IN THE 1976 movie Network, newscaster Howard Beale is harangued by a TV executive for an on-air tirade in which Beale tried to torpedo a Saudi takeover of the conglomerate which owned his station.
“You have meddled with the primal forces of nature Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it”, the executive fulminates. “You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples…we no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies Mr. Beale.
“The world is a college of corporations. Inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale.”
This philosophy eventually trickled down to the Premier League, although it was far less eloquently expounded.
“We bought Weetabix and we leveraged it up to make our return. You could say that anyone who was eating Weetabix was paying for our purchase of Weetabix. It was just business. It is the same for Liverpool”, said the club’s charlatan former owner Tom Hicks, the Texan who was partly responsible for saddling the club with debt and taking them to the brink of administration.
Such is the absurdity of the age, the idea that a football club wouldbe just a for-profit business now seems quaint; these days anyone who’s anyone is a front for the image-laundering operation of a repressive, avaricious state.
Football clubs were never intended to be run as businesses or corporations, but to try and reverse this trend now isn’t even about trying to close the stable door after the horse has bolted: Sorry sir, this stable has been sucked up by a shadowy investment group, given a glass front and turned into a Chopped and a Starbucks.
The scale of the money and the global sprawl of the interests involved in the Premier League makes it difficult to comprehend just how disfigured and grotesque the competition has become, and the quality of entertainment and spectacle every week makes it difficult to even want to.
But its malign effects were made blatant this week with the demise of Bury FC, expelled from the Football League over unpaid debts, ending the club’s 134-year history.
Fans outside Bury's Gigg Lane with symbolic clock and coffin. Dave Howarth
Dave Howarth
There is lots of blame to apportion for Bury’s demise. The EFL were found shamefully negligent in following their own rules in vetting owner Steve Dale, who bought the club for £1 without having to prove to the EFL he had the money to maintain the club, as is supposed to be a requirement under the “fit and proper persons” test.
Dale bought the club after it was led into financial ruin by the club’s previous owner, property developer Stewart Day, whose company borrowed £1 million secured on the club’s stadium Gigg Lane.
Per David Conn of The Guardian, the rate of interest on this loan was obscene – it ended up being 10% per month, which accumulated to an annual rate of 138%.
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£450,000 of this money was loaned from a company called Cash4Assets.
Day’s company, Mederco, went into administration, and ultimately Bury could not be hauled from the abyss.
The EFL have much soul-searching – and reforming – to do. But what of the Premier League? The vile inequities are plain to see: the week Bury went to the wall, the Mail reported that Manchester United were happy to pay Alexis Sanchez £300,000 a week to play for someone else.
The frightful chasm in wealth between the Premier League and the rest of the Football League, exacerbated all the time with relegated clubs dropping down with their pockets stuffed of parachute payments, is dragging clubs beyond their means in the hope of merely competing.
Beyond this, the Premier League isn’t sharing its wealth to a remotely acceptable standard.
The clubs who don’t qualify for parachute payments are given what are called “solidarity payments.”
Championship clubs receive £2.3 million a season, League One clubs get £360,000 a season and fourth-tier clubs are handed £240,000. It’s not a whole lot, considering Premier League clubs made £2.45 billion in TV and commercial revenue last season.
Manchester United are among the Premier League clubs reportedly open to increasing solidarity payments, but consider what the biggest clubs have actually done of late.
These “solidarity” figures are calculated as a percentage of third-year parachute payments, the value of which is 20% of the television revenue shared by the 20 Premier League clubs.
The domestic television revenue for the Premier League is – in strictly relevant terms – divvied out pretty equally: 50% of the rights are shared equally, with 25% awarded on the basis of league position and the remaining 25% divided on the grounds of how often a club has appeared on live television.
This distribution kept the League reasonably competitive – in comparison to La Liga, at least, where Barca and Real could sell their own TV deals and swallow the rest of the competition while they were at it – but a recent change led by the Premier League’s Big Six has, to misquote our fulminating executive, meddled with the primal forces of the League’s founding nature.
The Big Six have recently secured a bigger slice of the Premier League’s international TV rights than the rest of the League – any increase in the value of the international rights would, from this season, be distributed according to where a side finished in the league.
The higher you finish – the more you get.
And so the rights promptly went up by 35% to £4.35 billion.
If you think that’s bad for the Brightons and Burnleys of the world, consider the EFL clubs – the solidarity payments are only linked to the shared TV revenue, so here’s a recent move in which the rich got richer and the poor got…nothing.
