Paul Ince, John Barnes & Managerial Vacancies

So, Paul Ince has been appointed as the manager of Blackburn Rovers, and I guess it's progress of sorts that the majority of debate concerning his appointment has been on the subject of his relative lack of experience and his decision to take the Franchise shilling, rather than the colour of his skin. It is refreshing to see a Premier League club take on a manager from the lower divisions. You might not like Paul Ince (and how successful he has actually been is open to question - he was given massive amounts of money by Milton Keynes and anything other than winning last year's League Two title would have been a pretty abject failure), but if he turns out to be a success in the Premier League, it doesn't take an enormous leap of imagination to see him being linked with the England job after Fabio Capello fails to take England to the 2010 World Cup. I don't, you'll be unsurprised to hear, think that there is anything wrong with taking managers from the lower divisions. It's easy to forget how much support modern Premier League managers get these days - a full raft of full-time professionals, trained and qualified to ensure that the players are fine-tuned to the same degree that modern racing cars are. The idea that, somehow, managing in the Premier League is more "difficult" than managing further down the ladder strikes me as being a somewhat curious one, even taking into account the enormous pressure that they are under.

Elsewhere, concerns have been raised about Ince's lack of a UEFA Pro coaching badge, which is now a requirement for any manager in the Premier League. Blackburn have stated that they hope to get special dispensation for Ince while he qualifies, but the question of why an ambitious young manager who has been in management for two or three years would not get themselves the qualification remains a valid one. After all, it only requires 240 hours of study over the course of a year, followed by a week at Warwick University to get a UEFA Pro Licence. The FA and the League Managers Association are in favour of all managers being qualified, but resistance to this rumbles on from the Premier League clubs themselves, who feel that these qualifications restrict them from being able to hire and fire as they wish. Putting to one side the fact that hiring and firing managers is a foolish policy to pursue if you seek to bring long-term stability to your club, it is still astonishingly wrong-headed of Premier League clubs to try and bypass UEFA rules over coaching qualifications. The circumstances surrounding Glen Roeder being exempted from it are well documented, but the situation regarding Gareth Southgate has shown the contempt with which the UEFA Pro Licence is held in Premier League circles. Southgate was appointed as Middlesbrough's manager in November 2006 with the club arguing that because he had been an international player, he hadn't had the time to take the qualification. Over eighteen months on, he is still studying for it.

These debates are important ones, but they do overlook the most significant factor in Ince's appointment - the colour of his skin. Ince becomes the first black, British manager in the Premier League (though not, of course, the first black Premier League manager - Ruud Gullitt and Jean Tigana have already been there and done that). It's difficult to argue that there isn't an element of institutionalised racism in this figure. After all, getting on for a third of all players are black, so why are they not given opportunities at a managerial level? It's not, after all, as if they're not applying for the jobs. John Barnes has gone public with his belief, citing the lack of response to his own applications for jobs at League One clubs and the experience of his former Watford team-mate Luther Blissett as examples of how difficult it is for black former players to get their foot in the managerial door. Barnes himself may not necessarily be the best example that one could give - after all, he was given a high profile coaching position at Celtic in 1999 and made an absolute pig's ear of it, and his complaint about not receiving replies to his applications could just as easily be explained by chairmen with long memories that don't wish to gamble on someone that has already failed as spectacularly as he did at Celtic as it could be by racism - but the questions that he raises are important ones.

If one considers the players of the same generation as Barnes that went on to become managers, many have been given repeat chances, often flying in the face of anything resembling logic. The likes of Peter Reid, Bryan Robson and Terry Butcher have failed, failed and failed again, but have all been given far more than one opportunity to make their mark as managers, but this is not a courtesy that has been extended to Barnes, who is currently working in a coaching capacity for Sunderland. Whilst it is true that a shade over half of all managers only ever get one managerial position, it would also seem to be true that candidates that have had higher profile playing careers will be cut a little more slack than others. As players' profiles go, they don't get higher than John Barnes, but the suspicion remains that managerial appointments remain an Old Boys Club to which the likes of Peter Reid and Bryan Robson are members, but Barnes isn't. On balance, it is probably fair to draw the assumption that the cultural divide between Barnes, the softly spoken middle-class son of a Jamaican military man, and the white, working class upbringing of so many people working within the game had a racial element to it, even if it was not explicit.

The question of why there are not more managers and coaches from the ethnic minorities in England is a complex one, and one which probably isn't best served by saying "racism" and ending the debate there and then. There almost certainly is a degree of racism to it, and the question of whether it is conscious racism or not is a red herring. It is irrelevant whether club owners think "I'm not hiring a black", say "I'm not hiring a black", or simply disregard applications that they receive from black managers. The end result is the same. When reading the comments of John Barnes, it is important to remember that he is not even getting to the stage of having an interview for the League One positions that he is applying for. He is simply sending in his CV and not receiving a response. For all he knows, his CV is not even being looked at. It's difficult to see what other conclusion he could come to other than to start to believe that there is an element of racism in the constant rejection that he faces. Meanwhile, the rest of the game needs to stop thinking of hiring a black manager as "taking a chance on a black manager". Equal opportunities means exactly what it says, and my over-riding suspicion is that nothing will change much until there is a wholesale reappraisal of the culture within which managers are appointed.

A Trust Issue

There was revealing stuff in The Independent this morning - a list of all twenty of next year's Premier League clubs, along with what their current estimated debts are and how much they're expecting to be able to spend on new players for next season. Surprise, surprise, Chelsea, Arsenal, Manchester United and Liverpool top the bill in both the size of their debt and the amount of money they're likely to spend. The combined debts of the top four are a jaw-dropping £1.862bn. The supposed beacons of success within modern English football are almost two billion pounds in debt. Set against this, the debts of the remainder of the clubs in the Premier League are relatively minor (though one can see just how important Fulham's win at Portsmouth on the last day of the season was - at £149m in debt, relegation would have almost certainly been the last that the Premier League would have seen of them, and a Leeds or Sheffield Wednesdayesque implosion could well have been on the cards), but the clubs will at least receive a greater income from television revenues next season as the new contracts kick in and, if all else fails, there are always the fans to bleed a little more money out of. Season tickets are rising at an average rate of 7.2% this summer (over twice the current rate of inflation), though this may yet backfire on them, coming in the middle of a year when the cost of mortgages is expecting to rise sharply and the cost of food has already made the front pages of the newspapers. Can football really buck the wider trend and continue to grow in the face of what might turn out to be the roughest economic environment in a generation?

We have done the argument on here before over how football supporters should define success (the very existence of their clubs rather than the winning of trophies), so I'm not going to go over that old ground again. I would, however, return to the subject of football's economic model and question whether the most established way of running football clubs can ever be regarded as sustainable. We always knew that Chelsea were a billionaire's plaything, but what has only recently become apparent is the extent to which they are - everything that they own is now mortgaged to Roman Abramovich. Massive, massive loans made to chase a dragon that one is starting to suspect that they might never catch up with. Manchester United may be backed in theory by the Glazer family, but that would be an over-simplistic analysis of the financial situation at Old Trafford. United are, in practice, owned by the myriad of banks and hedge funds that loaned the Glazers (or, rather, loaned Manchester United itself) the money for the buy-out in the first place. Manchester United are mortgaged up to their necks - the interest payment alone on their debt last year was £42m. Liverpool have joined the race, too. A club with a serviceable debt that was in the region of £50m last year are now £350m down, and what have Liverpool's supporters got for this money? Well, nothing of any real substance. The promise of a new stadium that will have to be paid for through bigger and grander loans, something approaching civil war at board level and Fernando Torres. You don't even have to think that this sort of financial behaviour to think that it is at best high risk and at worst reckless.

