We want our cold nights in Stoke….

 

Since Sunday afternoon we have seen football fans unite to destroy the European Super League (ESL) because of the greed, deceit and the actual damn cheek of it. But one thing that stuck out for me was the banners of the “Big 6” and the irony I saw in most of them. 

• Earn it, you can’t buy our passion (Chelsea fan)

• Fans before finance (Leeds fan)

• What’s so Super (Liverpool fan)

• Liverpool 6th

• Spurs 7th

• Arsenal 9th

• Created by the poor, stolen by the rich (Manchester United fan)

• Football is for the fans (Leeds United first team squad with T-shirt)

I agree with all of these banners and I am sure they were created and shared with passion for their club, but it's too late!

Football was broken many, many years ago and us fans allowed it to happen. We continued to buy match tickets, even though they never went up with the cost of living, we brought merchandise and allowed clubs year on year to increase the cost of the kit. We even allowed them to create a new type of shirt the actual players wore on match days and paid £80 for the privilege and then finally we allowed some clubs to launch Champions League kits and then change them every season. 

Football fans are as loyal as they come and this has been taken advantage of by clubs with clever marketing campaigns and using social media to its maximum. Most clubs in England will tweet at least 5 times a day minimum, they will have special offers from the league sponsors and we now have every type of sponsor going. Liverpool have a globe official wristwatch and timing partner who felt that the timing was all wrong for the ESL and called time on the sponsor. Like seriously, who needs a timing sponsor and how would Sir Alex Ferguson have got on by constantly checking his watch at the end of the game. He was behind the times and would have made some serious money if we had them back in his time. My own team Wimbledon are not alone in having loads of sponsors and we recently added a local company in Reston Waste Management who thankfully have only been made a digital partner and not collecting any of the waste we had on the pitch at Kingsmeadow in previous seasons. Do be careful if you are around the Plough Lane area as the lorries from this company fly round corners and are not in the business of wasting precious time. 

The ESL is not yet defeated if you listen to the Real Madrid owner they have released statements that it has been suspended. These owners don’t sign up to something like this without the understanding of the consequences, especially when it's reported that the founder members have already provided £8m each to create the ESL and all the background work/resources that this type of league would need. They also are in breach of contract and that could result in massive payments at a time when these clubs along with the remainder of the pyramid are playing with no fans and no income. It's almost laughable when you hear the EPL clubs claim poverty, but they have and a number of them that have also benefited from the government furlough scheme. Tottenham and Manchester United together have just under a billion pounds of net debt and it gets worse if you look at the top two clubs in Spain. Real Madrid have committed to around €500m of loans to help pay for the upgrade on their stadium and Barcelona have serious short term debt that could result in them having no choice but to sell the crown jules. 

It was commendable to see nearly every journalist, pundit, tv presenter and ex-players come out and speak out about the proposed league, but one person I do have a lot of respect for is Gary Neville. He has been talking about the damage being done to the English game and the pyramid for many years and became louder when the Covid pandemic arrived and the closure of grounds. The interesting thing with him is that he is a co-owner of Salford City which is bankrolling the club to achieve EPL status in the next 10 years I reckon, however he hasn’t forgot his roots in non-league and voted for the salary cap earlier this season, even though this would impact the level of spending needed to move Salford out of League 2. Gary is a member of the ‘Saving the beautiful game reform group’ which wants the government to introduce an independent regulator to help distribute money down the pyramid. His argument is that we can still have the best league in the world, with the best players, but we must still look after the pyramid and let more more drip down to the teams in need. 

Now that the fans have suspended the ESL, what are they going to do next?

Because if the comments I heard on many radio phone ins and social media are to be believed, they wanted to save the future of all clubs in the pyramid. I don’t want to treat these fans as naive, but I wonder if they actually realise the detail of the money paid to the EFL in solidarity payments and what percentage of that is compared to the income they receive each season. Wimbledon received £1,198m last season made up of £675 core payment which is based on the league you are in, £423k for the academy and £100k for our community activities. If we were to be promoted to the Championship, based on a similar sized club the total money received would be £5,077m with the increased revenue being the core payment for the Championship as £4,5m. The solidarity payments split per division is way out of sync and currently the Championship get 80%, League One 12% and League Two 8%. So even if Wycombe Wanderers spend one season in the Championship, they will be rewarded well and if they invest the money, they will be very strong next season. 

