FA chairman posed as the good English football man standing up to billionaires but that was not Project Big Picture’s realityWhen the Football Association chairman, Greg Clarke, manoeuvred into the space left by Richard Scudamore’s departure from the Premier League and started Project Big Picture, he told his small group of invited participants they needed the “moral authority” to secure changes to the game. Sadly the plans Clarke developed – and the misleading accounts he has given after they were leaked and exposed to the light – have stripped any moral authority he and the FA had to reshape football in these critical times. Clarke was trying, when he initiated the talks in January, to restore the FA as football’s...
The plan put forward by Liverpool and Manchester United seeks to empower the biggest clubs at the expense of the Premier League itself and they will not remain quietThink back, if you can, to how football looked a week ago. Try to remember that prelapsarian age, when the only concerns were a rampant pandemic, a financial calamity threatening the future of the game and a continuing reckoning with the stark absence of racial equality within the sport. Peaceful, wasn’t it?Well, that was before the 17th (or was it 18th?) draft of Project Big Picture was made public. A plan advocating the complete restructuring of English football as we know it, it provoked between figures at the top of the sport...
Liverpool and Manchester United have lagged behind other big clubs in support of their women’s teams and their interest now reeks of financial opportunismMaybe we should be grateful that those responsible for Project Big Picture have included support for the Women’s Super League within their plans for total football domination.Nestled within the proposed £100m “gift” to help the Football Association combat the £300m-plus hit it has taken because of the Covid-19 pandemic is a £10m to bail out the WSL and Women’s Championship, a commitment that “a new independent league for the women’s professional game will finally be developed and funded” and reportedly more than £50m a year for the WSL, Championship, Women’s FA Cup and grassroots. Related: 'Mo Marley?...
The leaked plans contain both good and bad ideas, but will act as a licence to print money for the so-called big sixNot many people seem to remember Benjamin Disraeli’s novels these days, partly because – by and large – they weren’t very good. Indeed, had their author not gone on to become one of the most important politicians of the 19th century, it’s likely they would have been almost entirely forgotten: a mixture of Byron-esque pastiche and half-baked political manifesto churned out largely to subsidise his extravagant London lifestyle. “When I want to read a novel, I write one,” Disraeli once claimed. Contemporary critics scoffed that it showed.And yet for their many flaws, there’s some interesting stuff in there:...
Liverpool and Manchester United have infuriated the Premier League clubs who were in the dark but the premise of their proposal is soundThere are so many extraordinary elements in the Liverpool and Manchester United proposals to reshape English football, and so much understandable scepticism, that the historic move at the heart of it is in danger of being missed.So, for clarity, it really is true that the US owners of these two fabulously rich football corporations have produced an offer that has not been forthcoming and never seemed possible from any Premier League leadership figures for 28 years. Related: Premier League's pay-per-view TV deal under fire from furious football fans Related: Arsène Wenger: ‘I try to read everything that helps...