"The other way", however, seems to be working reasonably well. Clubs run by supporters trusts won four promotion places this season, at Stockport County, Exeter City, AFC Wimbledon and FC United of Manchester. All four of these clubs face challenges going forward. At Stockport, the race is still on to raise £1m as the deposit to start the process of buying their Edgeley Park stadium back. Exeter City have to, having taken five years to get back into the Football League, hold onto their place there. AFC Wimbledon will be trying to balance the budgeting of improving their squad in order to challenge for a place in the Conference whilst continuing to make payments on the loan taken out to buy their ground in the first place and paying for much-needed improvements to it. FC United of Manchester have arguably the biggest challenge of all - their groundshare at Bury's Gigg Lane doesn't appear to be working (they make very little money from match day revenues when they should be, in theory at least, one of the better off sides at their level). Can they find another home and maintain a ground development fund that would allow them to build a stadium of their own? They've managed two successive promotions, but are now up into the Unibond League Premier Division, where the competition will undoubtedly be greater.

The challenges facing clubs like these may look like a different universe to the worlds of the likes of Manchester United, but all four of them are doing what they can to plug that gap. Would you seriously bet against all four of them being in the Football League in ten years' time? Stranger things have happened. As long as they are open and transparent in their dealings, don't act in an irresponsible manner with regard to their finances, and keep their revenue streams intact by working within their communities to ensure that they are at the heart of them, giving people an affordable alternative to the hyperbole of the Premier League, there is nothing to suggest that they can't continue to develop. Maybe other clubs will start to take note - after all, four promotions when there are only fifteen trust-owned clubs in Britain is too many to just be a coincidence. In a season that has often made me want to bang my head against the wall, the sight of four well-managed clubs, run by supporters for supporters and trying to do things the right way both on and off the pitch is a real success for the English game in general.

A Tale Of Two Cities

It takes quite an effort to provide a crashing comedown after making the European Cup semi-finals for the third time on four years (or whatever), but Liverpool's ownersm seem, somehow, to have managed it. Tom Hicks' letter to Liverpool's chief executive Rick Parry, in which he asked him to resign, doesn't carry any weight. In fact, if anything, it demonstrates little more than the extent to which relationships have broken down between Gillett and Hicks over the last twelve months or so. Parry's decision to not take Hicks up on his very generous offer to walk away from the job that he has been doing reasonably compentenly for the last ten years or so does, however, offer an insight into how dysfunctional those running Liverpool Football Club are at the moment.

In the red corner, you've got Gillett, Parry and Rafael Benitez (who was, of course, angered by Hicks' open courting of Jurgen Klinsmann). In the, ahem, blue corner, you've got Hicks. Neutered by the fact that his 50% ownership of the club doesn't allow him to make any decisions without the approval of the man that is now, to all intents and purposes, his enemy. One suspects that Gillett is blocking any hopes that Hicks has of selling his half of the club because he would like to own it himself, and all the time DIC are waiting on the sidelines, making statements of varying degrees of helpfulness. The key thing for Liverpool supporters that aren't interested in AFC Liverpool to remember is that they have absolutely no control over this whatsoever. They chased the yankee dollar with admirable tenacity last year, and this is what they have ended up with. Other clubs looking at investors that are on the outside looking in whilst seductively waving wads of banknotes should take note.

One hundred miles south at Birmingham, the police have got involved by arresting David Sullivan and Karen Brady over reported irregularities in tax money paid to two players a couple of years. This, according to the press, has "shaken the world of football", to which I would say only this. No it hasn't. I have no idea whether English football is corrupt or, if it is, the extent to which it is. I would say this, though - I wouldn't be "surprised" if it is. More worrying for Birmingham supporters is the news that the club has been suspended from the Alternative Investment Market (the stock market on which they are floated). The club should really be issuing a statement to confirm exactly why this is.

Easter Shopping Options

On the 30th March, Grimsby Town take on Milton Keynes Dons in the final of the Johnstones Paint Trophy at Wembley Stadium. Now, if you've been reading this site for any period of time, you'll know my opinion on Milton Keynes and, indeed, the freaks that have started following them, and I'm not going to restate it yet again (my official policy at present is something like, "if we all ignore them, they might just go away"). However, the outstanding independent Grimsby supporters site Cod Almighty seem to have stated the viewpoint of the average English football supporter with this rather natty T-shirt. Says it all really - with £1 from each sale going to the Grimsby Town Supporters Trust and £1 from each sale going to the Dons Trust (that's Wimbledon, not Milton Keynes), I suggest buying one.

What The Premier League Thinks Of You - A Response

It has taken me the best part of twenty-four hours to fully ingest the message that I put up on here last night. At first, I thought that it must be fake. However, Tom at Pitch Invasion's source for it is impeccable, and there is no reason to think that it is anything other than genuine. We have, in England, lived with the creeping understanding that we are viewed as little more than walking open wallets by football clubs, and that is something that Premier League club fans seemed to have reconciled themselves to, but this insight into the mind-set of the man that is in charge of the Premier League seems to demonstrate that even this isn't enough for the Premier League clubs any more. Our money isn't enough for them. They have swallowed the hubris about themselves to such an extent that they seriously believe that they can take over the world.

When reading this document, it is very important that one detaches oneself from the comments made by the writer about Mr Scudamore's tone and suchlike. Whilst these are mannerisms that clearly drive the writer to distraction, they should be of little concern to us. We don't even need to worry about the editorialising of the report by its writer when there is so much other meat on the bone. The quotations contained within it contain, in isolation, an almost breathtaking contempt for and disinterest in the interests of English football supporters. You don't even have to think about how downright rude it was of him to simply ignore the very first question that he was asked in favour of a ten minute long explanation for why no-one was told that this announcement was to be made before it was, when you can simply pick and choose from more or less every quote in it that has been directly attributed to Scudamore for examples of the madness surrounding the modern game. Let's take a look at some of the juicier morsels:

"We have had to accept from the start that it won't be perfect, there can be no symmetry" - So, in effect, the Premier League simply doesn't give a damn about the fact that, after 120 years, they will be sacrificing the very principle of league football that meant that the league format was expanded across the world and is still used across the world. They don't care about this.

"We do have an international following and by serving it in this way we can control the wealth redistribution down the league" - So, to clarify, is Scudamore trying to claim there is some sort of Socialist redistribution of wealth going on here? Are Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool agreeing to this scheme to "help out" Derby County, Wigan Athletic and Fulham? It is an indicator of just how little Scudamore thinks of us if he thinks that we'll fall for a line like that. If clubs aren't making money hand over fist at the moment, considering the massive TV deals (both domestically and internationally), global marketing and exorbitant ticket prices, then perhaps they should look at a financial model that spends such massive amounts of money on wages and transfer fees before looking abroad to bring in even more money.

"It's not me that will decide and certainly not Mr Blatter - if 14 people stick their hands up that's it" - I've said on here before that I believe that I believe that the biggest clubs are headed towards open war with FIFA, and this might just prove to be opening shot. It is an extraordinarily hostile statement to make at a time when the Premier League should be trying a charm offensive on all levels abroad. I, to be absolutely honest, cannot believe that Scudamore said this. If he has, they might as well call the whole thing off, because the FA won't give any consideration to any proposal that jeopardises the World Cup bid, because to say that FIFA don't have a say in the ultimate decision is just idiotic.

"Part of the calculation the clubs have to make is to ask 'is it going to cost us'? For how many people is it going to be the tipping point. For 16 years we have been losing various segments of our supporter base. We have lost some, but we have gained a lot more. Part of our assessment of this project will be those we'll lose and those we'll gain. We'll weigh that up in the 'is this worth it?' column." - This is the section that Premier League supporters should read the most closely. Stripping it down to the basics, it is saying this: the Premier League will weigh up how much you care and how much you are worth to them. If you aren't worth enough, they will jettison your support in favour of those with more money, even if it means going abroad to do so. They've spent the last fifteen years pricing people out of football, and now it's reaching its logical conclusion. The last pretensions of giving a damn about the communities that they came from and supported them when times were leaner end here.

