The most regrettable food I’ve ever seen on the Great British Baking Show is the Rainbow Bagel. Bagels are great and rainbows are fun but if you’ve ever tasted anything with a lot of food dye in it, then you know that those bagels only tasted like dye. Also, imagine what would come out in the end if you ate more than one. Reminds me of a joke by the venerable comedian Steven Wright: “Lately I’ve been trying to feel healthier, so I eat a lot of vitamins, but I don’t know. Do you know how many vitamins you have to eat to be full? One good thing though, the color of my urine is a-ma-zing. It’s like going to a laser show.”
Do not, I repeat, do not eat that many vitamins. You know how much that would cost?
Meanwhile… back at the hall of injustice.. Liverpool and Man U have gotten together with the head of the EFL and put together a “modest proposal” which is very much like a rainbow bagel: one bite and you’ll be shitting colors for days.
Here’s the thing: football in England is in big trouble. No fans at games, no real profit sharing mechanism, no monopoly over the business (like the USA), plus the promise of a huge payday if you climb the table to the Premier League, and you have a situation where a lot of clubs have been living on a knife’s edge financially and will go out of business if they aren’t bailed out.
As an American part of me says that maybe they should go out of business. Football has been in a bubble for far too long and it has to pop at some point. But as someone who has been following English football for well over 20 years now I also understand that these clubs I’m talking about aren’t just businesses: they are often the lungs of their local communities. Shuttering a club isn’t just a simple matter of hanging up a “going out of business” sign and selling off the assets. It’s a huge loss to the local community and every club closure causes massive ripples up and down the football pyramid.
So, I understand why it’s so important to prop up these clubs. And that’s the only selling point of what’s been called “Project Big Picture” – that the Premier League would create a bail-out fund and also share a portion of television profits equally with the EFL.
There’s merit to those two ideas. The first is pretty obvious, the EFL needs an injection of funds right now. So, ok, good call! And the 2nd is probably a bit less obvious.
Back when the Premier League was being formed, there was a proposal on the table for the top division to share a portion of the television revenue with the EFL, 20% of television revenue. But it was rejected and instead the “parachute payment” system was installed. That’s where clubs relegated from the Premier League are given huge payments to keep paying their player’s wages for several years after they leave the League. In hindsight that was a disastrous failure: instead of spreading the wealth among all the teams in the lower leagues, it distorted the budgets of certain teams, cementing inequality.
So the idea of revenue sharing is a good one. However, the way that this proposal is written, I don’t think it will work out the way that the lower rung teams quite want.
The Premier League has already used the pandemic to power-grab pay-per-view broadcasting revenue streams. The last television deal for the Premier League was crazy huge but this new model will almost certainly result in lower revenue for the broadcasters as they get squeezed out of their main gig: showing matches to fans. The way I see this playing out is smaller TV contracts going forward, more PPV matches (especially for the big clubs) putting money directly into the pockets of the big clubs, and overall less and less revenue to the EFL.
That’s a lot of conjecture on my part and I could be wrong. However, while that portion of the proposal is a bit murky the other parts are unambiguous in their intent.
They want to reduce the Premier League to 18 teams. This would result in 4 fewer matches per year for the League but that absolutely doesn’t mean that they will play less football. No. I expect that the clubs will use those 4 matches for special tournaments, European League matches, and/or money-spinning friendlies. If you thought the “39th game” proposal was awful, wait until they say that games 35-38 are going to be played around the world.
Again, back to TV revenue, this part of the proposal reduces the number of matches to 306 from 380. That’s 74 fewer matches for the TV broadcasters. Which means smaller bids in the future.
But they don’t stop there. They want to abolish the League Cup and Community Shield. And again, this would be fine if we ever thought for a moment that clubs like Arsenal and Man City would just not play those matches. But like hell they won’t. They will use those extra games in European competition, absolutely, hands down, no question about it. Premier League clubs have hated the League Cup as long as I have been watching football because it provides them with almost no money. It should be a competition to rejoice because it’s a chance to play kids and a chance to get fans in the doors for a great price. But that’s not the goal, the goal is to play matches which maximize profits and damn those folks who get joy from the League Cup.
But if all that weren’t bad enough there’s the real king donnacer: they want to give special voting rights to nine clubs. Those clubs are Arsenal, Liverpool, Man City, Man U, Everton, Tottenham, Chelsea, Wet Hams, and Southampton.
