Cod Almighty | Article

by Simon Wilson

12 October 2002

The fallout from summer's ITV Digital collapse has seen a number of Football League clubs making moves to reduce their outgoings. Selling off players for an immediate chunk of money, to shift the financial burden of high-earning players elsewhere. Pleas to defer bonus payments until TV money shows up - assuming it does at all. (The Mariners went as far as asking the non-playing staff to consider a temporary pay cut - which they did, shaming the playing staff who initially rejected a similar request.) Bradford City even went to the extreme of threatening to tear up their players' contracts if the club slipped into administration. And over the past month there has been an accelerated spate of clubs trying to negotiate wage cuts, from 12 per cent (at Watford) to 25 per cent (at Coventry).

Which was too much for Professional Footballers' Association (PFA) chief executive Gordon Taylor: "Players are being intimidated and harassed. They are being threatened with 'well you won't have a job if you don't take a wage cut'." Taylor goes on. "Contracts have to be honoured. They must be. Otherwise it's a waste of time having any agreements and we'll end up a Third World country in footballing terms. We know only too well the Football League have got problems. That's why we made such a loud noise when ITV Digital collapsed - we knew where it would leave the clubs and a lot of our resources are being used to help keep the clubs going." If Leicester's lowest earner - reputedly on £7,000 a week - accepted a 20 per cent cut to £5,600, he'd hardly be on Third World wages.

Four clubs are currently in administration - Barnsley, Bradford, Bury and Lincoln - with signs that more from the first division will be forced to join this reluctant group shortly - Leicester, Coventry and Watford all peering the most ominously over their shoulders. Intimidated and harassed? If that's what it takes to make players realise the precipice that the state of the game in the country currently teeters on, then so be it.

In March, the PFA announced that they had loaned around £1 million to 12 second and third division clubs. Taylor admitted: "We do have serious problems at some lower-division clubs and we have been covering the wages [at the 12 clubs] this season."

Handy, then, that Taylor made a stand late last year so the PFA could cover this. Under threat of a players' strike, annual contributions of £5.2 million to the PFA by the Premier League were raised to £17.4 million. The PFA argued that since the players make the game what it is, contributions to the PFA - as the representative of the players - should be raised proportionately to the increased cash from the new television deal. Dean Holdsworth, PFA representative at Premiership-dwelling Bolton, said the strike was to support the poorer players in the lower divisions. This in an organisation that asks its members to pay just £75 a year - regardless of their income and status in the game.

As the row escalated, Taylor became stubborn and increasingly vocal in his demands through the press. A press backlash - echoing a public who struggled to sympathise with players felt to be already overpaid - forced Taylor's hand to concede on what he generously dubbed a "concessionary figure".

At the turn of the year, the financial battle won, Taylor concentrated his rhetoric on misbehaving players, "emphasising the responsibility of both the clubs as employer and player as employee." The PFA was considering recommending financial punishment beyond the current limit of two weeks' wages. A few weeks later and Taylor was placing the emphasis on the club missing out on a player's services rather than suffering at the hands of a fine. A subtle switch, but placing the onus on clubs to keep tabs on their players.

So in early March when Portsmouth chairman Milan Mandaric threatened to withhold his players' wages as he felt they weren't performing, you'd have thought that Taylor could have seen his point. After all, Mandaric seemed to be missing the services of his players, despite paying and playing them. Not so. "It's a return to the dark ages!" Taylor exaggerated somewhat (again). The people paying £20 to attend matches at Fratton Park - the people supplementing Mandaric's personal charity - sympathised with their chairman. A 3-0 victory averted the threat. But this was warm-up territory from Taylor as regards Where The Game Was Going.

By May he'd moved on from murky bygones to a parallel universe. As Bradford's administrators suggested that they would rip up the players' contracts, he exploded: "The game here will become like a banana republic. A number of clubs have gone into administration and what we expect is that all contracts are honoured. If they are not then football will lose all credibility."

