As the crisis at English Premier League club Portsmouth lurches on and the ownership of a good old fashioned English club passes from one disinterested overseas owner to yet another, the simple cause of their problems and those which will all clubs must face is blatantly obvious......the money all goes on players.
Acquiring,paying, motivating players, and paying their agents to get them in, and sometimes to move them out.....that,reader,is the cause of the problem....The Premier League will soon be announcing the millions of pounds they have generated centrally from overseas television rights. The destination of the money, after it has been divided and allocated...players.
Why? Simple a vicious, nasty and self destructive circle that get a club to the promised land of the Premier League, then suck the life out of it...buy better players, pay big fees to acquire them, pay them top dollar, we must stay up/we must make Europe/we must make the Top 4/we must get to the group stages of the Champions League....All to feed the all consuming monster that is the wage bill.
Here is an alternative plan; The PL collectively say enough is enough. We need to draw a line in the sand that says at the end of season 2013/2014 we will have standard contracts for all our member clubs that offer four tiers of player salaries. (The numbers used are to illustrate the concept)
Tier One Big Star, base salary £2.5m per year.
Tier Two,established player base £1.5m per year
Tier Three younger player base £ 1.0 per year
Tier Four; entry level potential star,base £750k per year.
The club then allocates an agreed and transparent percentage of revenues to a huge incentive scheme in which all tiers are incentivised to deliver on and of the pitch, with each category getting an agreed slice of the money. Everybody knows where they stand, everybody knows what is expected of them.
Challenges: The players won't come to England.....so what, get back to growing home grown players let them try and make the big money in failing Euro economies like Spain.....good luck
This will give the businesses, the clubs, control of their industry, not their employees and the headhunters they use to acquire talent.
All it needs is a collective view and the vision to see it through
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Great post and idea. But would clubs, like Chelsea, Manchester United. go for something like this?
ReplyDeleteHi Jim: Really nice read your oppinions on blogspot. First of all sorry for my poor English I´ll try to write it best.
ReplyDeleteI´m really agree with you, the money how is winning by players and some agent (also some teams CEO) are obscene. It´s necesary down their salary for make rentablity a club. But I´m not agree with you on one aspect; Spain can not take all players from Premier because many clubs economy are broked. Ok, Real Madrid & FC Barcelona can pays high salary but only thouse two. If you take a eye to other bigs teams; Valencia CF, Villarreal FC, Sevilla FC, Atletico Madrid, ... the salary range downs sudenly and are on the same salary range you posted or less. On resume only some starts will arrives to Spain, the other big market can be Italy because the growing AD rigths on next season, but looks a broking on the player´s salary range on all Europe. A pleasure Vicent Fuertes.