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.

It is merely a private commercial venture open to the public.

Public ownership is when the government owns.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.