The Last Dance for football as we know it?

First things first: The Last Dance, the story of Michael Jordan's remarkable career, was as good as it gets for quality sports TV during these past painful weeks.

You don’t have to know anything about basketball to appreciate the stunning ability, power, strength, pace and sheer intensity of the best player of all time and his six NBA titles in eight years with the Chicago Bulls.

My obsession with American sports and how they are run had me transfixed. I have grown to love the glamour and spectacle of the NBA, NFL, MLB and NHL (basketball, American football, baseball and ice hockey) and I am still frequently embarrassed by how little I know about them, but we could learn an awful lot from them.


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The ‘Last Dance’ phrase is now established in our sporting vocabulary, and as you watch professional football tear itself apart these past weeks, searching for a way out of a nightmare season, you wonder whether you are watching the Last Dance of the game as we know it.

It pains me to even consider the next bit or even suggest it for the future - but the calamity facing football is so dark, so broken, so instant and so damaged as to be irreparable.

I am a traditionalist. The fact we have 92 teams in four professional divisions is something to be proud of. It’s there to allow movement from top to bottom.

But have we reached the point when that is little more than a pipedream, fantasy? Have the vastly different finances from top to bottom made the current situation frankly a waste of time? Is the current system broken beyond repair? The financial gap widens with every season.

This evil pandemic has revealed, all at once, the financial shambles of our national game from top to bottom. The financial fault lines have been brutally revealed for all to see.

In years gone by we have tut-tutted as Leeds, Portsmouth, Sunderland, Bolton and Charlton, to name just a few, have collapsed financially. What has happened in these few weeks of lockdown is that every club, every division, has seen varying degrees of financial catastrophe exposed.

In particular the two lower divisions are on their knees. They get precious little TV money and depend on match day revenue and there’s been none of that since March. There are frightening claims that up to 40 clubs could go to the wall this summer.

The Championship is not much better. Their division is a financial basket case. So desperate are they to climb onto the Premier League gravy train that they have risked everything and more, some spending 80 to 90 per cent of their income on wages.


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There have already been private discussions between League Two and the National League about some form of amalgamation. Two regional divisions, north and south like the old days, with the National League north and south feeding into it.

League One is the problem, with suggestions that it could be a national top division aligned with clubs below rather than above. I can hear the howls of anger already and I don’t much like the sound of it, but the reality now as never before is frighteningly obvious.

That leaves the Championship, a terrifying division of overspending to the point that clubs are splashing out dangerously on wages in a desperate bid to cling onto the promised land of the Premier League.

Now the worst bit. Starting a Premier Two. There has long been suggestions of such a move, and with no relegation. There is reasonably only Portsmouth and Sunderland from Division One that could make any impact on the Championship, so some form of swapping around could facilitate that.

But a Premier Two, with an expanded TV deal and some protection from the abyss of the lower leagues is surely worthy of consideration.

Now we are getting into franchise territory. Yes, I know, I know. But having spent some time trying to understand the American version that operates in all their top sports it is possible to explain the reasoning, other than pure protectionism.

Rich owners are more likely to plan for the future over many years without the fear of relegation. New stadiums, enhanced community involvement, higher quality product and freedom for coaches to play a more entertaining, expansive game without the nasty scrap to avoid the drop for at least half of the division every season.

I know it goes against everything we believe in, everything I have been brought up on. But has the old style UK vision of how sport is played been exposed these past weeks? The lower divisions do not have the financial capability any longer to cling onto what is becoming an impossible dream.


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Even in the top flight our goodselves could be something like £100million in debt by now. There’s been a share issue but last season’s debt, the current estimate and then the loss of millions because of the coronavirus shut-down could well have left our owners with the same level of debt they faced when they took over a decade ago.

And we are not alone. Every top flight club is confronting vast losses. That’s why there has been such a desperate attempt to get the games on again, anyway, anyhow, to hang on the TV cash and somehow protect next season’s big pay-day too.

