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All
those many years ago, back in the early 1990s, the Big Six, as they
were then, promised us a revolution that would lead to football
being a wonderful thing, the people’s game, free from the old
school tie and the bias of the Establishment.
We were going to go into a brave new world where we could all get
into games for nothing, where your team would win every week and
where Graham Poll would just be a terrible figment of somebody else’s
imagination.
Going well isn’t it?
Now we have the Humungous Two, the Giant Sized Two and the Makers
Up Of The Numbers Sixteen. I don’t think it’s free to
get into any games anywhere is it? You don’t win every week,
do you? But at least Graham Poll has retired, so let’s count
our blessings shall we?
How was this Promised Land to be delivered I hear the younger among
you ask. It was decided that the Football League was a horrible,
outdated institution that thought the game was all about the strength
of the 92 not the six, a ludicrous idea in these days of the overpowering
market. So they decided that the body that had run the “greatest
league in the world” reasonably successfully for over 100 years
was greeted with the mass resignation of its top 22 clubs who ran
away to work with the Football Association whose gifts to the game
were the FA Cup - very good - and the running of the national team
- not very good.
We all know about the money that has tsunamied into the game, drowning
everybody except those who can build their stadiums on stilts made
of used fivers. We all know of the foreign imports suffocating the
next generation of English talent. And, in fairness, we have all
we enjoyed some wonderful players, stunning games and we all want
to be a part of it.
But we also know that an institution built on money, on surface,
on image - it’s just the Premier League now, ditching the FA
moniker because that’s a tainted organisation post-Sven - can
never truly stand tall, because the truth is, it doesn’t stand
for anything. And, within weeks of losing the FA tag, it managed
to prove that it was an organisation that knows the price of everything
and the value of nothing.
The price of Premiership survival to West Ham was £5million.
The value of the integrity of the English game’s showcase league
was nothing. Because this year’s competition is a complete
and utter sham, devoid of meaning, and, above all, devoid of principle.
Sheffield United should, by any standard of justice, be playing
Premier League football now. West ham should be in the Championship
rather than fielding the multi-million pound team they’ve assembled
in the summer on the back of the next immense handout they’ll
get from the Premier League. Well worth a £5million down payment.
Those at the top, they wring their hands and talk of tightening
loopholes, loopholes that nobody would dare exploit again. But they
do nothing, because they quite like having West Ham in there. They
spend fortunes and that’s what the people want.
Meanwhile, the Football League, that institution that was so outmoded,
so out of step that it had to have a suffocating pillow shoved over
its head, like getting rid of geriatric relative that’s lived
just that bit too long, it is showing the way. Leeds United, cold
and calculating, tried to bend the rules and went into administration
almost as soon as they knew hey were relegated, just to avoid taking
a ten point penalty into the new season.
For all their money worries, there still isn’t a bigger club
in the Football League than Leeds United. Nor is there a more dogged,
antagonistic, implacable, downright narky adversary than Ken Bates.
But the Football League didn’t like the way the game - our
game - had been wronged. They knew they were in the right and so
they reimposed the 10 point deduction into the new season plus another
five for good measure. And they stared Ken Bates down, where in
a similar position, the Premier League would have licked his shoes
clean. And probably slipped him a dozen points.
The Football League gets a lot of stick and, at times, rightly so.
There’s too much talk of rebranding, of image, of marketing.
But hopefully, the events of these last few months will mark a turning
point. Maybe, just maybe, football will realise that principle comes
before profit, and that ultimately, profits will follow principle.
No,
I’m not holding my breath.
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