If you work at a company of substantial size, chances are that there will be
an employee whose job it is to cut the budget. He will probably be
incentive-rewarded, too, perhaps with a small percentage of the money he has
saved. His job will be dressed up as having something to do with efficiency
or better use of resources; in the old days he would be called a
time-and-motion man.
The bottom line is that if the budget — and I’ll make it easy because this is
an E-grade mathematics O-level student you are reading here — is £100
million, his job is to get it down to £90 million. And the next year, when
the budget is £90 million, to make his bonus, he again has to cut it by 10
per cent. Now it is £81 million. And his job hasn’t changed and he’ll want
to hit that target in time for Christmas next year, too, which is probably
why you can never get a seat on a Ryanair flight these days and every
Travelodge is rammed Monday to Friday.
At the best companies, the ones that care about the quality of the product and
the wellbeing of the staff, somebody important works out that you can’t keep
hacking away at a bone with no meat on it and decides to invest and treat
people with a little respect. But there are plenty of businesses that are
sliced down to the marrow and still going.
I know, because I used to work for one.
Now, apply that logic to the international round of matches in the Premier
League. There are 20 owners, or their representatives, sat around a table,
many of whom have overpaid for their investment and need a greater return.
Transfer budgets and wages are spiralling. The manager is hammering on the
door each day, demanding money for players. The fans are an ungrateful lot.
And, yes, the new television deal is stunning, but that was last year’s good
news. Where is the next hit? What is Richard Scudamore, the chief executive,
going to do for us this year?
So here it is, gentlemen, the 39th step — an extra £5 million per year per
club, guaranteed on departure. Suddenly, everybody is happy. But only for
now, because, deep down, Scudamore is just an employee, like Joe Schmo in
the back office, whose job it is to rifle through the stationery invoices in
the hope of finding a cheaper ballpoint pen. And farther down the line, when
the money from the international round has been blown on agents’ fees and a
striker from Brazil with legs like a Queen Anne table who came highly
recommended via video, his licensee and PlayStation, the room will turn to
Scudamore again and say: “Well, that was good, but now what?”
So while Scudamore says that there will be no 40th or 41st match on his watch,
he cannot make a promise that the next Premier League money-grabbing
exercise will not be even worse. He admits as much with his insistence that
the game cannot stand still. This is not because football competitions are
in a permanent state of flux — the concept of the symmetrical league was
introduced in 1888 and survived intact until last Thursday, which is no bad
run — but because a Premier League club is a different animal and needs to
be fed money constantly.
Whatever Scudamore claims, match 39 is the thin end of the wedge because it
establishes the principle that the league must never be at rest, that it
must always be refined, not for the sake of greater fairness or equality,
but to give its members more.
So there may not be a match 40, but there could be a play-off to decide the
champions, or fresh rules on relegation, penalty shoot-outs, or a two-tier
Super League at the halfway stage, all to fix something that was not broken,
but was merely failing to generate enough wedge for a guy dumb enough to
give Terry Brown £100 million for West Ham United and then pay Freddie
Ljungberg £70,000 a week. As if anything ever could.
The sadness is that these seismic changes will be driven and sanctioned by men
who are passing through our game. When the matches kick off in January 2011,
some clubs are about as likely to have the present owners as the present
season-ticket prices.
Rewind three years to January 2005 and see the future. In that time there has
been a change of the boardroom guard at Manchester United, Liverpool,
Portsmouth, Aston Villa, Newcastle United, Manchester City, West Ham United,
Sunderland and Derby County. This does not include the significant power
struggles taking place at Arsenal and Birmingham City, both of whom could
change hands short term, along with Reading, Tottenham Hotspur, and
Portsmouth and Liverpool (again).
One of the leading supporters of the scheme is David Gold, the Birmingham City
chairman, who this season was preparing to sell the club to Carson Yeung, a
Hong Kong investor who ran out of money having destabilised the business, as
good as driving out Steve Bruce, the manager. Having failed to cash in, Gold
is now going to be part of a process that alters English football
irrevocably, which is fitting considering his previous readiness to dance to
the tune of Asian investors.
Yeung’s pursuit of Birmingham was not all it was cracked up to be and the
skirmishes of the past week suggest that the same could be said of the
riches promised by the international round. One by one, the confederations
of East and West have been voicing a lack of interest in the plan, a stance
that is to be taken with a Siberian quantity of salt. This is a negotiating
manoeuvre to force down the price. Premier League football does not come
cheap and to appear keen at this stage would only inflate the bidding.
This, though, is the first sign that the nations identified as slow-witted
cash cows by Scudamore and his owners may not be as stupid as they look.
Remember when football viewed television companies with similar contempt?
Now who calls the shots, sets the kick-off times, even has a hand in the
fixture list, if you consider the weekend just gone? Television still pays
top dollar for football’s rights, but it makes damn sure that there is a
return; and won’t the same be true of the Premier League’s new partners in
Asia and the United States?
The balance of power between football and television shifted very quickly.
In the beginning, the networks needed football to sell satellite dishes and
subscriptions and the game had the upper hand. What has changed is that
football has grown to become dependent on television money and now both
sides have a bargaining tool.
That will be the fate of the 39th game, too, or any of the other gimmicks
requiring lavish patronage. At first, English football will be able to name
its price, but, in time, when this bounty is factored into the budget of all
Premier League clubs, the host cities will be in a position to play hardball
with everything from kick-off times to format and the identity of the
visiting clubs. Don’t think this cannot happen. A few years ago Scudamore
was claiming that something else would never happen on his watch: Premier
League matches kicking off abroad.
Yet one question remains unanswered, which is the fate of the English invader
when domestic football takes off in Asia. There are an estimated
1,321,851,888 people in China and, eventually, 11 of them are going to be
able to kick a ball. When this happens, the foreign market will sink like a
stone, because there is nothing more popular than a local hero. At the 2002
World Cup, the Kamo Soccer Shop in Tokyo sold 1,000 Junichi Inamoto shirts
in two days on the back of a good performance by the host nation.
When the Japan merchandise was unavailable, customers bought Inamoto’s Arsenal
shirt instead, so there was some benefit to the European market, but had he
been playing for his former club, Gamba Osaka, there would have been no way
for the avaricious Premier League to mine this little earner. As the Asian
economy expands, the money will talk, the best players will stay at home and
the domestic league will grow stronger. If the Premier League has hitched
its wagon too securely to the foreign market, one day there could be an icy
blast of indifference; particularly chilling if, in its pursuit of an
international audience, it has neglected and alienated its loyal supporters
at home.
There were 104 years between Commodore Matthew Perry’s landing in Okinawa
harbour, which ended centuries of Japanese isolation with an American trade
agreement, and the first Toyota car arriving in America in 1957. By 1991,
Japan had the biggest car industry in the world (9.7 million produced
compared with 5.4 million in the US) and in the next 12 months it is
predicted that Toyota will overtake General Motors as the largest individual
manufacturer. Japan has six out of the top ten motor companies and seven of
the top 20 computer chip producers. They move fast, these foreign types. We
wouldn’t want to be caught standing still.
