[spireitematt]

I have been doing a lot of thinking lately about the future of football and the future of Chesterfield in this crisis. Not only is the Coronavirus going to change our social lives, the way we live, the economy etc but it's also going to change sport and I think it's going to change football drastically and dramatically.

The Premier League and some teams in the Championship will be able to come through this pandemic but I reckon majority of L1, L2 and I would say nearly all non-league clubs will go bust including ours. Grassroots football should bounce back as they will rely on fundraising and the local community to help those Saturday and Sunday amateur teams and players will come together as a collective. Premier League will rely on merchandise, shirt sales and also TV revenue from Sky and BT so it would be financially viable for them to continue behind closed doors, unfortunately the same cannot be said for teams in the Championship, L1, L2 and non-league. Majority of L1, L2 and non-league clubs heavily rely on gate receipts, programme sales, food and bar to keep them going and also sponsors from local businesses in the area. A lot of small businesses are going to struggle to get through this crisis and keep themselves a float and a lot will not reopen again. Now if businesses go under or are financially struggling themselves then they are going to pull there sponsorship deal or advertising deal with a football club. Like every business currently furloughing staff, clubs will also have to adapt their expenditure to match their income and that will mean releasing players who are on large money or on lengthy contracts, it could mean letting managers, coaching staff go too.

The Premier League and the Football League are currently talking about how to restart the season and finish it but I think it's more important to talk about the future of football and the football pyramid and that would mean getting the Premier League, Football League, National League and representatives from each league in non-league and FA officials in the same room. There needs to be discussions, negotiations and a collective decision on how to come through this but unfortunately the Premier League and the Football League seem to be looking out for there own interests. Before the Coronavirus came about there were several teams in non-league and the Football League struggling financially and look at what happened to Bury and Bolton at the start of the season. If the FA and the Football League continue to bury their heads in the sand then we will see the end of the football pyramid as we know it and you know what will happen don't you? The teams which go bust will be replaced by Premier League B teams and that means we will see the majority of L1 or L2 with Premier League B teams in them which would mirror a lot of the lower leagues in the rest of Europe. In time we will see a lot of clubs which will go out of business rise like a phoenix from the ashes and they will more than likely be fan owned clubs until a buyer comes in. They will be like Hereford, FC United or AFC Wimbledon etc.

My suggestion would be these:

• Call the current season null and void in all divisions including the FA Cup
  
• Come together as a collective and discuss the future of all football right down to grassroots level
  
• Look at setting up a draft system for players once the next football season resumes whenever that will be and I say a draft system because a lot of clubs won't be able to afford to buy players in a transfer market so therefore if players are drafted then it will help clubs financially in the long run
  
• Introduce a Salary cap for each division
  
• Introduce a spending cap for each division now this would mean spending on transfers and wages as a whole
  
• Introduce a ticket price cap on all divisions
  

Clubs would have to do there own incentives as well on trying to get people through the turnstiles when it comes to ticket prices and offers. They will need to attract the armchair and glory hunters to go to games and to get behind their local teams and teams working with their communities more as well.

Football is more than 22 players chasing a ball on blades of grass for 90 minutes. A lot of clubs are the heart and soul of cities, towns and villages across the length and breadth of the country, it gives people hope, something to look forward to on a Saturday afternoon, it creates friendship and camaraderie between fans. If a club is successful then it could turn the city, town or village successful. They help businesses generate income especially those businesses which work in the catering and hospitality sector.

I really really hope that clubs manage to come through this successfully but unfortunately it's difficult to see especially with the way football is run in this country by the FA.

[Devongone]

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.

[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.

[Devongone]

The major truth is that football does need to sort out its future and this has been an opportunity to do so. It is one that so far has been spurned over concerns about both future television money and having to pay back monies if the current season's games aren't completed.

For smaller clubs the financial unreality of their business is now stark. It is illustrated in black, white and red on every balance sheet.

Take Chesterfield, apart from the problems create by our ownership, we are in a position in which we have been running only one adult team. Therefore when we get a junior of promise we immediately hit a problem when we want him to graduate to first team level, because he has to make a huge jump, there are no stepping stones. Similarly if we bring in a player from a lower level he has to be first team quality straightaway.

If we were talking about administrative staff no-one would be surprised if several of the positions were part-time, but if we suggested extending the idea to players the reaction would be, "Oh no we can't go part-time!" But why couldn't we mix full and part time players in order to have a second team where developing players could develop and players recovering from injury could regain fitness? Stockport have a mix of full and part timers in their first team. Surely that is a way of furthering our footballing needs within the tight budget to which we will always be confined? Playing football is a job. In all other areas of employment full and part timers mix happily and benefits accrue.

[spireitematt]

The major truth is that football does need to sort out its future and this has been an opportunity to do so. It is one that so far has been spurned over concerns about both future television money and having to pay back monies if the current season's games aren't completed.

For smaller clubs the financial unreality of their business is now stark. It is illustrated in black, white and red on every balance sheet.

