out of 8 is a more underwhelming achievement.
Smaller clubs are also the supply chain in another sense. Jamie Vardy is currently the Premier League's leading goal scorer and arguably the best pure striker of a generation. Without non league and lower league football he'd have been lost to the game. There are countless examples of players who've either never attracted the interest of elite club in the first place, or been deemed unfit to meet their exacting standards who have forged successful careers in the lower leagues and made it all the way to the top of the game, to international honours and trophies and medals.
As I edit this, Ollie Watkins has just put Liverpool to the sword - that's an ex Exeter City and Brentford forward if you wondered where he'd appeared from.
To let the pyramid wither is a dangerous move by elite level football. It's a tiny little bit like Amazon deciding to put their suppliers and distributors out of business, which wouldn't be a wise business move at all.
Successful businesses shouldn't have to bail out unsuccessful ones:
This truism is really interesting to analyse as it gets to the heart of how we think about the game and what has gone really wrong somewhere, even in the heads of people who genuinely do think about and watch it a lot.
What is 'success?' - In business, broadly speaking, it's making money. Football clubs are oddly exempt from this rule, even though the same people who spout this phrase, often also insist that 'Football is a business'
Many Premier League clubs aren't business success stories - they're examples of vanity projects, run for the ego of their owners or perhaps for the political capital associated with the positive image that goes along with sporting success. They don't make money. If they're not making money - how can they be a 'business success?' - If I set up a coffee shop or a photocopier repair business, I can win all the trade awards I like, but if I'm putting more money in than I'm getting out, my business cannot be described as 'a success' - I might have another very successful business, I might succeed in keeping my coffee shop afloat and even inflicting damage on my coffee shop rivals, I might serve very good coffee, but if I'm having to keep pumping more and more money in and it not breaking even, it can't be regarded as 'good business'
Manchester City are not a 'business success,' Chelsea are not a 'business success,' Everton are (under Moshiri) a palpable disaster of a business and so on. You could make a (likely very unpopular) argument that the (in footballing terms) unsuccessful Newcastle United are in fact a success (in business terms.) The former clubs turn massive losses and but for the grace of their benefactors wouldn't be in the position they are. Newcastle turn a small profit and pay out money to their shareholders. By the definition of a 'normal' business, they're a success. Is football a business or not? If it is, it's a fucking odd one.
Now let's look at some lower league clubs. I'm going to pick Accrington, but I could just as easily pick any number of clubs. Accrington have established themselves in midtable in the third tier. By my reckoning, Stanley haven't been relegated for 21 years, and in that time have been promoted 4 times, each time consolidating their position in a higher division, before slowly and steadily making their way up that division. There's been moments along the way when finances have been shaky, but generally, Stanley have lived within their means and survived on a diet of other team's cast offs, young players, overlooked senior pros and carefully selected loans. Their ground has slowly been improved and they make the absolute most of their resources through good management. It's probably fair to say, Accrington don't treat football 'as a product' but anyone who has visited the Crown Ground will testify, they do a good job of serving it up and balancing the books in the process.
What makes Accrington remarkable, is they don't have a multi millionaire at the helm, they don't have huge cash injections or millions of pounds of TV money. They're flanked by Blackburn and Burnley, bigger places, bigger, more successful clubs and yet they're competing with Sunderland, Ipswich and outperforming Bolton Wanderers. They go toe to toe with teams with bigger resources and sometimes they win.
I could pick plenty of other clubs from the lower reaches of the league, or from non league football who are run in this way. Within their means and with ingenuity and dedication. For whom achievements have been hard fought and twice as well earned as if they'd simply been bought.
The point is - who is it who that dares to define a club like Accrington as unsuccessful? On any sporting measure, they're a triumph. As a business, they've maximised their performance and broken into a market that seemed beyond their reach without excessive financial backing to distort the market in their favour. Accrington have never done what Chelsea did and spent wildly above their incomings, they've never posted losses of many millions that are simply underwritten by their owner and yet they've not taken a backward step in 21 years. Their losses, such as they are, even at their lowest ebbs, were nothing in comparison to those of, say Everton. So how are they unsuccessful? What weird business rule applies, where the business that loses most money is more successful than one that generally breaks even?
