Philip Collins
(Picture: Daniel Hambury)This weekend a competition began to rival the Conservative Party leadership content in its predictability and lack of intrigue. Though the standard of play is higher and the entertainment on offer greater than that provided by Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, the English Premier League just opened another season in which the rich will rise to the top and the poor will compete not to be relegated.
There could hardly be a better metaphor for the nation that the Conservative leadership candidates aspire to lead. Sunak’s unwise confession last week that, as Chancellor, he started to divert funds from areas of great deprivation to Tunbridge Wells is the political equivalent of the Premier League. Here money talks, with the also-rans left with little hope of becoming genuine contenders.
The central fact of English football is the vast funding from the Champions’ League and the TV rights. Manchester City pay more in salaries than any sports team in the world. English football clubs have become playgrounds for plutocrats to indulge vanity projects.
The Premier League is now dominated by a rich six: Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham and Manchester United. With the once-in-a-blue-moon exception of Leicester City in 2016, no club outside this group has finished in the top six of the Premier League since 2004/5.
In the three decades before the Premier League began in 1992, there were 11 champions. In the three decades of the Premier League era there have been only seven. The First Division was won by teams whose chance of repeating the feat is now close to zero: Derby, Nottingham Forest, Aston Villa.
All competitions are only alive if they contain jeopardy and embody unpredictability. West Ham United had a great season last year but seventh is really the summit of their ambition. Fulham have just been promoted but they will do well if they merely manage not to be relegated.
Nobody in their right mind would want to go back to the 1970s, to the mud-swamped pitches, the dangerously crammed terraces, the racist chanting, the battles between firms of hooligan fans. The Premier League has made every aspect of football cleaner, gentler, better. Not least on the field, where the standard is incomparably higher than it was.
But better play is not the same as a better competition. If the gap between the rich and the poor grows too much, the two groups lose touch. And this is why it is almost impossible to discuss the Premier League and not sound like you are discussing Labour Party economic policy. A cartel operated by wealthy companies. Powerful owners exercising undue influence. A rigged and broken market in need of better regulation.
The Premier League can be fixed, just as the British economy can be fixed. The financial fair play rules of the European governing body could be properly enforced. The rules regarding acquisitions could be stiffened. Firms that own football clubs should be forced to reveal more about the content of their balance sheets. We could copy the Germans by introducing break-even legislation and we could ensure no individual is able to own more than 49 per cent of a club.
The club that won the title in the last season of the First Division was Leeds United. In a leadership hustings in Leeds, Truss said she wanted to channel Don Revie, the manager who won the league twice for Leeds.
Struggling even to stay in the Premier League, there is little chance of that happening again — and nothing in what Sunak or Truss say suggests they have the first idea why not.
