Grass roots football to get more money (original) (raw)
So, the Premier League will be flush with the £1.7bn harvested from Sky and Setanta, but some of the Premiership's own clubs and many in football are already questioning whether the bulk of that fortune should go to the few already rich clubs at the top. After concluding the deal, the Premier League has finally confirmed what it had previously denied, that the grass roots are to receive an increased slice, an agreement the Premiership made in return for government support during the battle with the European Commission over TV arrangements.
Since 2001, after the Office of Fair Trading first challenged the legality of collective selling by the Premier League clubs, the Premiership has sliced 5% of its TV deals to the Football Foundation, principally to improve neglected football facilities nationwide. The money, £105m, was matched by the FA and public funding.
The new agreement, extracted by the sports minister Richard Caborn in what was said to be a fierce meeting with the Premier League's chief executive Richard Scudamore last autumn, is that 6% of the next TV deal up to £1.1bn will be distributed to grass-roots projects, 7.5% of the £300m above that, then 10% of any money over £1.4bn.
With highlights and other secondary packages still to be arranged, that already amounts to £118.5m, steered away from the top players whose agents are eyeing the next payday from the 2007-2010 contract, and directed instead to the windswept wastelands on which everybody else has to play the game.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport modestly acknowledged its part in securing the increase, saying: "We are very pleased the new deal will mean more money for grass-roots football."
Before the current deal which began in 2004, two Labour MPs, James Purnell and Andy Burnham, both now rising ministers, called for the Premiership to increase its distribution to 10%. "This time," one government source said, "we weren't prepared to back them in Brussels but get no more in return."
When the Premier League came lobbying for support against a renewed challenge from Brussels, Caborn insisted on more for the grass roots and eventually Scudamore agreed. After the deal was struck, Tessa Jowell, the senior DCMS minister, made representations on the league's behalf to the EC competition commissioner Neelie Kroes. Other senior government figures, including the chancellor Gordon Brown, also put a word in for the league to be allowed to maintain its collective selling arrangements.
The result was that the EC said the Premier League must make at least one package of matches available to a broadcaster other than Sky, rather than half of all matches as the league had feared. Last week, competition from Setanta and other pay broadcasters produced the deal at the far edge of the Premiership's hopes: £1.7bn for domestic rights alone.
The Premier League resents the suggestion that it has been dragged unwillingly into supporting the grass roots; its chairman, Dave Richards, is also the chairman of the Football Foundation, which he is said to regard as "his baby". For some, that reflects an unsatisfactory conflict of interest, undermining the foundation's independence from its principal funder, but others maintain that Richards is committed to the foundation and so has promoted it when others in football have not always been as positive.
"We are very pleased to make our contribution to the grass roots," a spokesman said. "The Premier League is a very powerful brand and we can bring a whole range of social benefits through our community football projects and improved facilities."
The increase in Premiership money for the foundation makes it likely that the FA and government will not match the investment next time; indeed, that was one of Caborn's conditions. The argument runs that, because the Premier League is swimming in billions, football does not need public money to improve its facilities. The league, however, argues alongside the FA that the government puts far too little into sport and facilities, which are mostly publicly owned, and that football alone cannot be expected to put right decades of municipal neglect.
Within the golden circle of the Premiership, too, there will be calls for a more equal sharing of money. Since its formation as a breakaway from the Football League by the First Division clubs in 1992, half the Premier League's television money has been allocated equally, £9m to each club this time, a quarter paid in "facility fees" when a club are shown on TV, currently £253,000 or £343,000 depending when the game is on, and the other quarter paid according to where a club finishes at the end of the season, £484,000 for each place in the table. The system rewards the more successful clubs. Having finished bottom, Sunderland will be paid only £484,000 in addition to the £9m, and they were on TV much less than the champions Chelsea, who will receive £9.68m in "merit payments".
The league maintains that this is a satisfactory distribution but, because money buys success, questions are being more openly posed about the Premiership's competitiveness. Blackburn's chairman John Williams said: "The deal we have is fabulous and demonstrates the league's popularity. However, it could be more competitive if we distribute the money more evenly, and I would like this on the agenda at our summer meeting." Other mid-ranking Premiership clubs, including Charlton and Manchester City, agree but they are unlikely to prevail against the opposition of the richest clubs.
Still, the howling gap with the Football League is the inequality that dares not speak its name. The Football League always maintained sharing between its four divisions, and before 1992 the TV money was split 50% to the First Division, 25% to the Second (now the Championship), and 25% to the Third and Fourth (now Leagues One and Two). Since the breakaway, the Premier League has provided a small amount to maintain clubs' youth-development programmes - it is about to agree £4.2m, matched by £4.2m from the FA and about £1m from the Foundation, to fund the schemes next season. Apart from those pennies, the Premiership shares nothing with the Football League. Relegated clubs are given "parachute payments", amounting to £6.5m currently for two seasons, to cushion their crash into the Coca-Cola badlands. The Football League's improved deal with Sky starting next season will see Championship clubs earning about £1m from TV, compared with £28m the average Premiership club will bank from the forthcoming bonanza.
The Football League complained to the All Party Parliamentary Football Group in 2004 that the "financial gulf is now utterly unbridgeable and threatens to damage sporting competition" but stopped short of calling for the leagues to be reunited. Instead it said somewhat daintily that football should "consider a more coherent, collective approach".
The league is coy because it fears that if it campaigns too vigorously for more equality the Premiership clubs might reconsider their participation in the Carling Cup, which gives the league much of its TV appeal. So its chairman Lord Mawhinney will say only: "I would be prepared to have that conversation if the Premier League wants to."
Fourteen years on, the Premier League has just concluded its fifth booming TV deal, taking its income from TV alone to £5.8bn since 1992. Highlights and other packages will see about 8% go to the grass roots, and 3% currently goes to the Professional Footballers' Association. Good news, but that leaves 89%, £1.5bn, for the 20 clubs, their top players and agents. The Football League's three divisions must surely have the message by now: the conversation is not happening.