"We've only got 330,000 attending fans - we have to weigh that in the balance against other stakeholders" - Well, this is just bullshit. The average attendances of all Premier League clubs adds up to well over 700,000. I don't know where he has taken this figure from, but my guess is that it is the average Premier League attendance on any given full weekend of fixtures. It doesn't take into account the fact that it's not the same 330,000 people every week by any stretch of the imagination. And who are these "other stakeholders" of whom he speaks? Sponsors? Television companies? I think that we can be pretty certain that "other stakeholders" is marketing guff for "people that will pay us a truckload of money".

"Read my lips - if the local football federations do not think this is a good idea for football development in their country, we will not do it. We believe that where we are successful, football around us is successful" - Well, no. The "markets" that the Premier League are looking to exploit are markets in which the domestic leagues desperately need investment. Investment that would be considerably easier to find if hundreds of millions of pounds isn't spirited away to the Premier League.

The battle lines, therefore, are being drawn up, and the Premier League is simply not going to give up on this scheme because of opposition from supporters or FIFA. One can only speculate as to why they appear to be so confident of getting the support of national federations, but we can now, presuming that this report is not a fake, at least be certain of where their priorities are in the Brave New World. This, as I have said before, will be the tip of the iceberg. If you support a Premier League club, the question that you should surely be asking yourself is this: if this isn't the tipping point, what will be? And if it is the tipping point, are you so much in love with your club that you are prepared for your relationship with your club to become an abusive one?

What The Premier League Thinks Of You

I've copied this over from "Pitch Invasion", and will be putting up a reply to it on here later on. An open letter to Richard Scudamore, if you like. It is, I think, a critical read if you are an English football supporter. I have made a few amendments to the formatting, but every word of what is printed below is as per the original transcript.

Consultation meeting between Mr. Richard Scudamore, Premier League Chief Executive, and representatives of the Football Supporters' Federation (the FSF).

Wednesday February 27th - 10.30-12.00

FSF representatives were the chairman Malcolm Clarke, together with one grass-roots member each from the previous week's FSF regional "NO TO GAME 39" campaign meetings (clubs whose fan bodies were directly represented were Aston Villa, Chelsea, Liverpool, Portsmouth and Sunderland).

Three of Mr. Scudamore's staff, including Cathy Long, were also present but said very little during the meeting.

FSF chairman Malcolm Clarke began by asking Mr. Scudamore what was the current status of the proposal to play a 39th round of PL matches overseas. Before he answered the question that had actually been asked, Mr. Scudamore embarked on a 10 minute explanation of why the proposal had to be made out-of-the-blue at the meeting of PL chairmen on February 7th, how the proposal was leaked some hours before the PL had called a press conference, and how frustrating this inauspicious start was to him personally.

He then continued his monologue by spending a further 10 minutes dismissing some of the objections which had been already been put forward by the FSF in their written submission, and by many other voices. Only then did Mr. Scudamore finally answer the original question, telling us that the proposal was very much ongoing, and that, "we sit before you in the middle of a consultation process which has had an interesting start� There was unanimous agreement between the 20 clubs in principle - there was not a dissenter. The clubs have agreed there is enough merit in the idea to move it forward�". A few moments later he strengthened this to "so much merit in the idea that it's got to be considered�".

"Format is the issue clubs want to get their heads round most (and this will be discussed and probably won't be settled until June/July), and if they're unhappy with the format, it won't happen. It's currently only a proposal, and will only become reality", he said, subject to:

- Consultation
- Calendar fit
- Sanction of host associations
- Club rules

"We have had to accept from the start that it won't be perfect, there can be no symmetry", he added. Mr Scudamore then went on to imply that we should be grateful that the Premier League had not proposed to take one of the existing 38 fixtures out of the calendar and play it overseas. Never for a moment did he consider that the fact that it won't be perfect and that there can be no symmetry' means that this Game 39 should not happen.

"I refute the suggestion that this is all about money. It's about a whole load of things before it's about money. We do have an international following and by serving it in this way we can control the wealth redistribution down the league. We have a responsibility to our fans on a global basis, and we'll do it before the big 4 go off and do it themselves. It's not me that will decide and certainly not Mr Blatter - if 14 people stick their hands up that's it".

Emphasising the strength of feeling on the issue and the level of protest, unprecedented in recent years, Malcolm Clarke called this a "Rubicon moment", and all the FSF representatives backed this up, stating that this proposal could mark the beginning of the end of their personal support of a Premier League football club.

In response, Mr. Scudamore stated that "we will have to weigh up those we lose against those we gain". He implied that he felt a lot of the recent furore had been merely "initial resistance and reaction", and that much of it would not be long-term - contradicting his earlier statement that "you can't weigh up one kind of supporter against another and judge whose support is better".

"Part of the calculation the clubs have to make is to ask 'is it going to cost us'? For how many people is it going to be the tipping point. For 16 years we have been losing various segments of our supporter base We have lost some,but we have gained a lot more. Part of our assessment of this project will be those we'll lose and those we'll gain We'll weigh that up in the 'is this worth it?' column. We know where the balance of the noise is (in the media and grass-roots furore over this proposal) -our difficulty is working out the weight of that. We know the feelings of those who are making the noise. We've only got 330,000 attending fans - we have to weigh that in the balance against other stakeholders".

However, Mr. Scudamore did state that, "If they (the dissenters) fight above their weight it might put people off ". So, in spite of his patronising tone, this does seem to offer apparent encouragement to the protest campaign.

One interesting phrase he used, when allusions were made to calls from certain quarters for his resignation (not something the FSF itself has suggested at all) was that "I am fairly committed to this proposal", suggesting that he does not see it as something he wishes to stand and fall by, going on to say that, "I wouldn't be supporting it if it was more than one extra game, and that if that proposal is made, say ten years down the line, I won't be here anyway".

Going back to what he had said earlier in the meeting he told us that the playing field is far from level already, with huge imbalances between the financial power of Premier League clubs, so "it's already about distortion - my job is to overcome huge imbalances". This is not about the Premier League brand, he said (contradicting his clear statements of three weeks earlier), "it's about 20 brands, giving Reading, Bolton and the like the chance to ride on the big 4-6 and promote their brands".

He re-iterated that the decision to host the matches was not up to FIFA or regional associations, but to the individual national Football Federations. "Read my lips", he had said earlier in the meeting, `if the local football federation do not think this is a good idea for football development in their country, we will not do it. We believe that where we are successful, football around us is successful. Since 1992 we (the Football league, the FA & the PL) have all grown together".

At the beginning of the meeting he had said that fundamental to the rationale of the whole proposal was "keeping the PL collective together against substantial threats from the bigger clubs (that they didn't want to have to play in the League Cup, FAC replays, etcetera, that they wanted to parcel off their own TV rights individually, etcetera)". Throughout the meeting Mr. Scudamore's arguments were fundamentally reliant on such spurious linkages and underlying threats that without him and new proposals like this, English football would all fall apart.

Needless to say, we made our total opposition clear and stated our determined intention to keep campaigning against this in whatever ways it would take to defeat it.

Football Shorts 4

Well, it's another Tuesday night, and another chance for me to catch up on all the things that have been distracting my tiny brain over the last few days or so (Caution: The following posts are small items that I don't have the time or inclination to write complete pieces about, but that I do feel warrant a mention - they're not all meant to be taken completely seriously).

