But I’m struggling to have one about the news that Premier League teams have voted to explore a proposal to extend the season to 39 games and have each team play one match a year abroad. Actually, it’s easy to have an opinion: it’s a stupid proposal, it would slightly upset the competitive balance of the league, and it’s motivated almost entirely by money. But it’s also not the fiery end of the universe, and looking ahead to the inevitable frenzy of outrage from bloggers and football writers who will try to portray this as the moment the league finally turned its back on every true and honorable fan, it’s tempting to go into a bleary ignore mode until the sirens stop wailing.
Some people in Singapore might get to see a match in person. An unlucky team might have to play Manchester United three times. That’s what we’re looking at. I’m against it, but—if it’s possible to make this claim about anything in football—it’s really not that big a deal. The NFL managed to hold an actual game, that actually counted, at Wembley last year, and the winner went on to win the Super Bowl in a manner that did not quite succeed in alienating either the country as a whole or its hometown fans.
The Premier League has passed a proposal to explore another proposal that can’t go into effect until 2011 even if it’s passed after it’s been further explored. Step down from the balcony railing. Take my hand. Keep breathing.
UPDATE: A querying take at Pitch Invasion; the amused reaction at 200 Percent.
UPDATE 2: Dave may well be right that “the Premier League is suggesting this outlandish idea to get fans to buy into a smaller idea” in the end.
UPDATE 3: You knew, of course, that if anyone was going to start throwing around Harlem Globetrotters comparisons, it would be Harry Redknapp.
Read More: Your Gnashing of Teeth Makes Me Drowsy
by Brian Phillips · February 7, 2008
How is distorting – for the first time – the fairly fundamental premise that League position is decided over a season where everyone plays each other the same number of times not a big deal? How is the possibility – for the first time – that relegation issues might depend on whether you draw Arsenal or Derby on the extra fixture not a big deal? And what hath the NFL to do with the Premiership?
That’s my fundamental objection as well. “The 39th Game”. Positively Hitchockian.
And to think that 20 clubs are willing to throw over that essential competitive principle for what will for several of them prove to be chimerical financial returns is profoundly troubling.
Do recycle a hackneyed terrace chant: “They Don’t Know What They’re Doing”.
The problem with that being the ‘fundamental objection’ is that it’s the most obvious problem related to the entire scheme, but it’s one that can be fixed in various ways (unlike challenging it on the premise that every league match should be played at someone’s home ground).
Fans can thus see that their concerns have been “addressed” when they come up with some kind of “compromise”.
Once again I admit to being an American with no knowledge of the game, fascinating as I find the game to be. I do not understand all the consternation over this proposal. What changes,exactly? They will play the same number of games in the same stadiums they would have played anyway. Then they will play an extra game somewhere else. How is the home fan adversely affected? He gets to see every game he would have seen anyway. What’s the problem? Some people seem to be upset that a weaker team might have to play a stronger team. So what? Cowboy up and go play! The weak team might pull off an upset. How cool would that be? I find it amusing to hear the gnashing of teeth over the “greed of the owners.” As if none of us would have the same “greed” if we were in the same position.
Because the points count. The three points won or lost could make the difference between staying up or going down. As of now, everyone plays everyone else exactly twice. Under this proposal, everyone plays everyone else twice and one other team three teams. That is manifestly unfair and wrong.
As for the ‘greed of the owners’, this is the UK. We don’t do franchises (except for MK Dons). Clubs belong, not to chairmen and boards of directors, but to the fans – the people who actually go and watch them play, the people who have the team in their blood. ‘Owners’ have a responsibility to safeguard the history, tradition and culture of the clubs and the League – not merely flog it off to the network with the biggest chequebook.
Sorry , Jim, I would have a lot of trouble rooting for a team that was afraid of the competition. If they can’t compete with the big boys, maybe they shouldn’t be in the “bigs” to begin with.
