A lot more money needs to be passed down the pyramid, not just in the Premier League. English football’s strength is the rich history of so many clubs and it’s tragic that some clubs feel entitled to perpetual success.
I’d be OK with the big boys pumping more money into League 1, 2 and the 4th tier.
I’m hooked on Welcome to Wrexham and want to see those clubs down there financially looked after and growing the game, and communities all the way down.
Wrexham, Salford etc are not like the rest, they are basically on cheat codes to get to where they are I.e. can spend more than rivals……
Oh I know. Hence why I’d like to see more money filter down to other clubs.
It’s become boring really. Ignoring Leister City, the highest spending clubs are going to win.
Did you know they also failed FFP?
Isn’t it how the world is? The richest win.
English football’s strength is the rich history of so many clubs
I think you’re wholly wrong here. English league football is so strong today because it has more money than any other league on Earth, and it has more money because of:
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The formation of the Premier League allowing top clubs to maximize TV revenue better than any other league
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English being the global lingua franca, allowing fans around the world to understand + interact with league media
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England’s colonial legacy making English culture (including English football) more relevant than most other major footballing nations around the world
As a personal anecdote: I’m American. I am a diehard for my local MLS club, but I still enjoy watching the highest levels of football, which is found predominately in the five major European leagues. Theoretically, I could watch any of those leagues, but I don’t speak Spanish, German, Italian, or French. I do, however, speak English. I don’t have to go out of my way to find Premier League content in a language I understand to begin with, and because I speak the PL’s primary language, the universe of available content is so much larger than what I could find for any of those other leagues.
To use an objective rough metric of popularity, the Premier League now earns more money from foreign TV broadcasts than it does domestic, and those foreign TV earnings alone are greater than the totals for any other league. The PL is one of the strongest sports media products in the world, and as a result it’s the biggest moneymaker in world football, which has fueled the PL’s ascent as the most popular league around.
I don’t mean to say this to be cynical or crass, but to be quite honest the median foreign viewer really does not care about the lower levels of the pyramid. It’s charming and fun when a League One team manages to beat a PL side in the FA Cup, but outside of the top 20-40 teams in the pyramid foreign fans are not regularly concerned with what’s going on. The vast majority of foreign viewers are tuning in on Saturdays because they want to see what United, City, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, or Spurs are doing (maybe also with an eye for which mid table teams have taken their perhaps once-in-a-decade run at finishing in the top 8), and maybe they have a more expansive view if they’re one of the few who’ve hitched their wagon to a non-Top Six club.
Obviously the view in England itself is quite different I’m sure, but this is a league that makes most of its money nowadays outside of England.
Very weird to see someone systematically devalue how unique it is to have 4.5 professional football leagues all connected and relevant in the same country. How it helps in terms of youth academies, playing time, football fandom. The Premier League has intrinsic value based on the dream that a club in League 2 over 10 years can get it all right and one day make it to the heights of the Premier League. This sort of thinking is how we get the Super League, one of the most soulless propositions ever the grace the game of football.
I’m just trying to speak strictly in pragmatic terms of what makes English football so good/important in the modern era. As an American, having a pyramid linking effectively every single team in the country is an incredibly cool concept that’s, unfortunately, all but a pipe dream here (we have hundreds of college football and basketball teams here with diehard fanbases and rich histories— it’d be amazing if they somehow had a competitive link to the NFL and NBA, for example).
My point is only that, while we all love a Leicester story, the dream of an underdog isn’t what brings in the foreign dollar, euro, etc. year over year (after all, Leicester is one of only two titles won by a non-Top Six club in the ~30 year history of the PL). The accessibility of the league to most of the world language-wise and fandoms associated with the top end of the league are why people keep tuning into the PL rather than the others. The Premier League is an English League rooted in English culture, but at this point it’s a global media enterprise funded (and, I don’t have numbers in front of me, but perhaps even owned) in majority by foreign sources.
That’s wholly inaccurate though because you’re not just looking at winning the title when you have the chance at European play. You don’t get Wrexham or Luton or Ipswich without the promise of making it to the Prem.
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Lower division teams get into difficulties because they overspend on wages and transfer fees. No matter how much money you give them, they’ll just blow it
Literally pretty much the same article the telegraph posted earlier but with a different headline.
