The price of a pound note

  • by Rocket
  • Filed: Monday, 17th February 2020

This article is unlikely to tell you anything new, unless you're a friend or relative who doesn't follow football and is reading it out of sympathy. It's a point of view that plenty of more experienced and talented journalists have pushed before me, and I hope will continue to push after me, because it's one that needs to be repeated until something changes.

Last Sunday, Storm Ciara saw the vast majority of fixtures in a variety of sports postponed, due to concerns over crowd safety. The Met Office issued an Amber weather warning that covered almost the entirety of England, potential hazards including, ‘flying debris could lead to injuries or danger to life’.


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Maximum speed limits were imposed on the railway networks, leading to journey times being almost doubled and multiple services cancelled; train companies offered immediate refunds to passengers who had purchased tickets for that day and advised against travel unless absolutely necessary. Given the circumstances, it perhaps wasn’t surprising that so many fixtures were postponed.

I had been due to attend the Manchester City v West Ham United game with friends and family, but the prospect of seeing City’s superstars give our boys a footballing lesson was made somewhat less appealing by two five-hour train journeys, a probable 1:00am return to Euston and work the next day. A group decision was therefore made to cancel our plans and an immediate refund was issued by Avanti trains.

The ticket office at West Ham United, however, informed us that refunds would only be issued in the event of cancellation: not exactly consistent with the Met’s and train companies’ advice, one might think. Perhaps the finances at West Ham are tighter than we are led to believe.

When I woke on Sunday morning, it seemed that our decision was going to be proved correct. Fixtures up and down the country had been postponed, with two notable exceptions: Manchester City v West Ham and Sheffield United v AFC Bournemouth (which in the end did go ahead, the Blades snatching a late winner in what the BBC described as ‘blustery conditions’).

Shortly after 11:00am, the announcement finally came: the game was off. Given the scheduled 4:30pm kick-off time, any West Ham fans who had decided to brave the conditions would have been well on their way to Manchester by then, but at least Sky had plenty of time to find something else to entertain the viewers at home. (The dark humourist in me bemoaned the fact that the game wasn’t rearranged for the following weekend only to be postponed once again due to Storm Dennis; the Paul Chowdhry fan in me bemoaned the fact that it wasn’t named Storm Dave.)

On the subject of Manchester City, few will have failed to notice that they received the perfect Valentine’s Day present of becoming the tenth club (after Besiktas, Bursaspor, Malaga, Rapid Bucuresti, Metalurh Donetsk, Petrolul Ploie?ti, Skonto, Galatasaray and AC Milan) to be hit with a ban from European football for breaching UEFA’s financial fair play regulations (bankruptcy followed shortly after for both Metalurh Donetsk and Skonto, but I’m sure their fans found someone else to support).

It’s perhaps interesting to note that although they sit fifth in the current Forbes Football Rich List, Manchester City’s global support, if measured in Twitter followers (maybe not the most accurate form of measurement, but if you’ve made it this far through the article you’ve probably realised that I’m not an expert in sports journalism) is outstripped by the remaining clubs in the top seven (Manchester United, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool), whose followings range from 33.7 million (Real Madrid) to 13.8 million (Liverpool).


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Of the other nine clubs who have also been hit with UEFA bans, only Besiktas, Galatasaray and AC Milan boast a Twitter following in the millions and the combined following of all ten clubs would see them in third place on the recently-invented and no doubt much-disputed ‘Global Twitter List’. Depending on which source you believe, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea are all saddled with enormous debts in various forms, yet none appear to have been sanctioned by UEFA. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about why I seem to think this is a relevant thing to mention at this juncture.

In a sport where the distribution of wealth is skewed to the extent that clubs relegated from the Premier League receive two years of parachute payments (which rose to £42.6million at the end of the last season) in order to help them remain afloat, few will argue that the concept of financial fair play is a bad idea. What can be questioned is the efficacy of the current system.

Does managing clubs’ finances simply by forcing them to spend (sort of) within their means do anything other than maintain the status quo? By and large, the richest and most successful clubs remain the richest and most successful whilst the rest continue to feed off the scraps. Although few like to see clubs buying success in the way that Chelsea* have since Roman Abramovich’s takeover in 2003 or descend into oblivion thanks to financial mismanagement in the way that Leeds, Portsmouth and countless others have in recent years, the rules as they are currently applied don’t really seem to work and the game certainly doesn’t appear to be any fairer than it was when they were implemented at the start of the 2011/12 season.

Might some sort of maximum spend, perhaps enforced through a salary or transfer cap, or a more even distribution of TV money, be a more effective leveller? Meanwhile, under the current system, the more frugal owners who appear to have no real ambition beyond maintaining Premier League (or whatever their national equivalent may be) status and milking the cash cow that comes with it can use Financial Fair Play as a convenient shield to hide behind.

When I started writing this article approximately 48 hours ago (I hope it hasn’t taken you as long to read it), I said that it was unlikely to tell you anything new unless you aren’t a football fan, but that the point I wished to make is one that needs to be repeated until something changes. As I draw my ramblings to a close, I’m not entirely sure what my point is. Perhaps that’s something else you’ll have to draw your own conclusions about.

*I should really include Manchester City alongside Chelsea, but a combination of the rollercoaster ride that their fans were subjected to in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the classier way in which they’ve gone about proceedings since coming into money and my obvious bias as a West Ham fan means that I don’t. Sorry.

* You can read more from Rocket on twitter at @mr_botts.

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