Further to all this, there is a simple structural truth. Someone has to be unsuccessful. In a sporting sense at least, someone has to be a failure. It doesn't matter if every single club makes all the best choices available to them on and off the pitch, someone will lose more matches than the rest. When we make such a strong link between sporting achievement and financial reward, we're giving teams a double reward or a double punishment. On the pitch at least, football is not like a business, in the sense that you can't expand the potential to succeed beyond the very fixed opportunity on offer. If it's not working you can't leave the division and try your luck in another one (as a business can with a particular product or market)
Someone HAS to be relegated, fail to make the playoffs, miss out on the last day of the season, have a disappointing mid table season. It's literally impossible for that not to happen to someone in any given season. Those teams are just as necessary to the narrative of football as the teams who win. Why is it necessary to create such precipitous financial cliff edges and indeed, such tortuous arrangements for those who fall from them? If we need 'parachutes' for relegation, why not just make the drop in finance more shallow?
The idea that a club 'deserves' to be liquidated because it hasn't achieved the necessary on ptch success to unlock the financial rewards that go with that is truly odd and demonstrates the way that 'business thinking' has permeated into the mind of football and corrupted it. Clubs deserve to be relegated, they might even deserve to be relegated several times and maybe, at a stretch, (I'm being very pragmatic here and abandoning all my higher ideals) even deserve to suffer existentially if they consistently manage themselves badly and ignore all sense, advice and warnings to the contrary. Football cannot sustain mass irresponsibility. But.... teams do not deserve to face financial ruin simply because their football decisions went wrong. Why? Because it's literally inevitable that will happen for some clubs. It's 100% unavoidable.
When people talk about clubs 'cutting their cloth' according to their perceived size/potential/current position, we're positing a really odd thing in sporting terms. We're creating a vision of a pyramid where each team stays more or less where they are and nothing changes much for them. In the current model where success costs, frugality and sense can only equate to stasis.
What is 'success?' - In business, broadly speaking, it's making money. Football clubs are oddly exempt from this rule, even though the same people who spout this phrase, often also insist that 'Football is a business'
Many Premier League clubs aren't business success stories - they're examples of vanity projects, run for the ego of their owners or perhaps for the political capital associated with the positive image that goes along with sporting success. They don't make money. If they're not making money - how can they be a 'business success?' - If I set up a coffee shop or a photocopier repair business, I can win all the trade awards I like, but if I'm putting more money in than I'm getting out, my business cannot be described as 'a success' - I might have another very successful business, I might succeed in keeping my coffee shop afloat and even inflicting damage on my coffee shop rivals, I might serve very good coffee, but if I'm having to keep pumping more and more money in and it not breaking even, it can't be regarded as 'good business'
Manchester City are not a 'business success,' Chelsea are not a 'business success,' Everton are (under Moshiri) a palpable disaster of a business and so on. You could make a (likely very unpopular) argument that the (in footballing terms) unsuccessful Newcastle United are in fact a success (in business terms.) The former clubs turn massive losses and but for the grace of their benefactors wouldn't be in the position they are. Newcastle turn a small profit and pay out money to their shareholders. By the definition of a 'normal' business, they're a success. Is football a business or not? If it is, it's a fucking odd one.
Now let's look at some lower league clubs. I'm going to pick Accrington, but I could just as easily pick any number of clubs. Accrington have established themselves in midtable in the third tier. By my reckoning, Stanley haven't been relegated for 21 years, and in that time have been promoted 4 times, each time consolidating their position in a higher division, before slowly and steadily making their way up that division. There's been moments along the way when finances have been shaky, but generally, Stanley have lived within their means and survived on a diet of other team's cast offs, young players, overlooked senior pros and carefully selected loans. Their ground has slowly been improved and they make the absolute most of their resources through good management. It's probably fair to say, Accrington don't treat football 'as a product' but anyone who has visited the Crown Ground will testify, they do a good job of serving it up and balancing the books in the process.
What makes Accrington remarkable, is they don't have a multi millionaire at the helm, they don't have huge cash injections or millions of pounds of TV money. They're flanked by Blackburn and Burnley, bigger places, bigger, more successful clubs and yet they're competing with Sunderland, Ipswich and outperforming Bolton Wanderers. They go toe to toe with teams with bigger resources and sometimes they win.
I could pick plenty of other clubs from the lower reaches of the league, or from non league football who are run in this way. Within their means and with ingenuity and dedication. For whom achievements have been hard fought and twice as well earned as if they'd simply been bought.
The point is - who is it who that dares to define a club like Accrington as unsuccessful? On any sporting measure, they're a triumph. As a business, they've maximised their performance and broken into a market that seemed beyond their reach without excessive financial backing to distort the market in their favour. Accrington have never done what Chelsea did and spent wildly above their incomings, they've never posted losses of many millions that are simply underwritten by their owner and yet they've not taken a backward step in 21 years. Their losses, such as they are, even at their lowest ebbs, were nothing in comparison to those of, say Everton. So how are they unsuccessful? What weird business rule applies, where the business that loses most money is more successful than one that generally breaks even?
