If the PL provided £5m to every Championship side, £3m to every League 1 side and £1m to every League 2 side at the start of each season, it wouldn't make a jot of difference as to how 90% of the 72 clubs would be run.
If the PL provided £5m to every Championship side, £3m to every League 1 side and £1m to every League 2 side at the start of each season, it wouldn't make a jot of difference as to how 90% of the 72 clubs would be run.
To a degree, yes, under current rules, but if there were stricter regulatory rules on budgeting and footballing punishments enforced for falling outside those rules, it would make a difference imo.
They’d all over budget more to keep up with the Jones’
That is 100% correct. The idea that if the PL just gave them more money they would save it or spend it wisely is pure nonsense. It would be used to player transfers and wages. How do we know this? Because that's what they do now.
We can't blame the premier league for Bury going bust.
It's been pretty well documented that Bury gave expensive contracts to players they couldn't afford. That isn't the premier league's fault.
Plenty of other clubs who are a similar size or even smaller than Bury manage to get by. But if you go handing out ridiculous contracts to players when you get crowds of 4k then the figures simply aren't going to add up unless you are Salford.
It was only 2 years ago that Bury signed Jermaine Beckford ahead of championship clubs. That same summer they signed Dawson from league one Scunthorpe who was their POTY and also signed Chris Maguire from Oxford who had been one of the best players in league one the season before. Did no one at the time wonder how on earth little old Bury were paying these salaries?
From an article on another thread on this board...
So if I read the above correct.....
1. Bury was about to go under before Dale bought them
2. He was able to buy it for £1
3. This means no one else was going to buy it, obviously
4. The EFL skipped DD because the club was about to go under
5. If they did do the DD and saw his bad record, they would have refused to let him buy Bury
6. Bury goes under in that scenario in December of 2018.
In
other words, if the EFL actually did their job and rejected Dale, the club would
already have been liquidated 18 months ago. So what exactly do people
here think the EFL should have done in this case? There were no other
buyers and they were about to go under. They rolled the dice and lost.
Their option was....what??? I really would like to know what people think should have been done. To reject Dale makes their current liquidation 18 month old news, the way I read it. Anyone?
From an article on another thread on this board...
So if I read the above correct.....
1. Bury was about to go under before Dale bought them
2. He was able to buy it for £1
3. This means no one else was going to buy it, obviously
4. The EFL skipped DD because the club was about to go under
5. If they did do the DD and saw his bad record, they would have refused to let him buy Bury
6. Bury goes under in that scenario in December of 2018.
In
other words, if the EFL actually did their job and rejected Dale, the club would
already have been liquidated 18 months ago. So what exactly do people
here think the EFL should have done in this case? There were no other
buyers and they were about to go under. They rolled the dice and lost.
Their option was....what??? I really would like to know what people think should have been done. To reject Dale makes their current liquidation 18 month old news, the way I read it. Anyone?
Fair enough..... but what about if there was proper scrutiny of previous owners.
This situation didn't start start with Dale in Dec 2018.
Clubs certainly need to re-think their strategies now to potentially adapt to whats gone on and not just rely on the EFL to safe guard!!
Almost needs to be an agreement amongst all EFL club that they follow a particular model e.g. a few crazy thoughts:
- More emphasis on clubs producing their own talent through their Youth Teams, stop spending crazy amounts (both transfer fees and wages) on over-rated players who seem happy to drift around each year
- Salary Caps... Not based on a teams budget like what we've seen with FFP to an extent. But a cap across the whole Division, means that there is a level playing field regardless if Team A have an owner who is far significantly wealthier than Team B
- Loans signed from Premier Leagues on the sole condition that no fees get paid; Premier League teams want their kids to get experience, well they pay for it, they can bloody well afford it... A little less income by charging clubs X amount for a loan deal might make them a little more reluctant to hoover up talent, especially if the kids are rotting in the reserves
- Should transfers be made then the club should have to prove to the EFL / Regulator that they can afford the players wages over the term of the contract and arent putting themselves at financial risk (Okay I've stolen that one from Colin Murray who mentioned it on Quest last week)
I'm not stupid and I know its laughable that I'm even making these suggestions as the Football League / Premier League would never agree to them... the difficulty would certainly be trying to ensure that all 72-clubs in the former adhered to them and didnt try to circumvent the rules to their advantage like what we already see with FFP...
