- As American clubs and Arab nations draw up the battle lines, the PL’s future clarifies
- Not having a top scorer in the team generates more points and more goals!
By tony Attwood
The issue of PGMO and the clear oddity of the fact that some referees predominantly oversee home wins while other mostly oversee away wins, is one that naturally exercises our thoughts, as we focus on Arsenal and the Premier League.
But beyond this, there is another issue, and that is the challenge to the entire structure of football, that exists from such financial giants as Manchester City and Real Madrid. Those two clubs are each going their own way while throwing as much money as is needed at whatever they want.
Each sees itself as the dominant party in football, and wouldn’t you know it, they have to play each other in the Champs League play-offs in the coming days. One of the two big guns will be eliminated; one wonders what on earth they will do in response.
So the new world order means ceaseless legal campaigns aimed at challenging the rules of the Premier League; changes that around 75% or more of the league want.
But the biggest difference of all is that while the issues we raise (for example not just ManC’s money but also the way PGMO exists and works) are ignored by the media, in Spain their main affairs gets debated fully. Nothing is left off the table.
And there is something else odd happening, which can be seen by the final table of part one of the newly arranged Champions League. Here are the top four from the Champs League’s first outing, and then the three “all the money you could ever need” clubs below them.
| P | W | D | L | F | GD | Pts | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Liverpool | 8 | 7 | 0 | 1 | 17 | 5 | +12 | 21 |
| 2 | Barcelona | 8 | 6 | 1 | 1 | 28 | 13 | +15 | 19 |
| 3 | Arsenal | 8 | 6 | 1 | 1 | 16 | 3 | +13 | 19 |
| 4 | Inter Milan | 8 | 6 | 1 | 1 | 11 | 1 | +10 | 19 |
| 11 | Real Mad | 8 | 5 | 0 | 3 | 20 | 12 | +8 | 15 |
| 15 | PSG | 8 | 4 | 1 | 3 | 14 | 9 | +5 | 13 |
| 22 | ManC | 8 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 18 | 14 | +4 | 11 |
Now the problem in football isn’t the debts; the problem is the ability to paydebts back. Take on a mortgage for 75% of the value of your house and you have a whacking great debt – but unless house prices utterly collapse you have the means to cover that debt. You might not want to sell your house, but that’s your final backup plan. Real Mad have no backup plan – at least not as far as I can see. Their whole business plan is based on being top dogs, and they no longer are. Meanwhile, every attempt to reign the City Group in results in an ever-prolonged court case on the basis that “we’ll sue you and everyone else until you run out of money”.
So what we have is ManC fighting the Premier League and RealMad at odds with its own League and that’s not really a good place to be The only hope we have is that the financial giants fail on the pitch, and that seems a bit like clutching at straws.
And this question is real because each of these clubs wants to remake football in its own image
In recent times Real Madrid has borrowed over €1 billion to pay for the upgrade of the stadium and has promoted the SuperLeague as a way of paying for the work – and without that extra income, the club has no way of paying off the loan. Meanwhile they are propagating stories about corruption in La Liga and it is being suggested that La Liga is thinking of suing its biggest club.
Of course, we know that oil-rich club owners like legal battles, because when they can’t bribe the court, they can just keep the legal cases running until the opposition runs out of money. That obviously is not how ManC and co see matters, but it is a fact that if they wish to challenge the Premier League over issue after issue in the courts, eventually the Premier League will have to give up because the club owners won’t pay the legal costs.
In Spain Real Mad are arguing that the whole refereeing system is corrupt; which goes even further than Untold goes in relation to the Premier League. We simply want the media to notice that some refs consistently behave in one way, and others in another way, meaning which ref a club gets affects the result.
Meanwhile ManC have launched yet another legal challenge to the Premier League challenging the rule amendments voted through in November to fix the issues that arose out of the last legal case.
And this is how it will always be from now on until the League gives in. A case is finished, and then another legal action starts because ManC have more money than the rest of the League put together.
Meanwhile Real Mad see ManC as part of their problem. ManC have no debts, and so can take over the position of top football club in Europe and the world. Real Mad, the previous top dogs, are over €1 billion in debt from the stadium rebuild alone.
Uefa ought to be the solution, but Uefa has failed to apply financial fair play sanctions to ManC from 2020 onwards. There is also a huge difference between the way the English media are by and large supportive of ManC while in Spain the media can be quite outspoken about Real Mad and Barcelona.