Further to all this, there is a simple structural truth. Someone has to be unsuccessful. In a sporting sense at least, someone has to be a failure. It doesn't matter if every single club makes all the best choices available to them on and off the pitch, someone will lose more matches than the rest. When we make such a strong link between sporting achievement and financial reward, we're giving teams a double reward or a double punishment. On the pitch at least, football is not like a business, in the sense that you can't expand the potential to succeed beyond the very fixed opportunity on offer. If it's not working you can't leave the division and try your luck in another one (as a business can with a particular product or market)
Someone HAS to be relegated, fail to make the playoffs, miss out on the last day of the season, have a disappointing mid table season. It's literally impossible for that not to happen to someone in any given season. Those teams are just as necessary to the narrative of football as the teams who win. Why is it necessary to create such precipitous financial cliff edges and indeed, such tortuous arrangements for those who fall from them? If we need 'parachutes' for relegation, why not just make the drop in finance more shallow?
The idea that a club 'deserves' to be liquidated because it hasn't achieved the necessary on ptch success to unlock the financial rewards that go with that is truly odd and demonstrates the way that 'business thinking' has permeated into the mind of football and corrupted it. Clubs deserve to be relegated, they might even deserve to be relegated several times and maybe, at a stretch, (I'm being very pragmatic here and abandoning all my higher ideals) even deserve to suffer existentially if they consistently manage themselves badly and ignore all sense, advice and warnings to the contrary. Football cannot sustain mass irresponsibility. But.... teams do not deserve to face financial ruin simply because their football decisions went wrong. Why? Because it's literally inevitable that will happen for some clubs. It's 100% unavoidable.
When people talk about clubs 'cutting their cloth' according to their perceived size/potential/current position, we're positing a really odd thing in sporting terms. We're creating a vision of a pyramid where each team stays more or less where they are and nothing changes much for them. In the current model where success costs, frugality and sense can only equate to stasis.
Essentially, when we talk about 'success' we're mixing up the random luck of the club who gets bought by an owner who has money with sporting merit. We're confusing businesses with oligarch's playthings and it's time to get the language right. To describe Chelsea or Man City giving Accrington or AFC Wimbledon or plenty of other teams a portion of their TV money as 'successful businesses' bailing out 'unsuccessful businesses' is an absolutely disgraceful misuse of truth and the English language.
The game can't support a pyramid this big:
This I simply don't understand. The game survived two world wars, the depression of the 1920s, the industrial unrest of the 70s and 80s. Football is followed throughout the pyramid by considerably more match going supporters than through most of the 1980s and early 1990s. (Gates in the top flight have more or less doubled since 1980, and whilst I can't find comparable figures for the other divisions, they're clearly higher than they were at all levels)
So, there's more fans who are also paying more. Match going tickets are proportionately more expensive and clubs of all sizes sell considerably more merchandise and many have more revenue streams than they could have dreamed of 40 years ago. The idea of my own club having a ground that included a hotel and office space seemed absurd in 1992, but yet, here we are with office lets and a hotel. We've barely even mentioned multi billion pound TV deals yet, but the notion of people in Sub Saharan Africa or the Australian outback paying money into the English game would have seemed bizarre in the 1980s. And yet, here we are in an era where the global TV rights are the biggest game in town.
Whilst obviously Covid has curtailed income, the money that has come into football has increased hugely to a point, where it seems frankly absurd to make a statement that the game suddenly can't afford it's own structure.
A more accurate statement would be 'The game is unwilling to curb the runaway inflation of top flight wages (3700% rise since Premier League inception) and the price we will pay for failing to use the money for anything more useful than wages that are excessive by anyone's standards is the existence of a whole series of clubs"
Bail out:
Here's a simple fact. The Premier League is the only English division that pays prize money. If we look at Accrington or Wycombe or AFC Wimbledon, or any other small, well run and successful club, they don't actually get rewarded very much for their success. Granted, Wycombe have achieved a moderate windfall in increased TV money for reaching the championship but all the teams who won leagues or finished far higher in the league than expected, or won a play off final or achieved any kind of 'success' last year in the football league, didn't actually get any prize money for it.
The Premier League prize pot alone would solve the immediate financial crisis, and in there'd be plenty left over for non league and grass roots football. The top 4 in the Premier league received £200 million in prize money last year. That's the amount which is suggested will be needed to safeguard the future of the EFL. That still leaves about £250 million in prize money to be paid out. Remember, no one else gets ANY PRIZE MONEY AT ALL.
