You'd been doing so well, and I was completely with you.
You came into Chelsea with fresh ideas and funds, you monitored the situation with the manager and said fairly quickly, ‘OK, it’s not working how I want it to, it’s my club and I’m going to make a change and hire a proactive English coach’.
In doing so, you bucked a trend within our biggest clubs and got a big thumbs-up from me. But now I’m embarrassed, Todd Boehly, because your latest brainwave, talking up an All-Star Game between north and south – and all the rest of it – was just a load of utter tripe.
Because we have our history here, Todd, our traditions, our pyramid. We have clubs which are more than 150 years old who have managed to keep the cash tills ringing for well over a century, so we don’t need you or anyone else telling us how we should run our game.
We’ve already had Pep Guardiola come over and start talking rot about parachuting B teams into our league system to make our sides more competitive but, unlike Spain, we don’t need that when we already have more than 100 professional teams.
The throwaway line you gave last week was that Major League Baseball made $200million (£174m) in two days with their All-Star Game but, even though the fixture would probably sell out, that wouldn’t happen here.
Your suggestion comes at a time when we’re trying to decrease the number of games in the calendar as well, not increase it. And it’s cocky in the extreme that someone who has only been here for five minutes would think they know things we don’t and fundamentally try to change our national game.
The world’s original sporting league simply doesn’t need hair-brained ideas from overseas. Not when it’s so vibrant that clubs such as Chesterfield, Stockport and my club Southend are so well supported in the National League, and Wrexham are getting 10,000-odd through the gates.
There are now two groups of people in football, Todd. There are the aficionados who really understand the game and go and watch their local teams from parks football all the way up to the Premier League.
Then there’s the other group who don’t get the history of football, they just want to lap up everything that’s funky and new. It’s all part of what I call the Fabrizio Romano-isation of football because it’s all, ‘We want information and we want it now’.
But people who really get the game will say, ‘Enough gimmicks, let’s row back on the schedule and let our leagues breathe. Let’s not continue with this constant stream of b******t from temporary guests of our game’. Because that’s what you are, Todd, and that is what Guardiola and Co. are, as well.
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Guardiola might leave a great legacy but, like you, he’ll be gone one day. Our guests should get with the programme and keep their mouths shut, they should realise why most football supporters like our game without the gadgets and gizmos.
Even 10 to 15 years ago, I was doing shows on talkSPORT about the pros and cons of the Americanisation of our sport, and talking about how our friends from across the pond struggle with draws. They don’t all get the nuance of a team holding Manchester City to a goalless draw at the Etihad in the way we do.
I said back then that it’s a concern and have said many times the law of our land should protect football as a unique institution of British cultural interest. You might just have been riffing, Todd, but you showed me what’s really going on under the hood.
That if we give you all many more inches you will take a mile and at the end of the season we will end up with a week to 10 days of cup finals and play-offs back-to-back-to-back with the All-Star Game at the end of it.
It’s not just what you’re saying, Todd, it’s what it leads to. And I worry that what you’re proposing could soon make our game unrecognisable.
Postpone call was correct
There has been a lot of criticism over football’s decision to postpone all fixtures last weekend and some matches this weekend, but organisers made the right choice.
Football did the right thing for football and, let’s face it, there aren’t too many times you can say that. I’m often a huge critic of Richard Masters and the Premier League, and the suits at the FA, too.
But they said, ‘For this period of time, if we take the sting out of the situation, then everybody wins’ – and they were spot on. They thought, ‘This way, those who are anti-monarchy won’t be fighting with those who are pro-monarchy inside or outside of grounds and no club or institution are going to be made a mug of this way, so it won’t be a problem down the line’.
They weren’t being lickspittle monarchists, they were simply taking a pragmatic approach, which didn’t bring any heat to their institutions. We all know that football’s crowd is different to cricket’s, rugby’s and horse racing’s – it’s the working man’s sport and more people attend games than any of those other sports.
So, in the end, football made the right decision for football, cricket made the right decision for cricket, rugby made the right decision for rugby and horse racing made the right decision for horse racing.
And do you know what? They were all right.
Tone it in a bit, Toney
I’m delighted Ivan Toney has been called up to Gareth Southgate’s England squad.
He and his Brentford strike partner Bryan Mbeumo are very easy on the eye and possibly my favourite old-school partnership in the Premier League now. I like Toney’s cockiness, although sometimes he can be borderline too confident and he might find that, being around players who are equally as good, if not a little better than him, a little humility might just go a long way.
My message to Toney, then, is, ‘Be who you are on the pitch and be the team player you are on the pitch and off it as well’. But he’s a very exciting addition to the England squad.
