Lord Triesman, the chairman of the FA, and Richard Scudamore, the chairman of the Premiership, got in an argument yesterday about the effect of the credit crunch on football at the Football Leaders conference, ironically held at Stamford Bridge. What a lot of this is about is a power struggle between the FA and the Premiership over who has the biggest influence on the game.
Lord Triesman, the chairman of the FA, and Richard Scudamore, the chairman of the Premiership, got in an argument yesterday about the effect of the credit crunch on football at the Football Leaders conference, ironically held at Stamford Bridge. What a lot of this is about is a power struggle between the FA and the Premiership over who has the biggest influence on the game. Triesman, who is a former trade union leader, used the opportunity posed by the credit crunch to try and land a few debating punches on the Premiership supremo, but Scudamore gave as good as he got. I was asked to go on television at noon and my basic message was: calm down. Your own club is not about to go under and, unfortunately, if anyone does, it won’t be the big clubs, but smaller clubs who are more reliant on overdraft finance, short-term loans or other forms of finance that can be cut off and perhaps the finances of a UK businessman. The most indebted club in the country is Chelsea, but this is money ‘owed’ to their benefactor, Roman Abramovich. He isn’t about to run out of money, nor is the Russian economy. Indeed, they have offered to bail out Iceland.
Triesman announced that City analysts had told him that football owed a collective £3 billion. Scudamore shrugged his shoulders and announced that there was nothing wrong with debt. ‘Debt, to a degree, is healthy … What is important is that the level of indebtedness has got to be in proportion to your income,’ he said. Debt, he added, was on a 1:1 ratio with overall revenues in the game. Like Sepp Blatter, Triesman is unhappy about the influx of foreign money and players into the English game. He wants a new Sports Law to regulate who governs what in English football. This is not a disinterested call, as it would strengthen the position of the FA, an organisation which enjoys little confidence among fans. Of course, this is good time for calling for more regulation. But one needs to think whether it would really work, or whether it would be yet another case of government/governance failure.