The numbers are simple: Less than half of the total prize money would save the rest of the league. Put it this way - this season a club in the pyramid will go bust and someone in the Premier League will receive prize money for finishing 14th - i.e. not winning anything, that could have saved that club. That's not impacting on any of the other means Premier League teams have to raise income. It's just trimming their bonus a bit.
It seems a bit strange to me. The majority of teams play for nothing aside from the prospect of promotion or fear of relegation and yet the Premier League simple MUST pay teams for finishing 10th and cannot possibly function without doing so?
Don't forget, the Premier League is also paying each and every team around £100 million pounds just for being in the division a figure way higher than the championship clubs recieves and way, way, way more than teams even further down the pyramid receive.
If it's such a great sporting competition, the greatest in the world etc, why does it need so much prize money? Why does no one ever ask that?
Lower league clubs must learn to live within their means.
We're back to the astonishing dual thinking that fetes Manchester City and Chelsea, that wants Saudi Arabian money to catapult Newcastle into Geordie heaven but demands anyone not in the promised land learns to get by on scraps.
Of course clubs should live 'within their means' but 'their means' are dictated by their league position. Manchester United have earned £1.5 billion pounds just for being a Premier League Club. 'Football' has paid that club to exist. That's not the money they've earned as a business, from selling tickets, shirts, executive boxes, trips round Old Trafford, sponsorship deals, player trading, etc, etc, etc. It's the money that football itself has paid to that club.
Their means are being considerably enhanced by the way the market (remember, football is a business and clubs operate within a market) is set up. This isn't even money coming from the generous owners. This is simply money paid by the league, to the club, for little more than existing.
Imagine a shopping mall, in which coffee shop A is paid every year by the mall owners and coffee shop B is paid nothing. Then imagine coffee shop A lecturing coffee shop B on running a profitable business.
There aren't comparable total figures for the Championship, but a club that has been in the league below for the same period of time could have expected at most to have recieved about 10% of that figure - which is still a lot of money, but indisputably a lot less.
What seems to be forgotten in the head long rush to castigate clubs for 'wild spending' and 'profligacy' is the fundamental purpose of a football team. We've touched on this earlier, but it's worth reiterating again, for so often it's forgotten, as if Stevenage, Exeter and Crawley are just there to make up numbers and give people somewhere to go on Saturday. The fundamental point of ALL the teams in the league is to try and one day beat Manchester United or Arsenal. Whether Accrington or Aston Villa, whether Wimbledon or Wolves, the point is to win games and get as high up the leagues as you can.
If you are setting the price of competing with Manchester United at a very basic £1.5 billion pounds (remember again, that's only the money from the league itself and an incredibly conservative estimate of the difference in resources between Man Utd and Mansfield) then essentially, the structure of the game is FORCING teams to gamble. How can a lower league team possibly compete with the established big names, when a considerable amount of their resources are simply handed to them in return for their mere presence in the league?
No one is advocating reducing Manchester United's capacity to earn. No one is proposing they stop selling shirts in China or doing lucrative tours of the USA or selling adverts on their TV channel. They're a big club and big clubs exist. Every market has market leaders. The problem comes when the market leaders actively suppress the ability of other businesses to function by driving up the prices of supplies. This is effectively what has happened with footballers wages. You can disagree, but you are wrong. The inflation rate since the beginning of the Premier League is (at least) 3700%
If you want to compete (which is the ultimate reason football clubs exist) then you have to pay the market rate for the resources (i.e. players) to do so.
Let's use an analogy to make what I think is a crude but illustrative point.
A man is born in a town. He grows up happily enjoying his life in the town, surrounded by family and friends. He meets a girl in the town, who lives there happily, surrounded by their family and friends. They decide to settle down and have a baby. The town isn't very rich in its own right, but it's pretty and nice to live in and they like it. They both have jobs, not very high paying (because there aren't any), but jobs none the less. Its a bit of an isolated town, so it doesn't make sense to move away because that will cut them off from their friends and family.
They go to the estate agents and are shocked to find that house prices are twice what they once were. They go back the next week and they're now 2.5 times what they were. Each week they do this and the costs keep rising!
"It's not fair!" they say. "We've worked and we like it here. We just want to set down roots and do what people do." - The estate agent replies, "I'm sorry, but it's people from the city - they're buying up the houses and using them at the weekend"
The young couple are heartbroken. They've had a dream and they just want to live it. They decide to do whatever they can do to make it happen and after scrimping and saving, begging and borrowing, they find a bank that will lend them the money. It's a risk, but it's their dream. It's what they've always wanted.
