By Tony Attwood
If you have been a regular reader of Untold in the past you will know that somewhat unusually among commentators on football in England we have reported on the abuse of young players. And by this I want to make clear, I am not talking about sexual abuse, but abuse in the sense of playing players who are injured, and not giving proper medical treatment to young players.
You might also have noted that this is not a subject that any newspaper wishes to cover, even though football is awash with allegations that players under 16 are often not treated properly (usually it seems because there is never a shortage of youngsters wanting to show a professional club their talents).
Of course, as you would expect, there are large numbers of parents who complain about the treatment their children get at the hands of major clubs, and social media is awash with such allegations and complaints, and yet nothing comes to light.
The reason for the absolute silence is that in most cases when an allegation is made by a parent against a club what tends to happen is that the club then tells the parent that if they do make the allegation public the club will sue the parent. Further investigations result in the claim that the “medical records for that season are missing”.
Where the parent then has difficulty is that the allegation hinges on the world of a child, and the fact that the club can invariably bring forward their own witnesses who say nothing untoward happened. Also it appears that the media might be told that should any such story be aired then at the very least the club will cut all contact with that broadcaster or newspaper concerned.
And this is where the insidious nature of the relationship between the clubs and the media comes to the fore, because each depends on the other. The clubs want publicity in order to keep fans interested in the club, although equally the clubs don’t want any sort of negative publicity.
Thus the clubs are happy with the media ceaselessly running fantasy tales about possible transfers every summer, because each story keeps the club in the news, if not on a national level then at least in the local media. And of course when the transfers don’t happen (as 97% of them don’t happen) then both the clubs and the journalists and bloggers all have a reason to stay quiet – the club because the non-arrival of the player is negative news, and the media because their reporters have clearly been led up the garden path.
These two situations (the reporting of non-existent transfers and the non-reporting of child abuse in clubs) are linked since without the vast array of transfer tales the media would have a gap in its summer football reporting, and with nothing else to report some writers might just turn their attention to the regular complaints made against clubs over the treatment of children.
At which point you might of course ask why Untold doesn’t report such cases, and here the answer is simple. We are caught in the trap as is anyone else. We hear stories of child abuse but we don’t have concrete evidence and so know that if we report a word, then we could get sued. And that of course we are trying to avoid.
This situation makes me wonder if there is anything else in football which is never being covered by the media and this thought came to mind.
In 2022/23, the last season for which I have a full set of figures, only three out of 20 Premier League clubs made a profit: Manchester City, Bournemouth, and Brighton. The other 17 made a loss; Arsenal’s (if you are interested) was £52m. The biggest loss maker was Manchester United with £150m.
In fact all the money that the clubs earn, and more, goes straight out the window on wages and transfer fees which between them absorb about 90% of total Premier League income.
Which raises the question, why do people want to own football clubs?
The BBC has an interesting line on this point saying, “It cost former Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich about £900,000 a week for 19 years in terms of interest-free loans to cover the club’s losses.” So why did he do it? Vanity? Fun? The hiding of illegal financial activities?
Staying with that club, overall, the table shows that Chelsea have spent over half a billion pounds on players during the Todd Boehly era. In the last three seasons, they have come 12th, 6th and 4th, which shows an improvement but they are still loss-making and yet still end up 15 points and 22 goals off the title. They recently only avoided an investigation into their finances by selling their women’s team to another company that they own for what some feel was a ludicrously large sum.
These sort of questions such as why the maltreatment of children is swirling around as a set of allegations, and why clubs go on losing money year after year, are the background to football in England, but they are rarely tackled in the meida. Instead we get the fantasy tales of hundreds of transfers that never happen. It does make me think something is very wrong somewhere in all this.
