I don’t see anything here that I seriously expect to be taken up. I doubt Liverpool and Man Utd expect these proposals to be simply accepted.
It’s a warning shot to the premier league.
What I like: Discontinuation of the League Cup and the Comm shield is ok. Pros and cons with that.
What I really do not like. That the Top 6 could control the league as a cabal. That you get money for your last three seasons, this is obviously to protect the big clubs from bad seasons and punish underdogs.
It reeks a bit this imo. But I will have to read more about it to make a detailed high information opinion on all of it. But I am suspicious like hell, what I have been reading is not exactly solidaric to mid-table and below.
More I look at it I wonder if it is the big six using the rest of football against the few teams in the PL, I can’t think the “Null and Void” approach by clubs helped these relationships, that is probably included in this approach.
I know Man Utd and Liverpool were keen to avoid “Null and Void” and yet we had weeks of the PL clubs at the bottom looking for it to be implemented and trying for reasons to scrap the league. Thing is we are now in a worst place than last season (or soon will be) and I’ve heard nothing from those clubs or players?
Why? In fact we are getting more cases now than we were at the height in football.
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Because the null and void argument was always a self-serving attempt to game the rules. The new season has just kicked off, we’re only a few games in and no club is that worried about relegation yet that they are willing to sack off the remaining fixtures (TV Money) to stop it happening.
If we were ten games from the end of the season and there were six clubs at real risk of going down, you’d see them agitating to void the season.
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Just to play devils advocate why should newly promoted teams get the same say in the league as a team that has competed in it for 28 consecutive seasons?
I don’t know if I agree with the governance proposals put forward by Liverpool and Utd, but I don’t think we can simply dismiss it as a power grab either.
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I agree… Was rhetorical.
I don’t see it as a power grab. I see it as a warning shot to the league.
The fact is that the governance of the Premier League by the administrators who run it is shambolic.
One of the most interesting thingS about the proposals on governance to me is the proposal that the gang of nine can vote on whether to accept a new ownership of any other club. This sounds awful, but what is it actually saying?
It’s saying that the Premier Leagues current fit and proper persons test is broken. And it is. Newcastle Utd’s ownership bid failed not because of their bloodstained human rights record or their intention to distort the competition by throwing billions of pounds at it. It fell because of a trivial dispute over broadcasting rights.
Why should clubs like Liverpool, Utd, Arsenal - who have all grown organically sensibly monetising their success on the pitch - be bumped off the top of the league because a sheik decides to make a middling club his new plaything. Arsenal already struggle to get into the top four because there are two other clubs who have leapfrogged them artificially. It isn’t fair and it isn’t sporting.
This is the big clubs saying we are not happy with the fit and proper persons test and you need to sort it, because if you don’t, we will.
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This is a fair point, but the Saudi issue was way more than a trivial rights dispute. It was about brazen pirating of of the product the league sells.
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Understood. I guess what I’m saying is it feels wrong that this is what collapsed the deal, not their murderous government. Had they not been implicated in piracy, the deal would have sailed through.
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A first time voter has one vote just as his/her grand parents who might have been voting for decades. Not to mention contribution to the family, community and nation for a longer period too.
If six clubs can override 14 (or 12) others, it will only mean the interests of the six (or nine) will always be the priority. The 250 million or the 25% of future TV money they are offering will not go from the coffers of the six (or nine) clubs; all the PL clubs will sacrifice revenue. So why some clubs will have greater say???
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Not only having a high limit on loaned out players but telling League One and lower that they don’t need to have academy systems seems to be a subtle way of getting them to bin the endevour (it’s expensive) and that means a bunch of youngsters would be available - and of course the PL clubs would have to expand their catchment areas in order to allow those young players an opportunity.
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The PL’s resistance to the idea is all very well, and there may be modifications that can shift support one way or another. But I find the whole nature of the conversation rather jarring. The EFL, the clubs, many supporters, and the Government are all looking to the Premier League clubs to ‘save football’. Yet most of the PL clubs are now in a money-losing position, and will be so for the foreseeable future. Why on earth would they want to spread their resources thinner to try to salvage clubs headed for collapse in a shorter time frame?
The simple fact of the matter is that I doubt the PL will be able to put together a majority to do anything at all.
Just want to pick up in the phrase, “murderous government”… perhaps in an unhelpful way.
Liverpool and Man Utd are owned by American investors, and America’s own murderous government is far from being a city on a hill that the world can look to these days. Illegal war in Iraq based on spurious evidence of WMD, hundreds of thousands dead, a dodgy war on terror with new arenas for war opened up around the world on that pretext. Back in the day Congress needed to approve war but nowadays it’s drip, drip, drip via drones and secretive operations. Then a brief glance at governance within the country would reveal a serious lack of law and order and hundreds of thousands dead - with many more to follow, because of a laissez faire response to Covid.
Maybe the difference is neither John Henry/FSG or the Glazer’s are anything to do with the American Government as they are private citizens. So maybe that’s different to Abu Dhabi at Man City? But Abramovich is not a representative of Putin’s government, as far as I know… even if he did have a lower level office in Siberia for a while, that struck me as for business reasons.
Anyhow, all I’m saying with the fit and proper person test is that yes, whatever standard the Prem applies appears to have the bar set so low that the test is worthless.
But on the other hand, we have to be careful about branding other regimes as murderous when some of our own leading western governments are such shitshows. The Saudis have a horrible regime, but that didn’t stop the Americans overlooking the fact that 15/19 hikackers in 9/11 were Saudi. The Saudi regime is horrible but the American government overlooked the murder of one of its own citizens, the journalist Khasoggi, in order to make sure hundreds of billions of dollars in arms sales went through. Etc.
Having read over the proposals there is quite a lot I like the look of - funding for lower league sides; and some bits that worry me - concentration of power with a few elite clubs.
In a way, the main structural proposals are modelling very much on the German leagues. Of itself this is quite appealing but the financial clout in that league is confined to a few clubs, and predominantly one club.
The key needs to be whether the voting structures are fair and equitable. I think we saw with the early ending of the lower leagues that some, predominantly Northern, teams were treated very shoddily by the majority.
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I think you touched on this in your email, but John Henry is not the US Government whereas the proposed owners of Newcastle were the Saudi Royal family using the sovereign wealth of the nation to purchase and invest in the club.
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Sure, you can play devils advocate and that is okay. But my reaction is kind of why not ? This is about fair play and equal rights or at least that is how I see that. However, as I said, I need to read it all a bit more before I can develop a high information opinion, but from what I have seen, that particular point looks bad to me.
Because the clubs that have been in the PL the longest have made the biggest contribution. They have made the PL what it is now; the world’s most watched league and therefore the biggest money-maker.
Should clubs like Blackpool, Barnsley or Bradford City, all of whom have been in the Prem at some point, have an equal say with the clubs that have been there for 20 years or more? Personally, I think not. I think that right has to be earned.