Full story below:
The Premier League’s so-called ‘Big Six’ are at odds with rivals over the long-awaited £130 million pyramid rescue package as a wealth-gap row reignites after the Everton crisis.A meeting between the 20 top-tier shareholders on Tuesday will be the most consequential in years as clubs finally attempt to vote through their New Deal for the wider game.However, amid increasingly febrile scenes after Everton’s 10-point deduction for spending breaches, tensions are resurfacing over whether the top clubs will be contributing enough to the bill. Telegraph Sport detailed a year ago how smaller clubs wanted the richest teams to accept a greater share, potentially through a transfer tax.
A transfer levy of sorts, in addition to the traditional formula of relating contributions strictly to prize money, now appears likely as a model is finalised on Tuesday.However, while some insiders now insist that the New Deal is “on the runway” ahead of Tuesday’s vote, there remains a fierce divide behind the scenes over whether proposals are fair.Several smaller clubs complain a sliding-scale payment system based on merit alone would leave them paying a much higher proportion of their revenue into the solidarity pot.Manchester City, for instance, could be paying as little two per cent of their revenue, which could equate to around £15 million.
That figure is dwarfed by club revenues soaring to a record £712.8 million this year, almost £100 million more than the season before.A wider sense of unfairness is felt most at Everton, where executives are still reeling after the club was plunged into the relegation zone by an independent panel on Friday.It has not been lost on the club that major teams who conspired in Project Big Picture and the European Super League breakaway plots previously went unpunished.
In a reference to unresolved spending inquiries into Chelsea and City, Everton wrote on Friday that “the club will also monitor with great interest the decisions made in any other cases concerning the Premier League’s Profit and Sustainability Rules”.Everton fans build a fighting fundThe club’s fans will be making their own noise in the coming days, having raised over £30,000 for a fighting fund to stage a protest at Goodison Park next weekend.Fans are making banners, flags and leaflets to show their anger amid a hostile atmosphere for a fixture against Manchester United which will be on Sky Sports on Sunday.A GoFundMe page set up by the The1878s Fan Group, which has a target to raise £50,000, says: “We have plans in motion regarding banners and flags against the Independent Commission’s quite frankly, disgraceful and nonsensical decision to deduct the club 10 points. If anyone would like to help, we will release more information in due course. Any more donated will go towards making Goodison Park atmosphere as hostile and electric as it can be at a pivotal time for Everton Football Club. We won’t take this lying down. F— the Premier League.”The Everton situation has prompted MPs to pile renewed pressure on the Premier League to finally announce the New Deal this week after years of talks. The league’s main priority is to ward off a more restrictive model under the new independent regulator in English football which was outlined in the King’s Speech earlier this month.
Dame Caroline Dinenage, chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, said the Everton verdict illustrated “that the status quo cannot continue”.Big Six at odds with rival clubsThe most likely scenario remains that the model for paying for the New Deal remains strictly merit-related rather than connected with any transfer tax.United, City, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur have often been at odds with the other clubs over how the new solidarity system should be paid for.Last year they were outvoted after initially proposing those playing in Europe should not have to contribute more and each club’s contribution should strictly mirror their Premier League income.
Small and medium-sized clubs successfully argued then for income from Europe, particularly the Champions League, to be part of the equation. But there is still a feeling that the wealthiest teams should be paying more.The Telegraph reported on Sunday how top clubs are also set to be handed a greater proportion of prize money, with the existing 1.6 to one ratio increasing to 1.8 to one from 2025-26.Other matters to be dealt with on Tuesday include a vote on fast-tracking a ban on loans between associated clubs ahead of the January transfer window. Clubs are also expected to be updated on the league’s negotiations for a new domestic TV rights deal, after executives began the tender process last month.
Typical, after years of mediocrity Newcastle break into the Big Six, then this happens! 🤣
If anything, the extra pyramid payments should hit the top more than the bottom.
Divide the 130M into 210 units.
Winners pay 20 units, runners up pay 19 units, 3rd place pays 18 units, etc, etc, finishing dead last pays one unit.
That’s about 12.3M for (last year) Man City and 620K for Southampton.
Bro take your logic and leave Reddit. No place for common sense approach here!
This makes so much sense it’s hard to believe something like it hasn’t been proposed yet.
So let me get this straight.
Other clubs want equal domestic tv rights but then want the big 6 to pay more towards the football pyramid?
No one else seeing the hypocrisy in this?
Aye man United cant even pay for the damn stadium to be fixed man.
I’m all for this
Man City should give some of their “sponsors” to the other 14 clubs.
Just feels like the EPL are scrambling around trying to appease some, and creating a bigger divide. Get them regulated, look at their books and practises and publish it all please