By Jason Davis - WASHINGTON, DC (Oct 19, 2011) US Soccer Players -- It finally happened, the news item that most astute observers knew was coming, whether English soccer was ready for it or not. League Managers’ Association chief executive Richard Bevan told a gathered throng at the Professional Players Federation meeting in London that several Premier League owners, made up of the foreign Asian and American concerns, were pushing to eliminate promotion and relegation.
Cue the firestorm, cue the ranting, cue the desecration of the American names involved in the running of Premier League clubs. Names like Glazer, Henry, Lerner and Kroenke.
Buried somewhere in the cacophony of outrage and mouth-breathing is a muddle of half-truths, xenophobia, and the real possibility that Richard Bevan just yelled “fire” in a crowded theater. Most fans - Americans who love English soccer included - are worried that the “foreign” influence, namely the American ownership crowd but lets throw the Asians in for good measure, are taking the Premier League down a dark path.
Cue the tossing around of words like “Americanization” and “franchise.” Just in case you couldn’t guess, rest assured that neither will be used in a positive connotation, because neither ever is outside of the United States.
The idea that English soccer, or any soccer outside of North America for that matter, might change to more resemble the National Football League is anathema to anyone who subscribes to the romance of the club system. Wagons are circling. Ranks are closing. As the narrative goes, English soccer is rising up against the Americans, with every mildly notable voice decrying the news. The American owners are now a “cabal,” their motivations and intentions, for the purposes of our story, assumed to be in concert.
This is the first mistake made by anyone who can’t help but be angered by the possibility that an institution like relegation could fall by the wayside.
Not only was there a quick denial from an American owned club, there's also the basic idea that being American owned means working in concert. The range of clubs owned by Americans have such very different profiles that it’s difficult to imagine they would all agree that doing away with an intrinsic part of the sport was a good idea.
A club like Sunderland (owned by American Ellis Short) might be open to the idea in theory simply based on self preservation. It's difficult to imagine Arsenal, Manchester United and Liverpool would be overly concerned about the possibility they could go down. The only conceivable reason for those owners to collude on promotion and relegation is the dubious notion that it might increase the value of their clubs because an element of risk - the possible, if unlikely, drop to the Championship - will have been removed.
Risk is the ultimate theme at play in any talk of abolishing promotion and relegation. The business world spends a lot of time and money on managing risk, and for the Premier League the drop to the Championship is a substantial one. That's no different regardless of the national origin of who happens to own a club. Yet it easily settles on the American owners as different, unable to grasp the history of England's game even as they fund it. The tale of the foreign influence sabotaging beloved national institutions hits a primeval chord.
Examples abound. West Ham United co-chairman David Sullivan told The Daily Mail: " it goes against natural justice and fairness and Britain is the home of natural justice and fairness. They want a closed shop, then they’ll bring in wage caps and everything else caps and make a pile of money every year and the money goes back to Boston, or wherever they’re from."
In the same article, Leeds United owner Ken Bates said: "English football was a first-class operation before the foreign owners came, and it will still be first class when they have gone. If they don’t like it then they should get out."
The chance that one day the very essence of the league structure might be changed to benefit those with the money (and therefore the control) was the risk English soccer took when the Premier League launched in 1992 and the country’s top league began it’s ascendancy to global brand (or sold its soul, depending on one’s point on view).
In ‘92, it was control of television rights that spurred the 22 First Division clubs to “break away” from the Football League. That change ushered in a new age of massive spending and international relevance, but it changed little about the way the top flight was connected to the rest of the English soccer pyramid. Bevan’s “revelation” to the Professional Players Federation shouldn’t be surprising. Closing the league is undoubtedly an evolutionary step along the path started in 1992, before an American ever owned an English club. Yet without question it is incendiary.
People should be unhappy that anyone would threaten something as basic as the mobility of clubs up and down the English ladder. But the tone is worrying, both because it smacks of unthinking nationalism without bothering to ask which clubs are actually interested in changing the system. That holds from the executives who chose to speak out to the fan response.
Little riles up a sports fan more than the perception that the people in charge of his team or the league in which his team plays are greedy. On the heels of Ian Ayre, managing director of American-owned Liverpool, calling for Premier League teams to be able to negotiate their own international television rights deals, Bevan’s statements hit a raw nerve in the psyche of fans already sensitive to the overexposure of the game.
These things are probably true:
- Not all of the American owners are chomping at the bit to close off the Premier League
- Ending promotion and relegation is not an easy enough task that it is likely at any point in the near future, and
- Money, more than the nationality of the people behind it, will ultimately decide it such a thing does come to pass.
Sadly, none of those things matter now. The story is off and running, more an exercise in anti-American blather than anything meaningful about the future of soccer. That's already clouded any serious discussion not just about the future of promotion and relegation, but how these issues are handled by those running Premier League clubs.
Jason Davis is the founder of MatchFitUSA.com. Contact him: matchfitusa@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: http://twitter.com/davisjsn.
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