My New Scarf: I've got a new scarf! It's blue and yellow striped, and it's so comfortable on my neck that I almost kept it on all day at work all day, and would have done were it not for the fact that I would almost certainly died from heatstroke had I not. Should you be interested, I can be seen modelling it here (I'm on the right, by the way). Of course, the ownership of a new football scarf can only mean one thing, and that it the immediate onset of an unseasonal heatwave that renders the damn thing useless until the autumn. If the weather turns and there's a mini-heatwave at the start of March, you'll know who to blame (although those of you that remember my topless raindance will already be aware that I'm not very good at controlling the weather).

Say It Quietly: ..But the Premier League is actually pretty exciting at the moment, isn't it? There are just seven points between Everton in fourth place and West Ham United in tenth, and any one of the teams in the top half of the table could yet harbour hopes of a top four finish. It's a similar situation at the bottom, with only seven points between Middlesbrough in twelfth place and third-from-bottom Reading. All of this means that, with eleven or twelve matches left of the Premier League season, nineteen of the twenty sides in the Premier League are either involved in a scrap to avoid the drop or playing from the title, or a place in the Champions League. The only team not involved in either, of course, are Spurs, who have already won one trophy and are still in with a chance of winning another. Savour it - it won't be this unpredictable again.

Wales Abandons Its Second Cup: Bad News for fans of the Welsh Premier League - the BBC have pulled the plug on £360,000 worth of sponsorship of the FAW Premier Cup. It's complicated stuff. Cardiff City, Swansea City and Wrexham aren't allowed to play in the Welsh Cup, but BBC Wales stepped in to sponsor the FAW Premier Cup, complete with live coverage in BBC Wales and on the BBC Website. It hasn't been a roaring success, and I was a witness to this last week, when I flicked onto the match between Cardiff City and Newport County, which was actually Cardiff City Reserves vs Newport County from an almost eerily empty Ninian Park. Newport have done pretty well out of taking it seriously, with the money going into a team which is having a better season in the Blue Square South for some years. Quite what Cardiff, Swansea and Wrexham got out of it I don't quite know, but Cardiff have recently had it confirmed that they won't be able to go into the UEFA Cup should they qualify for it through the FA Cup this season (and don't laugh - Millwall managed it a couple of years ago, and it only requires Manchester United, Chelsea and Cardiff to win their quarter-finals for this to become a distinct possibility), though they are hoping to arrange a meeting with Michel Platini with a view to getting an exemption.

A Small Victory: You all know that we haven't heard the last of this, but at least the Premier League have had the relative good sense to abandon their talks with UEFA over The 39th Game. None of this means, of course, that the whole things is being shelved and that Old Man Scudamore is to be replaced by Tony Benn. Expect a watered down version coming soon to a press conference near you.

He's At it Again

It looks like Leeds United's Ken Bates started legal action against his team's fifteen point deduction for not following Football League rules on administration just in time because, on the pitch, his team is falling to pieces. They haven't won a single match in their last seven games, and have collapsed from being being contenders for automatic promotion from League One to being in ninth place in the table and five points off so much as a play-off place. Yesterday, they were reliant on a late Tresor Kandol goal to salvage a 1-1 draw at home to struggling Crewe Alexandra.

Bates' campaign reeks of his own trademark brand of self preservation, and it runs the risk of dragging the name of Leeds United even further into the mud. The circumstances surrounding Leeds entering into administration and their subsequent sale back to Bates last summer was highly suspect, and the League's decision to dock them fifteen points would seem to indicate that they felt the same. Bates, you may remember, had initially offered the insulting amount of one penny in the pound to his club's creditors, and the final offer agreed by the administrators still only offered their creditors a small percentage of what they were owed back. As soon as Leeds were released from what they seemed to think of as being some sort of unfairly applied straitjacket, they started spending again, and pretty heavily by League One standards.

The story took a turn for the strange last week, when the Football League's Brian Mawhinney announced that Barnsley had decided to publicly to back Leeds in their fight. This was news to the Barnsley chairman Gordon Shepherd, who had been away from his post for a few weeks with health problems. "I have nothing against Leeds United but this is their fight, not ours", said Shepherd, which leads one to wonder where where this particular piece of information came from. Whatever the situation with Barnsley, other clubs in the Football League have been most conspicuous in not supporting Leeds in their legal action.

What sticks in the craw is that Bates is back-tracking on an arrangement that his club signed in the summer when, desperate to get their "golden share" back in time for the start of the new season (and without this, they wouldn't have been able to start the season and would almost certainly have closed), they signed an agreement promising that they wouldn't enter into any legal action against the Football League over this matter. Bates, with his trademark habit of being utterly self-centred in his pursuit of anything whatsoever, is arguing that this should now be voided and rendered unenforceable. They're trying to spin it that they are somehow the victims of a miscarriage of justice here, to the extent of starting a petition about it, which, with wearying predictability, 8,000 Leeds supporters (all of whom are presumably so desperate for promotion that they are happy to concede any moral misgivings about this) have signed.

Should they lose the legal case (and, without wishing to put a hex on it, I can't see them losing it), the Football League should seriously consider playing hard-ball with Leeds. They should consider removing the "golden share" from them, and if that means dire consequences, then so be it. Everybody knows the circumstances of what happened at Leeds United last summer, and a fifteen point deduction was, considering what Bates got away with, an exceptionally light punishment in many ways. Football clubs may need to learn the hard way that there should be no easy ways out of financial mismanagement.

Another Fabulous FA Fudge

You wouldn't have expected an outright condemnation straight away, would you? I mean, it would surely be asking too much for the FA to take one look at Scudamore's Insane Plan For Global Domination and say, "You know, the only reason they're doing this is to get even richer than they already are. They'll give it the usual about the global market being important and how their legions of foreign supporters deserve a chance to see their heroes in action, but we all know that it's about making even more money than they already do. Which is nice for them. However, they're selling the fans of the game in their own country down the river, and chucking away the principle of league football - which, might we add, is one of the few truly great things that Victorian England gave the world - and they're going to cause irreversible damage to our World Cup finals bid, so we're going to nip it in the bud and tell them where to stick it. Especially David Gold".

That would have been asking too much. However, I think that, as supporters who are ultimately powerless to prevent changes of this nature, we are entitled to little bit more than we got from the FA this afternoon. I know - I'm a hopeless idealist. The guardians of English football? Standing in the way of progress and the New World Order? Let's have a look at what they said, and I would also ask you to remember that, in his initial statement to the press last week, Lord Triesman, the all-new chairman of the FA said, "“I am determined that our international and domestic relations must be sustained at the highest level, and I will not countenance any damage to those relations.”:

- "We've just had a long and a serious discussion of the Premiership's proposal for a 39th game at The Football Association Board. We are still, as I said in Parliament, and I repeat there are still a lot of fundamental issues for us" - Right. Jolly good. Glad to hear that you don't have any issue with this whatsoever, then.

- "There are serious problems of congestion in the season and I make it very clear that we would want to make sure that all of our own competitions can be played successfully, and that there isn't the usual overstretch that you get at that time of year which can have an impact on the England side. And I am very clear that it does not impact on the England side." - The problems with congestion in the season would be alleviated if the Premier League did as it once promised it would, and reduced its numbers to eighteen clubs. But that would miss two of them missing out at the trough, so that's not going to happen. It might also be alleviated if the clubs didn't jet off abroad every time on a marketing mission every they had a spare five days. Strangely, these never seem to contribute to fixture congestion, whereas the occasional League Cup match at Grimsby does.

- "Secondly, I think that we have to make sure that our international relationships are in good shape; there are very many reasons for that, and the 2018 World Cup is one of those reasons, and it is an important reason, but it is also true that we want to make sure we are working with international partners in a way that is effective" - Actually, the Premier League may already have caused irreversible damage to the 2018 World Cup bid with their insufferable arrogance in trying to colonise parts of the football world whose own infrastructures desperately need investment and support.