Most of the other things that they are proposing are vaguely acceptable on some level. If the big clubs want to play more European matches and fewer matches with EFL clubs, that’s just good business. Hey, ok, so that’s my Americanness coming through again. If I step back for a sec I can actually see that this would hugely hurt the EFL clubs who love these games because they allow for potential big paydays when they face a top side. But again, I just want to say that at least I understand it from the big club’s perspective.
But this 9 “special rights” proposal is just downright crazy. I think this has to be dead on arrival because I can’t imagine the other clubs agreeing to vote away their power to a handful of clubs. And what’s hilarious about this is that if you go back to even when I started watching Arsenal and what constitutes a “top 6 side” is vastly different than now. In 97-98, you had Leeds and Blackburn in the top six and Everton escaped relegation by goal difference only. Aston Villa actually has more top six finishes than Tottenham.
The point here isn’t the specific but rather that this kind of form is temporary. Man City were relegated multiple times in the early days of the Premier League and the only reason that they are included in the group of nine is that they have bought their way into that group in the last decade.
And as if that hasn’t been clear for the last decade, the Premier League and the top clubs are less and less clubs and more and more global brands. Ways for rich people to get richer.
And that brings folks like me to an existential crisis. Why do I keep supporting Stan Kroenke’s cash machine? At what point do these types of absurd and disgusting proposals finally turn me away from the Premier League? I already pay way too much money per month to follow the Arsenal. I’ll always love Arsenal but maybe like a bad marriage, you can love someone and decide that you just can’t be together anymore. That it’s just not good for you.
I think in a funny way Arsene Wenger kept me hanging on to Arsenal for a lot longer than I probably would have without him. The football we played was at least fun to watch – even if frustrating at times. And Wenger was a miracle worker as well, considering the players he had who have been a lot less than stellar since he left.
But there toward the end as the Kroenke’s took over and the club turned more and more into a corporate entity the fun dried up. Wenger’s artistic vision started to wane, he got older, people figured out how to play against him, the players under his management got worse, infighting, and more started to tear things apart. Then the club appointed Unai Emery with his dossier and promises to improve the value of players like Xhaka and Kolasinac. And the football got as ugly as the corporate soul which spawned it.
I think it would be the end for me – the end of me giving my money to Arsenal – if this proposal went forward. It’s very close already, what with the PPV nonsense and them sticking it to my friends in England. Of course I would keep a passing interest in the club, watch a few games if they came up on services I subscribe to, but that’s about it.
Not that they (Kroenke, etc) would even care one iota. And that’s the real Big Picture.
Can’t wait to see the reactions about giving tottenham a rebate for their stadium.
I think the Super League is inevitable and see this is a step towards it. I wouldn’t mind it so much. A good sporting and financial solution can be reached. But this is pure opportunism. Using the disruption caused by the virus to try and get clubs in need to agree to proposals that would basically end football as we know it.
As for PPVs. Yes. Kroenke was pretty up front about it when he bought into the club iirc. As were Liverpool’s owners. They see that as the future.
La Liga is dying because of the big clubs hogging the pie (and no TV broadcasters here). The PL will avoid that by having it out between 6-9 instead of 2-3 teams.
Eventually becoming like the MLS. No relegation, for the ‘top teams’ at least. Maybe even post season games to determine champions and the ‘league winners’ to get the new ‘League Cup’.
It is what it is. I’m already coming around to the idea of not watching Arsenal. I had stopped watching much of the PL 2 seasons ago. That was due to their refereeing. This is worse.
And honestly, business ethics aside, the game isn’t quite played with the same sense of magic anymore. It’s too industrial. A product.
South American football is fun. Indian football has potential. There’s other ways and other places to watch the game.
Sounds like the big clubs are doing their best to not let a crisis go to waste.
I can’t find the original document online but all the explainers seem to agree that it would mean increased revenue and a fairer structure for the lower leagues, which sounds great. The quid pro quo is fewer matches for Prem clubs, and more opportunity to go off and make additional revenue elsewhere.
