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Graham Kelly: Premiership pays the price for FA's lack of courage

Monday 19 August 2002 00:00 BST
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The Premiership is celebrating its 10th birthday. The Football Association was none too keen when the then Premier League chief executive, Rick Parry, submitted the idea of title sponsorship by the League's original backers, Carling (now replaced by Barclaycard), but, as the sacrosanct "FA" part of the name had been retained, there was little they could do about it.

This was the least of Parry's worries in the early years. In a move that would have jeopardised central marketing arrangements, eight clubs banded together to sign a collective perimeter advertising agreement in September 1992, prompting a furious row between Ken Bates' Chelsea and Arsenal, one of the eight.

As chief executive of the FA, I had flown to Spain at the time with the England team that was supposed to be the main beneficiary of the new Premier League, with its reduced programme of matches. As soon as the plane landed I was dispatched back to London to sort out the argument.

The Premier League came into being after many false starts in the 1980s when the wealthier clubs had grown restless in the 92-club Football League. The management committee commissioned the leading academic, Sir Norman Chester, to produce a report in 1983, but, when he concluded that the market for full-time professional football was limited to 64 clubs and those below should be consigned to an intermediate league with the major non-League clubs, they snubbed him.

By the end of that decade, ITV was forced to dramatically increase the rights fees to acquire football in the face of competition from the fledgling satellite station British Satellite Broadcasting, which had proposed a 10-year partnership with the Football League, only to see it scuppered by the big clubs who were chary of losing their exposure. Most of the money was cornered by the First Division sides as their price for staying in the League in 1988.

By 1990 the clubs faced massive investment costs as a result of the Taylor Report following the Hillsborough Disaster. The ITV contract was due to expire in 1992 and the Football League management committee approached the FA with a proposal that a joint executive board be formed between the two organisations.

The League knew that the FA's own proposals for a modern board were foundering on backwoods opposition, but, while the League's ideas had merit, they would not have gained the approval of its own big clubs, much less the grass-roots representatives of the FA.

It was against this complex background, following an approach from Arsenal and Liverpool, that I, my FA colleagues and outside consultants drew up a wide-ranging set of proposals under the title "Blueprint for the Future of Football" early in 1991, with its centrepiece an 18-club Premier League designed to act as the catalyst for a commercial revolution that would stimulate investment in stadiums, provide the base for a World Cup bid and generally, via its 100-odd pages, change the face of the game.

So why, following the period of monumental growth which football has since experienced, is there now a need for the new financial revolution that the FA's Adam Crozier spoke of spearheading last week? Why the need for tighter rules governing players' wages, transfers and agents?

The answer lies in human nature. It can be traced back through the ambition of club chairmen whose dreams of success have induced them to lead their clubs into financial peril, to the longstanding, mutual suspicion between the FA and the clubs which prevented better arrangements being made at the outset.

Had the FA possessed the courage of its convictions, it would have imposed much tougher terms of entry on FA Premier League clubs, such as the financial controls which have recently seen Fiorentina demoted from Serie A in Italy. A senior FA figure told the prospective Premier League clubs that the size of their new league was entirely up to them. Heedless of the fact that England had reached the semi-finals of the Italy World Cup in 1990 with a top tier of only 20 clubs, the Premier League kicked off with 22.

In truth, harsh economics will inject much of the realism that Crozier aspires to and which should have been imposed much sooner. The transfer market at top level has cooled; there are welcome signs that some Nationwide League chairmen,chastened by the ITV Digital losses, are holding to the line of their revised budgets; and Supporters Direct, the supporters' trusts initiative, is making a new call for clubs to become mutual co-operatives in a move to protect from predators' assets built up over many years.

The clubs in both leagues could yet survive.

grahamkelly@btinternet.com

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