T
ThatpartII
Guest
Apologies, deserved a proper reply as it was a really good post busy this weekend only to find out I’d been banned altogether today.Sorry, there's an essay.
We should maybe have just met at the windmill for a straightener in classic AVFTT style. It would have been more fun for everyone else and I wouldn't be writing reams of shite. I literally can't stop myself writing this sort of thing. The main reason I write a blog is to limit the amount I put on here really. It's like a cupboard under the stairs to put shite you don't want in the front room...
I think a potential positive could be a more decisive decision maker. The EFL have been hopeless for years as our experience tells us. The FA have totally ceded control.
Even if you just kept the present rules, football governance would benefit from not being so dithery and inconsistent. It all smacks of panels meeting ad hoc and reaching decisions too late or different decisions about the same thing.
Secondly, the parachute payment debate is an interesting one. They're absurd but I'd argue necessary - yet they're only necessary because of the way the 1st and 2nd tiers interests are represented by two different bodies and two different negotiations. If it was one body, you'd just smooth the curve between the leagues but with two, that never works because the two leagues just argue and the bigger one wins.
I think if we end up with a mess of complex regulations, it's probably not the FSA or anyone else's fault - it's probably the FA for basically turning their back on the wider implications of the Premier League and existing more or less in name only whilst the EPL clubs devise a system that more and more suits them.
There's no going back overall, no, but equally some of the negotiations of the past have been awful - stuff like the Elite Player Programme that essentially was the concession that EFL clubs had to make to get a few crumbs is just needless. It's financial bullying and undermines clubs ability to even produce their own players and sell them on. If we have a decent prospect, we basically have to accept a set fee for them at a certain age and that's that. Stuff like the size and capacity of academies at the top level is also easily regulated and arguably, it's not good to have all the young players heavily concentrated in particular regions and essentially the biggest clubs managing access to them.
We've ended up with a weird reversal of the trickle down model whereby the biggest clubs have huge numbers of young players who they don't need - they farm them out and charge clubs like us for them. The model used to be that a good percentage of those players would develop with us and the biggest clubs would then compensate us for buying them. Now we're paying to borrow the kind of player that we once might have developed ourselves.
I haven't looked at this in depth, but I'd really like to see a visualisation of where transfer fees go now as compared to say 20 or 30 years ago.
That's something that could easily be addressed and I don't think would especially damage the EPL brand
Things like that only exists because of the uneven power dynamic whereby the economic heft of certain clubs outweighed sporting values because the internal regulation process was utterly broken.
Anyone looking objectively at that would think 'nah, that's nonsense from the point of view of encouraging competition, it will just entrench power further in the long run' - but no one has really overseen football objectively from within football.
I think I'm trying to be balanced. The past was not a glorious rosy time, far from it and the future is unknown. I think you just have to (as you rightly say) enjoy the game for what it is, but also football as a whole has to remember that, yes, it's a brand, but it's also, first and foremost a sport and it must balance the interests of brands and business with the values of sport because ultimately, even the strongest brands are weaker than the more or less timeless appeal of sport. It's the fact it's a ** brilliant game that is the very best selling point of all - and I think a broader debate on how you further evolve that game is good.
Finally, anyone developing anything, be it software, art, business whatever also iterates and sometimes you roll back changes because 'new' isn't always good. The code you write is buggy or the interface isnt intuitive, the colour you chose doesn't quite go as well, the product turns out to have too many issues etc... We absolutely can't recreate 'the good old days (that never really existed as we remember them nostalgically) but I think you can also go 'ah, that particular thing actually isn't better now' if you are selective about it. We look at natural evolution but evolution is about responding to factors outwith our control. When we develop things as humans it's slightly different I think as it's at least in part a choice. Nothing is entirely black and white when we look at history.
I definitely want football to evolve, I just don't want that evolution entirely driven by the interests of the global TV spectacle alone because the ultimate end game is depressing and actually, possibly not very good for the football business as a whole (i.e. as the IPL has been quite bad for the interests of the ECB as a crude example) - if we assume that at some point a 'world league' type model will emerge, then you've got to ensure the game in this country is built on strong foundations because that potentially could be a seismic event
I don't really want to think about all this stuff - I just want to enjoy people kicking a football about but it's not been easy to do that for a while, not least because of our experience - what I'd like to think is that the threat of regulation jolts football into taking self governance a lot more seriously and in various areas it has a hard look at itself and doesn't just rely on 'yeah but richest league so everything is grand' - because I think that's a bit simplistic and I do think football (especially the EPL) is guilty of going 'yeah but money' and not really properly addressing some quite important things.
Fwiw I agree to an extent that our own experience is not actually that instructive, but I also think one of the reason why we allow shit owners is simply because the economics don't really work at certain levels so essentially, the EFL are waving anyone they can find into clubs, just to ensure they're owned by someone. Yes, you can punish 'bad owners' but then you need 'good ones' Aye, theoretically you can find more billionaires but again, I dunno, you just end up waiting about hoping that you get bought out and that's not really a particularly engaging experience as a fan as then everyone just bangs on all the time about takeovers and consortiums and so on and so forth and to go back to my poorly expressed original point, that's quite boring.
I'd guess the optimistic reading would be that if you controlled the flow of money better (i.e. didn't allow it to leave the game so easily or coalesce around 'the pointy end' quite so much - you could actually make it MORE attractive to invest across the pyramid not less as currently, you'd need to be a mentalist to invest at certain levels.
Fuck me, I can go on and I don't know sometimes how I end up where I am from where I started.
We'll see what happens I guess!
Must have ruffled someone’s feathers somewhere. I always thought I was pretty beige to be honest.
