NY for the Big Three, Walsall for minnows
IT IS a far cry from the Big Three clubs meeting over a lavish dinner in New York, but the lower leagues have held their own clandestine meeting at a Holiday Inn outside Walsall this week.
Eleven clubs from Leagues One and Two were discussing the same grievance as Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester United across the Pond — the distribution of TV revenue — although the numbers involved and the ambience were very different.
The Premier League giants want an increased percentage of the £3.6billion overseas money, while the smaller clubs want a bigger slice of the EFL’s new £600m five-year deal. The lion’s share will go to Championship clubs.
The Midlands gathering was organised by Accrington Stanley chairman Andy Holt, who caused controversy earlier this year when he called the EFL a ‘starving peasant begging for scraps off your (Premier League) table’.
The 11 comprised Accrington, Cheltenham, Fleetwood, Luton, Oldham, Oxford, Peterborough, Port Vale, Scunthorpe, Stevenage and Walsall. One of them said: ‘It was just a few clubs getting together to chew the fat around specific League One and Two issues.’
The EFL say there wasn’t a single matter raised when the new TV contract details were presented to the clubs.
THE England cricket team have previously held boisterous drinking sessions to bond ahead of tours. In 2009, Andrew Flintoff (right) infamously missed the bus from Ypres in Belgium to the First World War battlefields the morning after one such booze-laden occasion. But this time, following Ben Stokes’s Bristol brawl, it was toned down to a few quiet pints at Stuart Broad’s co-owned pub, the Three Crowns in Wymeswold, deep in the Leicestershire countryside.
IS IT any wonder that today’s multi-millionaire footballers are so detached from ordinary people when you see an England player park his Bentley illegally on the white zig-zag area of a pelican crossing while he saunters into a crowded Costa coffee shop in the Manchester suburb of Hale. Unfortunately, an approaching traffic warden was unable to put a ticket on the Bentley as the footballer’s partner, waiting in the car, drove off quickly to park elsewhere.
PFA chief executive Gordon Taylor, who skewered FA chairman Greg Clarke in his council speech on Thursday, also added to the pressure on the mysterious external PR advisers who prepared the FA quartet so poorly for their car-crash appearance in front of MPs last week. Taylor’s advice to the FA is to sue them.