Project Big Picture

[the chimp 1,497]

Samuel is paid by Abu Dhabi to write what they want. I know this for a fact as my mate was offered the gig initially but turned it down. Huge, life-long City fan too.

[coachpotato 464]

Samuel has always argued for anything that benefits West Ham and against anything that doesn’t.

Needless to say, he rarely agrees with anything that might benefit Liverpool.

[Creator Supreme 1,074]

It's a no from me on scrapping the league cup and charity shield, and it's a no on an 18 team PL. I also don't want all of the power in the hands of 9 clubs! The only things I like on this are the initial bailout for the EFL, and the continued drip down of more money down the pyramid!

 

I'm disappointed but not surprised at FSG having a hand in this, the Glazers and Coco can fuck off as well!

[AngryofTuebrook 18,360]

12 minutes ago, Creator Supreme said:

It's a no from me on scrapping the league cup and charity shield, and it's a no on an 18 team PL. I also don't want all of the power in the hands of 9 clubs! The only things I like on this are the initial bailout for the EFL, and the continued drip down of more money down the pyramid!

 

I'm disappointed but not surprised at FSG having a hand in this, the Glazers and Coco can fuck off as well!

No. I'll never stop stalking you!

[Creator Supreme 1,074]

1 minute ago, AngryofTuebrook said:

No. I'll never stop stalking you!

You are Rick Parry and I claim my £5!

[Vincent Vega 3,679]

Martin Samuel should get back to fighting Popeye over the affections of Olive Oyl.

[VERBAL DIARRHEA 8,029]

Martin Samuels is a cunt. Fuck him. Not literally. Unless you want to. Each to their own. 

[Scott_M 5,187]

Reading more in The Athletic today, apart from the voting issues & distribution of TV money, I don’t see a problem with it.

 

I think some Premiership teams are against it because their feelings have been hurt that they’ve not been invited to the party. 

[Trumo 14,195]

Ultimately there is no solution that will suit all parties because nobody will want to get off the gravy train.

[dockers_strike 2,126]

37 minutes ago, Trumo said:

Ultimately there is no solution that will suit all parties because nobody will want to get off the gravy train.

That's true and why there's shitloads of cash on the table. 25% of future PL revenue, annually, to be shared between the EFL clubs, £250m one off to tide them over the current situation as well.

 

Like Ive said, the only bits I dont like are the player loan proposals and the weighted voting.

 

It's a complete joke the way Samuel is reacting over this plus, it seems like the whole press corps has got together in a darkened room to condemn the proposals out of hand.

 

The latest stuff about stadium rebates, they headlines spurs, who'd get the biggest handout because of their stadium cost and us to keep the agenda going. They 'only' mentioned everton, if they get BMD built, Brighton, West Ham, Wolves etc further into the article because, well, it's good to kick Liverpool as one of the lead proposers,isnt it?

 

I'll say it again, they're proposals,a starting point for negotiations, not the end point.

[Rotpeter 1,074]

Are there any details on how the tv contract money will be distributed?  That's surely the real bone of contention.

 

And how does all this governance stuff compare to how sensible (i,e German) leagues do it?

[Jordy Brouwer 443]

Not that arsed about all this really. Football doesn't have a soul left to sell. Winning for the first time in 30 was great and meaningful but I'm under no illusions about what this game is now. 

 

Speaking of which football sure has been shit over this international break (and just before of course). We've still got the best part of a week when our last result was a 7-2 loss against Aston Villa. 

 

 

 

 

[DaveT 438]

11 minutes ago, Jordy Brouwer said:

Not that arsed about all this really. Football doesn't have a soul left to sell. Winning for the first time in 30 was great and meaningful but I'm under no illusions about what this game is now. 

 

Speaking of which football sure has been shit over this international break (and just before of course). We've still got the best part of a week when our last result was a 7-2 loss against Aston Villa. 

 

 

 

 

Same here. Some of the stuff is very good, some of it is a bit questionable, even though I understand where it's coming from. Some of the knee-jerk hysteria in the media is, well, absolutely typical. It's a proposal. In the real world, proposals get discussed, amended, binned etc. 

Anyway, after decisions to play a World Cup in the desert, international football during a pandemic and letting Man City get away with their cheating, my well of outrage has pretty much run dry.

[RoyHodgeGone 20]

I get the idea about 18 premier league teams but the reality is that the clubs will simply replace the matches with other ones - an expanded champions league/prestige preseason games etc. I don't think it is about reducing the workload at all. Two thirds majority does seem a bit high but reducing it to the nine teams who've been there the longest is way too much. And do we really want to be getting too cozy with the Glazers?

 

The stuff on opening accounts up is impressive - not least since we seem to be relying on Man City and Chelsea to support this proposal! Other than ourselves and United is anyone publicly behind this?