The little house costs way more than it should, but it's their happy home. For a while. Until the roof leaks and the plumbing needs doing. Till he has to take six months of work because he's hurt himself at work and they fall behind on the mortgage and things spiral from bad to worse and to cut a long story in the middle of a longer analogy short, the house gets repossessed.
The house goes to auction and the young couple (who are now living with one of their parents) stand outside sadly as the new owners arrive. It's a posh couple from a far away city who spot them stood there and ask them what they're doing. When they recount their sorry tale, they tell them 'You should have lived within your means - look at us, we sold the house my father left me for over a million - now we're buying up places like this, y'know, sensible investments, frugal ones - why can't people like you learn to live within your means?"
The posh couple aren't entirely heartless. They offer them a job, cleaning in the week, whilst the house is empty between holiday let guests and drive away in their 4*4, happy to have done their bit to prop the ailing rural economy.
The analogy is over. What, you may ask (forgivably given the length and digressive nature) was its point?
Football is a dream. The dream is to win. When you put an absurd price on that, people will chase it because what choice really exists - what else are they supposed to do? Turn to another cheaper sport? Clubs exist within a pyramid for a reason. The reason is to try and climb it. When you lift up the ladder, people will jump for it. Sometimes they'll fall in the process.
The message of 'live within your means' is absurd, when the profligacy of the top flight is the petrol on the flames of spending.
Well, it's just bad owners. If we can just sort that out...
As the cost of football rises, each foreign (I say that, because generally, they are) superstar owner is greeted with a delighted squeal and rubbing of hands, excited to learn what big name player will be tempted to the top flight next. The media can barely contain their delight at another coat of glamour being applied to the most beautiful of games.
No one seems to stop and wonder 'why is almost exclusively foreign money in football?' When Wigan Athletic were in very recent financial trouble, it seemed the only English figure the receivers could drag out of the world's 7th most successful economy was Norman Smurthwaite, the dodgy as hell former owner of Port Vale. Wigan were saved by a Spanish bidder in the end.
Charlton Athletic whose ownership travails are the stuff of nightmares have recently been taken over by a Belgian businessman.
There are 33 people or groups listed as owners or part owners of top flight football clubs. Only 27% of them are British. Put it another way, 73% of them are not. In the Championship, there are 40 people or groups listed as owners and only 15 of them are British. The amount of non British money dwindles a lot from League 1 downwards, but the fact of the matter remains, Far more of the top ranking 'English' clubs are not owned by English people or companies based in England.
Does this matter? On one level, no, not really. On another level, perhaps it matters a lot. What is going wrong economically where UK finance wants little or nothing to do with football?
As global finance drives up the cost of competing in football, it's not simply that 'more foreign investment' is making its way into the game. It's (as witnessed by the struggles of any number of clubs, most recently Wigan, to find an owner) that the traditional reliance of most provincial clubs upon a local benefactor is now failing. There comes a point where, if local money doesn't want to know, then clubs are at risk of completely unknown, completely unaccountable money.
We've established quite clearly that football, whilst a business in one sense, is quite unlike other businesses - in that what's expected of an owner is to sink vast amounts of personal wealth in a quest for glory and that whilst some clubs have owners are willing to do that, others don't. The amount of local multi billionaires on tap for Rotherham United or Gillingham, for Newport County or Stevenage Borough is probably not that high.
Why do we end up with so many bad owners, making weird decisions, dodgy dealings or just proving to be simply crooked fantasists? At least in part because you'd have to be a bit mad to invest in football in the first place. A few hundred grand, a couple of million quid simply won't go far enough anymore. Why? Because the money involved in doing any more than surviving in the lower reaches of the league is frankly insane - yes, the rewards are plentiful eventually, but the odds of success aren't very high and football is a demanding game that's difficult to master. Plenty of people have sunk fortunes into it and gained little glory in response.
There's nothing wrong with calling out bad ownership and weak governance in the press. In fact, as a Blackpool fan, I wish it was more common. It's just that the papers, podcasts and TV shows so rarely go beyond any immediate issue, rarely look beyond 'calls for a better fit and proper test' and question why there's a paucity of decent owners, why it's so rare that people with a connection to a club or an area are willing to step forward.
The answer is surely: because the game has been so unwilling to manage its spending and so willing to reward the top clubs in a vastly disproportionate way, that the chances of ultimate success, in either business or sporting terms seem pretty low. Generally, if you're successful in business, you have a fairly pragmatic character. You see things objectively. Anyone looking at football objectively would see a business model that almost certainly requires you to lose money in significant amounts and a high chance that you'll never be repaid. Whilst that might be a price to pay for some local kudos or a platform for your business, there comes a point when that price becomes simply too high and we're left where we are. High and dry and looking abroad.
