Mails: The Premier League should be forced to help out

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Some serious issues with the Premier League and finances
A lot has been said yesterday about the state of the finances in football, particularly regarding the lower leagues after the tweets made by the chairman of Accrington.

I believe that there are a few answers to the problem(s).

Money…
The money that the smaller clubs receives, is largely irrelevant. If you give a small club £350K they will spend it, if you give them £500k they will spend it, £750k… The problem is that it gets spent on player wages, agents fees etc. the more you give them, the more they will take. So what’s the point. It’s a zero sum equation. Maybe the smaller clubs should be moaning at the EFL themselves for the way it divides up the money, £2.3 million for Championship clubs but only £360K for the smallest, seems a little unfair.

I believe it would be better to give the clubs a pot of money as they get already, they know they have that to work with. But also have a pot for each division that the clubs can bid for. So they can improve facilities, run community projects etc. and for god sake make a song and dance about it, it would be great PR. Imagine Chesterfield building a new stand with a massive Premier League logo on the hoardings letting everyone know who’s paying for it. This kind of thing would enable them to make more money themselves without having to take out expensive loans, which they can invest back into the club, making them more sustainable, and making them less reliant on money from the premier league.

Player wages and agent fees…
These are part of football, they are not going away. I don’t begrudge someone earning £300k a week to play football, it’s ridiculous, but hey. But in the lower leagues if squad wage caps were in place like they are in the MLS, with a couple of star players that you can pay what you want, it would be a simple way to keep a lid on most of the problem. Why the lower league chairmen are not voting this in for themselves is a mystery. If you are fed up with the players and the agents having you over then bring in a system that takes it out of everybody’s hands and puts everyone in the same boat and pulls back some of the power from the players and agents, redressing the balance. At the end of the day the players want to earn and the agents want a cut.

Pecking order…
The problem with a lot (not all) lower league clubs is that they need to know their place in the pecking order. Realistically only one or two clubs have gone from the very bottom to top in the last 25 years, Bournemouth who had a very wealthy backer and Swansea. So unless a Russian billionaire fancies buying Port Vale, Cheltenham or Torquay the odds are very much against them.

So the clubs should accept that for the most part you are peoples second team or “local side” and sort out the fan experience on match day. The value for money for what you receive and match day experience in British football is terrible. Horrible beer, disgusting hot dogs, sort it out. Small clubs should look at themselves as community assets and act accordingly, source the beer from local breweries, the sausages from local farms etc. They should look to the smaller German clubs for inspiration. Fill the stands because it’s a good experience and work from there.

Facilities and resources…
Over the last couple of years the idea of Premier League “B” teams playing in the lower leagues. An idea I don’t like. But instead, why don’t the bigger clubs buddy up with smaller clubs in their orbit, for e.g. Arsenal and Barnet, Man Utd and Bury, Stoke and Port Vale, Man City and Stockport. The smaller clubs would benefit greatly from the access to the facilities and expertise that the bigger club has, the bigger club would benefit from sending their young players on loan to the smaller club who gains league experience, while the big club maintains a large degree of control over their development. Think David Beckham at Preston North End, that worked out rather well. Also the positive PR would do them the world of good.

In an era of unprecedented wealth in English football things should not be the way they are. Miss management from top to bottom, FA, Premier League, EFL, they should all hang their heads in shame. We the punter should stop putting up with it.
Adam

Definitely time to give Conte more credit
Reading your article on Carvalho’s comments and also hearing another chump on a radio talk show playing down Conte’s work this year has sent me over the edge a little? Isn’t it time Conte got a bit more credit?

Yes he’s exuberant on the touchline and, as somebody who hated the way Rio Ferdinand used to celebrate other player’s goals as if he’d scored them himself, I see how that might be annoying. Yes he’s inherited a team that won the league not so long ago and yes he could win the league this year without having had the impact of European football.

All of these things are of course relevant but let’s not ignore how Conte has handled his first season. He’s learned the language pretty well and certainly never hidden behind that in his interviews. He’s also managed to go through the season without baiting any other manager or offending/upsetting too many people -other than two managers getting huffy about him celebrating of course. When the team loses it’s clear Conte’s unhappy but I don’t recall much bitterness or any toys being launched from prams.

