In this era of shiny, well presented, statistics-laden football, it would be easy to imagine that the influx of money has done nothing but make the Premier League a better place.
After all, when we see the likes of Sergio Aguero, Robin van Persie, Yaya Toure, Eden Hazard, and many more world class players, the standard of footballer certainly appears to have improved.
But that wouldn’t be entirely honest.
You’ll notice that the players listed above have one thing in common – they are part of squads that compete in the top half of the league, arguably the far more entertaining half.
What we’ve seen in recent years, and this year in particular, is a split in the capabilities of teams to perform. With Financial Fair Play being touted as some kind of ultimate levelling of the playing field by some, UEFA would have use believe that the end result is increased competitiveness, and thus increased fairness.
But that wouldn’t be entirely honest either.
See, the reality is that Aston Villa – a team who have been wildly erratic in form terms – are in tenth place in the table. Yes, that’s right, Villa are actually in the top half.
Such a statement, in a sense, goes against the Sky-driven mantra that money has improved the game. If Villa, a team who have been handed £80m for this season’s TV rights alone, are simultaneously tenth and five points for the drop zone, it can only point to one thing – that money hasn’t actually improved the majority of the teams in the Premier League.
In fact, if anything, the corporate/TV driven drip of cash, skewered as it is into the metaphorical arms of clubs like Villa, has done little but fill the bottom half of the league with increased wages.
After all, when income goes up across the board, all that happens is that price goes up, whether in contracts paid or in transfer fees. When Wayne Rooney, a good player for Manchester United but, in my opinion, far from world class, is looking at £300k a week as a potential pay packet, the world has, quite literally, gone mad.
It isn’t just at the top end where madness has taken over either. For some of our own transfers, we’ve been conditioned to think paying £8k a week to a player under the new Villa ethos is great value, but is it?
Should young players coming in from League One be earning four times the money a GP earns over the same period, or 16 times what an average punter might earn, assuming he or she can even find a job? As time goes by, there’s increasing disparity between the money lavished on the game and the money the fans have. Surely that has to have a tipping point when enough is enough? After all, one way or another, fans are paying wages, whether through TV subscriptions or at the turnstiles.
Getting back to Villa’s overall trajectory, I wrote earlier this season that the club’s footballing “plan” has started to cultivate apathy in me as a fan. As a man of (apparent) sound mind, I have to think that spending £600 a year on a season ticket to watch a team win with no real regularity is utter madness. That Villa are also, despite such an awful home record, actually tenth is equally crazy.
Unfortunately, for a club like Villa, one that prides itself on a history filled with trophies, they have become the epitome of an addict who has lost it all – one that is purely addicted to the TV revenues, with little thought of anything more than just staying on that cash drip.
This widespread addiction is creating a visible split in the Premier League. On one hand, we have the very top teams able to own some of the very best players in the world. On the other hand, we have ten or more teams that seem to have no real ambition to do anything other than make up the numbers, surviving by single figure point differences.
It may well sound sad – largely because it is. What Sky appears to have created is a dull and boring underclass of teams, desperately trying to just stay afloat on the Premier League lifeboat.
Underneath them, desperation (and greed) leaves teams in the league below going all out for promotion, a situation that is increasingly more entertaining as a spectacle than the bottom half of the league. After all, if you can hit the jackpot going up, you can be sure the chasing pack will be going at it full throttle.
Looking at the overall league system – English football’s footballing pyramid – logic would dictate that quality gets better as the leagues are traversed upwards. However, as a result of disproportionate turnovers, the associated financial inequalities and a desperate clinging to TV revenues, we’ve ended up with a paradox – a poor quality sub-league happier to take money over success, with cups kicked to the kerb in favour of the three points that might make us finish 12th rather than 13th.
Is this what we really want? Nothing in football’s immediate future, not Financial Fair Play rulings nor an increase in TV revenue – nothing – looks to fix this issue, a result of years of (ever increasing) disparity between the top flight and the league below it.
So what’s the fix?
Should we split the Premier League in two, sending the current underclass into their own division or firing the top ten into some Super League?
Perhaps we should review the relegation concept and nail the trapdoor shut so that going down is no longer an issue, and meaning that even those at the bottom can attack rather than cling to dear life.
Or maybe we should seek to change the parachute payments to a more substantial amount in order to balance things out more evenly. Yes, relegation clauses can help clubs survive if the unthinkable happens, but they don’t help improve the quality of play.
Whatever happens, something has to change. If not, the future looks increasingly one where finance dominates the fun-factor, as Financial Fair Play does little to stop the increasingly dull and desperate footballing attitudes of the increasingly obvious second tier of the Premier League.
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