Taylor decided around this time to remind people of one of his other duties in life - that of president of the international players' union FifPro (the body that, among other gambits, wants computer games companies to pay for using real player names). The elite G14 group of top European clubs was considering salary capping. Taylor had his take on things: "This is just the rich clubs agreeing to have some agreement among themselves. It will be virtually impossible to implement across so many different countries - it would be hard enough in one country. The very clubs that put forward this sort of agreement are usually the first ones to break it. It would be little more than a gentleman's agreement - and there are too few gentlemen around."

At a time when the global football economy was entering depression, the bigger clubs were (belatedly) making a move to at least plan for the future. Taylor has a point that a club could benefit by breaking their wage cap. In the summer Milan moved to shatter their self-imposed wage ceiling given the chance to sign Rivaldo. They argued that by not paying a transfer fee to Barcelona after the £15 million-rated World Cup winner was released by the Catalan club, they could afford Rivaldo's greater wage demands. Milan maintain that their wage ceiling lasted for the majority of the 90s. Taylor, you felt, simply didn't want his members' earning potential curbed.

But in the main (with the exception of Manchester United's capture of Rio Ferdinand), the big European clubs hadn't been as extravagant in paying transfer fees as over the previous six years. The feeling is that the income was slowing down, and measures are being taken to combat that now.

Which is what a lot of people feel should have happened in this country a few years ago. A season would end and at least five chairmen would say how nice it was to be receiving so much money, but it wouldn't last: "We should plan for the future and safeguard a club." But no-one took action - and the financial madness has culminated with UEFA honouring a fund-raising Bury fan who used every trick in the book to wring money out of his fellow fans to keep his club from going under.

Last weekend Taylor said: "The players feel they're being asked to make sacrifices for poor management of finances. Many clubs are so poorly managed that, even if the players accepted their demands, the clubs would spend their way back into trouble within 18 months." Yet it's feasible that if players hadn't demanded so much in the first place then the clubs wouldn't have run out of money so quickly. With the strike threat, Taylor argued more money was coming into the game so the PFA should have a proportional raise. More money has gone into the game, and into the clubs, but the wages of Taylor's members have increased above and beyond any figure of 'inflation' you can attach to the football economy.

To blame every club that is in this trouble is unfair. Each club has its own circumstances. Two of the clubs in administration - Barnsley and Bradford - have unexpectedly been in the Premiership in the past five years. Their inexperience showed in their attempts to go straight back up (Barnsley nearly succeeding in the play-off final) or their attempts to blitz their second season in the Premiership (Richmond's mass recruitment of Petrescu, Carbone et al). Lincoln and Bury merely live in the shadow of small attendances, hence small incomes.

To label all those clubs as badly managed and to punish them for their pasts is wrong. Clubs are companies, limited in their number and limited in the number they can employ. Every company suffers from an element of bad management. Taylor might believe "a number of clubs have gone into administration and what we expect is that all contracts are honoured; contracts with all football creditors must be honoured otherwise it makes a mockery of the competition," but that standpoint won't see football out of the mire, nor can Taylor truly purport to be representing his members' best interests. If Taylor doesn't concede ground then he will see his membership shrink as clubs go under.

Irony lies in the fact that the PFA is helping the clubs by using the increased annual contribution from the Premier League. The PFA has agreed to players having bonus payments deferred. But this still means debts for the clubs, and coming at a time when the pinnacle of income has passed, will it ever be feasible for these to be paid? There's no doubting the PFA makes a valuable contribution supporting footballers through their ills - mental and physical. But the players are forced into a position of "being offloaded at the first opportunity" because the clubs have no choice, snatching at any chance to lessen their wage bill or a wedge of cash to appease the snarling bank manager and removing themselves from a contractual obligation.

Finances in the lower leagues are terminal. Instead of making a stand and fighting for as much money for his members as possible, it's time Taylor led everyone to the table and sought a solution to this mess, to quote the PFA's tagline, for the good of the game.