If we know
one thing about the people in charge at Bolton Wanderers, we know this – Phil Gartside
once proposed there should be no relegation from the Premier League. And here they are, playing Bristol City in a
lower-table Championship dogfight in which they fall two goals behind after
less than 20 minutes.
Hubris is a
bitch, isn’t it?
Like most
things which are just too poetically perfect, the above received wisdom isn’t
quite accurate. Gartside didn’t propose
a cut-off top tier – he proposed a cut-off Premier League One and Two. Thus introducing a second Lucre Line further
down the league, splitting yet more clubs utterly away from fiscal survival and
no doubt hastening the descent into part-time regionalised entities of such
proud clubs as, say, Notts County, Preston North End and Accrington
Stanley. Yes. But let’s get this right.
Still,
since he wanted a two-tier structure with 36 clubs in it – and since he wanted
Rangers and Celtic in there too, therefore reducing by two the number of
English sides in his proposed elite – seeing Bolton start the day below 34th
place in the Football League is pretty satisfying.
34 feels
about right for Gartside’s purposes, as well.
I’ve written before about parachute payments, and how they’re designed
to ensure that the same clubs get promoted time after time. And how they’ve had to be increased since
football’s still-semi-conscious anarchic spirit has magnificently overruled this
particular bit of financial doping, giving the likes of Swansea, Blackpool and
Hull their seasons in the sun. 34
unrelegatable “big clubs” fits with this, the 20 which happen to be in the
Premier League at the time plus a further dozen or so to fight over the scraps. And this would be built into the system
rather than left to the not-reliable-enough parachute mechanism to ensure.
To be fair,
Gartside’s most recent revival of this charming little scheme was slightly
different. This link is well worth a
read for all fans of weasel words, poorly hidden agendas and outright lying. I
like that he’s prepared, rather sweetly, to reintroduce promotion if clubs “meet
standards of size and finance”, thus removing the possibility that promotion
could be a way for a small club to become more competitive over time, like
Bolton did. He’s also concerned, poor
dear, about the “polarisation of clubs”.
You’d think that proposing a “promotion license” system would increase,
rather than decrease, polarisation, but you’d be misunderstanding. He’s actually worried about “the same few
clubs continu[ing] to benefit from the huge additional revenues from the
Champions League” as well as “a fear factor” concerning relegation to the
Championship. Simply put, 2009’s Phil Gartside felt that raising the drawbridge
was fine if he was on the right side of the moat, but terribly wrong if he wasn’t.
As far as I’m
aware, that’s the last he’s said in public on the matter, probably because of
the reception he’s received every time he’s made a proclamation, possibly
because relegation has rendered his views moot.
That’s slightly irritating as it means I’m hanging this blog on a
three-year-old hook. But crashing on, I wonder if his views, for all that they’re
motivated by naked self-interest and greed, don’t merit slightly further
examination.
What he’s
proposing is something that would turn the de
facto divisions in football into ones that are de facto. The same teams
would compete for the ludicrous, inflation-busting TV money, spread slightly
further perhaps but guaranteed. By
definition, in his most recent proposal, the rich would get richer. And I’m not sure how his system would break
the Champions League cartel at the top of the English game – after all, for
twenty years now the dreadful Premier League has claimed exclusive access to
the money teat, and it’s been a long time since Newcastle or Blackburn have
been in with a shout of the European Cup.
So we can safely dismiss this whole “closing off the top divisions” idea
as bloody dreadful. Fine.
What I’m
more interested in is looking at it the other way round – ie Gartside’s
nightmare scenario of the big boys vanishing into their own European Super
League. This is nothing new as an idea,
of course – it’s been kicking round for as far as I can remember, that likeable
chap Charles Green most recently giving it his backing in comments almost
admirable for their fuck-you honesty.
Indeed there’s a sense of inevitability about it – Wenger certainly
seems to think it’s going to come along, Clarence Seedorf is behind it, and
Florentino Perez (they just get more and more likeable, don’t they?) would like
to see the “best” (read “richest”) guaranteed to play the “best” (yep, still
read “richest”) every single week.
You can see
why these luminaries of football sense that the middle finger of history is
only pointing one way. The current,
bloated, nasty Champions League appears to have been born as a result of
blackmail by the big clubs, who were prepared to walk out of UEFA altogether
unless the competition was expanded so that they could all be in every
year. And fuck the Cup Winners Cup and
UEFA Cup. What the wealthy bastards
want, the wealthy bastards get, in football as in life.
So perhaps
at some point this is going to happen.
Unlike Gartside’s proposals, there seems to be sufficient precedent that
it genuinely might. No promotion, no
relegation – just Man Utd vs Real Madrid, Bayern Munich vs Juventus, every week
until we all kill ourselves out of existential despair. Another few parts of football’s rich tapestry
torn away for good.
But. But, but, but. Who gets left behind? Look at England. The giant clubs are the teams who adapted
best to the post-1992 world order – not necessarily the likes of one-time
Champions League semi-finalists Leeds, who are very much the Icarus of this
story, but the teams who flew slightly less high but slightly more
consistently. Arsenal, say; even
Manchester United, who had an amusing spell of going out of the CL early for a
few years but never failed to be there.
They were
the teams on the right point of the oscillating wave of form all football teams
go through when the Champions League rolled over the top flight like Jurassic
sap, preserving everything in amber that it costs a vast amount to break
into. The teams they left behind were
the likes of Everton, Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest . Historic giants of the game with genuine
European pedigree – far more, in the early ‘90s, than Chelsea, for instance. If they break away those teams will still be
left in the English game. A game without
the Champions League income, stuck outside looking in.
Good. To me, that sounds wonderful. Imagine Norwich v Sheffield Wednesday as a
top-5 fixture, like it was in the early ‘90s.
Imagine not knowing who’d be in contention for the league every
year. Imagine a team like Clough’s
Forest, nearly Clough’s Derby too, shooting through the top flight to win it as
a newly promoted side.
We’re a
European breakaway league away from having that back.
I know there’s
a flip side. We wouldn’t have a
selection of the “greatest players in the world” any more, I appreciate
that. No more would AgΓΌero, Vidic, Cazorla, Bale or Hazard
play in the English Premier League. But
then, what precisely would be the difference?
If their clubs were all in the breakaway league, they’d play in exactly
the same stadiums for exactly the same teams. They’d probably be on telly at
exactly the same time. OK, fans at the
Liberty Stadium or Upton Park wouldn’t see them in the flesh. But they’d see more competitive games, fewer
thrashings and, who knows, maybe a title or two.
I say let
them go. I say give us our league
back. I say we can either put up with
all levels of football being infected by the fiscal trickle-down of the
Champions League, or we can actively hope for the final breakaway and enjoy the
real thing we get back in return.
And if we
could work out how to get Steaua Bucharest and Anderlecht into European Cup
finals again, that’d be good too.
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