I’m disgusted by this grim power grab & appalled by role of Liverpool’s owners
THE Premier League’s elite clubs, led by Liverpool and Manchester United, are using the global pandemic to seize control of football.
You’ve got an economic slowdown, folk losing their jobs and clubs banned from letting fans into their grounds, and football’s top dogs have decided to make their move.
They are offering incentives to the lower reaches, to install themselves as the rulers of the game, cementing a status as the unopposed aristocracy.
I find it insulting, insensitive and it makes a mockery of a semblance of solidarity from top to bottom.
And I am disgusted they think they can get all the power and the vetoes to run the Premier League by bunging the desperate clubs below much-needed cash.
Anger can’t express what I feel. A good start to amend Project Big Picture would be to move forward with the financials of this plan but not the power play.
Giving a £250million bailout, yes. Give the £100m to the FA, yes.
Yes, we should have a mission statement of what the Premier League is all about.
No. 1: “The league, as a guardian of the e game, will give 25 per cent of TV revenues to the EFL clubs, s, because we realise Wimbledon, edon, Tranmere and Oxford are e as important as Man U and Liverpool – one cannot survive ve without the other.”
But uncouple le that from the elite having ving total control to reshape eshape the pyramid. If we e give the big six (Man U, Man City, Liverpool rpool, , Chelsea, Arsenal enal and Spurs) and d the three other longs ngn tand in g members of the e
L e a g u e (Everton, West t
Ham and d
Southampton) all a the power we will get to a position po where the balance is so bad we will have Premier L League B and C teams in League One and Two.
We will have h 16-yearold old youth you players playing playin against proper prop pros. We will wil have those nine ni clubs being b able to stop s a club
like Newcastle being taken over by a rich owner because it would make them a threat.
What we have had for more than a century could be frittered away in two or three years. Are we prepared to do that? We accept the monetisation of the game, being called customers, but not this precious pyramid being ruined, and made even less competitive than it already is. During the first period of the Premier League from 1992-2000, as a player I thought the dark days of dreadful facilities and stadium disasters were over.
It was a new product regenerating English football and that everyone would benefit. More people watched on TV. Klinsmann, Juninho, Cantona came here to play.
The football was multifaceted, Liverpool and Man U at one end, Wimbledon at the other. Different styles, lots of characters.
It felt like an opportunity to support the pyramid more – the likes of Stafford, Kettering, Chorley – and everyone benefiting from a trickle-down.
Sunday’s statement was an insult to those early hopes, and what it could have been. It has become about more and more money.
How much can we make for ourselves? Emboldened by Sky, BT, the t Champions League. Second Se kits, third kits, EA Sports special edition kits – the ambit ambition to be the world world’s biggest sporting ing product, bigger th than the NBA.
I am appalled by my old club Liverpool’s role. Or rather with owners Fenway Sports Group. The club of S h a n k ly and managed by Klopp, who is a person who I’d deem a socialist and community-minded.
They have defaulted to type and become greedy Americans who want more power and cash to enable their club to be permanent football overlords.
For FSG, ultra-capitalists, it is about having more say, more power.
The Premier League elite have got away with it for years, becoming detached from the traditional fan base.