Take Chesterfield, apart from the problems create by our ownership, we are in a position in which we have been running only one adult team. Therefore when we get a junior of promise we immediately hit a problem when we want him to graduate to first team level, because he has to make a huge jump, there are no stepping stones. Similarly if we bring in a player from a lower level he has to be first team quality straightaway.

If we were talking about administrative staff no-one would be surprised if several of the positions were part-time, but if we suggested extending the idea to players the reaction would be, "Oh no we can't go part-time!" But why couldn't we mix full and part time players in order to have a second team where developing players could develop and players recovering from injury could regain fitness? Stockport have a mix of full and part timers in their first team. Surely that is a way of furthering our footballing needs within the tight budget to which we will always be confined? Playing football is a job. In all other areas of employment full and part timers mix happily and benefits accrue.

You could have a reserve team of part-timers or even put a reserve team into a regional league like Plymouth Argyle do. Could put a development team in the Hope Valley League. Derbyshire FA could create a reserve league for Derbyshire semi-pro and professional teams.

[Devongone]

I agree Matt.

The gap between part-time football and full makes clubs like ours very reticent when recruiting a young promising player from a lower non-league club. So, financially strapped, we become risk averse ……. and probably reject the player who represents a bit of a gamble ……. and we sign somebody safe and boring from our own league, who is never going to improve. If the signings we make don't improve then neither will we!

Ideally I'd like to see our second team play competitive football against some of the teams we would meet in the Derbyshire Senior Cup if we entered it.

[spireitematt]

Wigan have gone into Admin and will be deducted 12 points at the end of the season. I'm guessing they won't be the only club.

[Devongone]

As Cookie now has them winning on a regular basis it looks like a real slap in the teeth to the players. On current form they are second only to Derby in the Championship.

If they had been able to hang on just a few more weeks they might have got 12 points clear of the bottom three. Now avoiding relegation will be very difficult as only Stoke and Hull appear keen to be relegated.

[Devongone]

I was just looking at Wigan's remaining fixtures. There are four they could expect on current form to win. They could beat Barnsley, Hull, QPR and Charlton. Could. They almost certainly won't get anything out of Brentford, and if Fulham have anything to play for in the last fixture that'll be another big struggle. If Wigan did get the 12 points then that would give them 62 points, which would leave them on 50 points after the deduction. The third bottom side would need nine more points to get above them! If, however, Wigan don't quite achieve the four wins and make 3 wins and a draw for 10 points that makes an enormous difference. They finish on 48 points and it is easy to envisage several sides sneaking one point more than them. Relegation for Wigan, even if several suitors are fighting over them, could be just a draw away and salvation might be a Fulham side, assured of fourth place, resting most of their team for the play-offs to come.

If there are other clubs a heartbeat away from financial disaster what does it say about the mantra that the season must be played to its end? Wigan could stay up or go down despite financial "misconduct" on the whim of whether Fulham need points from their last game. So the Championship won't have been decided on the field at all.

[spireitematt]

Manchester City's Chief Excutive has talked about how the Football League's business model is not sustainable and that they should rethink the whole of the football pyramid and introduce Premier League B teams into the lower divisions to replace clubs which go bust or don't survive and they see the Coronavirus pandemic a good time to look at the structure of the football pyramid. They are complaining that they have hundreds of players in the academy who are 17-18 etc who don't have the opportunity for first team and that German clubs buy them cheap, develop them, give them game time and then sell them back to them for 10 times the price.

The way I see it is this. Get rid of the U23 and U21 leagues and create a reserve league where these players can play against players who are older, more experienced than them. It would also give fringe players an opportunity for fitness and to show the manager what he can do in a game and it would also help players coming back from injury with fitness etc.

L1 and L2 need to look at becoming regional leagues of North and South where the top 2 teams from each league get promotion. You could have 3-4 teams getting promoted but I don't think the Championship would take kindly to that.

If B teams get put into the Football League then it will destroy the football pyramid and also destroy the league's. Who will want to watch there team play a B team on a Saturday afternoon and the B team wouldn't bring many fans if the first team is playing at home at dinnertime or is on TV. What the Premier League need to understand is in the Football League and Non-League right down to grassroots football there are a lot more fans than fans of Premier League clubs.

I think the Premier League don't like the fact we have a unique system in England and Britain regarding the football pyramid, they see the rest of the pyramid as competition and possibly as an enemy because they I think they would love it if 1 or possibly 2 divisions in England existed as it would bring more focus and revenue on them especially from a TV audience aspect. The Premier League in the near future will probably go the way that American franchises of leagues have gone in sport where there is no promotion and relegation and you have to buy your way into the league, if that happened then it would be detrimental to international football.

Have you noticed though especially in the Premier League, teams and managers are very reluctant to buy players from the lower leagues or even play youth players in the first team instead they will go and buy an experienced player from a team abroad for about £40-50 million but who says the experienced player can't make mistakes?