“Money, money, money … it’s a rich man’s world!”
The amount of money in the English football Premier League has corrupted the game of football. Everything now revolves around money.
Not a statement by Karl Marx but the prophetic words of those Swedish pop legends, Abba; and after the shananigans of the English Premier League over the past few weeks, it’s as if Benny & Bjorn were giving a prophetic warning to all English football fans.
First, there was money from Sky TV that helped promote the idea of the English Premiership and has helped to make it the richest football league in the world; and now the Premier League has become the playground for foreign owners, many of whom have no knowledge or interest in football as entertainment, but see the ownership of an English Premier League team as a prize medal or worse still, simply a way of making money.
As far as I’m concerned there are positives and negatives to consider, but what is for sure, football ain’t what it used to be!
Sky TV money has certainly helped attract some of the best players in the world. Now teams can compete with other leagues by offering outrageous wages to the most wanted. This is nothing new. The Italian Serie A and Spanish La Liga leagues have been attracting world class players from all over the world for decades by offering players more money.
The negatives of the Premier League now relying on television companies for money includes the ridiculous nature of kick-off times that now start Saturday lunchtime and finish on Monday evening. It may be a small thing, but it has taken the edge off a traditional Saturday afternoon when all teams would kick off at 3pm and lead to an exciting “Final Score” at the end of Granstand.
Now we have foreign owners buying up all the bigger teams. Again, this is great for attracting the best players in the world but it has led to short termism and the acceptable ideas that managers are not choosing who to buy and sell, let alone given time to build a team.
Short term business management is going to affect whether the cream of young English talent rises to the top much more than whether they can break into a first team squad full of international players, as it doesn’t allow managers to spend so much time nurturing young talent or taking risks.
The latest debacle caused by Premier League money is the fiasco of an independent tribunal judging that West Ham are to pay Sheffield United £30 million 16 months after they were relegated to the Coca-Cola Championship because it was judged that West Ham played Carlos Tevez, who was deemed to be an illegible player.
I understand Sheffield United’s stance to a point; afterall they are a business. A business that, by being relegated, lost serious amounts of revenue. But whether or not West Ham were breaking the rules, they were simply relegated because they failed to win enough points over the course of a season and were not good enough for Premiership status.
Premiership status is one thing, teams breaking the laws of the game is another. But when £30 million is thrown into the equation, well that’s a game with two halves; and I wonder what Sheffield United’s chairman Ken McCabe would choose given the option of £30 million in compensation or to be reinstated to the Premier League.
He may well ask to ‘phone a friend’ though if the friend was Neil Warnock, who lost his job as Sheffield United manager due directly to their relegation, I don’t think he would agree with Neil’s answer, do you?
1 comment so far
1 Football shirts // Sep 24, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Such a difficult situation with the West Ham/ Sheff Utd affair. On one hand I can see how Sheff Utd feel and would have been sufficiently annoyed had it been my team that got relegated, but part of me just thinks, let it lie. I suppose if they get the dosh out of West Ham though, they might have the funds to get the players to get back up again. On the other hand, with so much debt in football these days, it wouldn’t surprise me if the whole amount just got swallowed up.