Project Big Picture

[lifetime fan]

10 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

Who runs it now?

Voting requires 14 of 20 clubs, it’s far from perfect I agree but it would only get substantially worse. 

[TheHowieLama]

2 minutes ago, lifetime fan said:

Voting requires 14 of 20 clubs, it’s far from perfect I agree but it would only get substantially worse. 

So a bubble of PL clubs (with really only about a dozen on firm ground)  while countless "local" institutions rot on the vine is preferable.

[lifetime fan]

2 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

So a bubble of PL clubs (with really only about a dozen on firm ground)  while countless "local" institutions rot on the vine is preferable.

 

I’ve said that where? 
 

There are lots to like about the proposal. But the change to voting rights is a no for me. 
 

The document even states they “can alter in a material way the nature of the competition”. 
 

Fuck that. 

[TheHowieLama]

6 minutes ago, lifetime fan said:

 

I’ve said that where? 
 

There are lots to like about the proposal. But the change to voting rights is a no for me. 
 

The document even states they “can alter in a material way the nature of the competition”. 
 

Fuck that. 

But they could do that now with a 14 vote right? For me I would make that a weighted voting as opposed to a closed group. I also think going down to 18 teams would be beneficial.

 

Maybe I misinterpreted this

 

 lots of nice shiny things to distract from the genuine essence of this deal

 

Has there been substantive talks led by the PL brass about revenue sharing with the lower leagues? Or a bail out under the current conditions?

 

Don't necessarily think it is a bad thing for poorly run teams to fold tbh but then you can't be bellyaching about the effects on the town/workforce involved etc.

 

[lifetime fan]

1 minute ago, TheHowieLama said:

But they could do that now with a 14 vote right? For me I would make that a weighted voting as opposed to a closed group. I also think going down to 18 teams would be beneficial.

 

Has there been substantive talks led by the PL brass about revenue sharing with the lower leagues? Or a bail out under the current conditions?

 

Don't necessarily think it is a bad thing for poorly run teams to fold tbh but then you can't be bellyaching about the effects on the town/workforce involved etc.

 

As a start to negotiations I don’t have a problem with it. The government and PL have offered fuck all to save lower league clubs. 
 

There are just a few red flags I’d have. 

[DalyanPete]

1 hour ago, aws said:

The relegation threatened clubs and those outside the Big Six are just as capable as anyone of pursuing their own selfish interests as we saw in the null and void debate and as we see now in their reluctance to help out the EFL 

Excellent point mate, how quickly they forget

[TheHowieLama]

4 minutes ago, lifetime fan said:

As a start to negotiations I don’t have a problem with it. The government and PL have offered fuck all to save lower league clubs. 
 

There are just a few red flags I’d have. 

I think I read that this is the 17th draft from discussions that started in January - that is just between 2 parties. 

 

The PL would be/are unable to achieve anything like this imo. Fuck them off entirely and go back to one organization running all football in England.

[DalyanPete]

We all know football sold its soul years ago, including high and mighty FC. Match going fans where looked at as a boil on the arse, so I find it quite funny now that Covid has put the premier league in this position.

The top guys want more and they will eventually get it.

Prepare for more £15 PPV games upcoming

[lifetime fan]

8 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

But they could do that now with a 14 vote right? For me I would make that a weighted voting as opposed to a closed group. I also think going down to 18 teams would be beneficial.

 

Maybe I misinterpreted this

 

 lots of nice shiny things to distract from the genuine essence of this deal

 

Has there been substantive talks led by the PL brass about revenue sharing with the lower leagues? Or a bail out under the current conditions?

 

Don't necessarily think it is a bad thing for poorly run teams to fold tbh but then you can't be bellyaching about the effects on the town/workforce involved etc.

 

Well let’s see how things progress.
 

But you know for sure, American hedge fund managers aren’t wanting to save fourth tier football clubs out of the kindness of their hearts. 
 

They’re offering this deal (and the concessions to fans) as they’re banking on more money, control and power from the deal. 
 

Nothing else. 

[TheHowieLama]

2 minutes ago, lifetime fan said:

 

They’re offering this deal (and the concessions to fans) as they’re banking on more money, control and power from the deal. 
 

 

Well, the system is fucked and it is not because FSG have been around for 10 years.

 

TBH - as I have said before - there really is no reason, much less a right to pretend there is legitimate demand for 4 leagues of "professional" football. 

 

So the choices seem to be:

 

Let the market dictate fiscal reality and the chips fall where they may.

 

Create a system that subsidizes the lower leagues.

 

Create some sort of partnership between lower league sides and PL clubs similar to what they have in Spain and Germany, probably not location specific, so more like minor league baseball as an example.

