The Premier League is pointless if you support any team other than Man Utd, Chelsea, Arsenal or Liverpool. The money that is thrown at our league from sponsors and TV rights goes exclusively to the Premier League clubs, and then just goes straight into the back pockets of the already overpaid players, who have little to no respect for the clubs they represent anyway. Champions League football offers an extra £20-£40 million per team. This separates the top 4 as virtually untouchable, because if ever one of them is in danger of being displaced from their pedastals, they can just dip into their spare change and buy £17 million worth of Russian wing wizard and eleviate their worries. As a fan of one of the others, I watch on enviably as the big four buy the best and win comfortably week in week out against the alsorans. The fact that their fans go into every game expecting to win is a bit of a disgrace: It's a scenario you cannot envision in many other team sports. Formula One is infamous as the most boring sport in the world, whereby Ferrari and McClaren win every race simply because they have the most money to spend on developing their car. But even F1 isn't as boring any more. Three teams' ingenuity this year lifted them above the rest, while Red Bull's well built car is keeping them second in the constructor's championship. Ferrari are chasing and McClaren are simply nowhere to be seen. Such a thing seems like an impossibility right now. Imagine the lower teams making some shrewd purchases, putting so much more effort in, and leaving Chelsea and Liverpool to battle for a Europa league spot whilst Man Utd settle for 10th place and Arsenal struggle to avoid relagation. Maybe then their fans might know what it's like to be a football fan. To feel the highs and the lows. And maybe fans like me would know the joys of topping the table and going into a season thinking that we genuinely had a chance to win it come the end of 38 games. I would like nothing more to see a FIA style wage cap enforced, or at least discussed, to perhaps have some kind of parity in England, akin to that of the MLS. At the moment, it's just not going to happen.
Manchester City, however are showing that the little guy can stand up to the footballing giants and buy the big names. This is in no small part down to the backing of a man with a personal fortune of £33billion. No doubt with the players they intend to sign, they will break into the top 4, and no doubt create a top 5 of immovable teams. Now all that is needed is for every Premier League club to be taken over by a huge multi-billionaire owner and we may have an even playing field. Only for the big boys of course, then you have to worry about the lower divisions, because there is no altruism in football, no money gets filtered down. The big boys want the gulf in class to be a chasm, and luckily for them, at the moment, it is.
At the moment, the Premier League is the mutts nuts; the puppy's scrotum of world football if you like, much like it was for Serie A in the early 90s and La Liga at the turn of the millenium. However, there's a shift on the horizon. This summer, it's already been seen that players are turning down the chance to play in the Premier League, preferring to stay with clubs like Lyon, Porto, Fiorentina, Athletico Madrid and Valencia, who would generally be considered mere feeder clubs to the might of the English league. Why this sudden change in player perspective? It may be that the major signings of Kaká and Ronaldo for Madrid has made everyone decide that La Liga is where it's at again. It may be that the loss in the final for Man Utd has transferred the air of invincibility to Barcelona and the Spanish league. The German league is always strong and seen as one with a great deal of integrity, not to mention the fascinatingly open title race for the Bundesliga last year. The Italian league is known as the most cerebral and technical of them all, in contrast to the all action physicality of the Premier League.Or maybe, just maybe, it's that in the land of crazy money, things are not looking as rosy as they once were. Granted, there has been an economic downturn for all of the Western world, but England is in a rather unique situation. I've already established that to be the best, you have to be the richest, because you need the most money to attract the big named mercenary stars. We have recently been dealt a 50% income tax on all high wage earners, meaning that
for the average player to take home £100, 000 a week (an entirely reasonable sum), the club will have to pay out £200, 000 a week. Compare this to Spain where their income tax for high earners is just 20%, a club outlay of £125, 000 per week will see the player home with the same balance. Presuming these players get paid for 52 weeks of the year, that's £3.9million extra that the club has to pay to make sure that the player goes home with the same wage that they would in Spain. Notice a lot of players suddenly going to Fenerbahcé? It's because they have an income tax of 12.5%. Mercenaries will go to the highest bidder. No wonder Manchester City are willing to pay £250, 000 to bag Eto'o, because if Barcelona wanted to pay him £156, 000 he'd get the same amount in bold on his payslip. Not that he's remotely worth it. The point is that the attraction of money isn't going to be as big now. Not to mention the collapse of Setanta, which brought so much competition to TV rights that every club in Premier League was rewarded with £40million a season. Without that competition, Sky can pay a little bit less, and the clubs in turn will receive that little bit less.It may get difficult to continually pay the wages that so far have only increased during worldwide economic decline. Maybe all of this over indulgence that has been seen from the top 4 and Man City, who are all operating at ridiculous amounts of debt, may haunt them in the same way that it haunted RBS recently. I hope beyond all hope that they all follow the example of Leeds United, and maybe in a few seasons time we will get to see a title race, whereby any one of a handful of teams can win. I can hope, but so long as the mega rich are bankrolling such stratospheric amounts of debt, the Premier League as a competition is more dead than John Cleese's parrot.
