Thursday, August 4th, 2011 « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade

By Tony Attwood

In 2014 Blatter will still be in charge of world football.  The FA will still be in charge of English football.  Uefa will still be there introducing its financial fair play rules – maybe.

Now you might think that football supporters everywhere might welcome anything other than that – even if the revolution starts at the top and leaves smaller clubs to sort out their own future – as has always been the case.

Indeed I would have thought for many there is a view that anything is better than the global corruption that Blatter and Fifa have given us.  Obviously I support, as I have always supported, Arsenal, as did my father and my grandfather.  But on my travels I have picked up two other clubs: Torquay United (where my father and I watched our final games together after his retirement) and Corby Town (just a few miles up the road from where I live).  I don’t get to see these other two clubs often, but I do occasionally.

And if I wear either a Torquay or Corby hat, I would still say, anything is better than the system we have now, dominated by corruption as it is, from the top down.

But not the Football Supporters’ Federation.  Nope – it seems they would soon stay with the status quo.  “It is just going to be a closed [competition] that stays closed forever. How boring is that?,” said Malcolm Clarke of the FSF when looking (obviously very briefly) at the proposals we have been outlining here recently, for an alternative to Fifa et al.

So, Malcolm,  let me give some information.  No one has said the new proposed approach will contain a closed league.  No one has said closed forever.  But you know, apparently, and so that’s that.  You’ve just ended my support of the FSF in one go.  Not because I disagree with you on this point – of course not.  Good debate is part of football.  But because you, like the journalists and bloggers who run the Anti-Arsenal campaigns all day long, are taking something that isn’t true, stating it as a truth, and then drawing a conclusion.

Let me tell you Malcolm, that’s not how it works.  (Unless of course you want to say that you never said that, don’t believe it, and the Guardian from whence I got the quote, made it up.  In which case I withdraw totally.  I hope you have told them what you think of them.)

The new Super League being proposed as the starting point of the removal of Fifa is not perfect, but nothing ever is.  But it has one glorious virtue.  It is a Blatter free zone.

But if you want more, here is more.

I have often quoted José María Gay de Liébana with his financial perspectives especially those on Barca.  He says that without rationalisation in football, it will all fall down within a couple of years.

Professor Gay shows that the top five leagues in Europe had losses of over €1.5bn for last season.  Each year revenues rise a bit, but salaries and other costs rise quite a lot more.  Put like that it is not even simple arithmetic, just plain logic of the sort that always escaped the mortgage companies until a couple of years ago, when they turned round and blamed the likes of you and I for actually wanting to borrow money to buy a house.

So, year on year on year the operating losses of the combined clubs in the top leagues gets bigger and bigger and bigger and no one does anything about it.

Here’s the professor’s words…

“This economic haemorrhage will trigger a financial default: from the ‘crack’ of football to the crash of the football bubble.”   With income of €13.928bn and debts of €12.641bn there is no way out.

So what happens?   Blatter says he will proceed slowly with his investigation into corruption in football.  Well, that’s reassuring.  The corrupt investigating the corrupt. Slowly.

The Parliamentary Select Committee has just published its report into football and demanded “urgent reform” of the Football Association so that it can oversee a new club licensing system, and have a new and “rigorously applied” fit and proper persons test.

Quite what one can say to this other than “Ah, bless!” I don’t really know.

The FA is blown and dead.  It got all nice and cosy with Fifa, the most corrupt and thoroughly awful sporting body this side of Ursa Minor, and spent millions of pounds of UK tax payers’ money bidding for the world cup.  And then when only the Ozzies voted for us, the FA suddenly decided Fifa was bent.

At least they didn’t demand a recount.

The FA has stood by while Leeds United ran rings round them over the ownership issue.  The FA watched from the wings as Birmingham City’s owner never had the money he promised, and is now being done for money laundering while the club is going to do a drop into the fifth division and default on its debts.   The FA let Portsmouth get exploited and ripped apart – and the court cases on that have still not started.  They have allowed the football creditors rule to exist (as has the government by refusing to change the law) whereby multi-million pound earning players get paid while voluntary organisations like St Johns Ambulance and honest local traders (like the firm that prints the club programme) get nothing and go bust.  And the EU courts have ruled that the whole system of selling TV rights country by country are illegal under EU law.

While in England we worry about the FA.

