The whole ethos of 'professional football' has been based around employing a combination of financial prowess and sporting ability from the day the Football League came into being. If anything, the Premier League and significant finance interrupts out what might otherwise be a fairly uniform system, based purely on size of fanbase alone, so unlike in the chart above, Clubs like Wigan and Bolton wouldn't have featured anywhere near their position on the distribution chart.....
But that's like you ignore the history of wage caps and latterly even distribution of TV money. Of course finances always mattered but the scale is totally different than it once was. Of course wage caps were cheated but the sums were laughably small. Stanley Matthews got a sports shop in town, in the Victorian era player were given nice cuts of meat in addition to their wage from the local butcher on the board or whatever. We're not talking about sums that were barely within comprehension. We're talking about a few underhand dealings.
You can't just say 'football has always been like this' - it palpably hasn't. There's always been friction between the ambition to spend freely and the desire to regulate for sporting reasons. AS much as you can say 'no! no! no! to regulation, regulation has been as much a part of professional football as spending has since virtually day one. Regulation was part of it even before the league, with all sorts of controvercy about payment and amatuer status. The league once formed quickly realised that free spending would diminish the product and swiftly moved to apply wage caps and rules.
I'm not saying those wage caps were necessarily 'good' - indeed, there are quite a few unanswered questions about where the money went in the maximum wage days when the crowds were huge and the wages tiny that have never really been answered. Brian Clough's animosity to 'the directors' is probably traced back to him being a pre 1961 player earning a pittance in front of huge crowds and wondering where all the ticket money ended up going. I'd recommend anyone in the world read 'When Footballers Were Skint' - it's one of the best books I've ever read. It's truly brilliant oral history... Anyway, I digress.
The point is - as much as you say 'money is part of the game and always has been' and we have to accept that (Arsenal essentially buying their place in the top fight as an example, various 'bank of England clubs' PKE and their shady dealings with Scottish pros and 'jobs' in mills and so on...) - you also have to accept that regulation and financial controls are part of the game and always have been. Granted, that doesn't mean FAN regulation per se is a good idea but reform or regulation or some sense of considering the financial impact on competition in and of itself isn't a terrible new imposition that has just been dreamed up by some Maoists - it's as much a part of the history of the game as anything else is. The friction represented by recent threads is in a sense, a similar friction as could be read in meetings in the 1890s or perhaps the meetings of the early 60s or maybe meetings in the 1980s about what to do with TV revenue or perhaps debates about the whys and wherefore of parachute payments and so on and so forth.
It is true that historically, we've relied on self regulation - but... what we have perhaps at this point in history, is a very different set of owners - it's fairly unprecedented that we've got the kind of global ownership that we know have. We know for a fact that FSG are baffled by the English obsession with the pyramid and would much prefer a kind of franchise system. Who knows what the Saudi's know or care about the British pyramid? Who really thinks the Glaziers have any consideration at all for Rochdale or Stockport or Oldham?
We know for a cast iron, stone cold fact that these owners (plus Daniel Levy) were more than prepared to walk away from the system to join a totally different structure.
Maybe we should have let them - that's not the point. The point is, we're entrusting self regulation and financial decisions to a system wherein the prime movers, the greatest influencers, the loudest voices are evidently looking for a closed shop. We know this as they LITERALLY tried to set one up. This year.
Thus glibly saying 'money has always been part of football' is true, but it doesn't tell the whole story. I don't recall Liverpool in the 80s, Wolves in the 50s, Arsenal in the 30s or any side of note from any era of football trying to essentially leave the pyramid behind as an irritating irrelevance.
Clearly the set up as it is, however loudly people say 'it doesn't' already impacts on the variety of teams that win trophies. That's a matter of fact, not opinion. There has never been a period like the last 15 years in terms of the predictability of the top 6 and the limited number of winners of domestic honours. That is a fact.
We ALSO know that the clubs as they are that benefit most from this set up are NOT satisfied with it. They want more money and even less precarity. In fact, they want to totally do away with precarity. They want a cast iron guarantee of a bigger slice of a bigger cake. Even though they've got more chance than ever of eating a bigger cake than ever - that's not enough.
What is an interesting thought experiment is - what if the EPL itself, stung by the actions of the 'big six' decided to make it's brand less dependent on those big 6? (Which sort of makes sense from a business perspective - if your most reliable brands are proving risky, make some new big sellers) - how would they go about doing that?