 

 

The current leadership of the PL can only accomplish one of the above.

 

[No2]

I like the fact we again have the biggest mickey in town. I don't like the idea of 6 individuals controlling football. 

[dockers_strike]

2 hours ago, Vincent Vega said:

I'm suspicious of our owners and the fact the Glazers' are backing it, but from what I've seen the 72 clubs in the Football League stand to benefit massively and it's the less established clubs in the PL that have something to lose. I suspect that the more contentious stuff like the power given to the "big six" (I hate that phrase) and possibly even the reduction of the PL to 18 clubs may have to go, but I don't see anyone else putting proposals forward that will help the smaller clubs. I think pressure will be applied to the naysayers to propose an alternative and I suspect they will have nothing to offer.

 

Two less hysterical opinion pieces from David Conn of The Guardian from the last two days.

 

Plan to mend football pyramid's great crack should not be swept off table

David Conn

Liverpool and Manchester United have infuriated the Premier League, which was kept in the dark, but the premise of their proposal to reunite with the EFL is sound

 

There are so many extraordinary elements in the Liverpool and Manchester United proposals to reshape English football, and so much understandable scepticism, that the historic move at the heart of it is in danger of being missed.

 

So, for clarity, it really is true that the US owners of these two fabulously rich football corporations have produced an offer that has not been forthcoming and never seemed possible from any Premier League leadership figures for 28 years.

 

There are, undoubtedly, some self-serving elements to their prospectus but by far the most significant is the proposal that the Premier League should share a net 25% of its future TV deals with the English Football League, and provide £250m immediately to help the 72 EFL clubs through their financial crisis.

 

That is an offer, finally after a generation, to rejoin the top division with the three below and repair the vast, calamitous financial gap caused by the breakaway of the First Division from the Football League to form the Premier League in 1992.

 

The wholly negative reaction of the government to this plan for huge financial reparations, which also includes increased money for the FA and grassroots good causes – approximately 8.5% of annual net Premier League TV money – seems bizarre.

 

For months throughout this pandemic and its financial crisis for the game and its cherished pyramid, the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, has been urging the Premier League to use its financial might to help the “football family”.

 

The Premier League has dithered, delayed and produced nothing solid, despite being told in the spring the EFL had an immediate £250m hole and that many clubs face ruin through a Covid-19 winter of matches in empty grounds. Steve Parish, the chairman of Crystal Palace, recently argued that “Premier League clubs are being unfairly singled out” and should not have to share their money.

 

“No other industry is asking firms to bail out competitors,” Parish wrote in the Sunday Times before offering some comparisons. “The supermarkets aren’t instructed to help the corner shops. Deliveroo aren’t bailing out your local cafe.”

 

Quite apart from the assumption that Selhurst Park counts as a supermarket among corner shops, these are dreary arguments that do not merit earnest engagement. It is the kind of reasoning, for the maintenance of inequality, that also makes it more difficult for the Premier League’s middling clubs to be outraged about Liverpool, United and the rest of the big six looking to cement their own power.

 

With these proposals, United and Liverpool, whose majority owner, John W Henry, is said to have been contemplating the great crack in the English football pyramid for years, have thumped through the last months of stagnation and presented a coming together that has not seemed possible for 25 years.

 

The idea of the EFL having anything like a 25% share of Premier League TV deals last disappeared in the dust in 1995, when with Rick Parry as the chief executive, the top flight did offer 20% but the Football League board, to the fury of many clubs, rejected it.

 

When Parry took on the chairmanship of the EFL only one extremely long year ago, he appreciated that the root cause of the 72 clubs’ various financial agonies is the eye-watering gap with the Premier League and the parachute payments that further distort the landscape in the Championship.

 

When he has spoken up and made that plain, including calling parachute payments “an evil that needs to be eradicated”, he has generally been patronised. The Premier League’s administrators and smaller clubs seem to have been proceeding on the basis they would not be seriously pressured into sharing their money more equitably, as they haven’t for the past quarter-century.

 

To be fair, nobody except Parry seems to have been aware that Henry, across the Atlantic, was informing himself about all of this, apparently becoming more knowledgeable about the bitter 1992 breakaway than many English football people who really should know that history better. And of all people who could be expected to support the idea of putting the game back together, it turns out to be Joel Glazer, of the family whose £525m debt-loading, 2005 takeover of United has been such a burden at Old Trafford and caused so much rancour and unhappiness.

 

Of course it is also true this proposal does not come without some pain but that Henry and Glazer do not envisage feeling any of it themselves. There is a planned consolidation of voting power within the Premier League of the big six plus the three outside clubs that have been in the top flight longest, Everton, Southampton and West Ham, and that is simply not a good look. The 25% for the EFL is mostly to be found by reducing the Premier League to 18 clubs – the original 1990 FA proposal that was never implemented – and scrapping parachute payments, rather than ceding the money out of Old Trafford or Anfield revenues.