- "Third, there is bound to be continuing concern about whether the 39th game would change the symmetry of the competition or would introduce unfairness as it is perceived in the competition. We'd be concerned with any competition that we are responsible for, in the sense that we sanction competitions, that had that impact" - Well, it's not really "concern". It's "knowledge". It's 120 years of a format which is fearsomely simple and works. We already know that it will change the symmetry of the game and, to be frank, we don't need you to hold working parties for two years to tell us that.

- "And, it's a slightly different order of things but it's also significant, it's important to see that we're in a very difficult climate; people are very hostile and we've seen a great deal of that. We have to need to try to ensure that the football family as a whole feels more content with any proposal going forward" - Firstly, please stop calling it "the football family". If it is a "family", it's even more dysfunctional than the royal family. Secondly, if you oppose the idea, you don't have to "try to ensure that the football family as a whole feels more content with any proposal going forward". If you are against it, you should oppose it, and not recommend to UEFA or FIFA.

- "I summarise the points in the following way: at the moment we have not seen a sustainable plan to which we can agree. If the Premiership has things that it wants to say about changes or new variants, well then come forward. But personally I'd prefer it sooner rather than later because I don't want this to drift on particularly as we launch our World Cup bid" - Umm, it's not called "The Premiership" any more, but how are you to know? After all, you're only the Football Association. But I digress. The World Cup bid has already been launched, hasn't it? Whether it has or hasn't, it's going to ruin it.

- "In general, I think uncertainty is not very helpful going on for any length of time, but that's a matter for them, they will conclude whether they have got anything else that they want to say and we will always do them the courtesy of listening and thinking about it, and asking the right questions, and trying to make sure we have understood the detail" - Well, that's just bland platitudes, isn't it? I mean, that's just a very long sentence that doesn't actually say anything, isn't it?

- "That's what I want to say about the meeting we have just had, where I think there was a great deal of convergence right across our part of the football family about the issues" - There's that phrase again!

There isn't a great deal more to say on the subject than what I've put above, and that's because the FA didn't say much this afternoon. It's all just bluster and marketing speak. Spin. Whatever teeth the FA showed in their initial statement has already been watered down into "we'll see". All the Premier League has to do now is water down this (obviously unworkable) scheme, and the FA will support them. Be warned - they're going to sell us down the river here. They just haven't got the balls to come straight out and say it.

Mock The Week

What a week we've had. As the wheels have started to come off Scudamore's Insane Experiment, the world has started to line up to criticise it all, but the damage may be long term. The FA's initial silence on the matter could already have blown England's World Cup bid out the window, and the practical nature of the objections has meant the there is yet the distinct possibility that other crackpot schemes will emanate from Gloucester Place over the coming weeks, months and years. Everybody on the inside track of the game was strangely quiet on the matter in the couple of days after the announcement was made. It felt as if those in positions of importance were playing a wait and see game on public opinion before coming out themselves and expressing an opinion.

The first to come out and speak publicly on the matter were the likes of Arsene Wenger (who appears to be singularly blind to the double standards at play in complaining about his players having too many matches to play and then coming out in favour of a plan that would involve his players flying half-way across the world to play a competitive match in the middle of the season) and David Gold of Birmingham City who was almost refreshingly honest in his opinion that it'll be GREAT because they'll make loads of money out of it (though we can safely disregard his opinions - I would suggest that there is a medium to high likelihood that Birmingham City won't even be in the Premier League by 2011). The press, frankly, let their readers down. At a time that they should have been giving them information on the plan and explaining just what the long term effects of this could be, they stayed largely quiet. As I noted on here before, the BBC's Sports Editor Mihir Bose did at least stick his head above the parapets, but only to post some ill thought-out comments about how great it will be because they'll make so much money from it.

One issue that seemed strangely overlooked in the forty-eight hours was the reaction of the international community. After all, this was a matter that concerned them. There were negative words from the USSF, the Asian Football Confederation and the authorities in Australia (the rumoured hosting cities had been Beijing, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Melbourne and Miami), but this was just a primer for the big guns coming out against it. Michel Platini, the head of UEFA, said, ""It's a strange and comical idea. I was laughing - soon you will have in England no English presidents, you already have no English coach, you have no English players and maybe now you will have no clubs playing in England. It's a joke". It was a devastating assessment, cutting to the core if the problems with the English game. The only thing we have left is the fact that the Premier League at least still plays in England. Get rid of that, and there is no such thing as top-class English football. More damaging yet was Sepp Blatter's assertion that, "This will never happen. At least this will not happen as long as I am the president of Fifa". Blatter, so often a font of wrongness in the football universe, hit the nail on the head and was as blunt in his assessment as Platini was in his: "I support the fans 100 per cent. If I was a fan in England I would say: 'No, please play at home and don't go abroad.' If the plan includes official league matches then, as a fan, I would protest".

These reactions were utterly predictable, and they made the FA's continuing silence on the matter all the more perplexing. One expects it of the Premier League, where the club owners are presumably so out of touch with the outside world because they spend all of their time sitting counting their money in the manner of Scrooge McDuck, but are the FA still so out of touch that they couldn't see which way this was going? It was almost as if they were sat at Soho Square, scratching their heads like cavemen while the rest of the world tore the plan to pieces. The penny seemed to finally drop with both the press and the FA when Platini and Blatter were so scathing. If there's one thing that means more to the press and the FA than keeping the big clubs happy, it's doing what they can to ensure that the 2018 World Cup bid is successful, and it was becoming apparent that this is likely to seriously damage it. At this point, the FA has still only expressed "serious reservations", when they should have been issuing an outright condemnation of the plan. They have been warned by Blatter that this may cost England the 2018 World Cup, and their hesitancy to side with the rest of the international football community may yet cost them dear.

The Premier League has been behaving like a bunch of old colonials in looking to expand out into an international market, and this won't be lost on many FIFA delegates when it comes down to voting for the 2018 World Cup. My belief is that the damage has already been done. When push comes to shove, all FIFA delegates will be more than aware that Premier League clubs will benefit greatly from a World Cup being held in England, and are they seriously going to want to give the any sort of financial reward, when the very same clubs are explicitly seeking to undermine domestic football in other continents for their own financial ends? Blatter, I believe, is not averse to England hosting the World Cup, and chose his words carefully to scare the FA into falling into line with them, but their failure to do this to the extent that they should have done could yet prove to be expensive. The press has hardly covered itself in much glory, either. Over the last couple of days, there have been numerous negative articles in the British press on the subject, but the question remains of why it took almost a week for these articles starting to appear. Was it because they were just waiting to see which way public opinion was going to go on the subject? Were they just slow in reacting? We may never know. By the early hours of this morning, though, even Manchester United were coming out against the idea. The best thing for all concerned now would be to just sweep the concept under the carpet and forget that it was ever mentioned.

Two serious questions remain. Firstly, what is to become of Richard Scudamore? In the course of the last eight days, he has exposed himself as being so far out of touch with public opinion that he may well have announced that clubs will using convicted paedophiles as their mascots from next season on, has exposed the Premier League (to anyone that didn't already know this) as being approximately a million times as interested in making money than it is in football, has exposed the FA to the risk of international criticism, and has exposed the England 2018 World Cup bid to being blown out of the water before it gains any momentum. All this, and he still seems to think that there is no problem - that the opinions of UEFA and FIFA are mere "technicalities" that can be overcome or over-ridden if needs be. His position in the Premier League (a company which has just two directors - Scudamore and Dave Richards, a man whose own competence is probably best summed up by the state that he left Sheffield Wednesday in when he quit as chairman: tens of millions of pounds in debt and heading towards two relegations and a financial crisis from which they haven't yet recovered) is surely untenable, but it remains likely that he will stay.