Something has to be done though, the current system isnt working and its a matter of time before it happens on a regular basis (I've said for years that Football cant sustain itself because it'll get to the point where we'll run out of Billionaires who can either afford to buy these clubs or even want to!!) - Think the best option regardless is for all clubs to just band together, acting individually and I think a lot of sides are doomed!!
If the PL provided £5m to every Championship side, £3m to every League 1 side and £1m to every League 2 side at the start of each season, it wouldn't make a jot of difference as to how 90% of the 72 clubs would be run.
But what's the point? it'll either go into players wages, or sticking plaster to unsustainable business models. If the PL did this, they would be well within their rights to demand significant governance changes in the EFL, or make the money ring fenced and paid out like a grant on the delivery of certain things.
The EFL should look at the salary cap system used by the ECB for county clubs. For example I am a Surrey county cricket supporter and though it is the wealthiest club in county cricket the cap limits us to spending no more than £2.5 million on players and coaching staff, much the same for every club.
The roots of this are the FA's appalling decision in 1991 to buckle to a few gobby, venal club owners like Dein, Bates and Sugar and let the FAPL be formed as a separate entity and let it negotiate with Sky and keep all the money. While Sky certainly fostered its relationship with those arseholes, at the end of the day all they wanted was the right to show live first division football. If the FA had stuck to their remit and negotiated those rights, and decided how to distribute those rights down through football, Sky would not have been concerned. And where would we be now? A football country like Germany IMO, where maybe we wouldn't have quite so many foreign superstars in our League, or certainly quite so many crap players in the Second Division earning £40k per week, but also without the dreadful fate awaiting Bury and Bolton.
That's where it started, folks, and anyone who wants to argue that point with me better make sure they at least read Tom Bower's "Broken Dreams" first; where in passing you will also read an interesting couple of references to Richard Murray...
It depends what you or anyone means by "the roots of this". I recall Accrington, Bradford PA, Workington, Barrow, Aldershot etc, long before Sky & The Premier League.
A reasonable challenge.
The key difference is that those clubs failed at a time when the vast majority of revenue of clubs was internally generated. TV money, even for Man Utd or Liverpool, was negligible compared with gate money. A further boost would come from European appearances, but again nothing like the boost it gives nowadays, and that of course is also powered by TV revenue.
TV revenue is, or should be, a collective revenue, which means it ought to be distributed by a body which has the good of the game as a whole, as its central purpose. Sky got that. They were marketing top level English football as a competitive League, not as a permanent service to armchair fans of Manchester United. They did not care too much about how their revenue was shared out, so long as the top league was an attractive spectacle for its viewers. Do not forget Sky's own business purpose. It was a new company and it needed to build a subscriber base. Football was the key marketing device to build that base.
That body should have been the FA. But at the time they were a quite appalling organisation whose main preoccupation was tribal warfare with the Football League, and it was that petty tribalism that prompted them to set up the FAPL. But even then they could have kept control of the money. They just did not have the people with the intellect and business understanding to argue with the Deins and Bates that it should still keep control of the Sky money and how it is disbursed. And that was English football's fatal error.
While I don't want to present German football as a panacea, a key point to note is that the Bundesliga is a subsidiary organisation of the German FA, and it is the latter that supervises the negotiation and disbursement of TV money.
The EFL should look at the salary cap system used by the ECB for county clubs. For example I am a Surrey county cricket supporter and though it is the wealthiest club in county cricket the cap limits us to spending no more than £2.5 million on players and coaching staff, much the same for every club.
How would that realistically work though?
For example you can't expect sides relegated from the premier league to have the same salary outgoings as us and Luton just promoted from league one.
And if you gave relegated sides some leeway for a couple of seasons, they'd just spend big in an attempt to get straight back up (admittedly some sides do this anyway), which would lead to huge problems if they didn't.
