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The end of the football season has brought renewed discussion of the dominance of the Big Four clubs and suggestions that the Premiership is so predictable that it is boring. Nevertheless, plenty of armchair fans were attracted by the championship and relegation struggle on the last day. One of the biggest factors changing the state of the game is the Champions League with entry worth £30m a season to the top four. The average earnings of the top four clubs is triple the amount for the little sixteen, although some analysts would make a distinction between a middle group of clubs that have some hope of a Uefa cup place and the bottom tier engaged in a relegation struggle. One newspaper expressed this as the difference between platinum class, business and economy. It's not so long ago (between 1995 and 1998) that Newcastle were England's second richest club while in 1994-5 Jack Walker effectively 'bought' the title for Blackburn by spending £23.5m on what was then England's most expensive squad.
Sports economist Stefan Szymanski reckons that 'Competitive imbalance is a fact of life in any sport. It exists in the US, where they go to great lengths to create equality of opportunity. English football is achieving record popularity and those who think it would draw more supporters if smaller teams had more of a chance ignore the fact that bigger clubs would shrink. Look at France where money is more equally divided. Their best players go abroad and their league has a lousy standard of play.' Szymanski asks, 'Why should we bothered?' Sepp Blatter certainly is. The Fifa president wants a quota system imposed on the number of foreign players, despite legal advice that this would be illegal within the European Union. Blatter is proposing the so-called 6 plus 5 rule for every team to field six players eligible for the team of the country. This would have a devastating impact on Premiership clubs. As few as 37 per cent of the starting line-ups on a match day this season have been made up of Englishmen.
Premiership chief executive Richard Scudamore is suspicious of Blatter's motives: 'There is a lot of envy out there of English football. Envy because of our success and because English football is the most watched in the world.' The Premiership may be hit by the new immigration points system. It requires immigrants from outside the EU to meet quite stringent English language standards which may be difficult for some players.
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