But away from the elite’s endless engirdling of wealth, they bear a deeper fault for the plight of Bury.
This isn’t to get nostalgic about English football’s vanished age – players and supporters were largely treated terribly back then – but the game was at least founded on the notion that clubs shouldn’t be run purely as profit-hungry businesses.
FA rules stated that directors could not be paid by the club or work directly for them, and shareholders’ dividends could not exceed 7.5%. Clubs agreed to give smaller, visiting clubs a percentage of gate receipts.
These were slowly rolled back in the 1980s, and in 1983 Irving Scholar managed to circumvent the FA rules on financial restrictions by creating a holding company which owned the club as a legal subsidiary, and thus could run the club and harvest its profits without being subject to the FA rules.
At this time, Tottenham, along with Arsenal, Everton, Liverpool and Manchester United were waking up to their individual commercial power and they were not reined in.
Their agitation ultimately ended in the Premier League, and its regulatory free-for-all has allowed clubs rake in the staggering sums of money we see today. When the League was set-up, the FA did not insist on controls on clubs’ spending or any kind of close regulation. Instead they shrugged their shoulders – literally.
The League was first envisaged as a slimmed-down 18-team competition to give the England team more time to prepare for competitions, but when FA Chairman Bert Millichip was approached by clubs to see if there was any leeway with that figure, he shrugged his shoulders and said “It’s your league, you decide”.
The first League season kicked off with 22 clubs and Brian Glanville nicknamed him Bert the Inert.
Bert Millichip. EMPICS Sport
EMPICS Sport
The Premier League has ultimately normalised the idea that a football club exists to make vast amounts of money and should be free from regulation to live or die by the actions of the private hands into which it falls.
This is great news for the television viewer, who can now watch football of an unfathomably high standard every week. But it means nothing this week to the people of Bury.
Their community is divided like many others in Britain – it voted 54% to 46% in favour of Leave – and this week they have lost one of the few things that can bring people together under a single, shared identity.
The club’s disappearance is a tragedy for the community, and if this happens at other clubs across the country, it will be a tragedy for English society.
Football clubs help knit together society’s fraying fabric, but increasingly, football doesn’t live in a world of societies and communities.
Football is a college of corporations and nation states, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business.
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Premier League's greed to blame for Bury's grim demise
IN THE 1976 movie Network, newscaster Howard Beale is harangued by a TV executive for an on-air tirade in which Beale tried to torpedo a Saudi takeover of the conglomerate which owned his station.
“You have meddled with the primal forces of nature Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it”, the executive fulminates. “You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples…we no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies Mr. Beale.
“The world is a college of corporations. Inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale.”
This philosophy eventually trickled down to the Premier League, although it was far less eloquently expounded.
“We bought Weetabix and we leveraged it up to make our return. You could say that anyone who was eating Weetabix was paying for our purchase of Weetabix. It was just business. It is the same for Liverpool”, said the club’s charlatan former owner Tom Hicks, the Texan who was partly responsible for saddling the club with debt and taking them to the brink of administration.
Such is the absurdity of the age, the idea that a football club would be just a for-profit business now seems quaint; these days anyone who’s anyone is a front for the image-laundering operation of a repressive, avaricious state.
Football clubs were never intended to be run as businesses or corporations, but to try and reverse this trend now isn’t even about trying to close the stable door after the horse has bolted: Sorry sir, this stable has been sucked up by a shadowy investment group, given a glass front and turned into a Chopped and a Starbucks.
The scale of the money and the global sprawl of the interests involved in the Premier League makes it difficult to comprehend just how disfigured and grotesque the competition has become, and the quality of entertainment and spectacle every week makes it difficult to even want to.
But its malign effects were made blatant this week with the demise of Bury FC, expelled from the Football League over unpaid debts, ending the club’s 134-year history.
There is lots of blame to apportion for Bury’s demise. The EFL were found shamefully negligent in following their own rules in vetting owner Steve Dale, who bought the club for £1 without having to prove to the EFL he had the money to maintain the club, as is supposed to be a requirement under the “fit and proper persons” test.
Dale bought the club after it was led into financial ruin by the club’s previous owner, property developer Stewart Day, whose company borrowed £1 million secured on the club’s stadium Gigg Lane.
Per David Conn of The Guardian, the rate of interest on this loan was obscene – it ended up being 10% per month, which accumulated to an annual rate of 138%.
£450,000 of this money was loaned from a company called Cash4Assets.
