[spireitematt]

I like that piece a lot Matt but I don't agree with all of it.  For a start it is not Coronavirus that is the cause, it is the worldwide over-reaction. If this is a dry run to find out how to deal with a virus that starts killing the working age population in large numbers it has shown any shutdown has to be early and complete, that we'd need to be ready to track and trace contacts instead of wasting months debating the infringement of liberal values in South Korea, and that you can't turn off a Capitalist economy for long periods and expect it to be there unchanged when you yell all clear.

Just as we've demonstrated that the bureaucracy and proliferation of different bodies within the  Health and Social Care System is a huge weakness, so football has demonstrated that the multitude of different bodies within football, all with competing interests and self-interests has enabled money, sport and people involved to splinter and every level of the game is coming up with its own proposals. Once upon a time the FA ruled football but it became old-fashioned and an enemy of change, so all its wonderful values like service, sportsmanship, honesty and fairness became discredited as it came to be regarded as a haven for the geriatric and out-of-touch. So now the Premier League rules with Sky money. The Championship whimpers up a weakling voice and the lower divisions hope Mark Palios might do more for them than ensure Tranmere aren't relegated. And then there's the rest of us, divided into self-interested leagues and FA associations. (And the fans pipe up and the players rightly pipe up and the owners pipe up and Chief Executives suddenly decide to come over all executive ……….)  So my first thought is unless we can stop the virus seeping into the cracks between all these interest groups and widening them into gaping wounds then football is in trouble. It needs one overall governing body called maybe The National Game so the game moves forward with one policy rather than juggling several balls in the air many of which seem doomed to hit the deck.

So yes I'd void the season too, because it'll be June and the season ended in May without a conclusion. That's when we play football in this country. If games are played now and Liverpool start losing all the time and by a miracle Man City grab top spot, is there anyone who wouldn't still think Liverpool were the best team?  

Yes football needs reorganising as I've tried to indicate. If the benefits of having a great Premier League aren't reflected at grassroots with the game being played as well as watched then it's on the road to nowhere.

A draft system should have its r removed. It's a daft idea because it is not supported by the complex college system they have in the States. Our players come out of academies already tied to clubs. If they are likely to be lost in a draft system no one will spend money on player development ……. unless we develop a very sophisticated system for rewarding the clubs who produce the youngsters. Equally the idea of giving first pick to the least successful side would end with Morecambe running their eye over a young Jadon Sancho and realising they couldn't afford his wage. It is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. If clubs can't afford to buy players then transfer fees will wither. As in previous seasons hundreds of players will move for free.

Similarly caps sound like an obvious solution to the financial dire straits in which many clubs find themselves, but how would they sit in a capitalist economy within an aggressively capitalist football environment? We like to think our Premier League is perhaps the best in the world, but how long could it remain near the top if capped salaries meant that imported players always turned down English clubs on account of the wages? The single most accurate predictor of how well a club will fare is its wage bill. The more you pay the higher you tend to finish. Our game is enlivened by promotion and relegation battles. Let's take a team from a formerly successful club that underperforms and goes down. So now they have a squad of good players who haven't gelled, still under contract, and a new salary cap means they have to find a way of off-loading much of the squad, at fees reduced by the previous season in order to create a much poorer squad, which will almost certainly fail to challenge for promotion and contribute to the inevitable slide of a previously successful club into obscurity. I'm afraid a salary cap is just going to create a race to the bottom and when you look again the goose that was laying the golden eggs will have turned into a duck.

How football survives the mismanagement of the country will very much be a function of how the whole economy survives and where its survival leaves it on the world stage. A command economy can switch itself on and off, but there's no off switch with capitalism. Like the universe it has to expand. We can't pretend Jimmy Hill never existed. He got it right. He recognised professional football was a business and it wouldn't grow if its most important asset, the players, were treated like servants. I can understand anyone saying "but the numbers have all got too big, it's out of hand". You're right, but unless you cut yourself off from the rest of the world, or convince them to adopt your plan too, then you're on the road back to Glossop North End plays Burton Swifts.

Thank you Dev. It's ok if you don't agree with all of it, we all have different opinions and view points and that's what makes us all different. Would be very boring if we all agreed with one viewpoint.