was the headline in a national daily over the weekend, arguing that clubs that went into administration should not be allowed to continue in the Fooball League. ........"There is no reason to have so many clubs if we cannot afford it. Let T.V money and sponsorship be shared amongst those who balance their books". Ironically a photo of the derelict Valley was used with the caption: " Weed them out, clubs that fall into disarray should not be propped up if they have lived beyond their means", We weren't mentioned but Leeds and Southampton were, with Pompey as a possible. Any thoughts?
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Also how is it that a club with "financial promises" can spend beyond their means (QPR?) and yet others have to trade within their means.
Why should Leeds and Southampton suffer points and the likes of CAFC suffer on and off the pitch whilst cutting cloth to suit?
Don't know why they used a picture of the old Valley though, especially as they didn't mention us at all.
Still, best coverage we've had in there for a while!
I don't know about adopting an approach that would let clubs go to the wall if they failed with their finances. As we have seen with Leeds in the past and Portsmouth nowadays, it is more often than not the boardroom, rather the fans that leave a club in financial ruin and also the latter that suffer the most.
It begs the question; should clubs be forced to live within their means with rules of wage and transfer spending caps? I'm certainly in favour of that approach if the caps are tiered, for example the top 5 finishers in the Prem have x maximum per week for wages and y maximum in each transfer window, then the next 5 have a slightly lower cap and so on downwards throughout the leagues. However, to be accepted it would have to be adopted Europe-wide so it probably would never happen.
I appreciate your intent, but a tiered wage system like that would just make it harder for other teams to break the premiership establishment i.e the big 4, Ferguson, Wenger and co would relish that idea.
I'm not proposing it as an idea to cement the positions the top 4/5 even further, I'm only presenting it as the lesser of two evils. As the article states, "it is long past the time — if ever there was a time — when we should be propping up broken football clubs".
According to this piece, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7741859.stm , "since 2000, 42 professional clubs in the Football League and the lower divisions such as the Football Conference have gone into administration" (and that was written in November 2008). Therefore, under this proposed policy of "natural wastage", where clubs are left to die out if they go into administration, almost half of the entire football league would have disappeared by now. So it sounds like football clubs will have to be forced to live within their means in order to preserve them. Tiered capping is a solution to this, i.e. the lesser of two evils. Do you, Jimmy 85, have a better idea?
I'd rather someone cleverer than me (there's plenty of candidates) came up with a solution that didn't feature the word evil anywhere in its description.