Football League feature in Times

[Josky]

Anyone read Martin Samuel's cracking editorial piece in today's Times about the Football League being better (in terms of excitement, management, etc) than the Premiership.

It also makes a strong case for the importance of football clubs as a centre of civic pride and national importance (sort of)...

Have a look:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8305-1106772,00.html

 

[Lush]

Brilliant article. And, among other points, an excellent argument for Falmer.

 

[Grizz]

A superb article and very informative. Thanks for posting the link Josky.

 

[Hiney]

Brilliant article, moving me to E Mail the author

 

[perth seagull]

Can anyone copy and paste the article here? You have to be registered with the Times to be able to read it.

 

[albiongirl]

Excellent article

 

[Turkey]

May 12, 2004

Heard about this brave new world of integrity? It's called the Football League
By Martin Samuel



OVERRATED. Underrated. Sports Illustrated, the American magazine, kicked off this little game. A few years back it devoted an entire issue to debating the most hyped and unsung sporting activities, teams, people, even venues. Its main incendiary conclusions were that Steffi Graf was the most puffed-up tennis player (without the intervention of a knife-wielding maniac she would have played second fiddle to Monica Seles as well as Martina Navratilova) and it was better to watch the game from the armchair than the main stand.
An English equivalent cries out to be done. We could start with the opinion once conspiratorially voiced to me by a member of the 1966 World Cup-winning squad that Johnny Haynes was a better player than Bobby Charlton. Next we invite Freddie Trueman to explain why Ian Botham couldn’t bowl “an ’oop down ’ill”, as he had it, or find an athlete to argue once more over Sebastian Coe versus Steve Ovett. I know grown men who grow incandescent with rage if Sir Alex Ferguson’s name is mentioned in the same breath as that of Brian Clough. Pencil them in for a punch-up on day three.



For the time being, though, make do with this morsel. Overrated: the Premier League. Underrated: the Football League. Get the beers in and off we go. This week, tucked away in a corner normally reserved for ice hockey or late dog results from Catford, came news that Football League crowd figures were at their highest for 40 years. Match attendances for the three divisions below the top averaged 9,595, an increase of 7 per cent on last year and the best figure since 1963-64, a season when well-supported clubs including Leeds United, Sunderland, Manchester City and Newcastle United were all to be found outside the old first division.

An aggregate gate of 8.8 million means this season’s Nationwide League first division is the best attended since its equivalent in 1955-56, when the top three were Sheffield Wednesday, Leeds and Liverpool. English gates beyond the top flight are 50 per cent higher than in Italy and Germany and more than double those of France and Spain. This is a vibrant, thriving competition, despite its gloomy persona.

Compare it with the moribund predictability of the Premiership, home of aggrandisement, unsustainable borrowing and mounting debt. History should be made at Highbury on Saturday, but the ability of one club to go a season unbeaten is hardly evidence of strength among the rest. English clubs have again been embarrassed in Europe (Newcastle were removed from the Champions League by the second-placed team in Serbia, then from the Uefa Cup by the seventh-placed team in France) and, Arsenal aside, much of the football played this season has been unexceptional.

Manchester United are at their weakest in ten years, Chelsea are cautious and dull and Liverpool and Newcastle are underachieving also-rans, nearer in points to Leeds at the bottom than Arsenal, on top. Those that resent the success of Arsenal should imagine the season without them. Shorn of Thierry Henry’s genius, the defining moments of football’s past nine months would be Rio Ferdinand’s missed drugs test and the relegation and destruction of a club that three years ago stood one match from a European Cup final.

While the Premiership does represent excellence in small doses, it just as comfortably stands for arrogance and wantonness on a scale that many supporters find unsettling. There is also the question of quality. Sam Allardyce and Alan Curbishley are fine managers deserving better opportunity; but where would seventh-placed Bolton Wanderers finish in La Liga? What impact would eighth-placed Charlton Athletic make in Serie A? Blackburn Rovers, a mid-table Premiership side, were knocked out of the Uefa Cup by a mid-table club from Turkey. Overrated? You bet.

Perhaps that is why supporters are again turning towards a competition that is perceived to possess in integrity what it lacks in eminence. In marketing terms, the Football League has a unique selling point in being everything the Premier League is not. It is not touring the Far East this summer. It is not bonding with the lads and assorted hookers in La Manga. It is not selling prawn sandwiches to tour parties from Norway. It is not paying £750,000 to agents for one player. The Football League may have a dour, cloth-cap image but with that also comes charisma and civic pride. That is why continued support is so essential.

Right now, there are just 13 towns and cities in England that boast a Premiership club (and there will be fewer next season). That leaves a great many communities needing the Football League to fly the flag. And if the League won’t do it, who will? I’ll tell you. Michael Ryan.

It is a sad truth that disaster and notoriety are often all that puts a town on the map. Hungerford, Lockerbie, Dunblane: nobody knew where these places were until tragedy intervened. Lynmouth is a beautiful village in North Devon, one of the prettiest places on earth, yet the majority of local features concern the night in 1952 when 34 lives were lost and 420 were made homeless in a flood. Hungerford finds a place in the national psyche via the actions of a maniac with a gun. Who had heard of Soham until two little girls disappeared? Much geography is no more than a macabre trawl through moors, rubble and book depositories.