I don’t know how the league is set up. Do you mean that the fans “literally” own the club? Or are you speaking figuratively? Why do all the websites refer to the greedy owners? Do you mean some enterprising individual has NOT put up his own money to own the club; that it is some sort of socialist (for lack of a better word) organization owned by “the people?” If it is a “socialist” organization, then why is there such a hue and cry about the proposal? The “people,” who own the organization could easily turn down the proposal if that is the case.
Jim, please understand that these are legitimate – non-threatening – questions, asked in all innocence. I would like it if you or someone else could explain how soccer is organized in your country.
Thanking you in advance.
Almost all the clubs in England are owned by businessmen . They bail the clubs out when in financial strife and they then cripple them through excess and/or negligence.
Some clubs around Europe are ‘owned’ partly by members and run by boards and presidents elected by members.
I think Barcelona FC and Man Utd before the American takeover are a couple of examples.
OK. First of all it is the Premiership who are considering the proposal – their executive in consultation with the chairmen of the 20 Prem clubs. This presents problems straight away, as three of them will not be Prem clubs in May as they will have been relegated and replaced by three clubs from the league below, the Championship.
Secondly, when you – or anyone – speak of ‘ownership’, it’s less than half the story. What do the owners own? The bricks and mortar? The players’ registrations? The business? All of these do not add up to owning the club, whose traditions, histories and lifeblood belong to the fans who pay their money season by season.
Thirdly, you still haven’t grasped that for the League, for the game to have integrity there needs to be a level playing field. The basic structure has to be fair – and playing one team more than another just isn’t fair. And your gung-ho, saddle-up Cowboy talk is all very well, but misses some basic realities about the game, viz, there is a huge gap financially between the Big Four (Arsenal, Chelsea, Man Utd and Liverpoool). Of course the smaller clubs can’t compete over a season – but to decide which of them should be relegated, on the basis of an extra game , is manifestly unfair.
Dan, as an American abroad, I think that it is genuinely difficult for North Americans to understand how essential the integrity of the league system is to football (soccer fans) in the most of the rest of the world.
The essential idea of the league structure: that the championship is awarded to the team with the best results after a season of matches in which each team plays every other team the same number of times home and away, was actually inspired by the National League of baseball, and has been in effect in England for well over a century. It is fundamental to the integrity of a system that doesn’t rely on any kind of playoffs at all (at the top level), not only for assigning the title and places in European competition, but also (even more crucially in this respect) for issues of relegation (in North American terms, demotion to what would be called a “minor league”).
In that context, I think you will understand how a change in the rules that would see teams playing an “unbalanced” schedule, with relegation potentially being decided on the basis of one team having played the equivalent of the Tampa Bay Rays three times while its direct competitor had to play the Boston Red Sox three times, is a big deal. North American sports fans take unbalanced schedules for granted because they have existed in every major North American sports since the expansion of the NHL in 1967 and MLB in 1969 (and pretty much always existed in football and basketball), but the impact of that imbalance on final outcomes is significantly weakened by the North American emphasis on playoffs and the absence of relegation.
That’s why this aspect of the plan is such a big deal. It would be much more of a revolutionary change than the introduction of wild card playoffs in baseball, shootouts in hockey or overtime in the NFL, and you may be old enough to recall that all of those “innovations” engendered significant debate at the time.
Oh, I get it. The weakest teams might get relegated to the minor leagues if they can’t keep up with everybody else. It wouldn’t be fair if they had to play a strong team, while another weak team got to play a lesser team. Very few things in life are fair, but one of the reasons we all love sports is because life in sports is supposed to be fair.
Why would the owners of the weaker teams vote for such a proposal? Where is the incentive for them? How would they enjoy the international profits if they are going to be sent down after a loss?
Apparently there is already a “huge gap financially between the Big Four” and the “smaller clubs.” How did that come about if the playing field is so even the way things are organized today?