Football in this country absolutely stinks in my opinion. The PL and Sky have ruined it really. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer and neither care. There isn’t a fair distribution of money. It’s wrong. Even the system of compensation for lower league clubs changed in favour of the big boys. The EFL are not fit for purpose.
There's a lot to like about the German model, but clubs have still had financial problems, and the Bundersliga is dominated by 1 club, because the ownership model is now a block to anyone being able to compete with Bayern Munich
If the PL provided £5m to every Championship side, £3m to every League 1 side and £1m to every League 2 side at the start of each season, it wouldn't make a jot of difference as to how 90% of the 72 clubs would be run.
But what's the point? it'll either go into players wages, or sticking plaster to unsustainable business models. If the PL did this, they would be well within their rights to demand significant governance changes in the EFL, or make the money ring fenced and paid out like a grant on the delivery of certain things.
Which would be good.
Ring fence it for academies, stadium facilities and only released when clubs have submitted budgets and other funding to cover running costs.
The roots of this are the FA's appalling decision in 1991 to buckle to a few gobby, venal club owners like Dein, Bates and Sugar and let the FAPL be formed as a separate entity and let it negotiate with Sky and keep all the money. While Sky certainly fostered its relationship with those arseholes, at the end of the day all they wanted was the right to show live first division football. If the FA had stuck to their remit and negotiated those rights, and decided how to distribute those rights down through football, Sky would not have been concerned. And where would we be now? A football country like Germany IMO, where maybe we wouldn't have quite so many foreign superstars in our League, or certainly quite so many crap players in the Second Division earning £40k per week, but also without the dreadful fate awaiting Bury and Bolton.
That's where it started, folks, and anyone who wants to argue that point with me better make sure they at least read Tom Bower's "Broken Dreams" first; where in passing you will also read an interesting couple of references to Richard Murray...
The EFL should look at the salary cap system used by the ECB for county clubs. For example I am a Surrey county cricket supporter and though it is the wealthiest club in county cricket the cap limits us to spending no more than £2.5 million on players and coaching staff, much the same for every club.
How would that realistically work though?
For example you can't expect sides relegated from the premier league to have the same salary outgoings as us and Luton just promoted from league one.
And if you gave relegated sides some leeway for a couple of seasons, they'd just spend big in an attempt to get straight back up (admittedly some sides do this anyway), which would lead to huge problems if they didn't.
Thats the cost of relegation though
Of course there is nothing to say that Luton or Charlton would have to have spend the same amount on Wages as Huddersfield - Throwing figures out there, you could have the cap @ £2.5m for all clubs in the Championship, would then be reasonable for teams coming down from the Premier League yet if a team coming up from League One only want to spend £1m then thats their choice
Its why I think that clubs should also have to prove they can afford wages / transfers prior to the deal happening; yes Charlton / Luton will have the ability to spend £2.5m on wages but doesnt mean they should be allowed to if its going to screw them over still
If the PL provided £5m to every Championship side, £3m to every League 1 side and £1m to every League 2 side at the start of each season, it wouldn't make a jot of difference as to how 90% of the 72 clubs would be run.
But what's the point? it'll either go into players wages, or sticking plaster to unsustainable business models. If the PL did this, they would be well within their rights to demand significant governance changes in the EFL, or make the money ring fenced and paid out like a grant on the delivery of certain things.
Which would be good.
Ring fence it for academies, stadium facilities and only released when clubs have submitted budgets and other funding to cover running costs.
I'm playing Devil's Advocate to an extent and my tin hat is at the ready but here goes...!
How many people posting on this thread have moaned on other threads on here about Roland's refusal to pay more than £5k a week in wages? (A quarter of a million pounds a year lest we forget). How many people have said Roland should just give Taylor the £20k a week Brentford supposedly offered? This at a time when we are what, £40/£50 million pounds in debt?
You can blame Sky, the Premier League, the unfair distribution of TV money whatever for the mess many clubs, including our own, are in. But the fact is players' wages are in most cases totally out of kilter to a club's income. (Indeed, wasn't this what Bury were supposed to have been doing, paying ludicrous wages?) Until those wages are reduced, clubs will not be sustainable to run unless they have a billionaire (not millionaire) or Sovereign state behind them.
