Super League

Interesting how, when there is a big outcry about something going on in the football world, it took about a day before the government said it would look into things and take action, but when there was a lethal virus about, the government never said anything or did anything for weeks......

The clubs only have themselves to blame for paying players anything up to £1m a week. I would reckon the average salary for an English Premiership player would be c£60,000 a week with those in the smaller clubs down around £35/£40K and those in the top clubs at the £75K + a week level. The big name players are £150K+ a week. The clubs make the market and the agents exploit it. Maybe there should be a lower cap on the total percentage of income that can be spent on players, a bit like a fantasy football team. With huge TV money the clubs end up spending today what they hope they will earn tomorrow - they have shown they can't deal with this responsibly so someone needs to impose more rules. In the long run it will be good for the sport.

The solution for that is that the clubs should get together and stop paying transfer fees plus get the contracts written in a better way.

For someone to be able to sit on the bench and earn £350k a week is a massive failing.

I said years ago that the players should get, say, £10k a week and the rest made up in performance related pay.
The performance could be worked out as the average of the individual player ratings awarded by the broadsheet newspapers - I assume they still do that for the big teams?
So if the goalie had a cracking week and got 10 then he'd get his £350k and his performance was a result of the defenders being shit they might get awarded a 3 and paid lets say £15k (it would be a steeply sliding scale that didn't offer great rewards for a mediocre performance).

The ESL fiasco came about due to the difference between two sporting models. The big European teams have spent billions on players and so need large and crucially, predictable revenues to afford the payments. But to the owners' way of looking at things, the revenue is not big enough and predictable enough. There is the inconvenience of having to qualify for the Champions League, or make sure that you don't get relegated out of the EPL and too many other people want a slice of your pie - agents, lower divisions, the FA, UEFA etc. How risky and how annoying. So what they really want is the US NFL-like model, where sports clubs are more like franchises. The league is a closed shop, with the teams limited in numbers to make crowds, sales of rights and demand big enough. You can't get relegated; you control all the rights; you control players movement much more. Kerching.

Unfortunately for them, their attempt to set up the ESL in that mode was defeated. I suspect that UEFA will need to make some proposals to placate the owners or else this will all blow up again at some point.

I doubt Fulham will get within earshot so not particularly worried, but, my local rugby club who used to have AN England play in it's squad (Rossylin Park) have now sunk out of sight. Not long ago, Rangers were broke. There HAS to be a way to fix the big business football has become from ruining it completely with zero recovery. My brother is a Man U fan but has to go to Fulham with his kid because it is too expensive. The NFL have huge crowds and lots of families. Like it used to be here....

I think the problem is that the current club owners see the problem exactly as you explain it - they only see one way to resolve this, which is to get more money. They are blind to the fact that the problem lies within - they are paying out too much and they are being held to ransom by agents and some players who bring ludicrous demands for more money. If these clubs get more money in, they aren't going to be any better off after a while because the leaches will just suck them dry.

When I was a teenager I used to play football in the park with a bunch of local lads. Two of them stood out as being better than the rest of us and one of them ended up having a career with Rangers for nearly all of his playing career and the other played for several Scottish teams before heading to the English First Division and then Premier League. Both of them did very well and like a lot of players of their era they bought pubs or other small businesses once they finished playing and that gave them something to do and a bit of income until retirement. They could not have lived on their pensions or savings from their mid 30's - they simply didn't have enough money. These guys were perhaps getting a current day equivalent of £500K a year. I am all for the players getting more than they earned back then but when current day players are getting £10M/£15m/£50m a year, something has gone wrong. At that level they have more money than they know what to do with. A lot of that cash should be retained in the clubs.

I am sure a cap of, say £5m or £7.5m a year would be more than enough. The level of earnings also has to be viewed in conjunction with the CEO's of some PLC's who are publicly criticised for having salaries of the same level. Why is it wrong for someone who works long hours running a £billion company and has tens of thousands of staff to be paid that amount when it is OK for someone who plays football and basically only thinks of himself and his team-mates to get paid ten times that amount? The answer is staring these clubs in the face but is anyone brave enough to do anything about it. The clubs are like junkies and the players are the dealers. 

FYP.

