Grassroots can still grow alongside Prem’s fantasy football world
SKY’S millions have wrecked English football. That is the premise of a new book that calls on fans to boycott games screened on pay-TV channels. ‘CanWe Have Our Football Back? How the Premier League is Ruining Football and What We Can Do About It’ was published yesterday.
In it, author John Nicholson argues that the sport in this country has been corrupted by cash and
ordinary supporters alienated by its retreat behind a TV paywall.
He calls for the introduction of a player salary cap and government intervention to make league football available for free on the BBC and ITV.
It is easy to feel instinctive sympathy with such a stance.
The Premier League can resemble a Kardashian party at times. When their clubs hand Richard Scudamore a £5million golden handshake or cough up £260m to agents in a single year, it belongs to a world of make-believe – as it does when Manchester United pay Alexis Sanchez £175,000 per week not to play for them.
The money at the top end of the game is obscene and much of it comes from TV with BT Sport armwrestling Sky and now Amazon Prime joining the party for the first time this season. But just imagine for a second if there was no TV income. Clubs in Spain, Italy and Germany would be handed an immediate financial advantage.
English football does not operate in glorious isolation. The top overseas players who grace the Premier League each week with their talents would migrate abroad. So too, in all probability, would the bulk of Gareth Southgate’s England squad.
The Premier League would become anything but premier and allEnglish Champions League finals like last season’s would become a pipe dream.
In an ideal world, it would be wonderful if all football was free to consume but the same applies to chocolate. Neither is going to happen any time soon.
Overseas TV rights continue to rise as a percentage of the Premier League’s overall pot and maybe one day the English game will reach the point where it can dispense with the Sky cash and manage on yen, rupees and euros, but we are not there yet.
Football’s top-end excess is indefensible but Sky’s millions allowed for the transformation of the country’s stadia postHillsborough. Money may be the root of all evil but it has also brought much good too. It has brought genuine superstars of the world game to England and tempted players of the calibre of Wolves’ Ruben Neves and Watford’s Gerard Deulofeu to clubs who could otherwise never have afforded them.
If the Premier League have become too bloated and fantastical for some tastes, then ‘real’ football does still exist out there.
On Tuesday evening, I warmed up for the Old Trafford Ashes Test with some National League North fare on the other side of the Pennines between leaders York City and sixth-placed Guiseley.
The ball spent as much time outside Guiseley’s snug Nethermoor ground as inside it. There was none of that playing out from the back nonsense. But as 0-0 draws go, it was fun. £13 well spent.
The opportunity is there to cleanse the soul with some ‘real’ football and, with the top two divisions taking a break this weekend, a window to do so.
But the Premier League will be back soon. And for all the indulgence, pretence and show, for all the over-analysis and hyperbole, nobody will be boycotting them. STAR: Deulofeu