0.04 OF A GOAL? THAT’S GOING TO COST YOU £50MILLION!

PPG is the latest panacea for football’s ills. Points per game. It’s the fairest way to decide promotion and relegation issues, apparently, and could be the way out if the season cannot be completed. And this is true if studying, for instance, the top of the Premier League. Liverpool are averaging 2.82 points per game, Manchester City 2.03. Extrapolated over a 38 game season that leaves Liverpool with 107.16 points, Manchester City with 77.14 — a difference of 30.02. There would seem little argument against Liverpool receiving the prize on this basis. Yet look at League One where three points separate second and eighth. On points per game, Wycombe would jump from eighth to third and would miss out on automatic promotion by 0.03 of a point from Rotherham. If PPG then determined a play-off competition, Peterborough would also fall short by 0.03 of a point. Relegation issues would be a minefield, too. In the Premier League, Aston Villa would go down by 0.04 of a point and how to separate the three clubs above them — Bournemouth, Watford and West Ham — for the final place given that all have played 29 games and have accrued 27 points? If PPG became goal difference per game — in line with how league tables are decided conventionally — Bournemouth and Eddie Howe (right) would end up relegated on a negative differential of 0.04 of a goal. Given the financial catastrophe that accompanies relegation, how could it be fair to deliver such ruinous consequence on an arbitrary formula? Holland’s top division cancelled their season last week and were immediately hit with threats of legal action, from Utrecht — three points outside the Europa League places with a game in hand — and Cambuur, who, top and 11 points clear of third in the second tier, had a reasonable expectation of promotion. Yet a football season, by any definition, contains a full league programme. It would seem difficult to make a legal argument based on hopes and ambitions, however positive the starting position. Utrecht may believe they deserved a chance of UEFA qualification but the practical realities of the coronavirus crisis, not the heartlessness or incompetence of the league organisers, denied them that. One imagines most arbitrators could see the Eredivisie’s unenviable position. It would appear easier for a league to win that argument, than to defend demoting Bournemouth and costing the club upwards of £50million, on what amounted to the tiniest fraction, using a system that was not even in the regulations when the competition began. What at first looks smart, easy, even fair, on paper is, in reality, anything but; unless you’re a lawyer.