Personally I don’t see a need for a quid pro quo – the big Premier League clubs should have the foresight to recognise that their own value is buoyed up by all the clubs below them. They should be able to recognise that the current imbalance is unfair, harmful and unsustainable and that financial redistribution is utterly necessary. That they can’t help themselves and have to demand something in return speaks volumes to the values and culture of the businesses and the owners.
And then on top of that this move to consolidate power among the nine longest-serving Prem League clubs… that’s just effing nerve.
Everything these clubs do to entrench their market power and fleece me for their product while cutting staff, makes it that little bit easier for me to walk away.
Everything they do to give something back, to repair and revitalise the game from the bottom up, to stand for something, makes it much harder.
Lockdown proved that we need meaningful things in our lives.
Big Picture?
Drop the PPV cost to £5 (price of a pint). Allow broadcasts globally on the internet. The PL Channel. PL would be astounded how much profit they’d make without cable provider middlemen.
Share revenue to the lower leagues. Float the lower leagues with a loan until global broadcast revenue can be reasonably determined.
Boot Tottenham off the island (or show me the silverware).
Being in the US as well? There’s a different perspective when you’re on the outside of the fishbowl of English football. If I were allowed to buy an AFC broadcast package for a season (all comps)? Probably would not hesitate to drop $100.
England is still tethered to outmoded broadcast blackout restrictions. Similar to ones that the US began phasing out or found more reasonable standards to lift– OR– allow viewers to purchase focused broadcast packages from cable providers. If a fan can’t afford the stadium experience– why not give them a chance to spend– even if it’s less?
We can buy almost anything today ‘cafeteria-style’. Like music, sports broadcasts should be available for a reasonable cost. Savable. Transferrable. Once you buy it you own it.
There’s a better way than anything currently on offer. This present situation could be a vehicle to long-term profitability for English football leagues on a grand scale.
Just not sure how a picture is bigger– when the audience gets smaller?
Not having middlemen sounds good in theory, but it doesn’t automatically work. An example is Spanish La Liga shifting to Facebook. I’m a football fan. I am interested in some of their matches. It costs me nothing. But I don’t log on to Facebook and look for their stream. It’s not worth the hassle. Forget the casual viewer.
That is how TV builds value. Establishing a presence in the world as a whole. Not only does it lead to more watchers, it also leads to those that watch feeling acknowledged for their passion.
They also have people who understand the various local markets. Too much overhead for the PL to build that. Their best bet for the online route is through the clubs. But not at the cost of removing TV altogether. As Tim said, it will likely mean less money from TV. But which might just suit all parties.
I go to B/R Live (Bleacher Report) website on the occasion I can only catch a Europa League match there. Pay $4.99 to watch Arsenal. That end of the equation is baked in.
The harder part is convincing the PL to take over production of their product. But It’s not impossible. It took about 10 years for musical artists to take control of distribution of their own music– and own the largest portion of their earnings.
TV? Is a device. To view content. I have my big screen TV connected to cable and broadband internet via a laptop. I could do without cable TV content almost entirely– but my better half cannot. It’s just a mindset.
It’s estimated that Arsenal have 125M worldwide. If half of them were able to watch the team weekly at £5? That’s approx £300M per match home and away. Multiplied by 38. Almost £2B. Now of course that’s a stretch. So lop that in half.
Even at £1B– per season– you are generating 60% of the club’s value on inexpensive PPV alone. That amount might vary among the 20 PL clubs. But that amount would dwarf the £5.1B Sky Sports pays the PL presently.
English football is a global product. Being sold locally.
Sky Sports is trying to keep the genie in the bottle as long as possible.
*It’s estimated that Arsenal have 125M fans worldwide.
just FYI, i think that all the EL, CL stuff is on CBS now.
Do see that now. CBS All Access. Another of the streaming channels my sweetie ‘must have’ (to watch ‘Picard’). I’m covered. 🙃
Picard was really good. Looking forward to season 2.
You’re right, but those numbers are too optimistic. Amazon experimented with bidding for games, and there was some talk of Netflix taking on Ligue 1 rights. But there’s still a gap between getting people the product on demand and being able to monetize it.
5 pounds is not a cost of a pint everywhere in the world and viewing habits and cultures are different..eg. In India, to watch every PL game (till last season, the Bundesliga too) plus the IPL cricket tourney, formula 1, some tennis, plus local language movies and tv shows, on a streaming service (of the same network as Sky) costs 4 pounds.. For the whole year.
