Newsletter

Get your daily update and weekly newsletter by signing up today!

Opinion

The rich and powerful determined to get richer and more powerful

6 years ago
Share

The drive to make the rich and powerful, even richer and more powerful, is never ending.

The very richest and most powerful in the Premier League have decided they aren’t getting a fair share. The ‘big six’ of Liverpool, Spurs, Chelsea, Arsenal and the two Manchester clubs, trying to persuade the rest of the Premier League to agree to 35% of the overseas TV cash to be decided on merit.

Which basically means giving a lot more money to the teams who usually finish in the top six, which is them. The reasoning being that when they play on TV, generally more viewers are interested than when it is other clubs on the box.

Exactly how they expect to persuade clubs that don’t expect to regularly finish top ten, to help get the vote up to the necessary 14 of 20, hasn’t been made clear. A meeting this past week saw the clubs pushing for the change decide not to have a vote and postpone it until November, by which time they hope to have won the argument.

One rumour is that a breakaway and/or the old European Superleague threat could be used but then if say Chelsea were playing Atletico Madrid in the ‘league’, what would be special about playing them again in the Champions League the next week?

Elsewhere, the drive to create a bigger and bigger gap between the haves and the have nots/less also continues, bringing with it ever growing levels of boredom.

Past weeks have seen the football public trying to work out whether the Champions League group stage is even more boring than England’s World Cup qualification. Both competitions sees the English clubs/team matched up against ever weaker opposition, with the seeding system increasingly manipulated to try and make sure the right ones qualify.

So many matches to ensure as much money as possible is made, then on top of that England then try and jam in as many meaningless friendlies as possible in an attempt to rake in even more money.

Recently there was a stat published when Celtic met PSG which said that the French club had a wage bill of around ten times the size of Celtic’s, who in turn had a wage bill ten times higher than your average Scottish Premier League club.

The English Premier League is getting ever more dominant in terms of money and subsequently, then buying more and more star players from other countries. This is in large part driven by the fact that people around the world see the Premier League as the most competitive league around the globe, played in front of full stadiums of supporters who realistically believe that on any given day their team can beat anyone.

Manchester United and others already have loads more cash than the rest but if they want to keep the cash cow thriving, they will do well to accept the status quo which at least keeps a decent level of competition week to week.

As for England..best advice is to switch off for now and wait until the finals in Russia next summer.
[get_involved]

Share

If you would like to feature on The Mag, submit your article to contribute@themag.co.uk

Have your say

© 2024 The Mag. All Rights Reserved. Design & Build by Mediaworks