AMERICAN tycoon Henry Ford once said: “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”
Which brings us to the trouble facing English football right now.
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Mesut Ozil and a couple of his Arsenal team-mates refused to take wage cuts
The UK’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty says social distancing will be in place for another year, so sport in this country has real issues ahead — especially the Football League who may need a bailout.
What is really lacking right now is leadership. Where’s the Sports Minister Nigel Adams?
While the FA, Premier League and Football League heads are absentee landlords when the interests of the national sport are in real danger.
We have heard from one leader but unfortunately, he’s from the dark side — the PFA’s Gordon Taylor.
His one-dimensional utterance is like something from Carry On at Your Convenience, with ‘everybody out’ and no help from the workers at its centre. Football is not immune from danger like the 2008 banking crisis.
It’s not going to skate again with spectator-less sport possibly for a year, no gate receipts, reductions in sponsorship and commercial monies.
This is unlike anything the game has ever seen.
If football’s leaders won’t start grasping the nettle, maybe it’s time for the industry to be regulated? Here comes the Government!
Football puts £5billion into the exchequer, so it might just be worth helping.
Oliver Dowden, Secretary of State the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, says football can open behind closed doors to get the transfer market started to aid the eco system of football. How wrong can you be?
Who told him that? The Lion or the witch? And was he briefed in the wardrobe?
Others have popped up with a populist viewpoint that it is good for public morale for sport to come back. That’s very true.
And they want remaining games be broadcast for free. How that helps the financially-stricken clubs is beyond me.
The Government could bailout clubs with loans via repayable bonds or gilts with conditions like immediate reform such as salary caps!
Look at the MLS in the USA, which is now the ninth best-supported league in the world and growing.
The club with the biggest turnover is Atlanta United with only £60m and it is still profitable. Now that’s a blueprint.
So, will football actually help itself?
Owners have to face up to pain but frankly the response from the Premier League players is nothing short of an absolute disgrace.
People are losing money, businesses, careers and lives but footballers are resisting giving up a little money.
They prefer their ‘PlayersTogether’ initiative that donates money to the NHS, which is a smokescreen to deflect from taking pay cuts.
The scheme is noble in spirit having raised £4m (a sum dwarfed by Captain Tom Moore’s garden walk for £30m) but it effectively shut down the notion that a minimum of £500m worth of pay cuts was the order of the day for their industry.
Only one club’s players — Arsenal, minus the staggeringly unaware Mesut Ozil and a couple of team-mates — have taken pay cuts.
Simon Jordan has hit out at the lack of leadership in football following the pandemic
Bluster from pundits such as Roy Keane on players not having to give up anything are ignorant and perhaps explain why he is no longer a manager.
Players need to be led and told properly.
Alongside this, unbelievably, the rumours are starting about the transfer market and clubs spending millions. Is football really this obtuse?
Manchester United’s Ed Woodward says it is inappropriate to talk about money and £100m transfers in the current climate, while his manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer has talked about ‘exploiting the market’.
The transfer market needs to be killed off for now and hopefully that will start the downward pressure on fees, and a subsequent recession of player wages. But I bet transfers aren’t stopped.
Meanwhile, a new chairman of the Premier League has arrived in Garry Hoffman.
I hope he has more success in this role than his desire to put a consortium together to buy Coventry that he and I spoke about three years ago.
Garry struck me as a real leader then and I hope he gets the opportunity to be one, presiding over a period of reform — rather than being a nodding dog for the Big Six.
At a conference about sport advancement in 2017, I talked about my Netflix of Football idea and the need for a downward pressure on wages.
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But I was told by another member of the panel — an executive director of Spurs, no less — that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Football doesn’t really deserve any help given its outlook.
And as far as the insightful analogy above goes, well it’s bloody broken now.
– SIMON JORDAN’S Final Word is on talkSPORT from 5-8pm on Sunday.
Source: Soccer - thesun.co.uk