Yet, every week, through a modest competition it is claimed few care about, scores of towns and communities find a place in your consciousness for an entirely positive reason: because they have a football club. The day James Alexander Gordon stops charting the progress of Huddersfield Town, Hartlepool United and Kidderminster Harriers, you will never hear of these places again unless a train derails.

Football gives more to its communities than it ever takes out. In the days when bad economics had ripped the guts out of Liverpool, any spring in the step came from one indisputable fact: the city still had the best football team in the world. And on a smaller scale the Football League gives that boost to provincial England every week.

Want proof? A true schoolboy football fan will be able to identify Colchester or Grimsby on any map, but ask him to point to Barrow or Workington. Those towns are now lost to his generation. That is the impact of the Football League. That is why it is so underrated.

Do you know that this summer the Football League will release details of payments made to agents by each of its 72 clubs, so supporters can see where the money is going? That it is putting a salary cap in place, with players’ wages unable to exceed 60 per cent of turnover (this happened in the third division this season and will be expanded to the second division next season)? That there will be a “fit and proper person ” rule placed before the AGM this summer, with the aim of effectively barring a gentleman such as Geoffrey Richmond, the now-bankrupt former chairman of Bradford City, from taking control of your club? These may be reactive rather than pro-active measures, brought on by the ITV Digital fiasco, but they constitute a damn sight more thought about the future of football than emanates from the privileged few at the Premier League.

Its critics claim that the League is ushering in a nanny state; that it should exist to run the competition, not the businesses of its members, that caps and controls merely stunt ambition and rob football of its dream. But when a dream brings a club to its knees, as happened with Leeds (whose chief executive discreetly sounded out the League about what level of re-entry would be permissible if the club were to fold completely this season), it is time to get reacquainted with reality.

For example, when Chris Moore pulled out as chairman of Oldham Athletic, he insisted that his £5 million investment in the transfer market was a loan, not a venture. Though he recanted, the problems he left behind almost killed the club. So now, when assessing the income stream used to define turnover, only money that is given, not lent, can be recorded. So if a chairman is handing over £2 million, no strings attached, then 60 per cent of that can be used on players’ wages. If he wants it back at a later date then, sorry chum, it doesn’t count.

So the dream that Roman Abramovich will lose interest in Chelsea and turn to Wrexham is still alive; it just has less chance of evolving into a nightmare that his parting gift is a £100 million invoice for loaning the money to buy such mighty talents as Hernán Crespo and Juan Sebastián Verón. This is something called good governance. In our game it is as rare as a leftfooted midfield player with a British passport.

There is a movement to get even more supporters back to basics next season. One idea is a kit amnesty, where second-hand Premiership shirts could be exchanged for new Football League ones at half-price. Imagine Northampton Town and Bristol Rovers reclaiming that lost generation of locals who favour Manchester United and Arsenal. A nice thought, if utopian.

It would be encouraging to believe, too, that, as a result of the Football League example, the biggest and richest clubs in the land would consider mirror measures to counter the growing economic crisis. That one day the work of agents would be made transparent, financial responsibility would be written into the rulebook and questions would be asked when 25 per cent of an important, historic club went to a man answerable for 2,245 government-sponsored deaths in three months last year.

Yet while Thaksin Shinawatra, the Thailand Prime Minister, may one day run Liverpool, the jury is out on whether he could get in as easily at Tranmere Rovers. The Football League dares to ask such questions. That is why it should never be underrated.


E-mail Martin Samuel at aogy90@dial.pipex.com


DEBATE
Is the first division better than the Premiership?

Send your e-mails to debate@thetimes.co.uk

 

[Simster]

That's one of the best football articles I've read this year. Unpretentious, clear, very interesting - superb stuff.

 

[Easy 10]

Martin Samual has long been the best sports writer in the business for my money. He talks so much sense, it hurts.

 

[Soton Seagull]

That article is spot on. Football brings economic benefits to all towns involved and contributes much to civic pride. Long may 'Lower League' football continue

 

[perth seagull]

That is a great article (thanks Turkey). It is encouraging to see the Football League getting its act together to protect clubs in the future, and that it is paying dividends in terms of attendances.

 

[Josky]

It certainly makes a change to all the doomsayers that keep going on about clubs in crisis in the Football League. The League may well have many clubs that are on the brink, but at least something is being done to protect these clubs now for the sake of the fans and football.

We'd never had the Archer debacle if these rules had been adopted years ago.

Football League = forward thinking
Premier League = on the decline

 

[Row Z Creased Shirt]

What a fantastic article. Possibly the best thing written about football this season, top stuff.

 

[Sorrel]

The trouble is that the best teams in the League end up in the Premier Leagure. That's where the trouble starts.

 

[Beach Hut]

Fantastic article - great read on the train this morning.