Excluding undisclosed fees, Manchester City’s summer spending this year adds up to £138 million. When you hear mammoth figures like that, it’s hard to believe that there are financial difficulties within the English game, but of course this goes beyond the big spenders and the Premier League as a whole.
I’d go as far as saying the Premier League, despite obvious setbacks, could operate permanently without fans when you look at the audacious prize money clubs receive, such as Norwich who finished rock bottom last season getting £94.5 million. Compare that to £7.1 million for the same club in the Championship just a season before and the gap between the leagues is as clear as day.
League’s below the top flight need crowds back in the stadiums for their survival. The further down the English football Pyramid you look, the more teams you find who have faced financial problems but of course, this was an issue before the pandemic when you look at the recent examples of Bury’s collapse and Bolton Wanderers being on the brink of the same fate, when the only Corona we knew of was a half decent beer. Common sense tells us though that these sorts of situations will become more common the longer match-day
revenue is absent for clubs, and it’s unjust that the Premier League weren’t offering any sort of support when they clearly have deep enough wallets to do so.
That is until Project Big Picture came into play.
Manchester United and Liverpool dangled a carrot in front of EFL clubs by offering a rescue fund to support lower league clubs in exchange for a total reform of English football, which included increased voting rights for the elite clubs, which I want to zoom in on.
What jumped out was the idea that these voting rights were partly concerning takeovers, which those at the top would undoubtedly block to stop their prestige being threatened. This takes away what makes the Premier League so special, and that’s the competitive nature of it, which isn’t matched in any other major league in Europe. Recent examples of clubs improved finances resulting in meteoric rises include Manchester City and in a less extreme sense, Leicester and Wolves.
The greed of those at the top would result in them keeping their place there, and significantly reducing the excitement of the competition. We’ve already seen a potential example of this when Newcastle United’s Saudi Arabian takeover was blocked in the summer, although there’s a lot of speculation regarding the real reasons behind it, which is another conversation in itself.
Project Big Picture was thankfully put to bed, when clubs unanimously voted against it, but it’s naive to think that the attempted power grab ends there.
Not long before I started writing this piece, it was speculated that Manchester United and Liverpool, the clubs at the forefront of the reform, were throwing their toys out of the pram by threatening to drop out of the Premier League altogether and form a breakaway European Super League, which has been in the pipeline for many years, as had Project Big Picture, but it seems like COVID has prompted this process to happen sooner.
The prospect of a European super league is certainly an intriguing one, but the majority of football fans, myself included, are one hundred percent against it, because this solidifies the gap between bigger and smaller clubs, and kills the spectacle of Europe’s giants facing each other, as they’d be playing each and every week. With the backlash it would get, I struggle to see something like this happening, but part of me would like these clubs to find out the hard way.
Regardless of what happens, English football will look very different sooner rather than later. A reform is needed to keep clubs stable, even more so with the problems caused by coronavirus. The reality is though, whilst issues have arisen from this pandemic, the biggest impact is the inevitable problems coming beforehand that have simply been sped up. My biggest worry is whether that’ll happen for the greater good of the game we love or to create a bleak hierarchy.
