11-09-2014, 00:21
Ska'd to be fair football is well past the "principle of sporting integrity"!!!! The very first Sky deals put paid to that and since then it has just gradually moved further away!! The creation of the PL was another nail in that coffin and the parachute payments for teams who fail sealed the coffin shut.
The days of a team like Wimbledon moving up the leagues and winning an FA Cup are i am afraid gone now unless you have an owner who is prepared to pump money into the club. As football fans we all want our teams to do well, we wanted to play in Division One and we all knew that if we could just make a few key signings and have a good manager we might just get there no matter what size our club was or how much money we had. That was part of the romance of football.
Now FFP is trying to bring some sanity to the clubs by preventing them from overspending, and I am fully behind that!! My team nearly went to the wall a couple of years ago through mismanagement and overspending and about 50% of the teams in the 4 divisions have been in admin or other financial situations at some point, but until the revenues between the PL and the other divisions are closer, the need for the rich owner to get up to the promised land will not go away and as a consequence of the disparity in money, teams like QPR will way overspend to try to get there. FFP while laudable will only end up rewarding the rich clubs over and over again because it almost makes it impossible for a team such as Sheffield Wednesday to challenge consistently with the teams who have failed in the PL and are on parachute payments that amount to more than our total revenue!!!
To me, FFP will only work if the PL adopt the same principles and apply the same restrictions on the teams in the top flight. I know UEFA are doing something similar but it only applies to those in Europe and for them the money is already there. The championship is littered with clubs with proud histories of top flight football, league titles, FA Cups and even European Cup successes, but none of them had that rich owner at the right time!! I think its only a matter of time before the PL becomes a closed shop like US sports where relegation and promotion are removed and heaven forbid if that occurs while your team is sat in the Championship and not the PL!!!!
The days of a team like Wimbledon moving up the leagues and winning an FA Cup are i am afraid gone now unless you have an owner who is prepared to pump money into the club. As football fans we all want our teams to do well, we wanted to play in Division One and we all knew that if we could just make a few key signings and have a good manager we might just get there no matter what size our club was or how much money we had. That was part of the romance of football.
Now FFP is trying to bring some sanity to the clubs by preventing them from overspending, and I am fully behind that!! My team nearly went to the wall a couple of years ago through mismanagement and overspending and about 50% of the teams in the 4 divisions have been in admin or other financial situations at some point, but until the revenues between the PL and the other divisions are closer, the need for the rich owner to get up to the promised land will not go away and as a consequence of the disparity in money, teams like QPR will way overspend to try to get there. FFP while laudable will only end up rewarding the rich clubs over and over again because it almost makes it impossible for a team such as Sheffield Wednesday to challenge consistently with the teams who have failed in the PL and are on parachute payments that amount to more than our total revenue!!!
To me, FFP will only work if the PL adopt the same principles and apply the same restrictions on the teams in the top flight. I know UEFA are doing something similar but it only applies to those in Europe and for them the money is already there. The championship is littered with clubs with proud histories of top flight football, league titles, FA Cups and even European Cup successes, but none of them had that rich owner at the right time!! I think its only a matter of time before the PL becomes a closed shop like US sports where relegation and promotion are removed and heaven forbid if that occurs while your team is sat in the Championship and not the PL!!!!