There is no point clubs crying now. They signed up to the rules... so play by them!
FOOTBALL is finally showing some teeth with regard to financial mismanagement and surprise, surprise, people don’t like it.
The charges against Everton and Nottingham Forest are not a crisis or a catastrophe, but simply a case of clubs who need to get their houses in order finally being brought into line.
Football watched the rules come into place, understood them and knew the responsibilities and obligations upon clubs without being overly concerned.
The game operates in a vacuum of not enforcing things properly, never doing things properly and never really saying what it means and meaning what it says.
Clubs know, or can forecast, by January what salaries are going to be paid, what commercial revenues they generate and what broadcast money they receive, so they can project their losses.
And if you’re doing your accounts properly, you know you’re in trouble and plan for it. But for whatever reason, clubs choose not to.
Now that the chickens have come home to roost, clubs don’t want these rules or the consequences of breaking them. Football has decided to get tough and there’s shock that the rules clubs agreed to are resulting in sanctions.
But if clubs felt the rules didn’t work, or if they thought the rolling three- year cycle of allowing £105million losses was wrong, they shouldn’t have agreed to them in the first place.
In the past, the Premier League was criticised for waiting too long to charge clubs, but now they’ve got themselves into gear, streamlined the process and turned it into what it should have been in the first place. And guess what? Clubs don’t like it.
The League’s independent sanctioning body decided, in their wisdom, that a 10-point deduction was on the menu for the breaches Everton committed and ultimately admitted to. Whether that’s right or wrong, those are the rules. That’s the governance Everton signed up to and these are the ramifications of it. They can, of course, appeal.
As I argued last week, Financial Fair Play is a force for good, but maybe it’s a blunt instrument that does need a little finessing to meet the nuance and requirements of newly-promoted clubs wanting to compete, or ownership changes.
But its overriding principles cannot be compromised. I understand the frustrations and difficulties of commercial people wanting to invest in businesses, but the consequences of uncontrolled spending in an ungoverned industry, and the sustainability and financial sanity of it, is far more important than the whims of wealthy nation states or individuals that have an agenda that suits only them. That
is why financial governance needs to bite — and now it is. On one hand you’ve got fans saying we want our clubs to be sustainable and on the other they’re saying they don’t want situations like Sunderland, Sheffield Wednesday, Derby, Reading or Portsmouth, who have all faced difficulties as a result of their owners.
Some seemingly want billionaires to come in and to be able to do what they want, but if they don’t fancy it any more, fans want order. Come on, make your minds up. Supporters inevitably point to Manchester City’s 115 charges, but their case is very different to Everton and Forest. Yes, City should have been dealt with sooner, but it’s a complex case and, unlike Everton and Forest, they haven’t admitted their guilt.
There’s an argument that these
cases damage the credibility of the Premier League, but I don’t buy that.
The driving force behind the Premier League is what broadcasters think of it. Our champions are in the dock, but has that taken away broadcasters’ appetite? Not a jot.
Is it stopping sponsors from aligning their brands with the Premier League? No. Are fewer people watching games? No. So I don’t accept the argument that the Premier League has suffered reputational damage, whatever the ‘optics’.
We live in a society where the media often dictates the optics of how people perceive things, when the reality is often very different. I get tired of optics. People lose their jobs over perceived optics. People make decisions based on optics. We shut our country down
based on the optics of politicians playing hard and fast with our lives over Covid.
It’s debilitating because the reality is very different. When you dig beneath the optics you get into the meat and substance of it all.
That’s where people should operate. Optics are the last thing we should be worried about when it comes to sanctioning our clubs for breaking the rules.
The reality and ramifications are what we should be worrying about, because the sanity and stability of the industry trump the instantaneous gratification of supporters wanting success and owners being able to do whatever they want.