Apologies if the apocalyptic nature of this blog leaves you struggling to sleep at night, pacing the bedroom floor and worrying if football in its current form can possibly survive.
Sorry, but it’s too late to turn back now.
Across the border in Scotland, the SPL might well be in the terminal stages of the disease for it’s hard to see how the lack of competition caused by the outsize Old Firm, inflated expectations for the other clubs driven by a media with no sense of responsibility, and the apparently irresistible rise in player wages driven by those expectations can ever be reversed in the current climate.
But is it so very different in England? Hardly. The issue has reached the Houses of Parliament in recent weeks, a Select Committee taking evidence on the state of the game. And the state is not good.
Perhaps the most interesting comments thus far have come from the comparatively new chief of the Football League, Greg Clarke. For all that the elite would like you to believe that the Football League is little more than an anachronism, it is actually the backbone of the English game. Without its existence, without the pyramid system, the Premier League would be nothing. The dreams, the ambitions that fire those lower league outfits are what gives the Premiership its status, makes it the pinnacle.
Without that, it becomes an hermetically sealed irrelevance. If ever a perfect case in point were required, last month provided it with the three best teams in England pitted against Crawley Town, Leyton Orient – a club about to be crucified by West Ham’s insatiable pursuit of money and the Olympic Stadium - and Notts County with results that would tease the romantic’s taste buds. If nothing else, those games underlined what it is that is special about the English – and British – game and why those links are far too precious to lose.
But according to Clarke, we are at risk of doing just that. He told the committee, “Debt is the biggest problem. If I had to list the 10 things about football that keep me awake at night, it would be debt one to 10. The level of debt is unsustainable. We are heading for the precipice and will get there quicker than people think."
In finest Soviet style, Clarke and the Football League hierarchy are working towards a five year plan that he believes the clubs must embrace, though he noted darkly, “Football can be a bit backward looking - there's a penchant not to change”.
Ironically though, the issue is that football changed too much and too quickly through the 1990s and into the new century. In particular, the advent of the Premier League created a pace of change that all too many clubs simply did not comprehend. Far too many simply spent today believing milk and honey would flow tomorrow. But there isn’t enough of the stuff to make up for the amount they’ve already squandered, not even if they put all the cows and bees on overtime from here til doomsday. Apologies to Bolton for bringing them up again, but if a team with a decade of top flight football behind it is £93million in the hole and has to carry on spending just to tread water in the top division, something is horribly wrong, and those horrors simply trickle down the food chain, unlike the wealth which remains resolutely unshifted from the top.
The issue at the heart of it all is the dysfunctional nature of football in England. The Sports Minister Hugh Robertson has described football as "the worst run sport in the country" and as a member of the coalition cabinet, he should know how to recognise a shambles when he sees one. There are three governing bodies – the FA, The Football League and the Premier League – each of whose agenda runs largely contrary to the others. The Premiership cares nothing about anything else, the Football League wants to relieve them of some of their money but can’t upset them lest they close their doors forever, while the FA sits in a corner consulting Pele over its erectile dysfunction.
How did we get here? That in itself is a constructive reminder of what happens when we forget about sport and think only of money and power. The Premier League was born out of the greed of the big six as they were then, all wanting money and none caring about anybody else. Worked out really well for Everton, did that. The Football Association saw this as an opportunity for it to wrest control of the game from the Football League whose competition had grown in strength and had gradually come to usurp the FA not least because the clubs did not always release their players for international duty. England were routinely hopeless and the FA got it in the neck for that. By running the league, went the argument, they could ensure players were always available for their country and England would go and win lots of games and tournaments. That worked out as well for the national team as the Premiership worked for Everton.
It was, lest we forget, the FA Premier League. It still is, though the Premier League is none too keen on associating itself with the Football Association which is seen as impotent, incompetent – hello World Cup 2018! – and out of touch. In its hurry to beat the Football League, the Football Association created a Frankenstein’s monster of its own and before long, the Premier League did exactly what the Football League had previously done to the Football Association. Made it irrelevant.
Which is where we sit today. A governing body that means nothing. An age old infrastructure that has been rendered so destitute that it can do little more than hold out a begging bowl. And a self perpetuating elite which exists as little more than road kill for the vultures at the top. No wonder Greg Clarke doesn’t sleep at nights. Nobody who cares about football should rest easy.
