You can pinpoint the moment football stopped being a sport and became a multi-million pound business as the moment the Premier League was created and the Sky contracts were signed. From that moment the notion of the larger clubs sharing their television income with the league’s smaller clubs was dead. Now the Premier League clubs would keep their own pots of gold, and the others would start to scrabble around in an all too smaller pond.
The bigger clubs paid the biggest wages, attracted the best players, and started to establish a self-contained elite which would become increasingly difficult for others to break into. That is why Hull’s explosion this year has been so welcome… Hull ain’t little, but in football terms they have had a meteoric raise. The money men, from home and abroad, saw the millions being made and thought they would take a punt on it too. The players, remember them, decided if there was a larger cake, they too wanted their enormous slice. There can’t be many businesses with a turnover of 30-40 million pound who pay a dozen or so employees over a million pound a year.
Anyway… the point of this rant is to say that on Saturday this week we will be able to identify a similar moment in cricketing history, and it is splendidly covered in today’s Guardian, It’s all over now, the day cricket loses its soul.
The match is a disgrace at almost every level, and not just because its Texas billionaire backer, Sir Allen Stanford, has spent the past week on a dollar-driven ego trip, parading around his private ground, hogging the limelight and cavorting with the England players’ wives. The key charge against the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), which sanctioned the game, is that it is has sold its soul for the Stanford millions (the ECB gets 3.5m dollars regardless of the result).
When 11 players involved in a single 20-20 slog-it match can earn a million pounds for a night’s work, what chance is there for teamwork amongst those who don’t make the cut playing alongside those who do for a 3 months Ashes tour for a few thousand quid. Or those same caviar billionaires playing the same game as the bread-and-butter stock bowlers plodding uphill into the wind on a cold April morning in Blackpool. Two different games… played by two different animals, using two different codes of what we once called cricket.
The thin end of a very fat wedge, I suspect.
Cut straight to the chase again, Bob!
When the Dirty Digger is involved things usually change for the worse.
I think you’ve missed the point. Much as Sky’s (almost) monopoly on football annoys me a bit, they have pumped a huge amount of money into clubs in lower divisions as well. In fact, I’m sure that nearly every club outside of the Premier League relies on money from Sky to survive.
If the ECB make millions out of these games, a proper investment strategy can ensure that the game survives at all levels. Whether or not that comes to pass is a very different matter.
I don’t think you are wrong, Bob, but the Premier league is brilliant so go on, admit it.
I suppose the statement:’The Premier leagues is great for football’ isn’t accurate with the smaller clubs heading for the drop and never for the rise, but English football(?)is a bigger player on the world stage because of its existence.
Would you go back to how it used to be?
Maybe a fairer share of the cash should be forced by Government into the lower leagues? Bet this is a winning idea.
Anyway, Stoke are doing what everyone (everyone in Stoke) said they would be doing and so we require another 3 points from you, so please be obliging.
The anxiety and the willingness for Stoke to win a game, gain some points and hopefully stay up is incredible in these parts and I know we can rely on your support.
With all due respect LFaT I think it is you that has missed the point. Yes there has been a trickle down effect, but the fact is the Premier League has become massively self-reinforcing, and Stoke are going back where they came from like Birmingham, Reading and Derby did last year. Hull, like Wigan and Fulham may survive again… but in reality they are just waiting their turn to go back down.
Do I want to go back to how it was? Yes, in many respects. I don’t care unduly if Chelski, ManUre or Aston Villa are part of ‘the best league in the world’ if it means the finance available from the tv deal doesn’t allow Luton Town or Rotherham to maintain a football league club.
Don’t you think Hull is heavy evidence for the point that the premier league is not a self contained elite?
Anyway, I’m happy to trade off the sacrifices football has made for the quality it’s bought…
I think the moment for cricket may have actually passed about 5am this morning, when Sachim Tendulkar went out to bat with India at 27 for 2, the holiday morning after Diwali, against a pumped-up Australian side looking to get back from 1-0 down in the series.
ST went out to a strangely empty stadium in Delhi. Beautiful innings of 68, so said the BBC online reporter (I don’t do Sky), but no-one there to watch it anymore.
Good point Paul. Outside of England the one-day bish-bash game seems to have already won the battle for audiences.
Hull are a bit of an exception, actually. I think Hull was the biggest City in Europe never to have had a top division football club, so they may… just may, survive at the expense of one of the others like Wigan.
The real joy would be to watch the scurrying around if Chelsea or United didn’t make the Champions League… or the likes of Spurs were relegated. But sadly, neither are likely to happen.
Definitely not cricket, bob.
If Jonathan Ross gets the boot will we get back our 18 Million ? This money could then be given to old folk and enable them to have a bit of extra heat during this cold snap. With regard to the footie, I think all players earning more than a million a year should have a windfall tax levied on them. That money could also go to the old and provide a hot meal in the evenings when it’s chilly. See the unions are demanding a slice of the big profits from the oil companies to also help the oldies, have a bit of a problem with that one, you see my company pension depends on these companies doing well or I’ll be poor too. So stop picking on the share holders of successful companies, and just hammer the BBC and Sky.
Bob, what’s this about Stoke going down? We are half way up the table and heading for Real Madrid on wednesday evenings. I love Roy Keane and Villa needn’t be jealous at all.
I don’t often agree with you Bob but you’ve hit the nail right on the head with this one. 20Twenty is a completely different discipline to the Test game although I hesitate to use the term discipline…
I think the great thing about cricket in this country is that it isn’t the 20Twenty game that rules the roost and if we’re honest it never will be. We may fear for the future of the Test game because of this upstart but I believe it’s going to take a damn sight more than some pig ignorant yank with a couple of quid to do away with the greatest game in it’s greatest format.