Cod Almighty | Diary
Your grandsons, they won't understand
28 May 2019
Oh, look – before he leaves his job as chief executive of the Football League, Shaun Harvey has sent us a message. He says fans should stop complaining about the people who take over their clubs, because we wouldn't have any clubs without them. Now where else have we heard that recently?
That's not actually true, of course – we would still have our clubs; they'd just have to stop spending money they don't have. Hey, it's almost as if Harvey is disseminating a deliberately reductive and simplistic narrative in order to deflect the blame from a situation brought about in part by his own monumental unfitness for purpose. If your original/regular Diary didn't always try to assume the best of people, I'd suspect he was doing it in a particularly offensive way on purpose, just to troll us.
When Richard Scudamore stepped down recently as Harvey's Premier League counterpart, those clubs at the top table could afford a nice little leaving present for him. I'm not sure we can quite stretch to that here in the Football League. But it's the least we could do to send a card. Here you go, Shaun. With lots of love from us all.
The work of a highly paid chief executive would, you might reasonably expect, include strengthening their organisation and defending its interests. Even on this most basic of requirements Harvey has failed. The Football League he leaves behind is enfeebled – less powerful and under greater threat on several fronts than the organisation he acquired control of back in 2013.
Its clubs are powerless to resist plunder and maladministration by the owners whose boots Harvey is going out of his way to lick clean. Its clubs are insolvent, led into ruinous overspending – again, by those owners who are apparently beyond criticism. Its clubs are divided among themselves, with those in the second tier increasingly set on cutting adrift the third and fourth, repeating the disaster that was the creation of the Premier League. And its clubs' own interests are increasingly sacrificed to the agenda of the elite, with the workings of both its competitions and its transfer system twisted out of recognition for the convenience of the richest.
For this reason, Town fans arguing that the club shouldn't have accepted Middlesbrough's offer for 18-year-old academy graduate Rumarn Burrell last week are missing the point. True, £100,000 isn't much in the grand scheme of things. True, that £100,000 will become payable only if particular add-ons are activated, presumably related to the player's by no means guaranteed progress through to Boro's first team. And again, despite the sweetly naïve hopes of many Town fans, whatever fraction of that £100,000 does find its way to Blundell Park is almost certain to have no appreciable impact at all on the Mariners' wage budget for playing staff.
But the fact is that because of those changes to the transfer system, overseen by the Football League's outgoing chief executive, the club had no option.
Perhaps Town should have got Burrell on a pro contract sooner. Perhaps the club tried to – after all, contracts have already been given to several other young players who have not yet made first-team places their own – but Burrell wanted to keep his options open. We don't know. What we do know is that because of Shaun Harvey, the club is in no position to resist any offer for its young players. Say no to the big club and they'll take the player anyway, and the tribunal will award you ten bob and a bit of string.
We've talked a lot recently about the academy being Town's last great hope. Overall, our club is on its knees, because of the agenda of Harvey and the men in suits who want the rich richer and the poor exterminated, and because of the incompetence and ingrained complacency of our own directors. But Neil Woods and his staff are doing a glorious job, and in some ways seeing Harry Clifton do the biz is the biggest win of all.
Now, though, we have to hope they don't do their job too well. We have to hope that the academy brings through players who are not that good actually – just good enough to play for Grimsby Town's first team, but no better than that. Players you might respect, but certainly not players who will ever excite you. Because if they're really any good at all, they'll just get gobbled up by Middlesbrough, Reading or Hull for essentially zero recompense before we even get to see them.
So thanks for that, Shaun. Now, as we said before, fuck off.