The problem is that the FA is tied to Fifa, and very shortly the big players in English and indeed European football (including Arsenal of course) will be out of the FA and out of Uefa, and hence out of Fifa and playing in a new Super League.  Anything the government does about the FA will be on a par to reforming the Conference.  Interesting if you support a smaller club, but not relevant to the broader issues.

The ideas in the Parliamentary report are ok: like the new licensing system that would give the FA control of all the rules on club ownership and finances, with a view to an English administration of financial fair play rules.

The EPL and the FA will object, and while they play, the big bit of football is going to walk away into the Super League.

And of course they (the government and maybe the FA) will try and butter us up by saying that the Arsenal Supporters Trust scheme, is a jolly good idea. But I know that anyway.  I am a member.  It doesn’t affect my support for the Super League and the crumbling of Fifa.

When a little while ago I wrote my first article about the top clubs pulling out of their leagues, out of Uefa and out of football as we know it, to set up the Super League, I thought it might just happen but not for a very long time.

Now I am seriously starting to think the change is much closer than I felt.   The current memorandum of understanding between clubs and Uefa ends in July 2014, at which point there will be no agreement for the clubs to play in the Champions League nor to release players for internationals including the appalling friendlies that plague the game.

So if there is to be a change that’s when it will happen.

As for the driving force behind the change it is not so much the ECA (of which I wrote in the last article) but rather the clubs that will make up the new European league that will be formed: Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester U, Chelsea, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Milan, Internazionale, and Bayern Munich.  Other clubs will be invited to join the league, such as Paris St Germain, if they turn their money into success, Ajax and other clubs like Marseilles that have had past success, plus the likes of Manchester C, Juventus, Porto, Roma and so on.  Total number: 20.

The idea is that the league will play mid-week games, all televised, and all requiring the first team of the clubs to participate.

As for the EPL this will go on as before.  The EPL could try and remove the clubs that move into the Super League (and this is already being threatened) but it is unlikely that they would want to remove the clubs that are the biggest box office draw and turn themselves into a variation of the Championship (ie league division 2).  The EP League would still have the little clubs like Bolton, Blackburn, Tottenham and the like but without the big players the league would become a shadow.  Wigan v Bolton as the main attraction on Sky?  Maybe, but not worth that much cash.

It is much more likely that a compromise will be reached in which the top clubs play their second XI in the EPL and their first team in the Champions League.  Since the clubs will no longer have to release players for internationals the players are more likely to be fit, and won’t be away on duty for things like mid-summer tournaments, and mid-season events like the African Nations Cup and so forth.

So when we look, as we have done recently on this site, at the two Arsenal teams with some left over, what we have is the starting point of a Super League team, and an EPL team, one playing on Wednesday, one playing at the weekend.

If we think of the immediate effect this would have had on Arsenal last season we can see that Vermaelen would not have been injured as he wouldn’t have been playing an international, and this summer we would have been able to train with Coquelin and Sunu who may well be considered part of the second XI of the club.

To make up the numbers the left-over Premier League could look at becoming more international, and taking in the two big Scottish clubs, and maybe even one or two other European teams that didn’t make it into the Super League.

The whole point of all this is that the reason for the revolution happening now is two fold.  First, as noted above, the whole league system in Europe is bankrupt and about to blow up.

Second it is Fifa.  Every time Fifa introduces new competitions and expands the number of games it does so without consultation with the clubs who pay the bills.  It demands more dates, it injures more players, it steals more money, it becomes more corrupt.

There is also the point that the clubs are frustrated that Uefa reneged on its agreement to insure players playing for their countries.

And there’s the point that most of the big clubs are losing money while Uefa and Fifa are minting it.  So if the clubs ran the whole show they would make the money.  As it is they argue that they are forced to make a loss each year, and then Fifa steals their players and makes millions.

In this brave new world, Fifa would continue to run internationals, but the players who elected to play for the Super League clubs would not play in them (since Uefa/Fifa would not recognise the Super League) but could play in a club owned and run international tournament at the end of the season in which the players play for their elected countries rather than for where they were born.  This “elected country” idea would actually be no change since something like 35% of international players don’t play for countries where they were born as it is.

As for promotion and relegation it is likely that the new league would exist without relegation for say three years, and then set up a few regional leagues below it to accommodate other clubs.

Thus as the government’s committee, and the FA do their merry dance, with the EPL dogs putting their oars in, the big boys are going to play elsewhere.

I am rather looking forward to an FA, Uefa and Fifa-free world of football.

Do you have a scrapbook covering Arsenal in the 1970s?

Which football blogs are the top blogs?  And why???

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