Clubs braced for battle on relegation
Bottom six to resist ‘points per game’ for settling drop Top flight’s latest 1,130 Covid-19 tests all negative
The Premier League faces the most significant remaining challenge to Project Restart on Thursday, with relegationthreatened clubs expected to oppose plans for a points-per-game calculation if the season is curtailed.
The bottom six clubs are unconvinced about the merits of relegation being decided on teams’ average number of points per game should the Covid-19 pandemic force a second halt to games following the proposed restart date of June 17.
The return of the Premier League was given a boost yesterday when its fourth round of testing for Covid-19 returned no positive results from 1,130 samples from players and staff. In the Championship, however, the latest round of tests produced 10 positive results from eight clubs.
Although there is no vote yet proposed on curtailing the Premier League season this Thursday, it is anticipated that the league’s board will have to decide on an outcome by the time the action resumes. Premier League clubs have been advised that they would face serious legal challenges from the clubs in the Championship promotion positions should they be denied a place in the top flight.
There is no appetite for expanding the league and the Football Association has made clear that it would veto any attempt to deny Championship clubs promotion. Nevertheless, only seven clubs are required to block the new rule being added to the Premier League’s regulations.
Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden announced that live sport would return from tomorrow. The Premier League says it has devised the stagethree protocols with the Government that will pave the way for the resumption of games. Top-flight clubs were told by Dowden that in return for the Government allowing them to resume playing, the Premier League in particular would be expected to bail out less wealthy leagues that have been forced to abandon their seasons.
Dowden said: “I set two challenges for football’s return. First, that a reasonable number of remaining Premier League games would be broadcast free to air. Second, that the financial benefits of returning would be shared throughout the entire football family.”
Among the games to be broadcast free to air will be the Merseyside derby between Liverpool and Everton, with Dowden saying he hoped this would discourage supporters from travelling to other people’s houses or to the match itself. The fixture is one of at least five that have been identified by Mark Roberts, Britain’s most senior football police officer, as matches that should be moved to neutral venues.
Discussions over the neutral-venues option are continuing between Roberts, local authorities and the Premier League. Dowden said clubs and supporters must obey the final decision taken by police on the matter.
A police and crime commissioner has called on Roberts to make public his evidence for moving matches to neutral venues. Arfon Jones, the commissioner for North Wales, said the information behind the drive for neutral venues was in the public interest and derided the plan as “nonsense”.
Jones told The Sunday Telegraph there was “no justification” for the argument that fans would gather outside grounds and said he had been forced to submit a freedom of information request to access relevant documentation. He added that too many police forces “look upon matches as a declaration of war” as he said Premier League clubs and supporters should be entitled to see the information provided from Roberts to local forces. “The clubs have not seen that advice, which is totally wrong,” Jones said.
Roberts said there would be an “ongoing dialogue” with the Premier League and that the top flight had not expressed concerns about the process. “Discussions with the Premier League have been very positive,” he said.
Project Restart: what a ride. From the weekend spent showing Premier League footballers pie charts of prospective salary cuts to the row over neutral venues that now feels like a pub fight which started over an argument no one can recall the details of. If only someone had come up earlier with the crowd-pleaser that the BBC would get the live rights to four Premier League games of unspecified importance, who knows how much easier this would have been.
June 17 it is then, although for all the anticipation of whether Liverpool will be crowned champions at Anfield, Wembley or in Mike Riley’s back garden, there is one Project Restart issue that refuses to go away. It was there again at the end of Karren Brady’s column in The Sun yesterday when she found the urge to disclose what is uppermost on her mind for
Thursday’s next Premier League shareholders’ meeting irresistible.
That was the question of what happens in the event of curtailment of the season, and in essence how relegation is decided. Or, as the West Ham vice-chairman described it, “a heartbreaking end to the most unfortunate season in history”. The points-per-game option is not popular with the bottom six, which includes West Ham, although it is hard to see what option would be popular other than the one that guarantees their club stay up.
“Myself and a number of other clubs,” Brady declared, “are reluctant to decide a future PL shareholder’s fate by a formula rather than a football match.”
Well, indeed. But here is the view of the experts: there is no vaccination against relegation. Three clubs will have to go down to the Championship when all this is over, so those involved need to find a solution one way or another. Whether that is playing the full 38 fixtures, a points-per-game calculation, weighted points-pergame, or just a traditional inter-club Zorb-ball death match, relegation is real. Even for the league that sometimes behaves like it owns football, relegation is not in the Premier League’s gift to scrap.
Looking back at Project Restart, it now seems obvious this was always going to be about relegation. The rest of it was largely the details that would look after themselves, from how many nasal swabs to order to whether the stadium should have fan atmosphere piped in. Now that live sport is back from tomorrow, the bottom six in particular must feel that the dawning of their fate is nigh. All that has changed is that the jeopardy feels closer and the desperation to avoid it gnaws ever deeper at the soul.
“This has to be debated and agreed by at least 14 clubs,” Brady wrote of the curtailment provisions, “that is the number of votes the PL need to change a rule.” What then, if there were more than six who would vote to block a curtailment formula?
The Premier League does not operate independently of football. It may act at times like a grotesque self-governed 21st century city state but it is surprisingly well tethered. The Football Association, for all its marginalisation, retains a special share of the league and has set its stall against the scrapping of relegation. The FA controls the conversation with Uefa and Fifa and there lies considerable power to suspend a domestic game from European club competitions. If the Premier League wants to declare against relegation it can find itself very quickly at war with some powerful entities.
As for the Football League, a subsidised subordinate of the top flight: it, too, has rights. The question has been asked whether Championship teams denied promotion to the Premier League might consider an injunction against season 2020-2021 beginning. It is hard to put a number on the financial remedy one could calculate at, for instance, Leeds United being denied promotion. What might 10 years in the Premier League be worth to them? In broadcast payments alone, on current levels, £1billion at least and then much more in terms of commercial, match day, ticketing, sponsorship and the countless other factors that Premier League status affects. Certainly it would make the £20million settlement that West Ham paid in 2007 as compensation to Sheffield United over their relegation and the accompanying Carlos Tevez-Javier Mascherano episode look like a most inadequate sum.
For the biggest, most influential Premier League clubs, the resistance to relegation is of no interest. They want the broadcasters to be granted what they paid for – a full-blooded relegation fight, especially in the absence of a title race. These clubs have no interest in any of the compromises that might come with a 22-team Premier League when the money is spread that much more thinly. They have no appetite for a legal battle that could mean the start of next season is delayed, especially when, proportionately, they lose so much more with games played behind closed doors. In short, having relegation is a much more straightforward option than not having relegation.
What is the price of dragging this argument further? The longer Project Restart is delayed over relegation, the more reasons Manchester United, Liverpool, Manchester City and the rest have to listen to the weird fantasies of the European Super League fanatics.
Andrea Agnelli and his fellow European Club Association extremists thus far have been thankfully ignored but in a pandemic-era Premier League enmeshed in arguments over relegation, even that option starts to look attractive.
It should be an easy decision on Thursday: complete the season on the pitch or when curtailment becomes the only option, as it stands, on points-per-game. There is no nice way of saying that three will have to go down to the financial dystopia that is the Championship, but three must go nonetheless.
It will say something to those who try to resist that their fellow Premier League shareholders believe they have a greater chance of resisting a legal challenge from those relegated than one that would come from those potentially denied promotion.