Richard Scudamore
As much as I admire the resolve of the Fratton Park marchers, you have to question the likely outcome.
Will a few dozen fans delivering a letter to Fratton Park make a penny worth of difference to the intentions of the faceless people that own Portsmouth Football Club? Barclays Bank included. I doubt it.
You can understand the fans' frustrations. The media's whipping boys one minute and the target of HMRC investigations and winding up orders the next. Couple this to some of the poorest financial management ever to be witnessed in world football and you have a Club hanging on by its finger nails.
To suggest though that this situation has arisen at the hands of Mark Jacob and his employers, is of course naive. And understandably Jacob and co are at odds to point this out. Claiming not to have been aware of the extent of the Club's debts and even threatening amidst the wise cracks to sue Sacha Gaydamak.
Why threaten to sue? Choose your own reasons, but I can't help thinking it has something to do with Gaydamak playing the game a little better than Jacob and Co, especially when you consider that Sacha along with Barclays still owns the majority of the land in the immediate vicinity of Fratton Park.
In short it would seem that Sacha remains in control of the most of the assets and Al Faraj and advisors got lumped with the debt. No wonder they are miffed.
But how come businessmen cited by Storrie as taking PFC to another level, bought into the Club without the necessary means to manage it? Clearly they had no idea what they were getting themselves into and even if they did, at best they had underestimated the demands of running a Premier League team that is still reeling from the excesses of the Redknapp inspired spend to the end gold rush.
But such oversights are not restricted to football and the well wishing marchers shouldn't take it so personally. The owners, whether with good intentions or bad, are symptoms of the modern day game and as such are guilty of no more than exploiting a commercial opportunity, which you can't help thinking, was 'sold' to them by a senior figure at Fratton Park. No wonder Jacob has been bought in. How could the previous management be left in charge when the sticker price on Fratton Park contained a few too many zeros and apparently too little in the way of accurate documentation?
Ultimately though, man will do what man will do and that's why we have laws, rules and regulations to curb the excesses of the human race. Or that's the idea in any case.
The trouble is top flight football's rule makers, in this case the Premier League and to some extent the F.A, seem more intent in chasing the green stuff than they do ensuring the Clubs are healthy enough to play on it. Take the Prem's Chief Exec as an example. Richard 'play it overseas' Scudamore, earned a Storrie beating £1.5m last year, with over £700,000 of that being paid in bonuses for negotiating ever higher TV deals. That's 50% of his remuneration dedicated to driving up TV revenues and all the consequences that come with it.
I ask you, how stupid can these people be? What is the point of throwing more money at the game. We still play with eleven players and give or take, the support staff remains fairly static. So where does the money go? Simple. Into inflation busting transfer fees and player salaries and anything that is left over ends up in the pockets of the owners or the execs. Under soil heating anyone?
We see average players earning more in a week than most of us do in a year and so called superstars earning sums so obscene that we all collectively gasp when it makes the news. And does the game improve because of this influx of cash? Does it hell. Anybody who thinks Rooney and Co are providing the public with better entertainment than the stars of, for example the 70s and 80s, really do need their footballing heads examined.
The fact is the financial culture that now rules our game is being driven by those who run football. Last year I had several off the record chats with Premier League spokespersons about the general situation at Fratton Park and the state of the game in general. Trying to get a rational response was like trying to get Redknapp to acknowledge his part in the demise of any of the clubs he has managed.
They were quick to remind me that new TV deals had been negotiated, but didn't or couldn't give decent answers as to why the foundations of the game are being undermined by people and practices whose motives are anything but aligned with the interests of the game.
On asking the Prem why they didn't take a more proactive role in checking out prospective new owners, I was told it was for the law of the land to administer and wasn't really their remit beyond the clearly myopic Fit & Proper checks that were already in place. A clear if implied acknowledgement that as long as prospective owners don't have an obvious criminal record then they are deemed to be fit and proper. So much for all the fuss that delayed Al Fahim's appointment back in the summer.
And when Al Faraj came along, exactly what checks took place then? Did the league check out his ability to meet even a single month's payroll? I wonder.
I think we all know the answer to that and if we don't and we are wrong then there has to be something else adrift when players who take off their shirt can get randomly booked and consequently red carded, yet major structural issues at the very heart of the game go unaddressed.
And now we witness the Prem withholding Pompey's TV money even though the Club's claiming it's unlawful.
Whoever is right, one thing is for sure. The Prem okayed the transfer of Pompey's Prem franschise to Al Faraj and possibly much more significantly, authorised each and every transfer in and out of the Club.
Didn't any of those ever so clever people at the Prem stop to think that the Club with the lowest ground capacity in the League and with a series of owners that were richish at best, may not be able to fund huge salaries and massive fees to clubs and agents without something breaking? Yet they went ahead and authorised the transfers and now it's gone belly up they are adding to the Club's problems by interfering with our attempts to stay in the league. And if that doesn't scupper us, they've always got the threat of the feared points deduction to put things beyond any doubt.
As I said, it's the Premier League, stupid.
Posted
Sun, Jan 17 2010 7:26 PM
by
c h r i s