The Beautiful Game

I had been waiting for this weekend with three months worth of anticipation. It was the beginning of a new season, where the mess that you had created for yourself last term can be forgotten about, and a new slate in which your dreams can be etched. If only life had a similar timeline to a football season. You could really get things wrong and make terrible decisions, but it would only last nine months and then you could start a fresh.

However rationally I had been expecting the worst this season, my little optimistic devil on my shoulder was whispering to me that it was a new start and anything could happen. If only we could get a good start against Palace on Saturday. Maybe we could kick on from there and get some momentum. Then who knows what might happen.

Southampton 1 – 4 Palace!!!!!

That’s what you get for wishful thinking. Although I knew it was inevitable, I still felt a little depressed thinking about it on Saturday night. But that was the least of my worries. On Monday evening the situation became dramatically worse when, in front of my very eyes, we were knocked out of the League Cup by Peterborough. Who??!!?? Exactly.

Although we are clearly in free fall I think this is a symptom of a much larger issue. As a club, we do not have any money. Burley, the manager, has announced today that he had to sell our defence in order to keep the club from going into administration. The problem is without a defence we cannot carry on playing at the standard we are at. So it is a vicioius circle.

Leeds has been the high profile victims of this type of scenario, but we are close to doing the same. We have not made as bad a job of our finances as Leeds, but through the structure of the game currently, it is very hard to fight on an even playing field with other clubs in your league.

A brief synopsis of the problem is that if you get relegated you are paid a vast sum of money (approx. $20m) a year to manage your overheads that you still have in place from being in the Premiership. You get this payment for two years and then it runs out. This payment enables, clubs who get it, to buy better players and be able to attract them to your club in the first place.

Apart from Birmingham and Sunderland who went straight back up, there are currently four clubs that have this benefit. The clubs that do not have it are forced to be creative with their resources and mount an attack anyway. I’m not complaining about this per say. Football has always had its giants and minnows, and arguably this is what makes the game so special. But it is more the speed in which you can go from hero to zero that is affecting so many.

It can also work the other way though, and the poor unfortunates down the road can testify to this. Portsmouth were sunk from a collaboration of poor management, poor football, and poor investment for the best part of 20 years. But then a corrupt Croatian came in and pushed them up so far, and then the big pockets of a corrupt Russian did the rest. Now after spending millions of pounds Portsmouth are easily a top half Premiership side.

What this does is take away the sense of building something year on year, and with the same team, achieving success. The norm now in the premiership is to sell five players and buy five players, and hope that the short-term fix will buy you success. Young English players from Academys are under utilised or loaned out to lesser divisions, and this then has a knock on effect with regards to the sustainability of the sport at a grass roots level.

If Southampton has a gifted youngster that is groomed for a career in Professional Football, then he will no doubt be sold at the next possible window to a Premiership club. A la Theo Walcott, or Gareth Bale.

Southampton are a victim of poor leadership and a lack of investment, and the latter is needed more importantly in the modern game than a 20 goal a year striker. The majority of the tabloid talk in the summer is not about the latest Argentine wonder kid, or the topical contract negotiations, but the speculation that a club is being looked at by an investor that is the nth richest man in the world, and also owns an ice-cream company.

The game has been so widely corrupted by money, that it has removed any trace of player loyalty, and with wages of £100k plus a week, which business can ever hope to sustain any growth pattern.

All of the teams in the premiership have been taken over in the last 5 years or so, and if you don’t join this list then you have no chance of any progression. Southampton will continually slump until more money is invested.

My theory to improve things is to remove the top five or six biggest clubs and put them in to a European Full Time League. Then have a promotion and relegation system of one club a year. Then the equivalent of the Premiership will be closer fought with the possibility of anyone winning it, not just the same three clubs. The gap will then be closer to the Championship, which will have raised status because this will be the lowest professional league. Remove League One and Two due to financial pressures. Although traditionalists will initially object they will be quietened after the first season. These will be the same people that claim that International Football is still the highest level, even though nobody sees much Andorran representation in the Champions League.

I wonder where Southampton will be when Dylan and Sophie read this in 30 years time. Playing in the Hampshire League, or the Champions League. Hmmm…