Fair? Not with these golden parachutes

APPARENTLY, the Championship is the most competitive league in the world. That’s the marketing spin, anyway.

A football fiesta where anybody can beat anybody. A beacon of fairness and equality putting the Premier League to shame. A genuine contest, not a closed shop.

Try telling that to Bolton Wanderers. Phil Parkinson’s side toiled like pitmen against Leeds last weekend. They ran. They tackled. They stuck to the plan.

“I couldn’t have asked for any more,” said Parky. Yet all supporters had to show for it were frostbitten fingers and another defeat, the 12th of an increasingly dismal campaign.

Nobody at the Macron is surprised. The Trotters are more hard-up than their sitcom namesakes, only without Del Boy’s relentless optimism.

In September, administration was averted only by a £5m gift from former owner Eddie Davies four days before his death. Last month, wages to staff and players were paid late.

As for the squad, Bolton’s roster reads like a team sheet from a testimonial – kids, has-beens and rejects from around the world.

Deploying that team in the Championship is like entering F1 in a Fiesta.

While we’re at it, try telling fans of Sheffield Wednesday how fair the Championship is. Or their owner Dejphon Chansiri, who this week put the club up for sale.

The Thai has pumped a fortune into the club, personally backing losses of more than £40m in a doomed tilt at the Premier League. His reward? A transfer embargo for breaching profit and sustainability regulations, an overpaid and underpowered squad, and a battering from the terraces. Is it any wonder he wants out?

Both clubs are on skid row and neither owner is blameless. Chansiri’s recruitment lacked direction or strategy, resulting in an imbalanced and ageing squad.

Nor am I willing to defend Ken Anderson, a flagrant speculator whose constant brinkmanship and ludicrous £25m asking price has served only to spook potential buyers and demoralise staff.

Dig deeper, though, and the root cause for all their problems is the Premier League. Or, more specifically, parachute payments.

At their inception in 2006, parachute payments were designed to soften the blow of relegation by allowing clubs to pay existing contracts. When Bolton were relegated in 2011, the cash didn’t even cover those.

Today, however, bumper TV deals ensure top-flight clubs turn a handsome profit, whilst the majority build relegation clauses into contracts. Meaning that parachute payments are tantamount to a transfer bonanza.

Bonanza

West Brom, for instance, announced record profits of £38m in the 201617 campaign and in January were named the world’s 27th richest club. Yet they still received £40m following relegation in May - and will pocket a further £49m over the next two seasons.

Bolton and Wednesday, meanwhile, will bank just £2.3m in TV revenue this term, plus a £4.3m solidarity payment from the Premier League.

The options facing the owners of such clubs are bleak. Subsist on revenue and accept second-class status; cover enormous losses; or sell up to someone who can.

“If money is the root of all evil then parachute payments are the devil incarnate,” one senior Championship figure told me recently. “At any time we could have nine clubs with these vast, ridiculous sums of money. And we have got to try and compete with those buggers.”

The solution seems simple. Return parachute payments to their roots. Would it be so hard for the Premier League, with their army of lawyers and accountants, to scour a relegated club’s books?

To see every creditor, commitment and contract, then calculate how much that club needs to fulfil their obligations?

That way they neither reward failure nor traduce Championship clubs to wreak the kind of misery currently being endured on both sides of the Pennines.

It won’t happen, of course. There is too much greed on both sides of the divide. But do not let the apparently open nature of the Championship fool you into thinking it is a paradigm of virtue.

The only reason it is the most competitive league in the world is because it is one of the most indebted.