Money Talks



I think Philip Collins is on the spot, so to speak, with this comment piece from The Times in which he argues that the English Premier League is not so much a market as a racket these days.

Now some good things have happened as well as bad, as Philip fairly points out, but what it comes down to is that a tiny handful of clubs dominate the scene, big has become best as in so many areas of public life.

Another example Philip could have mentioned are the trade unions, of course, where three big players completely dominate the scene in the shape of GMB, Unison and Unite. 

So who knows maybe Ed Miliband will add these well known 'strikers' to his wish list if he ever gets the manager's job at Westminster.       

Call this a competition? You’re having a laugh

By Philip Collins - The Times

The Premier League is a broken market, with gross inequality and overpaid stars. Perhaps Ed Miliband has the answer

Where did it all go wrong for Gary Neville? Many leagues ago, in the jumpers-for-goalposts era, Mr Neville and his brother, whose grandmother was cousin to mine, played football in a Bury park with too large a team of local boys that occasionally included my brother and me. To think that if he’d only stuck with me, rather than eight championship medals, 85 caps for England, the vast wealth that bought his customised eco-house in the Pennines, his job as the England national coach and his status as the nation’s best television pundit, Gary Neville could be deputy chief leader writer ofThe Times by now.

If he were, he might point out that the Premier League, which began again last week, shows exactly what Ed Miliband does not much like about modern Britain. Football talk, like Mr Miliband’s politics, is always on the verge of back-to-the-1970s nostalgia. To look back fondly on the waste-stenched grounds, the mud-swamped pitches, the dangerous cramming on the terraces, the racist chanting and the opportunity to be an uninvited guest in a scrap between two hooligan firms, would be a kind of sickness.

The Premier League has made every aspect of football cleaner, gentler, better. Not least on the field where the standard is incomparably higher than it was. The Premier League is the first exhibit for the case that immigration improves a nation.

However, there is no doubt that this has come at a cost and the paradox is that a higher standard has led to a less interesting competition. The Premier League is now a cartel in which the rich are pulling up the ladder by which they climbed. Mobility, the acid test of a competitive society, has stalled. Between 1973, when the late James Alexander Gordon started reading out the results in the vocal style he made famous, and 1992, when the Premier League began, seven different teams won the title. In the past 20 years there have been just four winners. The old first division was won by teams whose chance of repeating the feat is now emphatically zero: Leeds United, Derby County, Nottingham Forest, Aston Villa. In 1974-75 Chelsea went down and Manchester United came up. Both events are inconceivable now.

The top four places, which bring with them the bonanza of Champions League money, are the preserve of an exclusive club. In the 19 years between 1973 and 1992, 18 teams made the top four. Since 2005 only six teams have made it. The days when there was room at the top for socially mobile teams such as Ipswich, Watford, Crystal Palace and Norwich are over.

So spare a thought for Delia Smith, Stephen Fry and Ed Balls. What’s the point in supporting Norwich these days? At the very best teams like this are in a competition to finish 8th. Most years their only realistic ambition is to avoid relegation. The money talks too loud and spoils the fun.

This is a market that is broken. Like the City, football is a socialist republic in which the workers take all the money, leaving the firms in deep debt. Half of all the clubs in Europe are losing money. The Premier League accounts for 2010-11 showed that clubs managed to turn annual revenues of £2.3 billion into a loss of £361 million. The richest two clubs, Manchester City and Chelsea, lost £197 million and £68 million respectively.

The only reason they can do this is because British football clubs are playgrounds for plutocrats to indulge a vanity project, conduct a laundering exercise or seek a passport to a passport. Chelsea rest on Roman Abramovich’s oil and gas billions. Manchester City is owned by Sheikh Mansour, the deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), who has arranged for four of the club’s sponsors to come from an oil company owned ultimately by — wait for it — the government of the UAE. The City of Manchester Stadium was suddenly in June 2011 reborn as the Etihad, sponsored by a loss-making airline run by Sheikh Mansour’s half-brother, for a sum twice the value of Madison Square Garden. Not surprisingly, the Manchester City accounts are written in the sort of code that Alan Turing, who gives his name to the expressway that runs past the stadium, would struggle to break.

One thing we do know about the money in Britain, though, is that it buys success. There is a robust relationship between cash and results. Manchester City and Chelsea, the best two teams, are the leading net spenders and Manchester City pay more in salaries (bizarrely still referred to as “wages” in a nod to working-class origins) than any sports team in the world. Five Premier League teams are among those with the top 20 wage bills in any sport. They are the most successful five over the past decade.

There is something familiar about this argument. Inequality so stark it hampers competition. The Big Six operating a cartel. Money as the measure of all power, the trend traced in David Marquand’s recent elegy, Mammon’s Kingdom. Powerful proprietors exercising undue influence. Star players paid excessive fees. A rigged and broken market in need of better regulation. This is Ed Miliband’s economic analysis.

The solutions are all Ed Miliband solutions. Impose spending limits on the clubs in the manner of Uefa’s financial fair play rules to make clubs earn what they spend. Impose quotas on English players — British games for British players. Stiffen the rules regarding acquisitions. Make firms disclose more about the content of their balance sheets. Copy the Germans: introduce break-even legislation and do not permit any individual to own more than 49 per cent of a club.

After one game of the new season, take a look at the table. The top four, in order, are Chelsea, Manchester City, Arsenal and Liverpool. This is a procession led by the mighty. Apart from the supporters of the rich clubs, who cannot be expected to care, what stake does anyone else have in this plutocratic society? It is probable that the Ed Miliband solutions do not carry far beyond football but the analysis, in energy, in housing, in job prospects, has too much in it for comfort.

This is the narrative of the great lost football novel of British fiction. From Scenes Like These, by Gordon Williams, who went on to write detective novels with Terry Venables, was shortlisted for the first Booker Prize in 1969. It is a story of the decay of rural life, told through the aspirations of the young hero to escape farming for football. The dream falls to injury. Football turns out to be a false friend. The rich pulling away from the rest. To those who have more is given. An almost complete absence of social mobility. This is the English Premier League but it is also, viewed from the vantage point of the poor, England.

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