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...
Football without crowds is financially destroying English game, which needs a transfusion of humanity in more ways than one “It is your custom to receive my plays with the most generous and unrestrained applause,” wrote George Bernard Shaw to his audience in 1913. “You sometimes compel the performers to pause at the end of every line until your laughter has quieted down … Do you not think that the naturalness of the representation must be destroyed, and therefore your own pleasure greatly diminished, when the audience insists on taking part in it by shouts of applause and laughter? Can you not imagine how a play which has been rehearsed to perfection in dead silence must be upset, disjointed, and spun...
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:...
The Irish bestsellers chart is deservedly dominated by an examination of the incredible financial shenanigans at the Football Association of IrelandDespite grabbing public interest with such force it is currently keeping even the mighty Midas that is Richard Osman off the top of the Irish bestsellers list, on the face of it there is no earthly reason why a book written on the deathly dull subject of football administration should be of particular interest to any right-thinking human being. And yet, here we are.Little more than a fortnight after its release, Champagne Football: The Rise and Fall of John Delaney and the Football Association of Ireland bestrides the literary charts, already heading for its third print run due to the...
Why would English football’s elite worry about propping up a system they have spent years actively seeking to obliterate?One by one, they lined up to condemn the madness. “It’s certainly destroying my enjoyment of the game of football,” said Roy Hodgson. “You’re ruining football for everybody,” fumed Jamie Carragher. “The game’s gone,” tweeted Andros Townsend. “Maybe we can all get together and stop it,” urged Steve Bruce.Meanwhile, on Monday a group of football fans, former players, administrators and politicians sent an open letter to the government warning that many EFL and National League clubs were “unable to meet their payroll obligations for next month”, and that without government assistance English football was facing “the collapse of the league structure that...