‘Feeder’ clubs will be swallowed whole by football’s fattest cats
THERE is only one type of football fixture that has remained unaffected by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Any EFL Trophy game featuring a Premier League under- 21 team. No one bothered going to watch before coronavirus, now they are saved the bother of not bothering.
It might serve Premier League clubs some purpose but it turned the competition into a farce.
Now, Ferran Soriano wants B teams in the EFL.
In one breath, the Manchester City chief executive said the EFL was not a sustainable business and in the next, he said Premier League clubs needed a place to develop their 17 and 18-year-olds.
“Maybe the crisis will give us the opportunity and will nudge us to get together and solve these issues,” Soriano said.
Roughly translated? We’ll bail you out but some of you will have to become feeder clubs.
Roughly translated? Soriano is asking the EFL to sell its soul to survive.
This is not a suggestion from Soriano, this is almost a threat, one that betrays City’s chequered, colourful, rich, local history.
How would City have felt at the prospect of facing Premier League reserve teams when they were in the third tier in 1998-99?
Then again, maybe they could have been Manchester United’s feeder club.
There are many reasons the EFL is, as Soriano points out, “not sustainable enough”, the main one being a wage level that has spiralled out of all control.
But there are other factors. There was a time when regulations made it hard for big clubs to nick the best young players from lower league development systems.
Those players might stay at smaller teams and then be sold for a big fee when they make it, giving the club and its community a boost. Hardly any more. Now, the likes of City go around hoovering up anyone who looks halfdecent, stockpiles them in a sprawling academy and bleats when there are not enough matches to ‘develop’ p them.
When Soriano says ‘develop’, he means try to give them a bit of value in order to get a few quid back on them because they are never going to make the first team.
Precious few do, but think of the lift and financial boost those youngsters might have given their original clubs.
Soriano spoke about a “development gap of boys that are 17 or 18” who are then
“taken from us by the German teams who try to sell them back to us for a price which is 10 times what they paid”.
That practice is hardly rife but we assume Soriano is referring g to Jadon Sancho.
The he a r t bleeds.
Just as it did for Watford in 2015, when City waltzed in and paid a paltry compensation fee to take Sancho from Vicarage Road, where he had been for half his 14-year-old life.
City, by the way, £8million for Sancho.
Or Soriano might be referring to Rabbi Matondo, the winger who had been at got
Cardiff since he was a kid but was taken by City for another nominal sum and was sold to Schalke for another £ 8m, having not played a first team game at the Etihad.
To cut Soriano some slack, he has been in English football for only eight years and this B team suggestion shows someone who simply does not get the invaluable community role of all 92 (and more) clubs.
The system is a part of a fabric that must be preserved at all costs.
After winning his first Premier League, Pep Guardiola was at an awards dinner, where managers in the north were honoured for their achievements that season.
Before collecting his honour, Guardiola sat and spoke to his fellow coaches and watched video footage of the deeds of Wigan Athletic’s Paul Cook, Accrington Stanley’s John Colman, Blackburn Rovers’ Tony Mowbray, Rotherham United’s Paul Warne, Tranmere Rovers’ Mi c ky Me llon and Macclesfield Town’s John Askey.
When he rose to accept his award, Guardiola only wanted to pay tribute to those characters, only wanted to say what they did was what the sport was all about, was what made the English game so special.
Hopefully, Pep will tell his boss exactly that.
Ferran Soriano is asking the EFL to sell its soul to survive