It’s a growing market. But there’s challenges to selling. You build passion for a ‘brand’ by letting people watch it, even if it is dirt cheap or even free. Those eyeballs and them getting in the habit of watching is far more important. A lot of people would simply turn away if it meant having to pay for every game individually. A lot more would have no choice but to.
The English League knows it is a global product. They sell the intl rights for less because they lack the local knowledge of customers, networks and sponsors, and want their product to be seen over and above anything else. If the PL and the clubs try to go for the cash now approach, they will lose out in the medium term. Especially factoring in the opportunity cost of simply letting it ride.
This is a bs power grab (with Kroenke leading from behind, shocker), but I think a lot of the contra arguments are slightly missing the point.
The pitch is that the biggest 6-9 clubs care about the rest of the pyramid, that the real ‘villains’ are the other 10-14 PL and the Championship clubs – the middle class who are guilty of the twin sins of envying the cream while ignoring the dire straits of clubs below them.
This is the exact sort of ‘pincer’ strategy that a lot of corporate lucre backed power grabs around the world have used, to great effect. Never mind that the plight of the ‘forgotten’ people is usually directly attributable to the greed of the top tier in the first place.
The smart thing for the rest of the PL and Championship clubs to do would be to offer an even more lucrative package to the rest of the pyramid, generous revenue sharing rather than a one-time payment and even more of a focus on the domestic game while sidelining European competition (which can be framed as the increasingly irrelevant preserve of the Caviar Six).
The important thing is to avoid the sort of moral disorientation that has set in after such power grab attempts in the past. Do not hold on to the idea that the cream and the bottom tier are just not natural allies. Work hard to break the burgeoning alliance early. Recognize that the ‘middle’ is obviously behind the Six in terms of lucre, but that the former are not poor by any stretch of imagination (18 of 20 PL club owners are billionaires, with a B). They have the capacity to offer the rest of the pyramid an improved deal – even in pure money terms – that can blow this power grab out of the water, and can split the costs among a wider base. This is not the time to be stingy and rely purely on principle to win the argument.
More risky but also worthwhile would be to call the super league bluff, giving the six their dream of perennial ‘elite’ European competition while cutting them out of English league competition, and negotiating a separate TV package for the latter. Trust the fans to support a dynamic league system (even with unfamiliar brands) over an ossified scripted docudrama, and they may be surprised.
This is a fantastic comment, very well explained
There’s a pretty good analysis on the Athletic, for those that have a subscription there. I actually don’t have too much of an issue with a lot of it, but the voting rights thing is likely to make it a non-starter. I’d bet the big clubs know that, and put it in there as a bargaining chip, being willing to accept less.
The construction fee offset thing is bogus as well. Blatant pandering to those that have spent money recently, as opposed to slightly less recently.
Agree with you about football bubble, particularly with ‘000s loosing jobs, in UK and a num of other countries.
Not sure if the clubs can make good on all the expenses commitments. The deferred payments like Pepe’s deal, which has us paying in chunks over the next couple of years. Contracts for players.
All this would have been setup with the planned gate and TV revenues. Which depends on fans spending.
While its been popular to call for the owners to invest, I’ve always wondered why as fans we should be at the mercy of the owners’ philanthropy. Also the fans demanding ambition from the owners. Why should they, its a business investment for them. They are in it to make money not to lose it. They want a well run business, maximise profits.
Its us fans who are invested emotionally!
Last season, for the 1st time in 22 yrs of following Arsenal, I didn’t even watch recordings of our games, I didn’t miss The Arsenal.
While, I’m reconsidering my time (& TV) commitment to Arsenal, Tim, if you stop writing that would be a great loss to the Arsenal fans. One of the voice of reason amongst the fan (TV) frenzy.
Hope Arteta helps us find the love for Arsenal again.
I’d probably keep writing. Just not as much about Arsenal.
Hey Qq,
Are you seriously still using a keyboard that’s missing the “Q” button?
Anyway, shouldn’t be a problem. Ernest Vincent Wright once wrote an entire novel (“Gadsby”) without once using the letter “E.” What he did without E, you can do without Q! Don’t be shackled by Q! Letters can be a resilient authoritarians. There was a strong movement to “depose” the letter C in the sixteenth-century , but check out its staying power! Even Shakespeare (ok, one of his characters) once called Z an “unnecessary letter,” but here it is still! Zzzzz!