Day’s company, Mederco, went into administration, and ultimately Bury could not be hauled from the abyss.
The EFL have much soul-searching – and reforming – to do. But what of the Premier League? The vile inequities are plain to see: the week Bury went to the wall, the Mail reported that Manchester United were happy to pay Alexis Sanchez £300,000 a week to play for someone else.
The frightful chasm in wealth between the Premier League and the rest of the Football League, exacerbated all the time with relegated clubs dropping down with their pockets stuffed of parachute payments, is dragging clubs beyond their means in the hope of merely competing.
Beyond this, the Premier League isn’t sharing its wealth to a remotely acceptable standard.
The clubs who don’t qualify for parachute payments are given what are called “solidarity payments.”
Championship clubs receive £2.3 million a season, League One clubs get £360,000 a season and fourth-tier clubs are handed £240,000. It’s not a whole lot, considering Premier League clubs made £2.45 billion in TV and commercial revenue last season.
Manchester United are among the Premier League clubs reportedly open to increasing solidarity payments, but consider what the biggest clubs have actually done of late.
These “solidarity” figures are calculated as a percentage of third-year parachute payments, the value of which is 20% of the television revenue shared by the 20 Premier League clubs.
The domestic television revenue for the Premier League is – in strictly relevant terms – divvied out pretty equally: 50% of the rights are shared equally, with 25% awarded on the basis of league position and the remaining 25% divided on the grounds of how often a club has appeared on live television.
This distribution kept the League reasonably competitive – in comparison to La Liga, at least, where Barca and Real could sell their own TV deals and swallow the rest of the competition while they were at it – but a recent change led by the Premier League’s Big Six has, to misquote our fulminating executive, meddled with the primal forces of the League’s founding nature.
The Big Six have recently secured a bigger slice of the Premier League’s international TV rights than the rest of the League – any increase in the value of the international rights would, from this season, be distributed according to where a side finished in the league.
The higher you finish – the more you get.
And so the rights promptly went up by 35% to £4.35 billion.
If you think that’s bad for the Brightons and Burnleys of the world, consider the EFL clubs – the solidarity payments are only linked to the shared TV revenue, so here’s a recent move in which the rich got richer and the poor got…nothing.
But away from the elite’s endless engirdling of wealth, they bear a deeper fault for the plight of Bury.
This isn’t to get nostalgic about English football’s vanished age – players and supporters were largely treated terribly back then – but the game was at least founded on the notion that clubs shouldn’t be run purely as profit-hungry businesses.
FA rules stated that directors could not be paid by the club or work directly for them, and shareholders’ dividends could not exceed 7.5%. Clubs agreed to give smaller, visiting clubs a percentage of gate receipts.
These were slowly rolled back in the 1980s, and in 1983 Irving Scholar managed to circumvent the FA rules on financial restrictions by creating a holding company which owned the club as a legal subsidiary, and thus could run the club and harvest its profits without being subject to the FA rules.
At this time, Tottenham, along with Arsenal, Everton, Liverpool and Manchester United were waking up to their individual commercial power and they were not reined in.
Their agitation ultimately ended in the Premier League, and its regulatory free-for-all has allowed clubs rake in the staggering sums of money we see today. When the League was set-up, the FA did not insist on controls on clubs’ spending or any kind of close regulation. Instead they shrugged their shoulders – literally.
The League was first envisaged as a slimmed-down 18-team competition to give the England team more time to prepare for competitions, but when FA Chairman Bert Millichip was approached by clubs to see if there was any leeway with that figure, he shrugged his shoulders and said “It’s your league, you decide”.
The first League season kicked off with 22 clubs and Brian Glanville nicknamed him Bert the Inert.
The Premier League has ultimately normalised the idea that a football club exists to make vast amounts of money and should be free from regulation to live or die by the actions of the private hands into which it falls.
This is great news for the television viewer, who can now watch football of an unfathomably high standard every week. But it means nothing this week to the people of Bury.
Their community is divided like many others in Britain – it voted 54% to 46% in favour of Leave – and this week they have lost one of the few things that can bring people together under a single, shared identity.
The club’s disappearance is a tragedy for the community, and if this happens at other clubs across the country, it will be a tragedy for English society.
Football clubs help knit together society’s fraying fabric, but increasingly, football doesn’t live in a world of societies and communities.
Football is a college of corporations and nation states, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business.
Football is a business, Mr. Beale.
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Bury Premier League talking point