Ive been looking at some of the transfers that have happened in the PL this summer and must admit I becoming more and more worried about the state and longevity of the game as a whole.
Take Man City for example. They are reported to be spending £40m on 8 players. None of which are British and none of which Ive ever heard of (baring Petrov), yet here they are spending £7-8m on what seems to be a Carlos Kickaball who, I would assume, has little or no affection for the game or the fans but has arrived on these shores because he, his agent and his club saw the ££££ signs when an English PL side came knocking.
Our clubs now spend far more on transfers and more on wages than in any other league in Europe!! Weekly wages at a side like Boro / West Ham are very comparable to what a player could expect to get at Real or AC.
This cannot go on! Its damaging grassroots football, our national side and ultimately I think you'll see quite a few name teams struggling financially in the future, not in an attempt to push onto Europe / Champs League but just to compete and stay in the division. Fulham being the prime example having spent £20m+ with debts already of c £120m.
Something like 70% of Seria A players are Italian, whereas last season the PL only had 50% home grown. That figure will fall again this year!
I'm not 100% sure what the answer is because you tend not to get a great deal of value from the football league these days, as players in the lower divisions are hugely overpriced by their clubs, hence why teams look abroad, but perhaps a ruling of having a cap of nonindigenous players would be one.
Thoughts? Would be interesting to hear from BFR, DutchAddick et al on what their local leagues do.
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I think this year will be an interesting year with the money that Spurs and Liverpool have spent in order to challenge for the title and others such as City and West Ham to try to break into the top 7.
Whilst down the bottom Fulham and Wigan have spent big on attempting to not being in a relegation battle.
Odds please on top 5 being Man U, Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool, Spurs and the bottom 5 being Derby, Sunderland, Birmingham, Fulham and Wigan.
As for the bulk of Dan's post, its a good point and though i agree with all he says, we've been forecasting 'the big bang' for about five years now, and it never seems to come. But it has to at some point, and it will only be the clubs who experience what we've experienced recently that will be impacted. With the big sale of Bent, it looks like we've largely got away with it, but if one of the clubs carrying £40m+ debt was to fall, i can't really see any way back. The other possible danger is the smaller club 'chasing the dream' of trying to get into the premiership, and failing over 3-4 year period. But i think these cases are less likely now as board's wise up.
As always, it will be the big clubs that will be fully insulated.
I've been forecasting the 'bubble' bursting on the Premiership for a while now, it's yet to show any obvious signs of doing so but the situation just doesn't seem to be sustainable. The money being spent is ridiculous and like you say it's now commonplace for 2nd tier Premiership clubs (yes, unfortunately we have a league with clearly defined tiers within it) to spend getting on for £10m on someone no-one's ever heard of. The main worry for me is that the more money that comes in to the game the more that leaves in agents fees, signing on fees and players wages. And IMO, when a player's just signed a £5m 3 year contract a dip in form just isn't as important as it once was - he's no longer playing for his livelihood - that was made at the stroke of a pen. There are exceptions but I think they're fairly rare. Was it Shankly or Paisley who said something about having never seen a great footballer who'd grown up with central heating?
The answer seems obvious, distribute the money more evenly throughout the Premiership and football league, make sure you invest in grass roots football, salary caps (whether individual or total wage bill as a % of revenue) and quotas on non UK players.
Trouble is for any of this to happen it needs to be passed through the Premiership chairmen and they're not going to agree to it (plus the quota thing is potentially illegal under European Law!).
For me the Premiership gets increasingly tedious and predictable by the season and that's at the same time as the TV saturation reaches breaking point!
Obviously I want us to get promoted next season but must admit that I'm looking forward to the season even more for the fact that it's a break from the Premiership.
The Carlos Kick-a-ball types coming in are being signed on Peter Ridsdale type contracts that are way out of their true worth as players, and I've long thought that the Premiership is becoming a place where because of the vast sums of money involved the "instant fix" is being preferred over blooding talented youngsters and bringing them on. In past seasons bringing kids through was necessary as clubs didn't have the budget or the resources to sign a ready-made star, which they do now. There was also the policy of buying British born kids playing at lower levels and keeping them for a season or two and training them up. Take Liverpool in their glory years - Ray Clemence, Kevin Keegan, Ian Rush, Alan Hansen and many others started at second/third/fourth division type clubs and their transfer fees would keep those clubs alive. That doesn't seem to happen that often these days. So instead of giving the talented young right-back a few games Premiership clubs can just reach for the phone and sign pretty much who they like, especially as many of the clubs have multi-millionaires and billionaires owning them. I guess when you are worth £2 or 3 bn what do you do? You've got the cars, the yachts and the place in the south of France, so you try and buy success, seeing your newly bought club win a trophy must be the only thrill left for these guys.
