Cash cows unravelled
> The Premier League’s most expensive summer transfer window in history
OH, the excitement. Oh, the glee, Oh, the vanity as spending by English football clubs in the transfer summer window passed the £1billion mark and eventually settled at the grotesque figure of £1,701,500,000 (RM 9,247,544,497) when the deadline fell for signings.
Oh, the shame. Can’t we see how the rest of the world is laughing at the folly of our extravagance, at the wanton waste of money, at the sheer decadence of it all? Don’t we see it for ourselves?
Another figure was revealed on deadline day, an announcement buried in the avalanche of transfer frenzy.
It was £28.3million (RM153.8m). This was the total amount of grants awarded by the admirable Football Foundation between January and June “from the Premier League and FA Facilities Fund towards 128 grassroots projects around the country.”
Do the maths. When the vast riches of the new television rights deal kicked in, the Premier League clubs decided it was worth spending more than one billion pounds on mostly mercenary footballers from overseas and just a modest few million on improving facilities for the youngsters who idolise our national game.
This is the true obscenity of modern English football – not the actual size of transfer fees or player wages but the monstrous gap between such gargantuan spending and the shocking state of grassroots pitches up and down the land.
Isn’t it as plain as daylight that the values system of football has been completely corrupted in a country that couldn’t even beat Iceland at the summer Euro 2016 tournament?
On every Saturday morning of every winter, hundreds and hundreds of junior football matches are called off because pitches are unfit to play on.
In most towns there aren’t nearly enough patches of grass, never mind modern allweather 3G surfaces, to cope with the demand for kids to play inspired by watching Premier League games. This is the reality of football. It is a scandal, a bleak scandal. This is why the figure of £1,701,500,000 is not exciting or splendid but a reason for horror and dismay. It’s not even as if the billionpound splurge has bought the best footballers of modern times. None of the finest current top 10 players in the world are in the Premier League. Barely any in the top 20 are here, in fact. Arsenal, for example, have spent an astonishing sum of £85m (RM462m) in the past few weeks to acquire the middling trio of Granit Xhaka, Shokdran Mustafi and Lucas Perez. And yet their manager Arsene Wenger is still considered by many of his own club’s supporters to be unwilling to spend much money in the transfer market. Madness is all around. The desperation of English clubs to spend has made them sitting duck targets for foreign teams. It is not just Arsenal who have paid far over the odds; in fact they are not among the 13 of 20 Premier League sides who have broken a club transfer record this summer. Leicester forked out the best part of £70m (RM380m) and Watford splashed out nearly £60m (RM326m) on players; £130m (RM706.5m) between the pair. The entire spending of 20 clubs in the French league was £160m (RM870m). More to the point; teams in France received £240m (RM1.3 billion) in fees. Football just across the channel was a collective £80m (RM435m) in profit on transfers. England’s net loss on deals was a staggering £620m (RM3.37bn). What does that sum mean in the real world? Well, it would provide Football Foundation grants for 3,200 all-weather 3G pitches around the country. England played Slovakia in a World Cup qualifier, the first match under new manager Sam Allardyce. He has begun his reign by actively looking for foreign players like Steven N’Zonzi to co-opt into the team because of the relatively few English players in the Premier League. It is another indication of the thoroughly corrupted values of our national game. We have so much money washing through the sport and yet we have so few talented English players and so few decent pitches for our young footballers. Did I mention the defeat to Iceland? Oh yes, I did. And what do the Icelanders believe was the most crucial factor in their emergence as a winning football nation? Oh yes, it was spending money on 3G grassroots pitches and indoor domes so that their kids could play whenever they want to. – Express Newspapers