In many American sports there is “profit sharing” between the teams, in an attempt to even things out. It works very well. Recently the underdog team
won the championship in American football. Does the Premier League not have something like that in place? Would that not be a good idea?
Finally, Jim, I think you are being unfair to the real owners of the teams, the ones who put up their own money and took all the risks. I understand how the fans feel as if it is their team. Hell, I’m a fan. I know what you mean. But I hold the owners in great esteem. They are doing their best to put a product on the field that we fans can be proud of. If they fail we won’t show up, their profits will suffer, and all the money they spent will be for naught. We’re fans, they’re owners. For them it is a business. They’re in it for profit, just like I’m in my business for profit. I think it is manifestly unfair for people to accuse them of being greedy. But then, that’s just me.
All said, there is more things wrong with this proposal than right (the potential for profits?) and should be dismissed for this reason.
You mean like the Glazers, who bought a debt-free Man Utd with a stonking big loan, took it out of public ownership and transferred their personal debt to the club? Or perhaps you mean like the recent owner of Wrexham, who bought the club purely so he could redevelop the ground as housing and a supermarket and starved the club of money, causing it to go into administration and to the brink of going out of business (and to the bottom of League 2)? Or perhaps you mean Peter Ridsdale, whose cavalier stewardship of Leeds – Leeds! – led to its relegation to the third tier for the first time in its history? Or again the owners of Luton Town, a club gone from the brink of the play-offs in the Championship to certain relegation to League 2? Or the former owner of my club Plymouth Argyle, Dan McCauley, who refused to spend any money on ground improvements and with less than a week to go before the start of the 1999-2000 season had locked the gates of the club and was threatening to put it out of business?
These examples are the tip of the iceberg. And your suggestion about product is misplaced. No Premiership club – and several Championship ones – survive on gate receipts. If they did, they’d all be bankrupt. What pays the money is the exorbitant domestic and overseas TV revenues – conservative estimate £50 million a year for the bottom-placed Premiership club this season, plus the lucrative (especially for the Big Four) branding and marketing deals – again, especially for overseas markets. As for profit-sharing, the reason the Premiership came about was because these philathropic owners refused to share their TV revenue with the lower leagues any more – thus turning, at a stroke, the beautiful game into the repellent cash-cow it has become.
So to answer your question, ‘how did the gap become so wide’, the answer is, TV revenue, not least from the Champions League, branding and marketing, and the relentless exploitation of overseas markets, especially in the Far East. If you’re starting from a position of financial strength, it’s relatively easy to stay strong. If youre starting from a position of financial weakness it’s impossible to bridge the gap. Look at the list of domestic honours won since the foundation of the Prem. No Cup Final has taken place that hasn’t been contested by one of the Big Four. Only Blackburn Rovers (in 1995) have won the Premiership – and they were bankrolled by Jack Walker and the squad broke up soon after – apart from Man Utd, Arsenal or Chelsea. Barring a massive, MASSIVE injection of cash no-one else will ever win it. Pre 1992, the First Division was won by many different teams, whose time of ascendancy waxed and waned. All that has gone forever – just to satisfy the greed of the chairmen. It is a scandal of epic proportions – and theres not a damn thing anyone can do about it. For the sake of “product”, these owners ruined the game for ever. Forgive me if I don’t bow down to worship them for their generosity.
This might further the talk along the tangent on which it’s running already but who is responsible for turning Man Utd into private ownership?
The Blazers surely didn’t *force* anyone to sell Man Utd to them.
And calling privately owned shares ‘public ownership’ even for rhetorics sake does not necessarily make it so.
A., Manchester United was always privately owned. Perhaps the key element in the Glazer takeover was his ability to buy the more than 28 percent stake that had been amassed by the Irish tycoons Magnier and McManus (previously primarily known for their horse racing activities); that was what put him over 50% and meant that the Manchester United Supporters Trust/Shareholder United bid to collect funds from from much less wealthy fans to buy a controlling stake could not succeed.
