Tom’s worthy soundbites a waste of time

TOM WATSON, MP, stood up and lectured the House of Commons this week, insisting something needed to be done about the governance of football.

This outburst from West Bromwich East’s finest (below) was in direct response to Aston Villa’s meltdown.

Cheers for that, Tom. Where have you been for the past 20 years?

This public show of hand-wringing is nothing more than grandstanding – playing to the gallery – ‘Good old Tom, man of the people, finger on the pulse...’

No lessons have been learnt and nothing has been done since the board of directors at Elland Road decided it was a good idea to mortgage a few years’ season-ticket money at Leeds United in a bid to ‘chase the dream’ at the turn of the millennium.

That worked out well. So well, in fact, there is now an entry on Wikipedia which details financial mismanagement in the game under the term ‘Doing a Leeds’.

Respectfully, Mr Watson, I suggest you sit down, shut up and come up with practical proposals on how to clean up the rotten ownership in English football.

Here’s one for you: Impose a yearly tax on the Premier League. Use the money to employ as many accountants as it takes to discover the providence of all these so-called saviours of English football clubs, such as Villa’s Tony Xia.

Insist that proper investigations are made – not this glorified credit card check which the EFL carries out.

If you come up with something worthwhile, I’ll be the first to acknowledge it as a potential framework for discussion and doff my cap in public accordingly.

Until then, pipe down – your soundbites of concern are meaningless.