Football can’t let big money talk this time
The Crouch Report isn’t even cold yet and the Premier League are off and running trying to water down its recommendations. No organisation likes losing power and money and the Premier League face both if the report is adopted in its entirety.
It is hardly surprising then that the chipping-away process has begun.
Target No.1 is the proposed transfer tax on Premier League clubs that would redistribute wealth through the game.
The thrust of the Premier League’s resistance revolves around dire warnings of a football stamp duty suddenly making English clubs uncompetitive in a global marketplace.
So say Barcelona’s Philippe Coutinho, below, became available in January for £30million. On top of the levies already in place, the additional cost of signing him under the proposed new tax would be £3m if the rate was set at 10 percent.
The Premier League are comfortably the wealthiest league in Europe and by extension the world. They have just signed a £2billion, six-year TV deal in the
US. They generated £4.5bn in revenue in 2019/20. In a pandemic.
Does anyone really think £3m in tax would stop a transfer?
This is the same Premier League that initially pleaded poverty when the Government asked them to help bail out the rest of the game during the pandemic.
Don’t fall for it.
If the top flight are so worried about peripheral add-ons perhaps they could pay agents less. That is the money side. Then there is the question of power. The imposition of an independent regulator would put a lot of noses out of joint given the scale of its remit – everything from financial checks to vetoing potential owners and even removing existing ones if they fall beneath the standards expected of them – but this is what you get when clubs prove they are incapable of governing themselves.
With the FA judged not up to it either, it needs someone else to oversee football.
The golden share proposal for clubs to empower fans – life-affirming though it sounds – is window dressing.To hold power to account requires someone with proper clout.
You can imagine the unease in some organisations at having independent regulators nosing around in their books, but other big industries in this country have this sort of oversight and for the American owners in the Premier League this is the norm in sports across the Atlantic.
Monitoring clubs’ finances in real time is vital if English football is to move away from the madhouse economics of boom and bust.
When you have a Championship in which wages operate at 120 percent of turnover in the manic chase for the Premier League, you know the asylum needs a spring clean.
While nobody can guarantee there will never be another Bury or Macclesfield further down the pyramid, intervention from the outside before a club is past the point of no return will help to avoid it.
Not all of the Crouch Report hits the mark. The absence of a clear directive on reducing the parachute payments that skew promotion to the Premier League was a disappointment.
And the plan to reintroduce alcohol in the stands is misguided. This is from someone who was not allowed to take a pint out of the clubhouse for the second half at a National League club even though it was in a plastic cup. But in the week in which a six-year-old went home in tears covered in the vomit of a drunken fan after a Wales rugby international, there is surely a pointer for football.
The two headline proposals, though, are sound. The Premier League will wriggle on the hook but the rest of football – and the Government – must stand firm and drive through what is a change for good.