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All in all, it’s been a pretty sobering few days for English football. Look at what the past week has revealed of the landscape of our national sport and all you see is betrayal and deceit and men lamenting the excuses of leaders and dark valleys where only greed grows and a vast plain where self-interest haunts everything that moves.
Rick Parry, president of the English Football League, and Greg Clarke, president of the Football Association, fighting, biting and screaming like ferrets in a sack, fighting over who betrayed whom and when. Manchester United and Liverpool, the main protagonists of the doomed Project Big Picture, look at their feet and wonder, if they keep quiet long enough, if we will forget any of this. But we will not.
We will not forget it because English football deserves better than this. Fans of clubs big and small deserve better than this. They deserve people who love the game, not people who just love money and adore it, yearn for it and serve it to the exclusion of everything else.
No one will forget Manchester United and Liverpool’s doomed Project Big Picture
EFL chief Rick Parry supported plans that would have given the Big Six more power.
“I don’t think soccer can reform itself,” says Gary Neville, and sadly, it’s hard to disagree. It has reached the point where now is the time to take some of the control of the game out of the hands of those who currently run it and help them realize that what we have in this country, in the Premier League and in the lower leagues, is worth worth fighting as it is.
We won’t forget that a Premier League president, Crystal Palace’s Steve Parish, saw the agony of small clubs and said it wasn’t the place for a supermarket to save a corner store. We won’t forget that the Premier League prepared a new pay-per-view charge of £ 14.95 as a pleasant surprise for a nation of spectators struggling amid a national crisis.
We will not forget that the greed at the heart of the Big Stitch-Up Project was disguised as altruism towards the EFL. The killers arrived dressed in the clothes of saviors. There are few things less attractive than a takeover disguised as a pity race, but that’s exactly what it was. Even the £ 250 million ransom was made in the never never.
The Big Stitch-Up Project would have destroyed the competitiveness of the Premier League. The promise of 25 percent of their future television earnings to the EFL ignored the fact that those earnings would drop sharply when the big clubs sold their eight biggest games on their own channels.
Gary Neville was right when he said that football is not capable of reforming itself
The backdoor route to B teams would have further undermined the EFL. It was not a rescue package. It was a death sentence. It’s no wonder that when people tried to convey the anger they felt at the way those at the top of English football had tried to betray those in the middle and bottom, they drew a series of vivid metaphors from the depths of your disappointment.
The Soccer Fans Association immediately saw the Big Stitch-Up Project and called it a “sugar-coated cyanide pill.” Others described him as a Trojan Horse, conjuring up images of the Big Six infantrymen leaping from the pages of this apprehensive and warped vision and running like mad in the English Football League, slaughtering the weakened and wounded until there were none left.
Others wanted to convey their disgust at the opportunism of the whole thing, the way the proposals had been leaked in the midst of a pandemic, with soaring infections, the country reeling, and a swath of our community soccer clubs on their knees and desperate. , absolutely desperate – for one last chance to survive. “They’ll catch him like a man drowning,” said Rep. Tory Damian Collins.
The allusion of the drowning man only tells half the story. The other half is more sinister. Because the truth is, the lower leagues have been churning in the water for some time, in obvious and growing distress. And all that time, the Premier League has stood on the riverbank with a designer life jacket in hand, watching and waiting, refusing to help, waiting for the crisis to deepen.
Lower league clubs have struggled for years and the Premier League has done nothing to help
Finally, last week, they pulled the rope. But before they brought the man ashore, they said there would be conditions. The EFL accepted the conditions. They are not to blame for that.
By then, they understood that they really had no other choice. They also understood that the next time the man is in the water, because there will surely be a next time, there will be no life jacket and no rope.
The next day, everything fell apart. As always he was obliged to do so. Parish and the rest of the Premier League rump didn’t take very well to discover that the Big Six viewed them with the same disdain that they themselves reserved for corner store clubs. So even though they still had the power to do it, they shut everything down. Neither United nor Liverpool tried to save their monster.
In this affair, the one thing that puzzles me more than any other is the way some have tried to praise Parry. I do not get it. He worked on something for three years with Liverpool and United, did not inform the EFL clubs he is supposed to represent and then stick with his plan when it leaked at the very moment they had no choice but to agree to it.
Had the plan succeeded, it would have enriched the Big Six, destroyed the Premier League, and eventually fatally undermined the EFL. So don’t tell me he’s the hero of the moment. It is not. If he really thinks Project Big Stitch-Up would have worked for the good of the English game as a whole, then he is not part of the solution. He is part of the problem.
However, there is a light in the middle of this gloom. If the cynicism of the Big Stitch-Up Project told us anything, it’s time to start over. English football doesn’t work. Your leadership is not fit for purpose. It is run by a pygmy army of I’m All Right Jacks who have proven time and time again that they are incapable of working for the common good. He is dying. It is bankrupt.
Accrington owner Andy Holt has long called for an independent regulator to govern soccer.
On Thursday, some of those advocating for change found a new voice speaking for them. Andy Holt, the owner of League One Accrington Stanley, has long advocated the creation of an independent regulator to govern soccer and that idea formed the core of a manifesto for change called ‘Saving Our Beautiful Game’, presented by a group of influencers, articulating voices led by Neville and including former FA President David Bernstein, Olympian Denise Lewis, Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham and former FA Executive Director David Davies.
The launch of the movement could hardly have come at a better time. Several EFL clubs are on the brink and the Premier League, which spent £ 1.2 billion on transfers during the summer window, has again maintained that it only has £ 50 million to help with the rescue. Every time they play hard, they bring independent regulation closer.
Many EFL clubs are especially disillusioned with Clarke and his apparent willingness to sanction B teams and the creation of a Premier League 2. “If anything describes English football, it is League One and League Two,” said the Leeds coach Marcelo Bielsa. “It is the core, the heart, the essence of football in this country.”
‘In another industry,’ said Andy Holt, ‘the Premier League would be reported to a competition commission, but football doesn’t work like that. It is another reason why we need an independent regulator.
This past week, everyone has seen how they work in English football and it has not been very pleasant. But we have to have hope in what the future holds. They say the time is darkest before dawn, right?
So maybe Project Big Stitch-Up was indeed a pivotal moment for the English game, not because it destroyed our football, as it could have, but because it finally woke us up to the threat in our midst.
The Premier League has again maintained that it only has £ 50 million to help EFL with a bailout.
Euros must be kept in a country
The last vestige of Michel Platini’s tainted legacy as UEFA president may be about to disappear. His plan to spread the word about the Euro 2020 final across Europe felt like a half-logistical nightmare at the time.
In the era of Covid-19, trying to pull it off would be total madness. There are suggestions that the tournament can be assigned to a country, which is the way it always should have been.
Mounting criticism is pointless
I admire Jack Grealish and think he makes a creative difference in England, but I don’t see why that means Mason Mount should be awash in criticism.
I’ve seen a lot of Mount and he’s a brilliant and smart player who can change a game with one skill, and he’s in good shape. You can be a defender of Grealish without causing collateral damage to Mount.
Jack Grealish is a wonderful player, but why does that mean Mason Mount should be criticized?
