By Tony Attwood
- The impact that Viktor Gyökeres is making for his country and for Arsenal
- Not every club is losing money, and the question for Arsenal is what happens now.
There has recently been a story that Everton are contemplating legal action against the Premier League for the way in which the League has handled Chelsea’s “undisclosed payments” sanction. The thinking is that Chelsea should suffer a points deduction. It is said that Nottingham Forest and Everton are particularly agitated about the issue.
But who could take action? Put another way, who owns the Premier League? For whoever it is, that is the person or corporation that would take such legal action.
In fact, as I have noted before, the Premier League is owned by the 20 clubs in the league at any particular time. Each club has one vote on each issue, irrespective of the length of time in the League or the size of the club. One vote for Burnley, one votre of Man City.
Now it is also true that the Football Association itself holds a single share in the PL, but as far as I can see, they also have just one vote, and can speak at meetings.
The day-to-day running of the League as a corporation is through an elected board, as happens with all limited companies. The chair of the board is Alison Brittain CBE, who was previously CEO of Whitbread and before that head of retail banking at Lloyds Banking Group.
So in essence, the Premier League can do what it likes if it gets a majority of the clubs in the League to agree. But of course, the clubs have their own divergent interests: the interests of Burnley and Arsenal (for example) are probably different and this mgiht well stop radical changes being made.
Interestingly, the PGMOL (Professional Game Match Officials Limited), the referees’ association, is jointly owned by the Football Association, the Premier League and the English Football League, which explains why nothing much is done to change refereeing in England. It would be quite unusual for most members of the PL board to all feel that refereeing needed (for example) enough referees so that each PL club only saw each referee twice in a season, as we regularly suggest.
Thus Arsenal can get the same referee six or eight times in a season knwoing that some referees give out on average four yellow cards a game, while another, having seen a similar number of games, has given out under 2.5 cards a game. Or why one referee sees over two-thirds of his PL games as home wins and another sees under one third as home wins. It’s bonkers, but some clubs benefit from the insanity and so won’t vote for change.
So we have the situation where just before the Brentford v Arsenal game this season, the referee was changed at the very last minute. Our article Brentford v Arsenal: with the teams evenly matched, the change of referee could be decisive was published before the game – it’s still on this site. Because of the secrecy, we have no idea why teh ref was changd, but Arsenal came out of it badly. No one else made a fuss, just us.
Now the owners of Premier League clubs tend to be very rich men and their companies, and as we all know, very rich men are used to getting their own way. For example, the estimated net worth of the prime owner of Manchester City is $16.8 billion, and although I have never had a chat with a person worth over 16 billion dollars, I feel pretty sure he’s not a man who would welcome a suggestion that his club has been cheating in the way it ensures it meets the league’s financial requirements. In fact, only two Premier League clubs have owners who are worth less than one billion dollars, and in each case, it isn’t much less.
So the long and the short is that clubs are owned by the very rich, and from what I know, the very rich often expect to get their own way. Which again (I presume without, of course, having met any of them) explains why change can be quite limited.
It can also possibly (and again this is just a supposition) explain why Chelsea have not been booted out of the league or had a greater number of points removed because of their historic activities, as recently revealed, because all the owners know, when you buy something as complex as a football club from a billionaire owner there is no tellng what went on before but again I make no allegation – I just presume that if someone with that much money wer to be cheating they would cover their tracks well).
Which brings us back to why Chelsea haven’t been given a harsher penalty for issues during the previous reign at the club. My guess (and I stress it is a guess) is that the owners of some of the PL clubs are quite aware that their club might have done something stupid in the past, and they don’t want to risk an enquiry. So everyone sticks together. (As I say, that’s just a guess).
Likewise, they possibly know that refereeing is a chaotic mess with the same referees seeing the same clubs over and over again. It’s not the money that would be spent employing more referees, it’s just (in my opinion) that no one wants to disturb the status quo, because if they do, there could be someone else also owning 5% of the Premier League who might decide to poke his nose into that other club’s business and raise a different issue.
I suspect (just suspect, no evidence) that every chairman has an inkling of something dodgy that some club or other has got up to at some time and reached the conclusion that it is simpler to let sleeping dogs just do whatever it is that sleeping dogs do.
But these are just my rambling thoughts. I don’t own a football club, so what do I know?
