Sensing the f irst proper threat to their untrammelled greed, the Premier League sent their middle management dogs of war into battle last week and they came out smearing.
By the end of their attack, they had invited us to link in our minds an advocate for reform of English football governance and the greatest mass murderer in human history.
If you had never thought of Tracey Crouch and Mao Tse-Tung as ideological bedfellows before, then the Premier League invite you to think again. The impression the eager Premier League hit squad conveyed was that even though Crouch might look and act like a highly competent, widely respected, unusually principled MP and former sports minister who had just released a set of cogent proposals arising from a fan-led review into English football, she was, in fact, a secret agent of the Comintern, the spawn of Satan and an existential threat to life on earth.
Christian Purslow, the chief executive of Aston Villa, wagged his finger and bade us beware the plans for an independent regulator, a golden share for fans and a transfer tax. Baroness Brady, the chief executive of West Ham United, said of the proposals: ‘The last time I looked we did not live in Russia,
China or North Korea.’
And it was Angus Kinnear, the chief executive of Leeds United, who won First Prize for Stupid by likening the planned reforms to the agrarian policies of Mao, which killed tens of millions. A half-baked
TED Talk about Chinese history from an over-excitable marketing man whose expertise lies in flogging cans of Coke seemed like a curious way for the Premier
League to make their case.
All that these interventions achieved was a hardening of the position against the Premier
League. Put all this clumsy, laughable, pathetic propaganda together and we are looking at a textbook example of what the writer Martin
Amis once called ‘species fear’.
They are afraid because regulation, and a transfer tax, promise a more equitable share of broadcasting revenue between the Premier
League and the Football League.
They are afraid because regulation would stop clubs betraying their fans by, say, joining a European
Super League or moving to a new stadium without supporter consent or changing the club crest. They are afraid because there will be more stringent tests for ownership. They are afraid because, for the first time, limits will be imposed on their greed.
That fear was exposed again at the Premier League’s emergency meeting on Friday when the clubs vowed to resist the proposed reforms. Crouch’s proposals were described as ‘emotional’, apparently, which was meant to be patronising and undermining. But I’m glad there is emotion in the proposals. The attempt to save English football from club owners who care only about enriching themselves is worth getting emotional about.
Forget the idea, trotted out by Purslow et al, that no sports league in the world gives more away than the Premier League. That is sophistry. It ignores the fact that highly successful American leagues like the NFL are based on a level of revenue sharing and talent sharing, through the draft system, that would mark them out to people like Brady and Kinnear as de facto disciples of Kim Jong-un. Heaven forbid we ever mention the idea of a salary cap to them.
The Premier League are trying to maintain they are better qualified to run the top flight than a regulatory board and if they had not spent much of the last two years trying to concentrate power in the hands of the Big Six, kill the rest of English football by joining the European Super League, drag their heels when the lower leagues begged for help during the pandemic, and if they had not been bathing their hands in Saudi blood money, I might have more sympathy for their argument. As they are, I have none.
There will be no apology here for the emotive language, by the way. I watched BBC sports editor Dan Roan’s excellent interview with Premier League chief executive Richard Masters last week and heard him ask Masters if he was ‘comfortable’ with one of his clubs — Newcastle United — being owned by a fund chaired by a crown prince who, according to western intelligence agencies, ordered the killing of a journalist. ‘I have to be ultimately comfortable with it,’ said Masters. Which was nice.
We can add that to the things we must not forget. Don’t forget the owners of our leading clubs tried to destroy English football once with Project Big Picture. Then they tried to do it again by joining the European Super League. They begged for forgiveness the first time and said it would never happen again. Then they begged for forgiveness the second time and said it would never happen again. And now they seem surprised by the idea that no one trusts them any more and no one believes them any more. Without regulation, sooner or later, greed will compel the owners of Manchester United, Liverpool, Tottenham, Arsenal, Manchester City and Chelsea to have another go at taking all the money for themselves and abandoning the rest of the English game. Without regulation, they will be drawn back to the model the American owners, in particular, trust most, which is a closedshop league with no relegation. With regulation, they will not be able to do that. Greed is built in to these club owners. They need to be saved from themselves.
They might even be right when they warn that no one knows exactly what the makeup of a regulatory board would look like. But what they don’t understand is that most people think it couldn’t look any worse than the status quo. What we have at the moment is a system that twice took English football to the brink of disaster. Is it really any wonder that some checks and balances seem like a good thing?
Purslow is an able administrator and communicator but when he talked about how we must be careful not to kill the ‘golden goose’, he might have been talking about exactly what the Premier League have been risking with English football.
They have built a fantastic league. It is hugely financially successful. It provides fantastic entertainment. It features many of the best players in the world. And yet for United, Liverpool and some of the rest, that is not enough. It is never enough.
Maybe that is why, when the Premier League sent out the attack dogs last week, there was no sign of Ed Woodward, John W Henry, Daniel Levy, Josh Kroenke or any of the other architects of the plans to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a few clubs.
These people are the enemies of English football, not Tracey Crouch. Crouch and the proposals emanating from her review represent the way forward for our game and the attacks on her have so far only served to expose the emptiness of Premier League thinking. Amid all their riches, they are bankrupt.
Let us leave them to posture about Mao Tse-Tung and North Korea and let others get on with the task of protecting the Premier League and the rest of the pyramid from the predators within. Now is the time to adopt Crouch’s key proposals, before it is too late.