19-04-2021, 04:12 PM
(19-04-2021, 04:04 PM)Grey beard Wrote: When the money finally has dried up owner's won't think twice about ditching a club and put their money in to the next new money making thing where they can rip off more money from things the fans of other sports other fan's love to watch???I am going to be slightly controversial here. I actually want the owners of a football club to be more interested in the accounts than the sport. We all know what can go wrong when you chase on field success without any view to the finances. The problem is that it makes absolute financial sense from the individual clubs perspective to guarantee themselves as much income as possible, and this is a vehicle for doing that, and if you can do that without even having to have on field success it would be tantamount to not fulfilling your fiduciary duty to not explore that. What you therefore need is governance that stops clubs being any to cannibalise the sport. Similar to the way that the competition commission is meant to stop firms like Tesco getting to big so that your corner shop can survive (albeit we can all have an opinion on how successful that is as well).
100% not in any way a dig at our club's owners, but what I believe is happening at the biggest clubs in this country, with owners or companies from abroad ,more interested in their accounts then the sport.
I also saw an analogy somewhere else which compared this to the power grab Kerry Packer made with cricket, and there are definite similarities. If you look back though in many ways Kerry Packer helped modernize cricket, and the game would not have progressed in the same way without it (mind you if that meant not having The Hundred that might not necessarily be a bad thing). Given this I do hold out a tiny little bit of hope, therefore, that this is a road to Damascus type moment, and it needs something utterly **** like the European Super League for football to finally look at proper reform. That said I am pretty sure I said a similar thing re the pandemic not so long ago so maybe its just another cul-de-sac rather than a road to Damascus.