WE DON'T NEED NO RELEGATION

Printed in the National League South game v Hemel Hempstead Town Saturday 8^th October 2022. We lost 2-0 in front of 647

‘National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer’ is not my usual bedtime reading. I know or care little about baseball but I have got an interest in how other sports economics works, and a few years ago with American football owners buying up more and more Premier League clubs you could see what was coming over the horizon. It surely wouldn’t be long before they would be rubbing their baseball bats and wanting to bring in a model that would make their investments secure.

One of the authors who also wrote ‘Soccernomics’ is Stefan Szymanski: “U.S. sports have an awful lot of revenue sharing and mechanisms to limit salaries, because the teams operate cooperatively, because it doesn’t matter where you come in the league, your sporting success doesn’t matter, you’re just in business to make money.”

And how do you do that? American sports leagues are closed, meaning there is no relegation and promotion. As Szymanski points out “The natural conclusion that the Americans reach, is if promotion and relegation makes you unprofitable, why don’t we just get rid of it?”

So, what does this mean for the future of European football?

In April 2021, the European Super League was announced – a breakaway competition that would see 15 of Europe’s elite clubs form their own, closed league. Although it was the brainchild of Spaniard Florentino Perez, it would not have gathered as much momentum as it did without the influence of American Premier League owners John Henry (Liverpool), Stan Kroenke (Arsenal), and Joel Glazer (Manchester United), who were all announced as vice-chairmen of the proposal and confirmed their clubs’ participation.

According to Szymanski, Chelsea’s purchase at the hands of US investors will only lead to further conflict between English football traditionalists and profit-focused American owners.

Already Chelsea billionaire owner Todd Boehly has come up with a plan to share the wealth that doesn’t involve any of that silly football regulation and levelling up the playing field.

You see what we’ve all been missing is an end of season extravaganza of north v south or more Harlem globetrotting games for the Premier League All Stars to play similar matches across the world. I don’t think he goes far enough. Wouldn’t it be better the go the whole It’s A Knockout hog featuring ball juggling competitions, blindfold shooting by the top 10 golden boot contenders, sumo suits and red noses stuck on anyone who does a bad tackle, finished off by a We-Are-the-Champions style swimming pool bundle at the end. That’s much more fun that getting stuck with some FA Cup third round replay at Rochdale.

Football is the perfect example of just how trickle down economics work - continually enriching the few while everyone else goes to the wall trying to join the club.

So they’ve come up with another Football New Deal which will lob a few bananas to those at the bottom of the football pyramid in exchange for some alarming proposals One of those was that Championship sides should all be required to take a certain number of under 23 players on loan from Premier League clubs. The Fair Game initiatve, set up last October to promote better governance in footbal and supported by over 30 league clubs was not impressed ‘The football pyramid is not the Premier League’s plaything.’

The top clubs say they are concerned by the increased strain on an already packed calendar that Uefa's Champions League expansion will create from 2024. An extension they wanted but which requires a cut in lower revenue generating domestic games. So wave goodbye to FA Cup replays, or the big clubs having to enter the League Cup; expect more shouting about B teams in the football league and fewer clubs in the Premier. All part of a continuing reorganisation of the English game for the benefit of a small number of clubs. And while this new government is against any regulation of anything believing the free market will sort out all our problems, as Charlie Methuen a former director of Sunderland pointed out “current practices are protectionist enough to make a Mexican cartel leader wince.”

Despite their super league bloody nose, the idea is never far away, with the Real Madrid boss once again shouting it needs to be done, complaining that youngsters are turning away from football.

As Szymanski points out : “I see this millennial struggle between the forces that say we want to preserve the system of promotion and relegation, and the hard-nosed money men coming in from the US who say we want closed leagues that are profitable like they are in the United States, I see that conflict becoming sharper, but I certainly think the European Super League debacle was not the last word, but maybe perhaps the first shot, in a longer drawn-out war.”