The end bit:
It's easy to sum up the problem in a few sentences. Hyper inflation forces everyone to spend more. Human nature is such that sporting ambition can't be curbed and football clubs are a highly tempting prospect for someone wanting to chance their arm at a bit of glory. As the costs rise and rise, the number of people who can actually afford that costs dwindles.
As such, the English game looks globally. It creams off the best players from across the globe and increasingly it requires global cash to pay for doing so. Global cash is attracted to certain sorts of investment and we've seen power, money and ultimately success coalesce around a particular kind of 'metropolitan big city club.' That's not to say that those clubs weren't already successful. They were, but balance of power between metropolitan and provincial England in footballing terms has shifted beyond question. Crap towns simply don't win stuff anymore.
In and of itself, is that foreign investment a problem?
On one level, money is universal. Does it matter where it was made? Money flows freely across borders and trade breaks down barriers between cultures.
On another, it's a strange thing. We're in a particular time and place culturally, where our national debates centre round notions of 'control' and what 'we' are able to do in terms of setting rules, laws and managing our own futures. It's a debate I don't want to get into as Nationalism is not a force to be casually embraced, but equally it's one I certainly understand from the perspective of seeing in my lived experience, the impact of globalisation on UK industry and the consequent influence upon the pride and prospects of the various post industrial towns I've called my home. If you cede control, then it's natural that at some point to want it back.
What mystifies me about all this, is in this particular cultural moment, where many will argue that it's worth sacrificing current financial relationship in return for control of our own destiny, why doesn't the same argument apply to football?
Ultimately, when the fate of the pyramid is decided, when the future of 132 (and counting) years history is in the balance, how much sway will American venture capitalists, Middle Eastern oil barons and post communist oligarchs place upon the intangible value of the history and tradition of the English game?
Who actually controls 'our' game?
This isn't (I think) a xenophobic point. I'm not in denial about the scumbag nature of many English people involved in football. I'm a fucking Blackpool fan. It's not a romantic point about 'good old fashioned chairmen like Peter Swales and Ken Bates' - I'm also not denying the good work of foreign owners at many clubs or seeking to drive them out the game.
It's a broader point about whether football is a business or not. Global capital has little sympathy for its competitors. It cares little about the collateral damage of the markets it colonises. Waterstones cared little for the independent bookshops and Amazon cares little for Waterstones.
Our game is increasingly controlled by the votes and ethos of people who think globally, not locally. Who think in terms of their club's own brand image above anything else. Where does that leave the rest of football? You can deny this, but it's like saying black is white. The clubs are now owned by multinational global capital, not local capital. That's the facts. Expecting global capital to not behave like global capital is like expecting a dog to be a cat.
It's also true that we're moving further and further from a position where owners are answerable to supporters. One thing you can say in the Oystons favour is, at least Blackpool fans knew where they were to tell them what we thought.
What do we do to influence the thoughts and actions of people thousands of miles away whose business interests and reputation have nothing to do with the town our club belongs too?
Football is run as a members club and the most influential members (The EPL and the Championship) have a vast and disparate range of board members. To point out that these people are unlikely to be thinking especially deeply about the fate of the league 2 teams isn't xenophobic, it's simply reflecting human nature. How much do you know about the third tier of Russian football? How much do you care about grassroots football in the UAE, what's happening in the 4th tier of US football? You almost certainly don't know and neither do I and I would argue, I like football as much as, if not more than any owner of any club but not enough to appreciate the nuances of the structures of far flung lands.
The broader point isn't that 'foreign money' = bad. It's that ceding control to less and less accountable figures who have more and more wealth and thus more and more influence is problematic. The next multi billionaire (of whatever nationality) won't improve football beyond perhaps serving up a slightly more competitive top flight - they'll simply move it further down the path it's on. They'll inflate wages still further, demand ever more TV games to compensate them for their spending and the effects described above will only become more and more serious. The nature of the ownership is a symptom of the way the game has been governed.
We've been served up years and years of the same thing. The governing bodies with hand off attitudes towards finances, but hands on attitudes to everything else. The matchday fan doesn't matter, the TV experience is everything, the rules are changed within complete disregard for anything supporters want. I could write another blog of the same length on VAR, substitutes, drinks breaks, fixture changes and so on. I won't, but fair to say, the game has been micromanaged but the finances have run out of control. This is a storm that's been brewing for years and Covid is just the thunderclap that presages the clouds finally breaking.
