Cod Almighty | Diary

Those are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others

5 November 2018

Trentside Diary writes: Remember, remember the fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot! We don't do gunpowder because the pyrotechnic sniffer dogs would find it but treason and plot have been much in evidence this week with all the talk of a European super league.

If you ever needed evidence that the 'big clubs' in our top division will never be satisfied until they have sucked every possible penny of income from football fans around the world, here it is. Not content with their current riches, they want to lock themselves in a fortress and pull up the drawbridge to make sure no-one else can sneak in to spoil their fun.

This idea has been floated before, and if that's what they want to do, just let them go. If the fans of those clubs are bothered, they will have to make their feelings known. But these aren't clubs that care about fans. Crowds are only there to provide a good backdrop for matches. I'll happily watch a top division match but if four or five teams disappeared I wouldn't care – my team will never be invited to join.

From the 2019-20 season, supposedly to give supporters more choice, top flight matches will be shown on Sky, BT and Amazon. That means that if you can't get or afford tickets to watch your team if they're in the top flight you will have to subscribe to three different providers. That can hardly be good.

And what would await the teams that think their future will be better in this pan-European league? At the moment I am sure there are plenty of Man U and Chelsea fans thinking that this will be amazing, they will be there year in, year out trouncing the likes of Barcelona, Bayern and Juventus. What they probably haven't considered is that they will suddenly be a fish swimming in a pond with fish the same size or bigger. I could take a certain pleasure in seeing these arrogant English clubs finish in the bottom half of their table for the next 20 years.

Maybe this 'creaming off' of clubs could be a positive for the teams that remain. Scrap the current format and go back to divisions one to four – rethinking the funding so that there is some genuine investment in grassroots football, rather than lip service. I know that's unlikely to happen: the Football League has no more interest in fans who attend matches than those running the Premier League. If they were, they wouldn't persist with the EFL Trophy in its current format and wouldn't have pulled a fast one over clubs by streaming matches at 3pm on Saturdays. I can hope though.

In other news, Town lost again. The team has come together; we just need someone who can put the ball in the net on a fairly regular basis. What's galling is we see former Town players bagging goals all over the place. Maybe if we had a set-up that players wanted to be involved with, and occasionally offered more than a one-year deal to proven players, we wouldn't have an issue. UTM!