Also, I would read your blog even if it stopped being about Arsenal. For you, of course, and also for the others who come here to comment, sometimes just about life, etc.
“Also, I would read your blog even if it stopped being about Arsenal. For you, of course, and also for the others who come here to comment, sometimes just about life, etc.“
+1
Qqaannoonn
On a more serious note, I have graduated to a new computer, thanks. I just always have signed off with Qq. I like it. I don’t know. Stop harassing me, big brain!
The Qq is the mark. Love it
I’m going to skip the outrage and opine that after almost years, the Premier League format is done. It may take another few seasons to evolve/devolve into a Super League or whatever is next but the clearly, the writing is on the wall.
The PL was a break away league to begin with and once again the top revenue teams will change the landscape of English football. How this will in turn change supporter’s views/enthusiasm of course remains to be seen but I was only ever interested in the football.
All the changes they’re mooting are awful. No ppv, no special voting rights, bring in real revenue sharing. Alternatively, I can start following some other team/league. As a ny-er I only started liking arsenal after spending a semester in Prague and taking a shine to Rosicky.
The funny thing, though, and what’s driven me to comment, is that stan’s other team has been great to watch lately. No better entertainment value in basketball than the nugs for my money.
I’m thinking some more about this and realising that my own views are probably too nostalgic.
One of my very happiest memories of childhood is Saturday afternoons in the winter, Grandstand was the BBC’s flagship sports programme and it would have been on all afternoon showing horse racing, skiing, rugby, tennis, darts, whatever was going on. Then at 5pm, when it was already dark outside, the final scores came in on TV (the BBC’s famous “vidiprinter”, where you watched the results coming up at the bottom of the screen as they were typed into a computer).
As soon as they had all the results phoned in from all the grounds around the country they would then ceremonially read out the score from every game that day, starting with Division 1 (now the Prem) and going all the way through the English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland divisions. Every league club would have their result read out live on national TV, to an audience of probably 15 or 20 million.
Later at University I would study nationalism, and in particular Benedict Anderson’s concept of a nation as an “imagined community”, an idea that is sustained through national media – newspapers, radio, TV. I can’t think of any better example of an imagined national community than millions of families in front of their TVs at the same time every week listening to all the scores from all the clubs up and down the country. And while we sat there savouring the language, the weird and wonderful names of all these towns and places that were part of our imagined community – cheering when our favourite names came up, louder if they’d won, noticing that Queen Of The South had lost again and feeling sorry for them even though we had no idea where that was – it definitely reinforced the idea that every club from the biggest to the smallest was at a fundamental level equally important.
The establishment of the Premier League and the TV focus and hype around it killed off Final Score a long time ago. Football has changed and the country has also changed, our imagined communities have shrunk and fractured and I’m no longer sure we’re even capable of situating ourselves in communities, and connecting our individual fates to those of strangers up and down the country, let alone beyond our own borders.
Maybe if the world has changed and the country has changed then football should also change and reflect the times. Maybe these changes are not all bad, especially to people on this blog. There is no doubt that the quality of football has improved. Also the establishment of the Premier League allowed us to export and market the league overseas, and is no doubt a big part of why many of you now follow Arsenal.
But there is an opportunity cost to everything, and the cost of the Premier League has been the damage done to the game’s ecosystem that reflects the way that government and capital have undermined and abandoned local economies for over 30 years, replacing the depth, resilience and “thick” culture of redundancy with “efficient” centralised corporate behemoths that are Too Big To Fail.
Yet all the time we continue to see proposals like this Big Picture thing, whether in football, environment, politics or economics, that fail to recognise and reverse that trend and instead try to entrench it.
That takes me back. It was poetry, like the Shipping Forecast.
hahahah! I learned about the shipping forecast via a podcast. I can’t remember which one… Cautionary Tales maybe?
99% Invisible.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-shipping-forecast/
Great post Greg. Remember World of Sport and Dickie Davis messing up live on air? Meant to say Cup soccer but actually said C*** sucker lol. And 1st Saturday in Jan as a kid rushing back from Highbury to get the FA Cup 3rd round draw? Happy memories from a time when the world was simpler.