Players' wages in the Championship are crazy. Look at the figures for Fulham that were published on here recently. The only possible outcome for clubs like Fulham who don't get back up to the Premier League is severe financial problems in the future.
And that's the unpalatable truth that clubs have to face and deal with.
If the PL provided £5m to every Championship side, £3m to every League 1 side and £1m to every League 2 side at the start of each season, it wouldn't make a jot of difference as to how 90% of the 72 clubs would be run.
But what's the point? it'll either go into players wages, or sticking plaster to unsustainable business models. If the PL did this, they would be well within their rights to demand significant governance changes in the EFL, or make the money ring fenced and paid out like a grant on the delivery of certain things.
Which would be good.
Ring fence it for academies, stadium facilities and only released when clubs have submitted budgets and other funding to cover running costs.
Interesting idea! But what if the PL actually decides to go the other way and share no revenue at all? And basically says, this is our league, we want nothing to do with you. Fix your own problems. Oh, and while we are at it, we are ending relegation/promotion.
I've heard they have discussed that possibility before. Can they do that or can England somehow intervene to stop it? I don't see the PL as having much interest in saving the EFL from itself. If anything, every year that goes by there seems to me more talk of the biggest teams leaving to form a Euro super league. Thoughts?
There's a mortgage on Gigg Lane which was taken out in stages by the previous owner, Stewart Day.
The lender, a firm based in Crosby called Capital Bridging Finance Solutions (“Capital”), is now owed £3.7m. Capital in turn mortgaged Gigg Lane to a company based in Malta whose own lenders were eight companies registered in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands.
Large portions of the borrowed money never came to Bury at all, because 40% was paid as “introduction fees” to unnamed third parties.
Comments
[Transferred over from other thread]
If you bemoan the amount of money in the game, and subsequently subscribe to any of the sports broadcasters, then you are part of the problem.
Until every supporter of lower league clubs chuck the towel in on broadcasters, nothing will change.
The virtue signalling will continue.
Still, Super Sunday, right?
"It will never happen, someone always buys these clubs"
Were wrong.
Domino theory says there will be more
We can't blame the premier league for Bury going bust.
It's been pretty well documented that Bury gave expensive contracts to players they couldn't afford. That isn't the premier league's fault.
Plenty of other clubs who are a similar size or even smaller than Bury manage to get by. But if you go handing out ridiculous contracts to players when you get crowds of 4k then the figures simply aren't going to add up unless you are Salford.
It was only 2 years ago that Bury signed Jermaine Beckford ahead of championship clubs. That same summer they signed Dawson from league one Scunthorpe who was their POTY and also signed Chris Maguire from Oxford who had been one of the best players in league one the season before. Did no one at the time wonder how on earth little old Bury were paying these salaries?
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/aug/27/bury-historic-club-football-league-financial-ruins
This situation didn't start start with Dale in Dec 2018.
Almost needs to be an agreement amongst all EFL club that they follow a particular model e.g. a few crazy thoughts:
- More emphasis on clubs producing their own talent through their Youth Teams, stop spending crazy amounts (both transfer fees and wages) on over-rated players who seem happy to drift around each year
- Salary Caps... Not based on a teams budget like what we've seen with FFP to an extent. But a cap across the whole Division, means that there is a level playing field regardless if Team A have an owner who is far significantly wealthier than Team B
- Loans signed from Premier Leagues on the sole condition that no fees get paid; Premier League teams want their kids to get experience, well they pay for it, they can bloody well afford it... A little less income by charging clubs X amount for a loan deal might make them a little more reluctant to hoover up talent, especially if the kids are rotting in the reserves
- Should transfers be made then the club should have to prove to the EFL / Regulator that they can afford the players wages over the term of the contract and arent putting themselves at financial risk (Okay I've stolen that one from Colin Murray who mentioned it on Quest last week)
I'm not stupid and I know its laughable that I'm even making these suggestions as the Football League / Premier League would never agree to them... the difficulty would certainly be trying to ensure that all 72-clubs in the former adhered to them and didnt try to circumvent the rules to their advantage like what we already see with FFP...