It’s easy to be critical, but it’s a industry. Is it any different to the retail trade lobbying to open their stores? That seems acceptable but when football explores every avenue to get back to playing again, that seems to be somehow wrong.

I saw Alan Sugar on TV recently saying how clubs live from hand to mouth. Few of us could have believed there would be so many and the cash disaster was so close for everyone. We have lost five match day revenues, something like £5million, and that has taken a terrible toll.

Anyone who thinks we will have much money to spend in the market this summer without selling (and who has the money to buy?) is living in a dream world. We owe a large amount on Seb Haller still, amongst others, and need to scramble together enough to complete the deal for Tomas Soucek. Frankly I’d be happy with that in the current climate.

When a club like Manchester United have decided to give away three players they have out on loan, for nothing, to their new clubs, it says a lot about how every club is considering unprecedented decisions.

In the lower leagues it is even worse. How much longer can they sustain the expense of travelling from one end of the country to another for matches? It’s becoming unsustainable. Lincoln let 11 players leave this week, Grimsby boss Ian Holloway reckons they will be out of business by September and has had to release several already.

I know of one League Two club which has taken a loan from their supporters trust to pay wages, and is suggesting every player will be released at the end of June. It’s anticipated that close to 2,000 players at that level could be out of work.


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The industry is on its knees. Desperate for the TV money to still be around and for it to trickle down to the lower reaches. And with the possibility of no crowds at matches for some part of next season, this financial disaster is only going to get worse.

Clubs may well be forced to think the unthinkable, to cut their losses and consider regional divisions that reduce costs and produce more local derbies.

As for this damaged season we are clearly going to get a Premier League, and probably a Championship, restart.

There has been plenty of high morale ground hand-wringing over this, and I sympathise with the view that no one should be playing sport with hundreds still dying every day.

But it is clear now that the recommencement of professional football is virtually Government policy now, in the plan to get back to ‘normal’ as quickly as possible.

Initially it was the clubs and TV companies who wanted the restart, the Premier League too. But it’s all got much bigger than that now.

The Government have thrown their top scientists and medical advisors into action. Professor Jonathan Van-Tam has been heavily involved.

Firstly fronting up the Premier League plan in discussions with clubs, managers and players. Then he was involved in discussions with worried BAME players, as well as conversations with Troy Deeney. People are now on board.


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Van-Tam has impressed people in the game, a clear speaker and now a man to sidestep awkward situations - as we saw on Saturday when Dominic Cummings' behaviour was discussed at the daily press conference.

Everybody seems to be on board, including Deeney. He never was my favourite player but the abuse had had from fans wishing a virus on his young son was a disgrace (the tweets I saw were from Leeds supporters). Horrible stuff and frankly those responsible don’t deserve promotion back to the top flight.

Finally, the thorny question of which 'points per game' method the Premier League should adopt. It has occupied a few minds of late, with the weighted version sending us down and the ordinary unweighted one saving us from the drop.

It has become something of a red herring really. The discussion and the maths were based on the league position when the game came to a shuddering halt in March. But those maths only apply until we start playing games again.

Once that happens, and it certainly will now seemingly from June 17, all the maths changes depending on results. Nobody can predict that.

Somewhat oddly the choices were not fully discussed at the last Premier League meeting. Initially one national paper, I forgot which one, said the straight-forward PPG had been agreed, and several online outlets reported that too.

But a Saturday conversation online with ‘friends’ who know a bit about what happened at that meeting revealed quickly that no decision had been reached. There were, it is believed, several clubs who still want the weighted version. So it will be discussed again at the Premier League meeting on Thursday.

What we need to do is win our matches. Simple. If the restart has to be abandoned again for a worsening Coronavirus situation, we need to be in a position that does not have us in the danger zone.

I have always felt that the league should be played to a conclusion if possible, however long it takes, so really it’s up to us to save ourselves on the pitch, not to find ways to wriggle out of relegation some other way.

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