There you go.
I give up, Jim. You win! I admitted right up front that I know NOTHING about your game, its rules, its organization, its history, NOTHING AT ALL. I’ve watched a couple of games on TV and found it fascinating, even though I didn’t know what I was watching. The athleticism was remarkable. I discovered this website and thought I might learn something.
Instead I’ve gotten into a pissing match about owners of teams whose names I don’t even know.
I’ll close this with one final comment,and that will be the last you hear from me about this subject. When a person buys a team he either owns it, or he doesn’t. If he owns it he has the right to do anything he wants with it, including paving over the field and turning it into a parking lot. We might not appreciate what he does with “our” team, but that’s neither here nor there. He bought it with his money (even if he had to borrow the money) and he assumed full responsibility for his investment. If we don’t like what he does with his team we can choose to quit supporting the team, or we could band together, borrow the money, and buy the team from him, and run it the way we think it ought to be run. Then we would face the rabid fans who were sure we were running it into the ground. Shoe on the other foot and so forth. Either way, the person who puts up the money is the one who gets to call the shots. We may not like it, but that’s the way it works.
Dan, one suggestion I’d have if you’d like to learn about the issues Jim raises about ownership — which despite his hectoring tone are important if you’d like to understand more about English football — is to try and get hold of David Conn’s book, The Beautiful Game?
It explores many of the problems that have arisen in Britain from greedy owners who have shown little respect for age-old vulnerable, small clubs (England has an unusually deep “pyramid” system with around 100 or so professional clubs, most of them a hundred years old but struggling to survive given the growing gap between rich and poor in football).
I’d also suggest just keep reading blogs like this one that explore the economic issues. It might take a while for you to get up to speed, but I hope this exchange hasn’t put you off asking questions.
One further thing to remember is that American sports leagues such as the NFL do a much better job of vetting ownership and also have safeguards such as revenue sharing, salary caps and luxury taxes to keep an artificially level playing field and prevent clubs from spiralling into financial disaster, which happened with some of the clubs Jim mentions like Leeds United. They were in the top four of English football a few years ago, but due to egregiously bad financial management, have plummeted down the league and faced bankruptcy recently.
English football actually used to have greater sharing of gate receipts and television money between the bigger and smaller clubs, but this all changed (and indeed was the primary motivation for) the creation of the Premier League in the early 1990s, as the top twenty clubs broke away from the traditional league structure.
This has led to a growing disparity between the elite and the rest. There is little control over who owns clubs and what they do with them, apart from the restrictions on “franchising” (with the exception, as already mentioned, of the Milton Keynes Dons, who were moved sixty miles away from their supporters). The results of this have been negative, in my view, for fans of the majority of clubs.
Well actually the Glazers did, as once they got over the 90% threshold they were able to commandeer the remainder. And a public flotation, where shares are able to be bought and sold freely *is* public ownership as opposed to delisting and preventing that from happening, which is what the Glazers did.
And if you think that owning something gives you the right to do whatever you like with it, then I shake my head in disbelief. Because it doesn’t. Just because you own a piece of land, you can’t just build whatever you want on it. And just because you happen to have temporary stewardship of a football club, doesn’t mean you can do what you want with it. You can’t own history. You can’t own tradition. You can’t own the heart and soul of a club that’s existed long before you were ever dreamt of. I’ll say again, this isn’t the NFL. We don’t do franchises. You don’t “choose to support a team”. It’s something you’re born to, something that is part of who you are.
That’s what football means where I come from.
A public float is not ‘public ownership’ at all.
It is merely a private commercial venture open to the public.
Public ownership is when the government owns.
Thanks, Tom, I’ll buy the book.
Actually, Dan offers the harsh but true perspective of a businessman and this naturally sets him on a collision course with the opinions of football fans at large.
A businessman will never pass up on any opportunity to make money but seeking the right balance to listen to football fans which are his customers is equally important.