Something has to be done though, the current system isnt working and its a matter of time before it happens on a regular basis (I've said for years that Football cant sustain itself because it'll get to the point where we'll run out of Billionaires who can either afford to buy these clubs or even want to!!) - Think the best option regardless is for all clubs to just band together, acting individually and I think a lot of sides are doomed!!
The key difference is that those clubs failed at a time when the vast majority of revenue of clubs was internally generated. TV money, even for Man Utd or Liverpool, was negligible compared with gate money. A further boost would come from European appearances, but again nothing like the boost it gives nowadays, and that of course is also powered by TV revenue.
TV revenue is, or should be, a collective revenue, which means it ought to be distributed by a body which has the good of the game as a whole, as its central purpose. Sky got that. They were marketing top level English football as a competitive League, not as a permanent service to armchair fans of Manchester United. They did not care too much about how their revenue was shared out, so long as the top league was an attractive spectacle for its viewers. Do not forget Sky's own business purpose. It was a new company and it needed to build a subscriber base. Football was the key marketing device to build that base.
That body should have been the FA. But at the time they were a quite appalling organisation whose main preoccupation was tribal warfare with the Football League, and it was that petty tribalism that prompted them to set up the FAPL. But even then they could have kept control of the money. They just did not have the people with the intellect and business understanding to argue with the Deins and Bates that it should still keep control of the Sky money and how it is disbursed. And that was English football's fatal error.
While I don't want to present German football as a panacea, a key point to note is that the Bundesliga is a subsidiary organisation of the German FA, and it is the latter that supervises the negotiation and disbursement of TV money.
For example you can't expect sides relegated from the premier league to have the same salary outgoings as us and Luton just promoted from league one.
And if you gave relegated sides some leeway for a couple of seasons, they'd just spend big in an attempt to get straight back up (admittedly some sides do this anyway), which would lead to huge problems if they didn't.
Ring fence it for academies, stadium facilities and only released when clubs have submitted budgets and other funding to cover running costs.
Of course there is nothing to say that Luton or Charlton would have to have spend the same amount on Wages as Huddersfield - Throwing figures out there, you could have the cap @ £2.5m for all clubs in the Championship, would then be reasonable for teams coming down from the Premier League yet if a team coming up from League One only want to spend £1m then thats their choice
Its why I think that clubs should also have to prove they can afford wages / transfers prior to the deal happening; yes Charlton / Luton will have the ability to spend £2.5m on wages but doesnt mean they should be allowed to if its going to screw them over still
https://twitter.com/AndyhHolt/status/1166612123503538179
How many people posting on this thread have moaned on other threads on here about Roland's refusal to pay more than £5k a week in wages? (A quarter of a million pounds a year lest we forget). How many people have said Roland should just give Taylor the £20k a week Brentford supposedly offered? This at a time when we are what, £40/£50 million pounds in debt?
You can blame Sky, the Premier League, the unfair distribution of TV money whatever for the mess many clubs, including our own, are in. But the fact is players' wages are in most cases totally out of kilter to a club's income. (Indeed, wasn't this what Bury were supposed to have been doing, paying ludicrous wages?) Until those wages are reduced, clubs will not be sustainable to run unless they have a billionaire (not millionaire) or Sovereign state behind them.
Players' wages in the Championship are crazy. Look at the figures for Fulham that were published on here recently. The only possible outcome for clubs like Fulham who don't get back up to the Premier League is severe financial problems in the future.
And that's the unpalatable truth that clubs have to face and deal with.
There's a mortgage on Gigg Lane which was taken out in stages by the previous owner, Stewart Day.
The lender, a firm based in Crosby called Capital Bridging Finance Solutions (“Capital”), is now owed £3.7m. Capital in turn mortgaged Gigg Lane to a company based in Malta whose own lenders were eight companies registered in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands.
Large portions of the borrowed money never came to Bury at all, because 40% was paid as “introduction fees” to unnamed third parties.