Crass power PREMIER LEAGUE SPORT play will take an age to heal
AS he wanders the grounds of his Hertfordshire estate today, imagining maybe that members of the Spurs ground staff might be tending his lawns, weeding his flowerbeds and trimming his privet, it is to be hoped that the Tottenham chairman, Daniel Levy, has worked out that throwing his players under the bus by trying to shame them into taking pay cuts did not work out so well.
Much has been made of the intransigence of Premier League stars in the argument about wages over the last seven days but the truth is that they were on the verge of agreeing cost-saving measures that would have helped their clubs until the Premier League alienated them with a selfrighteous, self-entitled presentation on the now infamous conference call with club captains eight days ago.
‘The presentation was amateur night,’ said one source close to the negotiations.
‘The clubs didn’t actually ask for a new Rolls-Royce for each chairman and chief executive but they might as well have done. That was how some of the players felt.
‘The spotlight was on how much the players cost. Nobody was talking about the dividends owners take out of clubs.’
It has taken much of the time that has elapsed since for the damage of the arrogance of the Premier League stance to be repaired but there are now signs that lessons have been learned and the game is starting to pull together.
Southampton were the first team to announce their squad had agreed to defer 10 per cent of their pay for the next three months so non-playing staff receive their salaries in full.
West Ham’s players have now followed suit. Many more will also agree squad deals this week. Negotiations are often complex because players are on different wages, have different concerns, are different ages at different stages of their career and have different lengths of deal. But there is a general willingness to help clubs and an acceptance that it is time to pull together.
After the conflict of the last 10 days, football is edging closer to a time of consensus. It also ought to be pointed out that for all the noise made by the Premier League, the problems of cash flow are far more acute in the Championship and lower leagues where match-day revenue is more crucial to paying wages.
There is no doubt that some Premier League clubs are on the brink of severe financial difficulty but the idea that the Premier League has no revenue coming in is a little disingenuous. The television deals with Sky and BT have not been suspended, so that is not entirely true. Match-day revenue has ceased but, for Premier League clubs, that is relatively insignificant.
It is also why it appears increasingly likely that, despite the reservations of some, the current season will be completed behind closed doors. Completing the season is really all that matters, however long it takes. It is the only way the clubs will get the full tranche of money from Sky, BT and foreign broadcasters upon which it depends.
The last seven days of contemplation of the horrors that might be visited on football’s finances have also pushed matters towards compromise and settlement. The threat of nuclear war was kept at bay by the promise of mutually assured destruction and it is the same with the broadcasters and the Premier League.
If, for instance, Sky and BT were to push for a rebate of monies due as part of the current television deal, some Premier League clubs would go to the wall. But if football collapses, Sky’s subscription model, which is heavily dependent on football, would collapse, too.
Other sources close to the negotiations suggest that mutual fear will drive negotiations forward and avert a financial apocalypse. One possibility is for the Premier League to ask for more money up front in return for agreeing a new multi-year deal that freezes the money paid for the current deal. Everybody gets something out of that. ‘Sky and BT are like football’s Bank of England,’ the source said. ‘They are the lenders of last resort.’
Football will not forget the varying ways executives like Levy and Karren Brady and Mike Ashley acted during this crisis. The divisions that have been created within some clubs because of crass power plays will take a long time to heal.
The game will not forget the division that was sown and the blame that was spread and the arrogance of billionaires. But for the sake of survival, the days ahead will show that if the owners had acted differently, much of this bitterness could have been avoided.
The clubs might as well have asked for a new RollsRoyce for each chairman and chief executive