Whenever footballer salaries come up I think back to the horror and front page headlines when it was disclosed that Eric Cantona had been fined 2 weeks wages - £24k - after his karate kick on a fan.
He was one of the best players in the world at the time and playing for the wealthiest club yet even with inflation his salary would probably equate to 1 day's salary for a mediocre premiership player.

Simply put BeN, no. They are not. The spanish clubs rely massively on tv revenues and those have been falling. Same with our clubs here in the UK. This is partly because younger fans are slowly being priced out. Currently if you want a combined Sky Sports and BT Sport subscription in order to watch your team play their league games (and European if their still in it) the cost if £90 a month and it's a contract that runs throughout the year even if there's no football (you get all the other sport of course but not all football fans want that).

When I was younger during the earlier Wenger years I watched all Arsenals champions League matches on ITV and their ratings were huge. Not even the highlights of those matches are behind a paywall. We're lucky BBC still show Premier League highlights for free. Unless Sky decide to put your teams match on their Monday Night Football programme.

Fans have been slowly been priced out of watching football for years and this new super League was a way of getting even more TV money from fans willing to pay.

I haven't seen a Champions League game since BT got the contract and I am sure there are millions more football fans who are the same. Wednesday night football used to be great but now I just check the scores on Thursday morning. Apart from some of the fans of the clubs in the ESL I don't see many other football fans signing up to watch an even more expensive ESL: this is the problem when you have several networks all vying with each other for different sports. I have enough trouble justifying Sky Sports to the wife and I would have no chance also paying for BT and some other channel just to watch something else I want to see occasionally.

A lot of motorsport is now spread over several broadcasters and the net result in our house is that I just don't get to see any of it! Eventually this splitting of support will kill sports as fans can't afford to pay to watch everything they want and broadcasters have insufficient numbers of subscribers to attract the advertisers and pay the amounts demanded for the broadcasting rights.

Whilst we’re all bemoaning access to televised sport if the model works for the businesses involved then it stays. As soon as sponsors and other parties that fund sport (tv adverts, merchandising providers etc) see less benefit there will be a change but as far as football is concerned there’s no sign of the big sponsors and advertisers changing their positions so the model remains. Motorsport is different with single or dual platforms holding rights per series across markets. So SkyF1 for F1 cars live; BT Sport or Dorna for MotoGP live, Eurosport for LeMans etc. I’m pretty sure marketeers have number crunched those that follow all of them and asserted that separate platforms works.

Anyway, accessibility: we’ve previously been spoiled by the monopoly held by the terrestrial channels who allowed us to watch for “free” via license fees, coverage sales and advertising. Before that there was NO live sport on tv and when Bernie put the first full season F1 deal together the BBC weren’t interested at all because “no one would watch a whole season of it.” hence some early commentaries were from a room in BBC TV centre with Muddly and James looking at a black and white feed, or post event commentary added on for the evening highlights show. If you wanted to see live football before the 1980s (before Italia 90 more likely) you went there in person. So let’s now look at a SKY sub of £960 per annum for a load of football vs a Gold season ticket at the Arsenal for about the same to see home games only and wait in a huge queue to get back in to Highbury and Islington station on a cold winter’s night after a shitty defeat to just about anyone these days and Sky know what good pricing looks like.

SKY reduced the cost of our package without me having to threaten to leave, so it’s under £100 now, which included line rental and super fast fibre but we don’t have Sports or Movies, just the legacy F1 subscription which we get for free because we had it from the start.  It’s still a lot when you think about it and even worse when you add Spotify, Netflix and Disney+ to the media bill.

Just because you have a significant other doesn’t mean you have to justify spending money on anything Dan.....if that’s what’s putting you off. Get it right and it can increase your overall spending power! 

Fully agree with you, Martin.  If a potential significant other expected me to have to justify spending my/our money on something I wanted, it wouldn't be the right relationship anyway.  And exactly the same if the boot was on the other foot - I certainly wouldn't expect them to have to get my permission to spend their/our money on something they wanted.

Within vaguely sensible parameters of course - if they emptied my bank account to buy themselves a large pink SUV with an automatic gearbox, that would be taking the piss

I would point out that Man Utd did not boycott the FA Cup. Pressure was put on them by the English FA to pull out of the FA Cup for a year and play in a FIFA tournament in South America as a way of supporting the English World Cup bid. And look how that turned out.