So what next?
It's been long mooted that the top clubs will breakaway. Perhaps it's time to breakaway from them instead. Perhaps it's time to reset, build a game based on some simple ideas around sustainability and competition and see what happens. Instead of grovelling to the elite for pocket change, like tramps with bowed heads, looking shameful as bankers and financiers walk past us, maybe we should up sticks, tell them to fuck their 'pyramid' and go and build another one, elsewhere, without them.
The teams who are left can keep their telly money and go and try and find some other teams to play elsewhere. I don't give a fuck. Perhaps they could play their own B-teams and glory in steamrollering them 8-0.
Tweet
The message of 'live within your means' is absurd, when the profligacy of the top flight is the petrol on the flames of spending.
Well, it's just bad owners. If we can just sort that out...
As the cost of football rises, each foreign (I say that, because generally, they are) superstar owner is greeted with a delighted squeal and rubbing of hands, excited to learn what big name player will be tempted to the top flight next. The media can barely contain their delight at another coat of glamour being applied to the most beautiful of games.
No one seems to stop and wonder 'why is almost exclusively foreign money in football?' When Wigan Athletic were in very recent financial trouble, it seemed the only English figure the receivers could drag out of the world's 7th most successful economy was Norman Smurthwaite, the dodgy as hell former owner of Port Vale. Wigan were saved by a Spanish bidder in the end.
Charlton Athletic whose ownership travails are the stuff of nightmares have recently been taken over by a Belgian businessman.
There are 33 people or groups listed as owners or part owners of top flight football clubs. Only 27% of them are British. Put it another way, 73% of them are not. In the Championship, there are 40 people or groups listed as owners and only 15 of them are British. The amount of non British money dwindles a lot from League 1 downwards, but the fact of the matter remains, Far more of the top ranking 'English' clubs are not owned by English people or companies based in England.
Does this matter? On one level, no, not really. On another level, perhaps it matters a lot. What is going wrong economically where UK finance wants little or nothing to do with football?
As global finance drives up the cost of competing in football, it's not simply that 'more foreign investment' is making its way into the game. It's (as witnessed by the struggles of any number of clubs, most recently Wigan, to find an owner) that the traditional reliance of most provincial clubs upon a local benefactor is now failing. There comes a point where, if local money doesn't want to know, then clubs are at risk of completely unknown, completely unaccountable money.
We've established quite clearly that football, whilst a business in one sense, is quite unlike other businesses - in that what's expected of an owner is to sink vast amounts of personal wealth in a quest for glory and that whilst some clubs have owners are willing to do that, others don't. The amount of local multi billionaires on tap for Rotherham United or Gillingham, for Newport County or Stevenage Borough is probably not that high.
Why do we end up with so many bad owners, making weird decisions, dodgy dealings or just proving to be simply crooked fantasists? At least in part because you'd have to be a bit mad to invest in football in the first place. A few hundred grand, a couple of million quid simply won't go far enough anymore. Why? Because the money involved in doing any more than surviving in the lower reaches of the league is frankly insane - yes, the rewards are plentiful eventually, but the odds of success aren't very high and football is a demanding game that's difficult to master. Plenty of people have sunk fortunes into it and gained little glory in response.
There's nothing wrong with calling out bad ownership and weak governance in the press. In fact, as a Blackpool fan, I wish it was more common. It's just that the papers, podcasts and TV shows so rarely go beyond any immediate issue, rarely look beyond 'calls for a better fit and proper test' and question why there's a paucity of decent owners, why it's so rare that people with a connection to a club or an area are willing to step forward.
The answer is surely: because the game has been so unwilling to manage its spending and so willing to reward the top clubs in a vastly disproportionate way, that the chances of ultimate success, in either business or sporting terms seem pretty low. Generally, if you're successful in business, you have a fairly pragmatic character. You see things objectively. Anyone looking at football objectively would see a business model that almost certainly requires you to lose money in significant amounts and a high chance that you'll never be repaid. Whilst that might be a price to pay for some local kudos or a platform for your business, there comes a point when that price becomes simply too high and we're left where we are. High and dry and looking abroad.
The end bit:
It's easy to sum up the problem in a few sentences. Hyper inflation forces everyone to spend more. Human nature is such that sporting ambition can't be curbed and football clubs are a highly tempting prospect for someone wanting to chance their arm at a bit of glory. As the costs rise and rise, the number of people who can actually afford that costs dwindles.