This fact, combined with what we already know about him, leads to the second big question: presuming that this plan will surely be killed stone dead in the next week or two, what other examples of "blue sky thinking" will he come up with? We know for a fact that he he doesn't give a damn about the integrity of the league system, so what's to follow? The FA Cup makes quite a bit of money that doesn't go straight to the FA - how about Premier League play-offs or dividing the Premier League up into northern and southern divisions, leading to a Championship match, like the Superbowl? How about scrapping relegation? Considering the events of the last nine days or so, there is almost certainly no plan too mad to be considered if it means that the Premier League makes a few million quid out of it. If or when this plan fails, we can be certain of one thing - we haven't heard the last of this most voracious forms of "modernisation" yet.

Viva La Revolution!

As you will have already hopefully read elsewhere, it now seems highly likely that a Trust run team of some description going by the name of AFC Liverpool will be started up. As happened at Manchester United several years ago, disenchantment with the politics surrounding a club is causing a number of its supporters to reassess their values, and what seems to be a common feeling is a creeping sense of dislocation towards the Premier League. Supporters of Liverpool have more cause than most to feel like this. A year ago, their club had a manageable debt, was owned by people that seemed to care about the future of the club and was on its way to a second European Cup final in three years. A year on, and the debt has spiralled out of control and is only being kept in check by refinancing at considerable cost. The new owners might be asset-strippers (no-one really knows for sure exactly what their motives are), the team might not even qualify for next year's UEFA Cup and, although they're still in the Champions League, it seems massively unlikely that they will get anywhere near the final of it this season. In a more general sense, the Premier League wants to play matches abroad and is happy to mess up the format of the league in order to do it, ticket prices are still rising massively year on year, and there seems no sense in which these things are going to get any better.

It was this combination of events that led to the formation of FC United of Manchester - the brazenly cynical Glazer take-over being the tipping point for a sizeable minority of supporters that were already heartily fed up with the rampant commercialism of it all, being viewed as little more than walking wallets and purses that clubs could dip into whenever they liked and having kick-off times shunted around to suit everybody other than those that actually turned up at the stadium itself. They seized control of their own destinies, and started their own club. It wasn't about "throwing their toys of their prams". It was about supporting a football club during the most successful period in their history and it not being enjoyable any more. No-one could reasonably argue that it was an "easy" decision for any of them to make. Every single one of those that walked away was jettisoning a lifelong commitment - a commitment that they never thought that they would have to walk out on. They were subjected to abuse from the supporters that stayed, insulted by a manager that they had lionised and who had built his own reputation on being a "man of the people", and they have found themselves in constant hot water with the authorities, not having realised that amateur and semi-pro leagues can be staggeringly incompetent and petty.

Yet they stuck with it, and if you ask those that have stuck with whether they have any regrets, the answer is unanimously "no". Football is fun again. They're not paying through the nose any more. They can stand safely on terraces. They kick-off at three o'clock on Saturday afternoons. They're building a better future for themselves - to the extent that they are raising money to build their own stadium. It my strike some as odd that they could go from expecting a place in the last four of the European Cup to hoping amongst hope that they can get promoted into the Unibond League Premier Division, but people's perspectives have been adjusted. Everything is a new challenge again. Liverpool supporters have a chance to experience this, they should cast aside their concerns & prejudices and welcome it with open arms. To not do it because of the embarrassment of doing something that "the Mancs" have done is absurdly short-sighted. It's not about "copying" them - that simply is not the point. The reaction on the FC United forum has been broadly supportive to AFC Liverpool, and they'll be likely to receive support in setting up from the club and/or its supporters. You never know - at this lower level, some of the poisonous hatred that has soured relations between the two clubs' supporters might even be diluted. It's not about "hating Liverpool" or "turning your back on Liverpool", either. The majority of FCUM supporters remain Manchester United supporters to at least some extent. They still watch them on the television. They still cheer them on, albeit from a greater. It's not a bond that breaks that easily.

It is, however, about creating a football club that exists as far from the spirit-crushing world of corporate business as possible. A football club that operates within its means. A club whose shirt isn't covered in sponsors' logos. A football club that does everything within its power to keep it affordable for everyone to get in. A club in which there is harmony between the supporters and those running the club because they are, essentially, the same people. It's about proving that you do not simply have to be a passive consumer, whose loyalty is, frankly, abused by a club that doesn't even really care about you any more. A club that plays in a league that doesn't care about you any more. It's not about "going to watch the reserves instead" - that's the footballing equivalent of giving up smoking by going from twenty cigars a day to twenty cigarettes. It's not about "just going and watching a local non-league team instead", either. They won't have that special bond if they all just pitch up at Marine or Bootle. It won't be theirs.

Maybe Liverpool's supporters are masochists. Maybe they enjoy the position of their club and the position of utter helplessness that they hold over its future. In that case, they should stay where they are. Give it five years and they'll have a dentists table built into the turnstiles at all Premier League grounds so that they can extract your gold fillings on the way in. That would certainly be the rational thing for the club to do - just before the bucket into which you throw the deeds to your house as well. The alternative is for Liverpool's supporters to take the one chance that they get at life and try to do something different. They may never win the European Cup, but they've done that five times already, anyway. Starting from scratch and getting into the Football League - now, that would be a challenge.

Now - This Is Just Too Good

Many of you will already be aware of the concept of "jumping the shark". Named for an episode of "Happy Days" in which The Fonz jumped over a shark on a pair of water skis, it has come to signify a step too far. A metaphorical line which has been overstepped. Today, as you may have heard, the Premier League jumped the shark. I have been pondering over the last few weeks whether the Premier League has been orchestrating recent shenanigans for our entertainment. The low comedy of Newcastle United and the slowly building crisis at Anfield seem to have been tailor-made for cynics such as me, but I was, I have to say, caught somewhat by surprise by this. It's an announcement so staggering in its avarice that it has taken most of the afternoon for me to fully absorb it. It's brilliant.

For those of you that hadn't already found this out, the Premier League wants to play matches abroad. It doesn't end there. They plan to extend the season by one match (to thirty-nine matches) and have every club play one match abroad in January, starting in January 2011. As if that's not enough, the plan is for them to auction off the rights to host two matches each to five different cities, with two matches to be played in each city over the same weekend. Brilliant! This is the moment at which the Emperor's new clothes have finally vanished from view. It is the point at which any pretence of caring about anything other than money suddenly vaporises. It is the point at which the Premier League finally says to fans of clubs in its own home country that you don't matter any more. It's not about you. It's about the global dollar, and nothing is going to get in the way of it. Consider, if you will, this magnificent quote from Peter Scudamore, the Premier League's Chief Executive:

"We believe that an 'international round' of matches will enhance the strength of the Barclays Premier League as a competition; create extra interest in all 20 Premier League Clubs at home and abroad; and allow increased investment in talent development and acquisition, facilities as well as our football development and community programmes."

Yes, Peter. These will be the "football development and community programmes" that have left the England football team without one single international class goalkeeper then, I presume. I'm also interested in how this creates "extra interest in all 20 Premier League clubs at home". Isn't there enough already? If there isn't, there's a reason for that. It's because there never will be. You could build one stadium with a capacity of fifty million people and put the entire population of Britain in it with Sky Sports being broadcast on the palms of their hands and it wouldn't be "enough", because once you start pursuing money and money alone, enough is never "enough". They're fooling no-one. Everyone knows what this is about. The Fonz has done his trick and he's already back at Arnold's, drying himself off, whilst enjoying a root beer and a cheeseburger.

