English pyramid at risk from Super League plan
IT is almost 27 years since a football club in the Western Daily Press circulation area graced the Premier League.
Nobody has since conceded as many top flight goals as Swindon Town did under John Gorman in that ill-fated 1993-94 season.
Bristol City, the West’s best supported club and the one the nearest to achieving the dream of Premier League football, are currently 34th in the league pyramid with early season dreams of promotion a distant memory.
One might ask why a proposed European Super League has anything to do with supporters of clubs based in this region?
After all, the West doesn’t have any sort of track record of top flight league titles or FA Cup wins.
It isn’t that our clubs aren’t in Manchester United, Liverpool or Chelsea’s league.
Historically the achievements of each of the clubs in smallish Lancashire towns such as Burnley, Blackburn and Blackpool have dwarfed those of all of the West’s clubs combined.
But the door was never closed to our clubs - no matter how difficult it might seem to bridge the gap, that’s what really matters.
Comment: Richard Bache on a plan that potentially jeopardises the dreams, no matter how unlikely, of any team being able to reach the top
It might seem fanciful that Forest Green Rovers, Yeovil Town, Bristol Rovers or Cheltenham Town would ever grace the big time.
They could all harbour dreams of reaching the top though.
Over the history of the game clubs that were once minnows have grown to be giants, while former giants have shrunk in stature to be a shadow of their former selves.
Bristol City have many of the ingredients in place to reach the top flight and have at various points in the past decade knocked on the door of the Premier League.
They have yet to find the key that unlocks that door, but now the very biggest clubs are threatening to shove that door in the faces of those below them in the current pecking order.
It stinks.
It is rare that any issue unites so many people and utterly unheard of in the past decade for any issue described as ‘European’ to provide anything other than division.
Yesterday though Tories and Labour were united, as were diehard fans of bitter rivals Liverpool and Manchester United.
Very few people indeed had anything positive to say about the proposals, which were met with widespread fury and accusations of greed.
The news that six of the biggest sides in English football are, with teams from Spain and Italy, planning a breakaway super league to play only each other at the most elite level of competition creates a two-tier system with a glass ceiling that can never be smashed.
Cynics will say that was always the case; that foreign money and overseas owners are interested only in the big brands.
But some of the greatest drama in competitive football still comes not from the major matches between two sides at the very top of the game, but in the clashes between the alsorans languishing in the lower leagues versus the fancy dans from the elite.
For many years non-league Yeovil Town were renowned as giant-killers, the lower-league club that the big boys hated to be drawn against in the FA Cup.
As a young football fan growing up in Portishead, I’ll never forget when Bobby Gould paraded the famous trophy through the North Somerset town where he lived, after his Wimbledon side shocked the mighty Liverpool at Wembley in 1988.
Little more than a decade previously Wimbledon had been a nonleague club.
But dreams do come true – as Leicester City were also to prove five years ago when they defied pre-season odds of 5,000-1 to win the Premier League.
The dirty dozen clubs who’ve gotten into bed with the big banks and hedge funds are not believers in romance though.
A guaranteed financial return is the only dream they share.
Bristol Rovers boss Joey Barton believes the move could cause irreparable damage to the game.
“I just think it’s sad, I think it’s really really sad,” he said. “But I think it’s just an indictment of where the game’s at the moment.”
Page 10: Boris Johnson vows to fight proposals