As such, the English game looks globally. It creams off the best players from across the globe and increasingly it requires global cash to pay for doing so. Global cash is attracted to certain sorts of investment and we've seen power, money and ultimately success coalesce around a particular kind of 'metropolitan big city club.' That's not to say that those clubs weren't already successful. They were, but balance of power between metropolitan and provincial England in footballing terms has shifted beyond question. Crap towns simply don't win stuff anymore.
In and of itself, is that foreign investment a problem?
On one level, money is universal. Does it matter where it was made? Money flows freely across borders and trade breaks down barriers between cultures.
On another, it's a strange thing. We're in a particular time and place culturally, where our national debates centre round notions of 'control' and what 'we' are able to do in terms of setting rules, laws and managing our own futures. It's a debate I don't want to get into as Nationalism is not a force to be casually embraced, but equally it's one I certainly understand from the perspective of seeing in my lived experience, the impact of globalisation on UK industry and the consequent influence upon the pride and prospects of the various post industrial towns I've called my home. If you cede control, then it's natural that at some point to want it back.
What mystifies me about all this, is in this particular cultural moment, where many will argue that it's worth sacrificing current financial relationship in return for control of our own destiny, why doesn't the same argument apply to football?
Ultimately, when the fate of the pyramid is decided, when the future of 132 (and counting) years history is in the balance, how much sway will American venture capitalists, Middle Eastern oil barons and post communist oligarchs place upon the intangible value of the history and tradition of the English game?
Who actually controls 'our' game?
This isn't (I think) a xenophobic point. I'm not in denial about the scumbag nature of many English people involved in football. I'm a fucking Blackpool fan. It's not a romantic point about 'good old fashioned chairmen like Peter Swales and Ken Bates' - I'm also not denying the good work of foreign owners at many clubs or seeking to drive them out the game.
It's a broader point about whether football is a business or not. Global capital has little sympathy for its competitors. It cares little about the collateral damage of the markets it colonises. Waterstones cared little for the independent bookshops and Amazon cares little for Waterstones.
Our game is increasingly controlled by the votes and ethos of people who think globally, not locally. Who think in terms of their club's own brand image above anything else. Where does that leave the rest of football? You can deny this, but it's like saying black is white. The clubs are now owned by multinational global capital, not local capital. That's the facts. Expecting global capital to not behave like global capital is like expecting a dog to be a cat.
It's also true that we're moving further and further from a position where owners are answerable to supporters. One thing you can say in the Oystons favour is, at least Blackpool fans knew where they were to tell them what we thought.
What do we do to influence the thoughts and actions of people thousands of miles away whose business interests and reputation have nothing to do with the town our club belongs too?
Football is run as a members club and the most influential members (The EPL and the Championship) have a vast and disparate range of board members. To point out that these people are unlikely to be thinking especially deeply about the fate of the league 2 teams isn't xenophobic, it's simply reflecting human nature. How much do you know about the third tier of Russian football? How much do you care about grassroots football in the UAE, what's happening in the 4th tier of US football? You almost certainly don't know and neither do I and I would argue, I like football as much as, if not more than any owner of any club but not enough to appreciate the nuances of the structures of far flung lands.
The broader point isn't that 'foreign money' = bad. It's that ceding control to less and less accountable figures who have more and more wealth and thus more and more influence is problematic. The next multi billionaire (of whatever nationality) won't improve football beyond perhaps serving up a slightly more competitive top flight - they'll simply move it further down the path it's on. They'll inflate wages still further, demand ever more TV games to compensate them for their spending and the effects described above will only become more and more serious. The nature of the ownership is a symptom of the way the game has been governed.
We've been served up years and years of the same thing. The governing bodies with hand off attitudes towards finances, but hands on attitudes to everything else. The matchday fan doesn't matter, the TV experience is everything, the rules are changed within complete disregard for anything supporters want. I could write another blog of the same length on VAR, substitutes, drinks breaks, fixture changes and so on. I won't, but fair to say, the game has been micromanaged but the finances have run out of control. This is a storm that's been brewing for years and Covid is just the thunderclap that presages the clouds finally breaking.
So what next?
It's been long mooted that the top clubs will breakaway. Perhaps it's time to breakaway from them instead. Perhaps it's time to reset, build a game based on some simple ideas around sustainability and competition and see what happens. Instead of grovelling to the elite for pocket change, like tramps with bowed heads, looking shameful as bankers and financiers walk past us, maybe we should up sticks, tell them to fuck their 'pyramid' and go and build another one, elsewhere, without them.
The teams who are left can keep their telly money and go and try and find some other teams to play elsewhere. I don't give a fuck. Perhaps they could play their own B-teams and glory in steamrollering them 8-0.
Tweet
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