 

United and Liverpool envisage their time being freed for more Champions League matches, which will happen anyway from 2024 when Uefa’s competition is inevitably expanded, and lucrative pre-season tours. They insist their proposals are not an effort to seize more of the Premier League TV money but it is likely other Premier League clubs will get less. It will make it more difficult to break into the top six; the more even competition will be created in the relegation zone.

 

So, quite rightly, there should be a battle over the detail of these proposals. If the other 14 Premier League clubs want to fight for the maintenance of the one club, one vote system that is understandable; most football people would agree with it.

 

But the heart of the plan should not be swept off the table, which is for the Premier League to finally reconnect with the EFL, mend the gap and ease the senseless worry that loved and historic clubs will go bust in the time of football’s greatest boom.

 

 

How Project Big Picture changed the politics of football in one swoop

Liverpool’s and Manchester United’s plan has been roundly condemned by the Premier League, but leaves the English game in uncharted territory

David Conn

The Premier League’s 20 clubs will assemble for a scheduled meeting this week with an agenda spectacularly disrupted by the Project Big Picture proposals of Liverpool and Manchester United to reshape the league itself and the English football pyramid. The other four clubs in the so-called big six are said to have been initially infuriated when the plan, for overwhelming voting control in their hands allied to a much fairer sharing of money with the EFL, was leaked on Sunday, and some time was spent assuring them Liverpool and United were not the source of it.

 

Liverpool’s majority owner John W Henry, the main driving force behind proposals he has worked on since 2017, is said to have been undeterred by the largely hostile reaction in the media and of the government, and to be preparing to press the case further. The EFL chairman, Rick Parry, has stressed his 72 clubs’ support and gratitude for the plan, which after months of delay by the Premier League centrally, offers to pay the EFL a £250m crisis fund immediately, and a transformational future 25% of net Premier League TV deals.

 

With salary caps now agreed in League One and League Two, and proposed for the Championship, Parry argues that financial discipline will be in place for EFL clubs to accept the unexpected windfall of redistribution from the Premier League, without blowing it on excessive wages to players.

 

The major sticking point, which led to a government statement rejecting the plans out of hand, is the aggressive move for the six – United, Liverpool, Manchester City, Chelsea, Arsenal and Spurs – to take control of the Premier League voting rights.

 

The plan, summarised by the EFL rather than Liverpool or United directly, envisage “special voting rights” being given to the six, plus three more, Everton, West Ham and Southampton, who have been in the Premier League longest of the other 14. But of those nine clubs a majority of only six would have the right to make crucial rules, including deciding on future TV contracts, and appointing or removing a chief executive. There is also the proposal, so far unexplained, that six of these clubs could wield that power to block a new owner of a club even if approved by the Premier League board.

 

The Premier League centrally has publicly denounced the plan, but the political alignment in football has suddenly been changed, as well as the parameters of negotiation with the EFL. If the four other top clubs come round to being tentatively supportive of the proposals, even if they were not ready for them to be made public, the Premier League as a body will be expressing its fierce opposition on behalf of only 14 clubs, three of whom will be relegated.

 

It will be difficult to find many owners among the 72 EFL clubs to oppose finally being granted the rescue package in this unprecedented financial crisis, and a previously unimagined 25% future redistribution from the Premier League. So in effect the six biggest clubs in the country could be joining with 72, leaving 14 Premier League clubs arguing for the status quo, in which they currently receive upwards of £100m TV money each.

 

Henry, who has not spoken publicly yet, is said by Parry to have genuinely informed himself about the English football pyramid since his investment group, FSG, bought Liverpool in 2010 then overhauled the club into European and Premier League champions.

 

Henry has understood that the 1992 formation of the Premier League was a breakaway of the Football League’s First Division clubs from sharing their TV money with the other three divisions, and since then the exponential growth of top-flight TV deals has enormously widened the financial gap. Parry has said that Henry has come to care seriously about this, and shares the view that the gap is damaging to the Championship and EFL more widely, and that parachute payments to relegated Premier League clubs are unfair and further distort the finances.

 

Others see Henry’s motivation springing from a more hard-headed recognition that the strength of the big clubs relies on a strong pyramid below. The plan to secure voting rights is said to be determined, springing from a view that the six should not be outvoted by smaller clubs that could be in the Premier League for only a season or two.

 

EFL clubs have also been exasperated with Premier League delays in discussing the £250m rescue fund during the months of the crisis, and various demands made in return for it. Parry produced that £250m figure in the spring as the financial cost of football shutting down then playing without supporters, but no agreement has been forthcoming from the Premier League administration in the negotiations.