I am worried that the fans of EPL clubs think the  fight is over now that they have stopped the ESL, as they will not want their club to stop spending money to recruit the best players. The most ironic banner I saw was the Chelsea “Earn it, you can’t buy our passion” Before Abramovich arrived in West London in 2003, Chelsea were nowhere near the biggest in London, let alone Europe and many of their younger fans would never believe the state the club was in during the 90’s. So bad in fact that Wimbledon used to regularly go to Stamford Bridge and come back with maximum points. I am not a massive fan of Chelsea and this is not an attack on them, but it just highlights that the fans have turned a blind eye when they have spent millions on players and salaries, turned a blind eye to the rest of the pyramid as if it didn’t exist and they even turned a blind eye to the demise of the FA Cup which is a massive money sinner for lower placed clubs in the pyramid. EPL clubs supported no replays recently and they have constantly sent weaker teams to these games. The money generated by a tie against Manchester United and the likes is worth a million pound outright as Crawley realised when they drew them away years ago. 

One of my biggest frustrations is that the EPL teams go on glorious pre-season tours to America, Australia and the Far East to promote their brand. If these fans believe their clubs support the pyramid, why do they not insist they play the lower league clubs around them locally? I remember going to a game at Kingstonians when Chelsea sent their entire first team squad for a friendly and ran out 10-0 winners. This was an annual fixture as they played their reserves at Kingsmeadow and this was a thank you and a nice money spinner for the non-league club. Arsenal used to do the same for Barnet and Liverpool for Tranmere Rovers. This summer it's likely that teams won't be travelling abroad and we could see the return of EPL teams visiting their local clubs. This shouldn’t be just for this season only, but should be every season. They can still go on their glamorous tours, but give something back to the clubs in the pyramid they care so much for. 

This morning's papers have stories about a British Super League with the Glasgow giants finally joining the money train. The idea is that this will help with negotiations for the forthcoming tv deal and help increase the money offered, which has started to decline. Why do these clubs need more money as they can currently get £100m at the end of the season for losing every game in the EPL. To give some balance the £100m would pay for Wimbledon’s yearly salary budget for easily 50 years, FIFTY years!! If they need more money, please can they use it to reduce ticket prices for EPL fans, reduce merchandise prices, and look to reduce players salaries as I don’t know how these players spend anywhere from £200k to £2m a month! Then use the excess money to help grassroots football, let more money drip down the pyramid and this will start to fix football. The EFL still needs to sort their own competition out and the additional money dropping down needs to be spent wisely. We can no longer have clubs spending over 100% of their yearly income on player salaries. I am not a businessman, but even I know that doesn't make sense and a sensible business plan. 

I read a superb article by Martin Samuel this morning in the Daily Mail about the reforms needed to fix football short term and It encourages our Prime Minister to actually do something, rather than joining the most popular campaign and bring in a government charter, effectively making it illegal to join another competition not under the UEFA and FIFA umbrella. Each owner would sign this charter and that should stop the next attack from the greedy European giants.  Martin lists a number of clauses within the charter ranging from not changing the team name, team colours and the finally as he words it, the Milton Keynes clause. The actual wording is “AFC Wimbledon will play home matches within a 10-mile radius of Plough Lane. 

The last week has frustrated me like no other as it has shown that if the franchising of Wimbledon was tried now, social media would stop it before you could finish the world renowned Charlie Koppel song. We never had the advantage of organising protests and demonstrations and reaching not just Wimbledon fans, but every football fan in the country like has happened this week.

The question to the whole of the football world is “Are you done now that you have helped destroy the ESL, or are you going to fix all off football and the pyramid?”