Who Needs Competition?

There was a time when football used to be competitive in the top league. OK Liverpool had a spell of prolonged dominance in the seventies and eighties and Man Utd subsequently, but the eventual title successes were on occasion perforated with other teams that believed they had a chance and, where the playing field was such, that it could allow a team like Nottingham Forest to jump a division, win the 1st division title in back to back seasons and enjoy European Cup success.

Now I am not naïve enough to believe that those that could spend the most didn’t succeed the most and after all Forest themselves signed the first £1m player in Trevor Francis and Tottenham Hotspur almost made Jimmy Greaves the first £100,000 player (but opted to knock £1 off the transfer fee – and no Daniel Levy wasn’t about back then). However, it was possible for clubs to compete and the wealth was evenly distributed. Steve Daley became a £2m player for City (who weren’t backed by oil money back then) but even so it was possible to compete.

All you needed was a good manager; good players (of course) and the backing of a local wealthy businessman. But in the early 90’s all this changed. The Premier League was invented and with the advent of satellite television and pay per view TV the landscape changed overnight. Those that were ready for it took advantage. Clubs like Man Utd and Arsenal were well run and grew with the new structure. Clubs like mine at White Hart Lane were too busy in fighting and trying to cope with recent near bankruptcy to be properly aware.

Things were aggravated further when the much talked about European Super League eventually became a reality and the Champions League was established. Fuelled by more money from additional broadcasting revenues it integrated European Football and widened the gap between the “have’s” and the “have not’s”. The Bosman ruling meant that player’s contracts were barely worth the paper they were written on, and therefore more of this money was needed to entice players to remain at clubs and ended up in players pockets: nothing has changed since. It has only got worse. No longer was the local wealthy business man able to invest in the local team. You had to be a multi-millionaire, or an investment company! This soon transitioned into the need for a billionaire owner and subsequently oligarchs and oil barons. Competitiveness flew out of the window. Harry Enfield’s “loadsamoney” caricature had arrived in football and they were swinging one almighty wad of cash.

So what’s the prize now in the top league? Is the game really still about Glory? Teams forego silverware so that they can continue to sit at the top table and bury their snouts at the trough of elitism. £52m per club in 2013/14 just for being in the Premier League. Add to that prize money dependant on finishing position and add to that more money dependant on how many times your team appeared in a live televised game and ADD TO THAT more millions for partaking in the Champions League. And yet more money pours into player’s bank accounts, agents trimmings and company dividends, whilst fans are being ripped off at the turnstiles, ripped off with their TV subscriptions and being asked to pay £90 for a replica shirt. Yet we keep going back for more because we as fans believe that this next season will be the one. The one where we can compete and achieve, yet we know in reality the chances are slim but we won’t admit it to ourselves.

So off the back of this bleak landscape of the chosen few; The Sky Four; The Newspaper Adored; how can the Premier League remain competitive at the top? How can teams like Everton, Tottenham, Newcastle and even Arsenal and Liverpool have any real hope of challenging the richest teams on a regular basis. They can’t can they? Not really. Not when the footballing behemoths from around Europe restrict your competitiveness as soon as you start putting a competitive team together by throwing more money at your best players and promising them realistic hope of glory as glory is now sadly only achievable for a few. Unless all of these teams hoping to compete are taken over by Oligarchs, the only thing that you can do to maintain competitiveness is to open a door to the Champions League. The “top four” needs to become the “top six”.

It is clear that Manchester City, Chelsea and Man Utd are locked in for top four finishes due to their resources. “Ah” I hear you say. “But Man Utd finished seventh last season and Chelsea sixth a couple of seasons before”. But dear friends these were mere aberrations. It did not take Chelsea long to restore order and neither will it take Man Utd to do likewise, and if like Chelsea you can fluke a Champions League triumph in the meantime, so what? No. As it stands there are currently three or four clubs competing for ONE Champions League spot each season, and given Arsenal’s propensity to qualify even when the odds are stacked against them then we may as well just call it from the season’s opening day. We only have to predict the order.

What we could probably do with are play offs. Yes. There I said it. Now I have never really been an advocate of the play off principle, however the way that the Premier League has panned out it seems that we have no other real alternative to create competition and redistribute wealth to try and gradually level that playing field once more. This may sound ridiculous (as all initial ideas are at times) but we can choose to have the teams finishing 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th to play off for the final Champions League spot, or we can take it a step back and have 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th playing off for two champions League spots. The top three in the first scenario and top two in the second, qualify automatically. The first scenario is probably more likely initially and will extend interest and value to the top seven positions in the Premier League. Finishing fourth will no longer be better than winning a trophy.

I can hear journo’s now gasping in shock and horror that anything should upset the apple cart for the teams that they enjoy writing about. But if nothing is done the premier league will become stale. We will get the occasional exciting title race between two clubs and some sadistic excitement at the relegation dogfight but the rest of the division will be an irrelevance which grabs the attention only during the transfer window and again when the managerial merry go round kicks in.

Other countries in Europe (albeit smaller football nations in the main) use the play off option for Champions League qualification and it seems to work. So why not here? Or are we all just content with the status quo, and are we resigned to the fact that teams that were languishing in the Premier League like Manchester City and Chelsea can suddenly have an infusion of money to such a degree that they can become the best in the land? The game is about competitiveness, or at least it should be. It’s about playing for something. It’s not just the taking part that should count and something needs to be done.

That said if you are a Spurs fan like me then no doubt we’d start finishing 8th and missing out by one point!!