[AngryofTuebrook 18,360]

4 hours ago, Creator Supreme said:

You are Rick Parry and I claim my £5!

I am Rick Parry, so you know I'll never part with that much cash.

[Aventus 2,061]

As much as I dislike all this, if it's going to happen then I'm glad we're on the right side of the fence.

When the Prem started United moved with the times, the likes of us and Everton stood still and got left behind. 

 

I'd rather be looking back thinking football is soulless but at least we're successful, than thinking football is soulless and becoming bitter that we didn't join the party when things were changing. 

[dockers_strike 2,126]

36 minutes ago, RoyHodgeGone said:

I get the idea about 18 premier league teams but the reality is that the clubs will simply replace the matches with other ones - an expanded champions league/prestige preseason games etc. I don't think it is about reducing the workload at all. Two thirds majority does seem a bit high but reducing it to the nine teams who've been there the longest is way too much. And do we really want to be getting too cozy with the Glazers?

 

The stuff on opening accounts up is impressive - not least since we seem to be relying on Man City and Chelsea to support this proposal! Other than ourselves and United is anyone publicly behind this?

It's pretty obvious FIFA and its confederations are intent on playing more games at international and club level. Yes, the CL is talking of more games and changing format. The end result if the PL isnt reduced is players are more fucked and pick up more injuries in an over crowded schedule.

 

I love it how samuel and his crowd are pushing the scrapping of the Community Shield and EFL cup bit but he omits to say the proposals also say scrap the EFL Cup for PL clubs or those in Europe. In other words, the EFL clubs still play the EFL Cup plus those PL clubs not in Europe.

 

But saying 'scrap the EFL Cup and Community shield' draws bigger headlines.

[aws 6,809]

Opening up the books? Tighter rules on FFP? And Bluto disapproves? Who'd have thought it? 

[Manny 1,378]

9 minutes ago, aws said:

Opening up the books? Tighter rules on FFP? And Bluto disapproves? Who'd have thought it? 

*Opens City's books*

 

"Look at that, they're paying someone in gravy!"

 

*M.Samuel*

[Vincent Vega 3,679]

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.

 

[TheHowieLama 10,896]

It does seem like a power play (and probably needs some massaging) but the only clubs I have heard making a squawk about it are West Ham and Palace -- two big sides that would have a real chance of getting relegated in the next couple of seasons if the league is trimmed to 18. 

 

Every lower league club I have seen are in support. Coupled with the fact that the PL brass are pretty much useless makes it worth looking at.

 

As an aside if anyone knows -- what happens to West Ham's vote if they go down? Does it pass to the side with the next longest time?

[Numero 6,959]

8 hours ago, Creator Supreme said:

It's a no from me on scrapping the league cup and charity shield, and it's a no on an 18 team PL. I also don't want all of the power in the hands of 9 clubs! The only things I like on this are the initial bailout for the EFL, and the continued drip down of more money down the pyramid!

 

I'm disappointed but not surprised at FSG having a hand in this, the Glazers and Coco can fuck off as well!

Interesting. Aside from my consider about power in the hands of 9 clubs, I've got pretty much an opposing view on everything. I do want to get rid of the League Cup (for top teams, others can do what they want) and Charity Shield. I've no issue with 18 teams in the PL, especially with an upcoming expansion of the CL. The bailout is okay but not something I'm dragging my balls over and I'm not arsed about the drip down. 

[aws 6,809]

45 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

It does seem like a power play (and probably needs some massaging) but the only clubs I have heard making a squawk about it are West Ham and Palace -- two big sides that would have a real chance of getting relegated in the next couple of seasons if the league is trimmed to 18. 

 

Every lower league club I have seen are in support. Coupled with the fact that the PL brass are pretty much useless makes it worth looking at.

 

As an aside if anyone knows -- what happens to West Ham's vote if they go down? Does it pass to the side with the next longest time?

Yes, I believe so. And if they came back up again, they'd have to start afresh. 

 

The voting rights need to be rejigged so all clubs get a vote but maybe the "senior clubs" could get separate blocking rights over certain proposals and the player loan system might need thinking through a bit more but otherwise I think there's a lot in favour of most of the plan.  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 

[lifetime fan 10,892]

While there is lots of nice shiny things to distract from the genuine essence of this deal, it still remains football would be run by the Glazers, Henry, Abramovich, Sheik Mansour, Joe Lewis and Stan Kroenke. 
 

That should scare the shit out of everyone. 

[TheHowieLama 10,896]

31 minutes ago, lifetime fan said:

While there is lots of nice shiny things to distract from the genuine essence of this deal, it still remains football would be run by the Glazers, Henry, Abramovich, Sheik Mansour, Joe Lewis and Stan Kroenke. 
 

That should scare the shit out of everyone. 

Who runs it now?