Spending Caps? It's Just Exchanging One Evil For Another
Posted by Zeno in Chelsea, Jose Mourinho, Roman Abronovich | 21 September 2006
How do you solve a problem like Mourinho? In fact, this is nothing to do with Mourinho, but his name scanned better than Abramovich’s.
Reports in the Mail and Standard – arguably the most debased newspapers in Europe, but that’s by the by – suggest that UEFA and the governments of Europe will impose a spending cap on Chelsea in an effort to curb the club’s gigantic losses and to try and rein in its unmatched spending power.
Actually, that’s not quite true. The quote from Richard Caborn, the UK’s “sports minister”, suggests that greater efforts will be made to ensure a close relationship between a club’s earnings and its expenditure. In other words, you can’t run up the huge debts we’ve been running up, then write them all off into the bottomless pockets of Roman.
So far, so predictable. But I have a nagging little voice in my head that won’t go away, and for once it’s not telling me to stab someone in the eye or feed a stray cat into an ATM machine. It’s saying that there’s something in here that irresistibly reminds me of the recent PR disaster for G14.
Many of you may remember a memo circulated within the G14 clubs and leaked to the nationals only a month or so ago. In it, they outlined a “vision” for G14 as the pre-eminent force – from both a footballing and a business point of view – for the foreseeable future. Within that was a suggestion that G14 should be granted automatic qualification for football’s biggest financial reward: the Champions’ League. The argument, as reiterated by Bayern Munich grande fromage Karl-Heinz Rumennigge, was that clubs such as his had been at the forefront of European football for time immemorial. It was their inalienable right to have guaranteed access to the pot of gold that comes with playing in Big Cup. The underlying message was “sod the proles, we were there first”: just the sort of elitist, open-minded thinking that has characterised much of the murkier dealings of football’s top teams. Just look at Luciano Moggi, waving his member about to get the “right” referees for his team’s games. It’s a club, and one that’s has a restricted membership which was filled 40 years ago. They have the ball, and outsiders play strictly on their sufferance.
Now think back to the spending cap suggestion; or rather, the club’s profit vs loss relation to spending. Which clubs benefit from this? The clubs that earn the most, of course. The more you earn, the more you spend. So far, so normal. Isn’t this business? Isn’t that how any normal company operates?
Problem is, football clubs aren’t normal businesses. And when the game exploded in the early and mid-nineties, and the vast influx of television money and sponsorship changed things, there were a few large clubs placed to take advantage of that. And take advantage they have, with aggressive marketing, regular strip changes, huge price hikes for merchandising, inflated ticket prices, tie-ups with travel companies to take advantage of European away matches, increased exploitation of the image rights of their star players, and so on and so on ad nauseam.
So come the mid-nineties, several clubs found themselves in a position of quite Croesian wealth. Thus it ever was, but now more so. So, assuming these sorts of strictures are put in place, and assuming (worst case) that G14 eventually gets its way, where does that leave football? With an ever-shrinking group slicing an ever-growing pie, and a long straggling tail of also-rans fighting for the scraps. In fact, wait a sec… that’s not a million miles from where we are at the moment.
The problem that Chelsea present is a tricky one for G14. They’ve refused the SW6 club a place at their top table. The Blues haven’t earned their money, the saying goes. It’s all nouveau. My point is that this is now a closed club. Arsenal were allowed in some years ago, along with one or two others, but make no mistake: this organisation has as many members as it wants.
The suggestion that clubs should operate as sensible and solvent businesses is a perfectly acceptable one, on that level. But it perpetuates a situation where a select group of haves will continue to lord it over a wide swathe of have-nots. Remember the cries of joy when Chelsea seemed initially to break the Man U – Arsenal deadlock over who won the League? DO you fancy going back to the Scottish football situation, where only two teams ever have a decent stab at winning the thing?
If a salary cap is the best measure the FA can come up with to curb Chelsea, surely it should curb the other clubs – and really, I’m talking about United and Arsenal here – that have the potential, from a monetary point of view, to dominate the League. And the fact that United sell a lot of shirts will, I’m sure, be a great comfort to the fans of Middlesbrough, Portsmouth, Everton and Villa as they watch the Reds stomp the title for 4 consecutive years. The problem is not Chelsea. The problem is an overall lack of financial parity that can only be surmounted by the Chelsea solution: of having an impossibly wealthy resource willing to invest heavily and without an expectation of reimbursement. If you’re going to impose strictures, make them apply to everyone. Only then will you see the fabled genuinely competitive League that everyone longs for.
