Fatal flaws that riddle this populist fan review
ThIS Government thinks it knows what is best for football. here’s what is best for football. For all sport, in fact. Competition.
A healthy, open competition is what makes football in this country so vital. We do not know who will win the league every season. We do not know who will make the top four or who will go down.
More than half the professional clubs in this country have experienced the Premier League since its formation. Now one of its founding members, Oldham Athletic, are in serious danger of dropping into the fifth tier.
And that is a terrible shame but it is also competition. Bournemouth, Wimbledon and Wigan went the other way for a time. The movement of clubs up and down a pyramid system is the vibrant core of the English game.
Some will tell you it is all about community and, yes, that is important, too. Yet Leeds has a population of 1.89million and the average gate at Elland Road is 36,405.
So, undeniably, any true focus on community for the majority would improve hospitals, schools, transport infrastructure and local facilities such as parks and libraries. Football cannot cure cancer. It cannot take your kids out of a minimum wage job, or provide the rail link to cities where better opportunities exist.
Yet it does have sexy footballers and charismatic managers and politicians love stuff like that. You have only got to look at the lists of gifts and hospitality for members of parliament.
And it is an MP, Tracey Crouch, who has chaired the Government’s fan-led review, which will now foist an independent regulator on the sport. Crouch was in favour of the idea before the review began, so has unsurprisingly come to precisely the conclusion she desired. And nobody would argue football has shown itself in the best light of late.
Yet Crouch somehow ties the proposed breakaway Super League with the ruination of Bury and the sale of Newcastle United to the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, so it is a report that is not afraid to take the intellectual leap. Much like Shaun the Sheep, in fact.
Want to take those topics in turn? Let’s start with Newcastle. Asked if the independent regulator would have blocked the sale to the Saudis, Crouch intimated it might. She talked about a new integrity test, taking character into account.
‘I think the test would have stressed the takeover more than the current test does,’ she concluded. This is utterly fanciful. It is well known that the Premier League were placed under significant Government pressure to appease the Saudis, who are valued trading partners.
Yet such was the League’s reluctance to approve the sale it was held up for close on 18 months. Only when every last issue regarding ownership and broadcast piracy had been settled was it decided the League could resist no more.
Now, given that entreaties to step in and help conclude the deal went all the way up to Boris Johnson, would a Governmentappointed regulator truly have addressed the integrity and character of those involved in the takeover? That sounds unlikely considering the back-channelling taking place.
And what is character anyway? It is such a vague, loose