For the purposes of argument, though, let's take a moment to consider the details of the proposition. Clubs will be seeded, so that no one city hogs all of the "big" clubs. This still, however, causes a massive degree of lop-sidedness in the fixture list. Using this season's table as an example, someone would have to play Manchester United or Arsenal three times, whilst someone would have to play Derby County three times. Imagine being relegated on goal difference at the end of the season, knowing that your team had played Manchester United three times, while the team just above you had played, say, Portsmouth three times and beaten them in Shanghai the previous January. Would you be any happier, knowing that at least the directors of your club were £10m better off? Thought not. Imagine, if you will, being an inhabitant of, say, Los Angeles, bidding an enormous amount of money on two Premier League matches and ending up with Bolton Wanderers vs Reading and Manchester City vs Fulham. If we assume that The Big Four are separated, how many of the other six matches are going to sell out a 50,000 capacity stadium? It could even prove to be counter-productive. Having been fed a televised diet of Rooney and Ronaldo, how will the residents of, say, Tokyo react to seeing Manchester City and Newcastle United bore the hell out of everyone for ninety minutes? They may never see the league in the same light again.

When the NFL played its exhibition match at Wembley at the end of last year, a conference was held for Premier League clubs on how to market themselves abroad. The clubs appear to have left it high on a mixture of champagne bubbles and talk of big, big money, and this scheme is its logical upshot. The hubris, the self-importance and the greed of modern football are all present and correct. One of its first vocal supporters has been David Gold of Birmingham City, who seems blissfully unaware of the fact that Birmingham might well not even be in the Premier League by 2011 when he says, "We are making history. The Premier League, which is the greatest league the world has ever known, is being adventurous. It is looking forward and is looking to take an English brand global. The idea is very worthy of consideration. I find this amazingly exciting". In fact, in calling the Premier League "the greatest league the world has ever known", his lack of self-awareness is almost mesmerising.

The Football Supporters Federation have issued an understandably robust criticism of the idea, and one would like to think that the FA and the media would have a thing or two say about it. Don't go holding your breath waiting for it, though. The FA's initial statement on the matter has been unsurprisingly weak-kneed, and we can expect little more opposition from the press. Where do you think this statement might come from?

"The growth of the Premier League has been impressive in the last 15 years thanks to the sale of television rights in this country, but now the market in the United Kingdom is becoming saturated and it is the overseas market which is now the big target area. This is a chance for the Premier League to showcase its product around the world. Some fans may feel aggrieved, but their concerns will be outweighed in the eyes of the clubs by the financial advantages. The clubs will see this as a chance to make more money so they can invest in new facilities and better players. It will be like cities bidding for the Olympic Games or the World Cup"

Peter Scudamore? David Gold? Wrong. It comes from Mihir Bose, the BBC Sports Editor - a man who, if he can't offer any more of a robust critique of such a transparently money-orientated, non-sporting proposal, should probably be relieved of his position with immediate effect and moved to their "Business" section instead. Supporters of Premier League clubs, about whose interests very little (as ever) is being said, should surely now, if they weren't before, be wondering why they bother. The Premier League seems intent on fulfilling what it regards as its "destiny" to become a wandering, global circus. For the average English supporter of a Premier League football club, though, the message is a stark one. The fact of the matter is this - your money and your support simply aren't enough any more. It has been coming for some time, with the renaming of the Premiership as the Premier League to align with the fact that the league is called the "English Premier League" abroad and the reorganisation of kick-off times on Saturdays to better suit Far East and American TV audiences (in case you'd been wondering why two live matches are scheduled at lunchtime and tea-time every week, that's the reason). For the domestic audience, this might just turn out to be the straw that broke the camel's back for a good many Premier League supporters, and that, in turn, could be the best thing to happen for lower division football in England for years.

Share & Share Alike?

Like many people, I had spent much of the last year or so wondering about the supine reaction of Liverpool supporters to the Gillett & Hicks take-over. Here were two people coming in with no apparent prior interest in Liverpool Football Club, making numerous promises and claims, but with the prevailing common knowledge becoming apparent that they didn't have the cash up front to pay for it. Very few people that closely connected wondered aloud where the money was going to come from. The club was being purchased for £300m and the new stadium will cost something like £400m. These are substantial amounts of money. They were also making promises of spending obscene amounts of money on players. In spite of this, Stars & Stripes flags were flown on match days. The arrivistes were feted as saviours. It was almost as if no-one had been paying any attention to what had gone on forty miles up the road at Old Trafford for the last few years or so. Considering that Liverpool is the city that was the birthplace of Militant, the home of the Dockers' strike and a city which remains one of the most politically left-wing in Britain, it was all most perplexing.

Over the last few weeks or so, the wheels have come spectacularly off the wagon for the new owners. They may have secured the refinancing package that they desperately needed, but it hasn't come cheap and it is now common knowledge that, just as at Manchester United, a football club is effectively paying for itself to be taken over by outside investors, and at a cost of £30m per year in interest payments alone - money which, ultimately, will come from the supporters themselves. The seeds of the problems for Gillett & Hicks were sown in their treatment of Rafael Benitez. Whatever the shortcomings of Benitez are, he has taken them to two European Cup finals in three years and is still enormously popular on Merseyside. The club's apparent misjudgement of this incurred the wrath of the supporters and a demonstration march to the ground towards the end of last year. The lack of harmony within the club may or may not be directly responsible for the club's slump in form, a slump so severe that it hasn't merely ended their Premier League championship bid but will quite possibly result in them taking part in the UEFA Cup next season rather than the Champions League. There was a further demonstration against Gillett & Hicks at the recent match against Aston Villa. Something, one suspected, was in the air. At last.

The upshot of it all is "Share Liverpool FC", launched today in the city by Rogan Taylor, a long time Liverpool supporter and the chair of the Football Supporters Association, Kevin Jaquiss, a lawyer specialising in employment law who was part of the group responsible for writing the legal model upon which all supporters trusts are based, and Phil French, a former director of communications of the Premier League who is now employed as the chief executive of Supporters Direct. In terms of knowledge and support, you couldn't really ask for much more experience. The plan is a simple (if ambitious) one: persuade 100,000 Liverpool supporters to pay £5,000 each and raise £500m to buy the club, and then run it as a not-for-profit mutual society, with no shareholder dividends and no profit. The group has had a somewhat shaky start (such was the level of interest that the web site collapsed fifteen minutes after it went live and, at the time of writing, hasn't recovered yet), but this would appear to bode well for them - a considerable amount interest in a concept that very few people had even heard about as recently as a couple of days ago.

So, can it work? Well, it can. These are monstrous amounts of money, though - are there 100,000 Liverpool supporters in the world who will part with £5,000 in order to take control of the club? Are there that many supporters groups that will band together and buy shares between them? The next few weeks will provide a few answers to this, but it is worth remembering that if nothing else, we should applaud the principle of this idea. Some, such as the apparently "humorous" website Who Ate All The Pies, have already chosen to scoff at the announcement, with a magnificently ill-informed article on the announcement that appears to have been written on the back of a cigarette packet in the pub. I don't know which part of their piece on the subject (which I'm not linking to from here - if you want to see it, you can go and look for yourselves) is the worst: "They should leave the running of the club to the money men in suits who know about such things", or "this is communism at its most hare-brained" are vying with each other (and a whole host more) for the most the most ill-informed comment on the subject. Having embarked upon second and third readings of it, I can confidently state that more or less every single sentence of it is as bad as the one that preceded it.

My personal inclination is to think that this plan is unlikely to work, but that this shouldn't preclude people from supporting it. What, exactly, are the alternatives? Well, there's The Middle-Aged Man Possibly On The Cusp Of A Nervous Breakdown Model (Newcastle United), The Asset Stripping Leveraged Buyout Model (Liverpool, Manchester United), The Billionaire That Could Get Bored At Any Moment And Leave Your Club Staring Into The Abyss Model (Chelsea), The God Knows What He's Up To Or, For That Matter, What His Predecessor Was Up To Either Model (Cardiff City), The Buy The Club, Kick Them Out Of The Ground, Sell The Ground And Vamoose Model (Brighton & Hove Albion) or The Former Foreign Dictator Who Could Find All Of His Assets Frozen At Any Moment Model (Manchester City) to choose from. I'd be more inclined to be critical of this project if the people that have run our clubs for the last one hundred and thirty years or so were paragons of financial and moral rectitude, but the bare fact is that they're not. If Share Liverpool should fail, they'll have at least given it a go, and it might plant the seed of an idea in the supporters of other, smaller clubs. If does turn out to work, it might just revolutionise the way that English football is run forever. Seems worth a try, doesn't it?

