Parry casts doubt on season with no crowds
THE 2020-21 English Football League season may not start until crowds are allowed back into matches as its chairman Rick Parry said the desire to finish the current season was more to do with sporting integrity than a financial imperative.
Parry, who warned it would get “very messy” if the Premier League blocked teams being promoted out of the Championship, spoke about the immediate and longer term challenges facing the EFL which have been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic when he addressed MPs at a Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee hearing yesterday.
He said the EFL needed a “reset” and said discussions around salary caps and other cost controls were taking place, while steps would be needed to address the immediate £200m “cash hole” he said clubs were facing by the end of September.
Parry stressed the EFL was very much a spectator sport and said there would have to be discussions, beyond finishing the current campaign, over whether there was any sense in starting the next one before crowds were allowed back.
“At League One and Two level, gate receipts represent 32 per cent of income, slightly less than that in the Championship. Gate receipts are absolutely fundamental and that applies not just to this season but increasingly it applies to next season,” he said.
“I think we have to think long and hard about how we go about starting next season, or indeed whether we start next season without crowds.”
Asked how much money clubs would retrieve if the current season could be finished, Parry said: “If we were starting behind closed doors it’s finely balanced economically. It’s probably almost neutral and for many clubs it would actually cost them to play.
“We stand to lose an element of broadcast money if we’re unable to complete the season but given our broadcast contract is clearly nowhere near that of the Premier League that’s a relatively small contribution.
“So it’s not really the economics of ‘we need to finish the season in order to generate revenue’ it is the sporting integrity part of ‘we want to complete the season because then we have promotion and relegation, and we finish the season clean’.
“At the EFL, aggregate attendances of 18 million, we’re a spectator sport, we’re not an international event in the way the Premier League is. Without spectators, the clubs are hurting. We are looking at ways of streaming our product via iFollow which is a hugely successful EFL streaming platform, so we would be able to recoup some money that way, but it wouldn’t make up for the whole shortfall.”