The Premier League is now teetering on the edge, but there is still a way out

 

 

By Tony Attwood

• • Why goals scored isn’t the measure it is cracked up to be
  • The key points we will be putting to the Football Regulator on Day 1

 

Before Manchester City started to win the League more often than they didn’t (seven times starting in 2011/12) we had had runs of certain clubs winning a lot.  Ironically (from a geographic point of view) one of these runs was Manchester United (13 times between 1992/3 and 2012/13).  Another was Liverpool (ten times between 73 and 88)   Even Arsenal had a run (five titles between 1931 and 1938 – which could have gone on longer had it not been something cropping up in Germany.)

But the ManC dominance seems different.  And indeed the normally staid Telegraph seems to find that a possibility as they present the headline “This is a civil war that could tear English football apart.”

And I noticed that because although there have been a lot of “experts” trying to unravel what the vast number of pages of legal documentation in the recent case actually means there are one or two publications, like the Telegraph, which are suggesting that this it is not just this ManC dominance, but rather that ManC’s determination to take anything they don’t fancy to court, could have major implications for football. as we know it.

For it is clear that part of the ManC defensive tactic is to run up legal costs – costs which, until someone stops them, they can readily afford but which are a drain on any and every club that has to fund a fight against them.

But attached to this is a curiously misleading view, summarised by a sentence from that Telegraphian report to the effect that “What was once a competition fraught with jeopardy risks becoming an entrenched duopoly.”

Now one might think at this point – where is the duopoly here?  OK for the last two seasons Arsenal have come second, but does that make this a duopoly?   

Not really.  There is Manchester United who seem utterly convinced that if they keep spending money on players then in the end by pure chance if nothing else they might well win something some day.  And there is Chelsea where they had the jolly idea of paying anything that was asked for the best players they could see, and then getting around FFP regulations by putting those players on eight-year contracts.   Those contracts still exist, but the League quickly changed the rules, so that the cost of a player is written down only to a maximum of five years.

But underlying all this is the growing notion in the media that actually the destruction of competition in the French league such that Paris St Germain can win the league nine times since 2012/13 is a jolly good idea. 

Yet watching PSG play at Arsenal stadium recently gave those of us there an extra reason to think why this was not so good, for surely never has there been an away support contingent less interested in a match than their supporters.  They were there to be a show, as they went through their ceaseless choreographed routines led by the cheerleaders at the front.  It had nothing to do with the match, and didn’t even stop when Arsenal scored.  As far as I could see from my seat, which by chance offered a fine view of them, the routines never varied and had nothing to do with the game.

And the point is that if concealed payments were made by Sheikh Mansour but disguised as sponsorship revenue, what is anyone ever going to be able to do about it if all that is left is supporters making their own show? 

For it isn’t that ManC have got away with things so far by working their way around the rules, and finding a possible double meaning here, or a contradictory sub-clause there, it is that the fact that they challenge the whole principle of making sponsorship payments of the market rate, rather than any amount of money that the club wants.

Now as the Telegraph says as it looks over the wreckage of the notion of some sort of balance in the league with income just coming from football itself, “The fear is that they [the Premier League] have lost not just the battle, but the war as well.”

And the interesting point is that this is where the discussion stops.  No one but no one (except I think Untold) is debating “so if that is right – what happens next?”

In one sense the answer is obvious.  If ManC win with a set of appeals, and/or they have the majority of the 115 charges against them set aside, they then have control of the Premier League and can do pretty much as they wish, just as PSG can do in France.   Meanwhile the Premier League has already started to look like the German and French leagues with one team winning most of the time, and is actually on the edge of making the Spanish league look competitive by comparison (which of course it isn’t).

So the last bastion of true competition among the big league falls.   But it doesn’t have to, because the rest of the clubs could do what others in Europe have been too afraid to do: start a new League without the clubs that always win.

It’s a radical idea, but they could do it.  That could leave PSG,, ManC, and the other serial winners to have their own little battle.  Maybe six clubs, maybe eight.   The rest of us could then once again watch really competitive football.

• The battle lines are drawn, but the Premier League has the winning hand.