- Just how much of a disaster was the summer transfer window?
- How come Arsenal get all this abuse as soon as one poor penalty goes in our favour?
By Tony Attwood
A number of interesting commentaries have been published of late which focus around a common theme: that Manchester City don’t just need to be punished for their financial activities against the rest of English football, because they have helped rescue one of our clubs.
Besides if anything is done to stop the owners of ManC carrying on as now, then other oil-rich people in different parts of the middle east who seem to be thinking, what Manchester C have done looks like fun – might be put off.
Now of course I can’t publish names and details, but it doesn’t take much imagination to realise that people with access to unimaginable amounts of money find themselves occasionally looking for fun ways to play with it. Hence the ManC affair, and the variants that are being contemplated.
And we need to remember that according to the judgement of the Premier League committee that investigated the situation, having got their money, Manchester City had “systematically” broken the rules over a nine year period. There are I suspect, quite a few people around the world with access to the relevant technology and money who wouldn’t mind playing around with the Premier League in order to take their team to the top, and knock a few others down.
This is why so many people are interested in the ManC affair – for it is not just about Manchester City but about any other club of any size that could be bought out. Indeed surely many owners who love their club deeply, would welcome in someone willing to pay three or four times what the club is worth, just to get it to win the league seven times in eight seasons. And when the council see what we have done for the town they’ll surely give us the OK to….
And this could be just the time to do it, while ManC has been threatening to tie the football authorities up in court proceedings until they all go bust. Who knows, Poole Town could rise up from the Southern League Premier Division South and be in the Premier League in no time. The old ground can be turned into flats and multi-millions pound luxury flats all around the harbour…
Meanwhile if the verdict in the appeal were to go the way of the ManC owners I suspect there was be a positive queue at the door of any agents offering football clubs for sale – no matter what league they are in.
And just imagine you were on the council of a small town desperately in need of funds to improve the housing, the schools, the down-at-heel high street, the sewage system and everything else, and someone comes along and says “we’ll take care of all that and we’ll take your little football team into the Championship….” All we want is planning permission on those fields, and for you to build a new highway…. There would be a queue from here to the Persian Gulf filling out application forms.
After all Manchester City was bought for £200m. How much for a Southern League club in a town desperate for investment? And the investment for the new owners would be nothing – they could buy every sixth tier club, rebuild the grounds, develop the area, and take the club to the Championship, What council would dare stand in their way?
Some honourable people would make a fuss – but just think how they would be treated – trying to block the complete rebuilding of every down-at-heel housing estate around the town. These clubs don’t have to become the richest in the world – just the richest in their league, while the local landowners and councils would be falling over themselves to get the investment for the football club, the housing estate, the local hospital, the shopping centre… And true the original inhabitants can’t afford to live there any more, but that’s just capitalism…
Next up would be a partnership between the football club and the town council. Then 2000 new houses built by a company now owned by the same people who own the club – and who would object – what with the town’s housing stock is in desperate need of an upgrade.
Oh yes and some new community facilities and leisure centres – and before you know it two dozen other towns are saying “Why can’t we have that too?” A new secondary school, new college, new shopping centre, new sporting arena. Someone would say the word “regeneration” and there would be no holding back, and no one asking where the money came from.
And yes it might be true that the local elections never took place, but then only one third of the population voted in them anyway,…. House prices would go up because the schools were now all graded “excellent”. Transformation would be the name.
Of course the football team would still be there, with new training facilities linked to the local schools except that the original local people would not be able to get their children into them because there hadn’t actually been any “affordable housing” build in the regeneration areas. Somehow the “affordable homes” got pushed to one side. Somehow the previous locals now have to live somewhere else. Somewhere with poor roads and hardly any shops, a drains that flood, a very run down school….
Obviously I am following a worst case scenario – but I do think that the evolution of small towns, just like the evolution of small town football clubs should happen via those who have worked in the towns for year, just as the local football club should be run by people from the town. And I rather want elected councillors involved too.
And you can tell if there is real local ownership and interest by seeing just how much secrecy there is surrounding all the new developments and the ownership of local things like the town’s football club. There shouldn’t be commercial secrecy around the club any more than around the hospital or the schools. If the local football club is suddenly doing incredibly well, that’s great – but we should all be able to know who owns it and how they did it.
Meanwhle, I’m delighted Arsenal are top of the league of course, but I want to be assured that once the debts of the club are paid off, Arsenal is not sold to another firm that is just there to milk our love of the club and its heritage, in order to make them a load of cash. I don’t want Arsenal owned by a group that has breached Premier League financial rules as seems to have happened with Manchester City. The government has said no football club is above the rules, but there must be a temptation for a club to be able to get away with anything, if its owners have just rebuilt the whole town.
Some of our clubs, like many of our nation’s schools, have been allowed to get into a desperate state, and most of us would welcome major investment in everything from the hospitals to the schools, from the roads to the parks. But we still need to be careful what happens to our lives and our towns as a result.
