The Premier League are poisoning the lower leagues. This is another spoonful of arsenic down the throats of the smaller clubs
THE Premier League announced the scrapping of FA Cup replays yesterday, although of course that is not how the elite club owners presented it.
They do not like to be candid about their greed. They do not like to be honest about their disdain for the rest of the pyramid, the ecosystem that is the kernel of their success but which they are hell-bent on destroying.
So they tried to hide that part. They told us that, actually, this was a good thing. They told us they would be putting £33million more into grassroots football without saying that many multiples of that figure would be lost to grassroots football through the death of replays that are often the difference between profit and loss for lower league clubs.
The truth contained here is simple: the Premier League are killing the lower leagues by degrees. They are poisoning them. They are doing it gradually and with what they fondly imagine is a touch of stealth but they are poisoning them nonetheless. Don’t be fooled by the weasel words: this news poured another spoonful of arsenic down the throats of the smaller clubs.
The dead hand of the Premier League is all over this but the FA should be ashamed of their complicity in it, too. They are supposed to be the protectors of the whole of the English game but the way they have caved in to pressure from the Premier League, like fawning supplicants, is a sorry abrogation of their responsibility.
The joint press release from the two organisations was an exercise in clumsy, mallet-shaped propaganda, a doomed attempt to dress a wolf in lamb’s clothing, a futile effort to disguise yet another Premier League land-grab as an act of great beneficence. However unpleasant it may be, I would rather they were at least honest about what they are doing.
The reality is that the leading clubs would rather play a league game in Philadelphia or Shanghai — the long-held dream of the father of the Premier League, Richard Scudamore — than have an FA Cup replay. And that dream is getting closer to fruition. The abolition of replays clears that pathway of another obstacle, too.
Maybe we should admire their front. Maybe we should admire the way they dressed up the loss of one of English football’s great traditions as something to cheer and then added, for good measure, that once more, the final weekend of Premier League fixtures, not the FA Cup final, would be the climax of the domestic season. But if they think people don’t see through their bluster, they take us for fools.
‘729 teams compete in the FA Cup,’ Nicola Palios, the highly respected vice-chairman of Tranmere Rovers, wrote on X yesterday. ‘Why is its format being dictated by the Premier League, who represent circa three per cent of them? Why were EFL clubs not given a say?
‘Why is the Premier League even dictating whether replays are allowed in rounds they don’t participate in? Protest is needed. The FA and the Premier League have reached an agreement to suit themselves further at the expense of the rest of the football pyramid. Bring on the regulator and make sure it has some teeth before the Premier League strangle the pyramid.’
Palios is absolutely right. How can the Premier League do all of this with a straight face? Do they have absolutely no shame? How can they sit in their ivory tower, frittering away their television billions on ever-spiralling player wages, and saying they feel uneasy about agreeing a deal to give more money to help the lower leagues survive because some of the clubs are not viable? How do they expect them to be viable when, little by little, bit by bit, mile by mile, they take away the lifeblood of these clubs that are at the heart of our communities and then tell them it’s their fault when their revenues suffer and they go into the red and they have to ask for help?
NEVER, ever forget when you read the weasel words that accompany announcements like the one the Premier League made yesterday morning that they are ruled by greed and acquisitiveness. They can’t help it. It’s just the way they are built. It’s the way they are conditioned to act. Once in a while, the mask slips and we see their real face. Remember when Crystal Palace chairman Steve Parish asked why the supermarkets should help corner shops? That’s their true face. That’s the greed breaking cover.
That’s the ignorance of what makes English football so popular and so successful. The Premier League is not an island, even though some of its more myopic owners think it is. The Premier League is successful because of the history of our game and the unpredictability of our game and the meritocracy of our game.
It has been successful because our game promoted an underdog culture. We had our own version of the American dream in English football, the idea that a club could come from nowhere and mix it with the big boys and even win the league. That dream was alive in Derby County and Nottingham Forest and Leicester City and it is still alive, to a lesser extent, in teams such as Luton Town.
But it was most alive in the FA Cup. The FA Cup encapsulated the romance of English football. And at the heart of that romance was the replay. When I was growing up in the Seventies, among the most memorable games was the FA Cup epic between non-League Wimbledon and mighty Leeds United.
And the famous game between Hereford United and Newcastle United at Edgar Street, the match that made John Motson’s name, the match they still show the highlights of every year, the one where a part-time carpenter called Ronnie Radford scored with a 30-yard thunderbolt and Ricky George got the winner, that was a replay.
Ryan Giggs’ wonder goal against Arsenal at Villa Park in Manchester United’s Treble year of 1998-99, where he slalomed, smashed a shot into the top corner and ripped off his shirt, whirling it around like a madman, that was an FA Cup semi-final replay.
The best game I have seen live in the last 10 years — and I have to admit to some partisan bias here — was Stockport County 5 Bolton Wanderers 3 at Edgeley
Park in November 2021. It had everything. It was an FA Cup firstround replay. It wouldn’t have been allowed to happen now.
Part of the point is that these moments that have made up the fabric of our game and that have helped build the game and that have helped attract fans from all over the world and have persuaded television companies to part with unfeasible amounts of money to broadcast the Premier League, would have been lost to us under the new arrangement.
Now, all the money that these replays bring, the promise of a live television broadcast fee that they bring, the exposure that they bring, the glamour of getting a big club back to a small ground under the lights on a Tuesday night with the stadium bouncing and the fans dreaming, the chance of a once-in-a-lifetime fixture at Old Trafford or the Emirates and the cash windfall that comes with that, all that has been wiped out.
Palios mentioned the regulator and so much of what the Premier League and the FA do now carries the suspicion that they are being led by their fear that an independent regulator will finally curb some of the Premier League’s dysfunctionality.
There is a danger that on days like this we see the regulator as a panacea when the reality is there will be much that will be beyond its remit. There will be things it will not be empowered to fix.
Days like this also make something clear: the Premier League, blinded by self-interest, gripped by fiscal dysfunction, in thrall to nation states and US private equity firms, are not fit to be the dominant organisation in English football. And the FA have become their butlers.
The time for checks and balances is long, long overdue.