bradley headstone
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Posted: January 16th 2010
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Football’s new ice age.
When searching for a clunky analogy to crowbar a blog from, the current cold ‘snap’ seems obvious. I’m also toying with the possibility of using the three Ice Age films which entered my world this Christmas. I’m not going to because as good as the first two are, they come a long second to Pixar’s least satisfying film, Cars. For a 21-month-old boy, Cars, for all its faults is as good as Raging Bull.
Let’s leave the miserable white hell of our recent existence behind and go with that other classic pre-cursor of doom…the dark ages.
Football’s new dark age.
Oh yes, a plague and a pestilence upon your house, especially if it resides in the fading glory of the Premier League. The accepted order is breaking down and an era of uncertainty and fear is heralded. Is this all bad news though?
The accepted goal for all teams that reckon themselves is the exalted top four and riches the position promises.
This top four has been a settled theifdom of Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool for a number of years but the pack are closing in and not necessarily because they’ve risen to the challenge of producing quality football.
The numbers are beginning to go against these aristocrats of the self-styled ‘best league in the world’.
Manchester United, once the model of money making commercial enterprise have finally released figures that prove that their American owners are systematically bleeding them dry. Their once world class commercial operation appears to have been subsumed into the Nike operation for short term gain. I can see a procession of major names leaving Old Trafford to maintain the cooked books.
Chelsea, the emblem of the cash rich, new premier bling is suddenly looking to be on shaky ground. Mr Abramovich has turned his £500+ million ‘loan’ into shares. Now Chelsea has a fantastic PR operation, they have to . Not since the Second World War has an organisation needed to justify such unjustifiable behaviour. They are desperately spinning Mr A’s move as a wonderful piece of transparency and good for the game. Yet I can think it positions the Village Hotel team, rather nicely, for a quick sale. Whoever rolls into Stamford Bridge next isn’t likely to buy the success that the oligarch has.
Arsenal, in contrast to their ‘big four’ colleagues, has championed the cause of careful financial husbandry, somewhat unfashionable in modern football and not necessarily a choice that they made with a free hand. My suspicion is that Arsene Wenger would love to be competing with the others for the big money signings. But Arsenal can’t and to be fair never really did play that game. The Arsenal board have been in a defensive frame of mind for some time now, funding the stadium and positioning themselves for potential takeovers from Russian and American interests, football seems a long way down their agenda at the moment. What kind of message is the re-signing of Sol Campbell sending?
The Pantomime season started early and is ending late in Liverpool, the flakiest of the big four. Mr Potato head Benitez is running out of ideas and players, the owners seem unable to engineer their own profit unlike their United counterparts. The air of complacency, incompetence and denial is now so ingrained that not only are they staring at missing the riches of the champions league they are struggling to grab a place in the much maligned Europa League. If Liverpool falls out of the elite four, can you see them re-establishing themselves soon?
The chasing pack, recently comprising an Aston Villa team that fades in the spring, a Spurs team that feeds promising young British players into an mincing machine that splutters whenever it nears success and one surprising, nose-bleed inducing run from a no-hoper who’ll panic in April and miss out everything (see Birmingham this year). They are all there again, supplemented by the mega-rich Manchester City.
Villa and Spurs look more ready to step up this year and there can be no doubt now that City have the momentum and depth of squad to take advantage of this most uncertain of seasons. But did the super rich Arabs really sign up to be top of a fading premier league? Surely they wanted to keep the company of United, Chelsea and Arsenal, not the likes of Villa and Spurs. Are they going to be happy watching the Spanish and Italian leagues rise from the top of our increasingly rickety leagues. I’m convinced they’ll be able to continue attracting the top players; well the top players who are interested in pension plans and portfolios anyway. But is anybody else?
It’s not just the upper echelons that are suffering, I could devote hours on the way Portsmouth have been systematically trodden into the ground. West Ham seem permanently on the edge of a cliff and you have to ask the question of any team splashing the cash this January, can they really afford that?
This isn’t an anti-premier league rant, the football leagues are littered with the debris of teams that ‘lived the dream’, Leeds, Southampton and on and on and money or the promise of it is no guarantee of a golden future. You’ll read plenty about the shambles that is QPR elsewhere on this site and ask the fans of Newcastle, Darlington or Notts County if their experience of a brush with a millionaire is one they’d care to repeat.
Football has been on a golden ride, 20 years of unparalleled glory and riches, but the raking in of riches has turned to grasping and grabbing and the last pennies are rattling around the piggy bank.
Nothing is definite; Capello could be the catalyst of a new golden era by bringing glory or maybe even glorious failure back from South Africa. But maybe it’s all too late and maybe that’s not a bad thing. If this approaching Dark Age leaves us with a little more perspective, a hint of humility and maybe a smidgen of surprise in our elite league, then I reckon we’ll welcome a little austerity.