Voting For Christmas

Finally, with just over a week to spare in January, My Football Club has released the details of the deal that they at the point of striking with Ebbsfleet United of the Football Conference, and what extraordinary reading it makes. It is notable, as much for what is missing from it as from what is contained therein, and culminates with what I can only describe as being an exercise in "democracy" so lightweight that it gives every impression of being little more than a legal rubber stamping exercise. The vote closes at midnight tonight, and will be the determining factor in sealing the purchase Ebbsfleet United by MyFC. There is a lot of legalese contained within it, and it's too long to post up on here in one hit, but I think it warrants further reading, so you can download it in full from here.

It is a most peculiar read, coming across as being more like an advertising pamphlet than giving any real information to MyFC members to enable to them make up their own minds on whether to vote in favour of or against the proposal to buy the controlling share in Ebbsfleet United. The opening section confirms that MyFC are to buy a 75% share in the club, and explains that the legal firm DLA Piper have carried out due diligence and create documents and, somewhat confusingly (given that they name the legal firm) an anonymous accountancy firm to carry out due financial diligence. They also state that they are unable, for legal reasons, to publish the results of the due diligences in full.

It then goes on to discuss how "numerous" clubs contacted them with a view to setting up a deal, and that, when everything boiled down, three choices were on the table. Irritatingly (though I'll do some scrabbling around on the grapevine and see what I can find out), the other two clubs aren't listed publicly, but it does say this much: "The former would have been too much of a gamble, and relied on a very significant upturn in membership to work, whilst the latter was eventually discounted on the basis of ongoing issues with the stadium". I think I know who one of them was (a Conference North club, once of the Conference, with a famously small support), but the other remains a mystery. There are a number of clubs that have ongoing issues with their stadium - which one could it be? York City? Barnet? Cambridge City? We may never find out.

Next, it's onto the sales pitch. What is noticeably missing from the "plus points" listed to MyFC members is what the benefits or potential benefits are to existing supporters of Ebbsfleet United. We see a lot about how good it will be for "the club" (ie, the new and existing owners) and how good it will be for the local area (the club sponsors, Eurostar, aren't mentioned by name, but they must be thrilled with all the news coverage an area that they have recently poured millions of pounds into is now getting). There are also a couple of interesting references to Ebbsfleet's tatty but homely Stonebridge Road stadium. In one breath, it is described as "small, but [with] bags of character", and that it "can apparently be fairly easily upgraded to league standard if the club is promoted" (almost all Conference grounds are practically League standard, by the way - a rash of clubs didn't get promoted from it in the 1980s and 1990s after falling foul of the Football League's regulations and the Conference reacted to this by tightening its own rules so much that, for a while, you had to have a better ground to get into the Conference than you needed to get into the League), but in the next it talks loftily about "the fact that the local area is being re-developed means that there is a good prospect that a new stadium will be built for the club, free of charge".

Hang on a minute. "There is a good prospect that a new stadium will be built for the club, free of charge"? I thought that this was poor, impoverished Ebbsfleet, with no cash, small crowds and desperate enough to try anything to keep themselves alive. What is becoming apparent is that there is more to this than had originally met the eye. There is a lot of talk about "regeneration", "opportunity" and, of course, "highly confidential". There's a lot of talk about property, generally. Interpret that as you choose. It continues in this vein for several more paragraphs, along with some almost incomprehensible guff about having three different tiers of shares, plenty more about what a great opportunity this is for MyFC and with practically nothing about what will be for the best for the people that really matter in this whole, sorry circus - the supporters of Ebbsfleet United.

What On Earth Is Going On At Liverpool?

This season's major trend has been a very singular type of managerial sacking, involving "intolerable pressure" building up in the media, directors and owners panicking, and a manager's job becoming basically untenable, regardless of whether he deserves to be sacked or not. In some cases, it was undignified to the point of being embarrassing to watch, such as at Chelsea, where the boardroom politics, the despotic ownership and the ridiculous amount of control given to senior players were made public. At Newcastle, Sam Allardyce did the impossible, in becoming a figure of public sympathy for being ousted through a mixture of supporter ignorance and an owner that seems to be too eager to please said ignorant supporters.

Now, at Liverpool, the position of Rafael Benitez seems to have been undermined still further by the actions of their owners, George Gillett and Tom Hicks. It has become apparent as the season has worn on that Liverpool are not going to mount a serious championship challenge in the Premier League. In fact, if anything they seem to have taken a backward step since last season, and are currently playing like they have more in common with the likes of Everton, Manchester City and Portsmouth than they have with Chelsea, Manchester United and Arsenal. The money that was reported to be delivered to Benitez to further strengthen his squad doesn't appear to have been forthcoming, and now there are worrying rumours coming from Anfield regarding a need to restructure the club's finances ahead of the construction of a proposed new stadium in Stanley Park. There are some Liverpool supporters that are starting to sound increasingly alarmed, to the point of drawing similarities with the beginning of the decline of Leeds United.

The problem at the centre of Liverpool's current difficulties is the funding of their take-over last year. As with Manchester United, Liverpool were subject to a leveraged buyout, meaning that Gillett and Hicks utilised stock market rules to purchase the club for a fraction of its actual value. At the time, Liverpool's supporters were very supine about it all. Stars and stripes flags were waved at Anfield. The new owners were more than happy to lap up the praise when they got to the European Cup final in May, even though they'd had precious little to do with it. This season, their big summer signing Fernando Torres has carried them single-handedly through the season. They made a dog's dinner of getting through their group stage, losing to Besiktas and Marseille in a group that they should have had sewn up with games to spare. In the Premier League, they have slowly and consistently fallen further and further away from the top three since the start of the season.

The major problem for Liverpool FC is that they simply cannot afford to not qualify for the Champions League this season and, indeed, every season for the forseeable future. The buyout of the club cost £300m, which has been loaded against the club itself. On top of this, one of Gillett and Hicks' first acts when they took over was to promise to build a new stadium, at a cost of a further £300m. Liverpool were already said to be £80m in debt at the time of the buyout. Gillett and Hicks are said to be trying to restructure the club's finances through the banks, but this in itself is an expensive business. A recent report in the Daily Telegraph put the cost of the restructuring at £15m, and the cost of the new stadium has already risen to £400m, with £20m having already been paid to architects.

In the beginning, Liverpool's supporters were open to the idea. Broadly, they supported Gillett and Hicks against their rivals in bidding, Dubai International Capital, who represent the interests of the ultra-wealthy Maktoum family. Gillett and Hicks said the right thing. However, leverage buyouts are done for one reason. To buy something that is considered under-valued in the market without putting much investment in and sell it on at a profit. DIC may well have the funding to underwrite the club's debts, but they have already stated publicly that they don't much want to pour money into a black hole (and why, indeed, should they?). The danger, for Liverpool, is that they could end up hundreds of millions pounds in debt, unable to service so much as the interest payments on debts that they may already have unnecessarily run up.

At Manchester United, supporters were already protesting before the Glazer takeover. It might not have been enough to prevent the buyout there from going through (although anyone looking at the end of year figures coming from Old Trafford will be able to tell you that journalists stating massive profits there simply hasn't read the full story of how they've been massaged), but their disaffected supporters at least have an alternative. Liverpool supporters might just find that things could get a lot worse for them before they get any better.