 

Instead, it is reported that the Premier League centrally, led by the chief executive Richard Masters, has most recently offered only £50m, with a further £100m repayable loan. The Premier League is also said to have been asking for commitments in return for this bailout, including the EFL falling in line with its rules for the threshold at which the season could be curtailed if games are suspended again. Some EFL club owners are said to have begun wondering if it is even worth accepting the Premier League’s help, if it is so meagre and with so many strings attached.

 

Then the plans worked up by Liverpool and Manchester United finally and prematurely emerged, and the terms of engagement, for the 14 and for the Premier League’s chief executive, have been scrambled.

 

An apparent lone, sensible voice on the matter amongst the so called sports writers, all of whom have just said 'No!'

[aws]

6 minutes ago, dockers_strike said:

An apparent lone, sensible voice on the matter amongst the so called sports writers, all of whom have just jerked their knee and said 'No!'

Slightly changed what you said. 

[No2]

According to Gary Neville 90% of the 72 football league are overwhelmingly in favour of this.  I could see this happening in some sort or other. Enough palms will be greased to get it done.

[TheHowieLama]

That tells you there are 8 clubs against it.

 

One is West Ham, one is Palace.

 

I highly doubt it is any of the top 6 or Evz or Soton. Really highly doubt it is any side not in the Prem.

 

[Leyton388]

I've always thought that the longest member teams of the prem should have the biggest say. Why should a team that is in its first season in the league have the same voting power as a team like Liverpool, United, Arsenal ect. 

[TheHowieLama]

A breakaway league was suggested "as a threat" by the organisers of Project Big Picture, says Football Association chairman Greg Clarke.

[Bobby Hundreds]

Transparency of all finances, sponsorships players contracts should absolutely be done. Once that is done try to justify 15 quid a game. But it is a choice we don't like 15 quid a game, don't fucking buy it, its the only way. Spending is voting.

[Bruce Spanner]

 

Cant add much to what has gone before, but fucking hell!

 

Look at the absolute state of Coco’s tie, the pattern, the colour, the fucking knot, all of it disgraceful!

 

How can one person get it so wrong on such a consistent basis?

[Herp McDerp]

 

[sir roger]

Sky has grudgingly started to interview League one and two chairmen who seem overwhelmingly in favour for obvious reasons. Their narrative has been constantly that this boils down to a 14-6 argument but the reality is it is a 78-14 argument. Amusingly enough the biggest mouth on Sky ( unsurprisingly) is Purslow who is totally against the proposals but not being asked how he would have felt if they had earned one point less last season.

 

In line with most on here I like some of the proposals but disagree with some , and assume this is where negotiations will focus.

 

- The League Cup would be better if it was for non-euro participants

- More support for the EFL is good ( I think the figures mooted will be reduced to suit the 14 along with concessions re parachute payments )  and the PL has been making excuse after excuse over this for 7 months so strange to see them try to claim the moral high ground over the proposal.

- More financial scrutiny is good.

-  Voting rights is a hot potato but I can't be alone in thinking it odd that Liverpol have the same clout as a team that has been in the league since June and that Paddy Power has already paid out on their relegation. This is where negotiations come in, as Dockers Strike said you don't expect to get everything you propose and Henry / Glazer wouldn't expect it in this case.

[Barrington Womble]

another interesting thing though i do wonder if the efl clubs are thinking though - or are just desperate for cash so will worry about that later. There seems part of this agreement clubs can pick 8 matches per season as PPV (including overseas) to transmit on their own chosen platform. so this means as well as fewer games due to the reduced number of teams, there will also be games taken away from the calendar for ppv purposes, reducing even more the Premier League TV money pot. So this 25% which is floating downstream is not 25% of what is sold now, but 25% of something vastly reduced in quantity. 

[Vincent Vega]

Sky won’t like the idea of clubs being able to sell up to eight games a season through their own channels as they will worry that this will lead to more games being sold that and eroding the reason most of us bother with a Sky subscription. Their coverage of this story will be influenced with that in mind.

 

Edit - I hadn’t read BW’s response when I posted.

[Vincent Vega]

2 hours ago, sir roger said:

This is where negotiations come in, as Dockers Strike said you don't expect to get everything you propose and Henry / Glazer wouldn't expect it in this case.

Yeah I reckon this has been leaked so speed up discussions/negotiations, and the pandemic has made reform more pressing.

[No2]

I see Everton demanded an apology from the big clubs at todays meeting. They were told to do one.

 

Interesting that they have gone down this route as the stadium partner this looks like a straight up bribe to buy their vote.