What does Germany do?
German football, other than Bayern Munich, isn't that well remunerated, financially most clubs are on a par with mid-table premiership teams, that is they are well supported but most are run on tight budgets and the money coming in from TV is significantly lower and German football doesn't have the international market that English/Italian/Spanish football has. (As a question could anyone tell me without looking it up who finished first/second/third in the Bundesliga? Or who won the German Cup? - My point being that German football rarely registers internationally - whereas the Premiership has just sold the international rights for the coming contract for over £600m alone). German clubs traditionally have a number of east Europeans playing for them. Many of these players qualify via having German ancestry eg. Klose and Podolski who play for the German team are only technically German, but mostly they are cheap, both to buy and pay. My local club, Freiburg typically fields only one or two Germans, the odd French/Austrian/Dane/Swiss player, plus a few Georgians and the rest are footballing mercanaries from the Lebanon, Burkina Faso, the Ivory Coast, Mali etc, whereas in previous years they were the exception. The result - there is no real affinity between the team and the fans/the town or even the State.
I could bore evryone about how I think the premiershit stinks or corruption and quangos but that's been done to death.
The only way forward is to give the FA power over the brand of the premier league. How the boys club that is the Premier league can hold sway over the national governing body of the game is beyond me. The first thing to do here is to give a much more even spread of television monies throughout the leagues.
For clubs like Man City, Pompey, West Ham, Middlesborough and Villa to be spending obscene (even by premier league terms) amounts on players that no-one has heard of or overpriced has-beens just to try and get in the top ten is pure and utter plain stupidity. Is anyone saying or doing anything about it though? No.
Sky own football and all the while they can have a story about Man Cities latest waste of money it will carry on.
There is only so much talent to go round and the best talent tends to go to the best clubs. Therefore clubs get desperate (like citeh and spam) so splash money on whatever is available to seem like they are competing.
If we go up though, we have it all to do again. Then the players who may have taken us up will have a couple of more mercenarial players join the ranks then in a few years we are left with a situation that cumulated in last years disaster.
Man U are about the only big club that can buy players for high transfer fees, pay them £100K a week and still make a profit. Chelsea are a joke making a loss bigger than the turnovers of most clubs, Liverpool have or had a debt of £80m, but it was structured in that European football and merchandising kept them afloat. Arsenal are reasonably well run as a result of astute buying and a big fan base. But look at Leeds for an example of a team that crashed and burned. It hardly seems feasible that four/five seasons ago they were in a CL semi-final and it's possible that they might not be allowed to start this season. That demonstrates the risk of second/third rung clubs building up not just debt but long running problems by signing players on multi-season high salaries. As a result they were forced to keep paying part of the wages of players like Seth Johnston, Lee Bowyer, Danny Mills, Robbie Fowler and others long after they had to be loaned out to other clubs just to get some part of their wages offset.
West Ham maybe narrowly escaped this fate, had the Premiership had the balls they could have been relegated straightaway, even so they only just escaped the drop, but with massive overheads had they gone down it could have been a lot more serious than our relegation. Players like Matt Upson and Lucas Neill alone are rumoured to be on £70k a week salaries, and they nearly went bust a few seasons ago but had several players in their squad that they could off-load for good money which saved them. One day though one of the teams owned by a billionnaire will get relegated, and with half the Premiership being owned now by sugar daddies it will happen sooner or later. That unlucky team might find itself falling a lot further than one division if their sugar daddy loses interest or refuses to punt more money in.
Thanks to our responsibility in the transfer market and running a club to a budget we've escaped that, more so as we've been able to sell the likes of Darren Bent and Luke Young. That means we'll never be a consistently top club in the Premiership at least in the short-term, but maybe in the future that might be of some benefit to us.
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That's been the case for several seasons now, only five clubs have qualified for the CL in the last four/five years with only Everton breaking into the top four in that time, and the team they displaced, Liverpool were allowed in as a "special case", realistically no team has come close to consistently breaking that monopoly. Maybe Spurs will this year, and have spent the money. I'd sooner our financially sound economics than being heavily in debt and chasing the dream.
R