You only have to look at the distinct lack of comments on F365 articles about Conte to see that he isn’t provoking much ire among other fans. In fact, as a Chelsea fan, it’s really nice to have a manager who isn’t constantly pissing and moaning or coming out with utterly ridiculous cack every week. We Chelsea fans do remember how Man United fans must feel now – it’s tiresome defending his comments all the time, isn’t it?

So whether being in Europe defines the success of a season or whether not being in Europe means a strong league performance is devalued is probably an argument best wheeled out by fans trying to defend their own league position or taking potshots at Chelsea’s. For me (and for many other Chelsea fans I’m sure) I’m pretty happy that my team has a manager that is a winner and has clearly instilled a different belief in a team, which could well win the league tomorrow.

That team could well win the double too. A big improvement on last year. Surely there’s room to consider and praise the way Conte has achieved that rather than constantly looking for reasons to cheapen it.
Ted Maul

Disagreeing with Rio on our clubs in Europe
Got to take a bit of an issue with Rio saying how far off the rest the Prem sides are.  The Champions league is not a test of the inevitable best like the league, but who can put on a better performance on their day despite injuries and opposition tactics. Hence Leicester being cracking this year despite the consensus being they were rubbish. (No offence, but you were pushing relegation).

Were Chelsea in the CL this year I think we’d have seen them do pretty good, providing Conte rotated his team in the league to keep the best fresh.

Tottenham similarly have a great first team, but whether it was Pochettino’s failure in tactics or a league prioritisation, they failed in the group. They’ve shown against Chelsea and Arsenal this year they can beat the best, it’s about managing them over through those games.

Similarly Klopp has a fantastic record against big teams despite having Klaven/Lucas/Lovren at centre back at all times. The problem is the oft discussed strength of the league, but also I feel the management beyond the first team manager in allowing squads to be built that can fight on both fronts. How many squads in the PL have bench options like Isco and Asensio?

This means that when your “star” player is missing you don’t collapse like Spurs did in the Europa or Liverpool in January.

PL squads may have excellent XIs, and 25 man squads, but the drop off in quality is so sharp that single injuries can derail seasons, and looking at a squad strength is as important as the first XI.
One way to look at it is if you were putting all 18 players on the pitch at the same time, who would have the best chance? Inevitably you won’t have your strongest XI every day so this is what you could use to measure their chances.

For what it’s worth, I think Juventus’ player army (look up their squad), is a massive influence in them building such a dominant team first in the league and perhaps now Europe.
KC (Barca spent £70m on players they knew would be benching this year)

Kit launches: A bonus system
Yesterday, I listened to an episode of Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast, which some people call RHLSTP, and he interviewed Tom Davis from Murder in Successville. Davis has also previously starred in some videos for Southampton FC’s kit launches. I’m usually behind the curve but actually this turned out to have some timeliness, as teams are gradually unveiling their kits for next year.

In light of this, in the unlikely event of me ever being put in charge of the FA, my first rule regarding kits will be to award bonus points on the following lines:

*any teams whose kits can be described as “remember back in the day when we had that really good kit? We’ve brought that back” – 1 point

*any teams who keep the exact same kits (allowing for change of sponsor) from the previous season – 2 points

*any teams whose launch is simply a club suit reading out a statement along the lines of “it’s a just a football kit, isn’t it” – 1 point

*any teams whose unveilings places emphasis on the kit’s merits for playing football, and pretending its models are some sort of gang or boyband – 1 point

*any teams who refuse to sell replica shorts and socks in adult sizes – 2 points

This scheme is designed to pose some dilemmas to the biggest teams, as to whether they are willing to trade boosts to their football success in order to grow their global brand by fleecing customers for every penny. If nothing else, I had a fun half hour coming up with this.
Ed Quoththeraven

On Keano and United’s season
Roy Keane has a serious chip on his shoulder about Man United. He is the best captain I’ve watched in my lifetime (too young to have watched Robson) but he seems to talk about United with the disdain of a massive rival. I don’t think it is because he now hates the club and it is also not solely down to the fact that he holds them in such high prestige that anything less than the lofty heights of Fergie’s prime is completely rubbish. It is a mixture of both. This attitude is the making and breaking of Roy Keane.

