Jon Holmes: The dangers of English football's closed shop

Do we really want one, two or, at most, three teams to win all the prizes? It makes for a very stale scene

As a sports agent, I have never felt the urge to run a football club. Nor, in joining Gary Lineker's bid to save Leicester City this week, am I trying to do a Victor Kiam. But there are times when every football fan must do his duty...

Those of us who've been fans for years were, of course, especially affected by the news that the club had gone bust last Monday, even though we were not exactly taken by surprise. But the failure of Leicester is not unique. Bradford City, Swindon and Barnsley all went under a few months ago, and I fear some more clubs will follow. That is why Monday's news was such bad news for football generally. It points up what has been developing too long; that the game in this country is becoming ever more polarised, and, I believe, dangerously so.

We knew that we were becoming two nations in football, but it is perhaps only when a club actually goes into administration that the reality hits home. There is a chasm between the Premiership and the rest. To give just one illustration: the TV rights enjoyed by any Premiership club, about £25m a year, exceed the value of the TV rights enjoyed by all the sides in the Football League put together. That is why Leicester's relegation from the Premiership was so ruinous, timed as it was with the building of a magnificent stadium.

Football today resembles a series of very steep ledges. The difference between the Premiership and the Football League is, in financial and prestige terms, immense and certainly wider than it has ever been.

The case of Leicester City shows what happens to teams that fall off one of those ledges, and just how far and how painful that fall can be. The penalties for failure in football, always great, can today make the difference between life and death. The distortions have become grotesque. And when teams like Leicester, and Ipswich and Derby for that matter, are threatened with extinction, it makes it all the more difficult for them to break back into the Premiership and challenge what is increasingly a closed shop.

We have to ask ourselves if we want football to be like this. Do we really want one, two or, at most, three teams to win all the prizes? It makes for a very stale football scene. Do we want English football to develop to the stage where it finds itself like the Scottish league, with two clubs so streets ahead of the others that the competitions become meaningless? Do we want England to end up like Scotland, where the top teams' players are almost entirely foreign and where the national squad is nearly a joke? That maybe is what some people want, but I can't believe it's what the majority wish for.

I don't have the answers to these problems. I have enough on my plate trying to make sure Leicester City is rescued. However, I do know that hard questions need to be addressed by all those with an interest in the game. How big a football league do we want? How competitive should it be? Is the present way of running many clubs, as floated companies quoted on the stock exchange, the best way?

In the case of Leicester City, it obviously was not. The rescue plan that I am involved in is about taking the company private. This was, after all, how the vast majority of clubs were organised until about 15 years ago. Tottenham Hotspur were the first to float in 1983. They have a lot to answer for.

The main advantage of floating as far as I can see for most clubs was so that fans could buy a small parcel of shares and get a certificate with the team colours. That's fine, but it's not the most important issue when it comes to financing something like a football team. We are well on our way to meeting our objectives, and we will give more details about our progress at a press conference today, but those of us in the consortium to save City are in it for the long run – we don't expect to see financial rewards for our stakes in the short term, and we are quite realistic about that.

I don't know what the future of football may hold. It may be that it would be better to have a closed "Premiership 1" and "Premiership 2" structure of around 32 clubs in which the clubs were franchised as in America. Other clubs that cannot get sufficient support of 10,000 or 15,000 fans would have to accept non-professional status. There is certainly a case for reconsidering the sharing of the TV money. The relationship of English football to European also needs re-examining. Some clubs seem to care only about it.

But even after the collapse of ITV Digital and the astronomical rise in players' wages (now thankfully wearing off), there is still a lot of money coming into the game, especially at the top. We have to find a much better way of spreading that cash around, and the debate about how we achieve that is only just beginning.

The writer is the managing director of SFX Sports Europe and is Gary Lineker's agent.