As a manager, I don’t think Keano could adapt to the fact he won’t have access to the level of players he was used to at United or have the attitude that Clough and Fergie instilled. Instead of adapting he gets angry and frustrated and demoralises his teams. Sunderland players have talked of his changing room tantrums.

Now that is what I call embarrassing. There has a quote f365 recently published on how Fergie described Kevin Keegan as a manager and I think this can be attributed to Roy Keane the manager. His playing success means he can not cope when things don’t go his way as a manager.

However regarding today’s quotes, if you cut through the OTT vitriol of how Keane puts his points across, there is a lot truth in them. The mailbox has been a hub of debate between United’s season. Is it a success, is it a failure? As a United fan I really enjoyed United winning the cup.

I will enjoy winning the Europa League even more if it happens but deep down we all know that this has been a poor season. When Jose, Pogba and Zlatan arrived we expected a title challenge. A top four battle wasn’t even mentioned as that much was assumed. United have had success in the cups but it’s the league form that really measures progress and United are set to regress in the league. Every season now the most hope and optimism United fans have is during the transfer window and it starts to slowly evaporate as the football starts.

That is pretty depressing and is a reflection of a club that has become more astute at running a business than a football club. I do have hope for next season and have seen signs of Mourinho creating a much more solid team than Moyes/LVG ever did but its been far too inconsistent to merit outright praise.

Jose needs to get it together over the summer and not allow next year it to get to the point that success and failure for the entire season hangs in the balance of a cup final.
Dave, Ireland

It’s away goals, again
The Madrid Derby was excellent last night – at least it was until the 42nd minute when it was effectively ended as a contest.

Why? Because Isco popped up with his away goal. Why are away goals still a thing? They made sense when European football first started when travelling across Europe was a big deal and only one team from each country qualified for the competition – travelling say from England to Yugoslavia was a big deal in the 60s or 70s.

However, the competition has changed beyond recognition now and once in the knock out stages it is pretty likely that teams from France, Spain, Germany, England and Italy will be facing off against each other and will be flying business class or on private planes for flights of only an hour. Last nights game took this to the extreme, you had 2 teams from the same city playing each other. The Real players didn’t need to travel and probably prepared for the game in similar style to a home game.

Even Monaco to Turin is a shorter journey then any of the London clubs have had going up to Sunderland or Boro this season. Given that Europe is getting smaller, isn’t just better for the competition to just let the teams get on with it – who cares if the first leg was 4-1 and the second 3-0 – it’s a 4-4 draw, one team doesn’t deserve to go through more because they nicked a goal on the others ground. Would Barca’s comeback against PSG have been less enjoyable if at 5-1 they were guaranteed extra time?

Atletico had momentum last night but due to one bit of good play by Benzema and the ball falling at Isco’s feet, the last 50 mins of yesterday’s game became no more than an entertaining exhibition match devoid of any real tension as nobody expected them to get 3 in one half.

I guess the concern is that it could change the way teams approach games if the away goal means less, so why not trial it next year. Use the Europa League as a guinea pig, scrap away goals, see what happens and if it’s positive get rid of them entirely.
Paul, Frankfurt

Neil Taylor: A nice bloke
Just a quick one on Neil Taylor. I can confirm he is not ‘that type’.

We’re currently in holiday in the same resort and he seems a really nice, down to earth bloke.

Had a quick chat re Villa, Bruce and Coleman. He comes across as a warm, witty, family man. Maybe not all footballers are a**eholes after all!
Lee – Darlington

Oh Damian
I laughed/cringed along with everyone else in reading today’s Mediawatch about The Spectator’s Damian Reilly, who, having previously admitted to not being into football began supporting Ferguson’s Man Utd in the early 90s but stopped upon Fergie’s departure and transferred his dubious affections to Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal. This is because he didn’t find MU exciting under Moyes and wanted a more thrusting, attacking team and Arsenal at that point fitted the bill.

Can we therefore assume that when Arsene Wenger inevitably leaves the Emirates, Mr. Reilly will start supporting Tottenham Hotspur?
Huw (please don’t Damian), WHL