England’s football authorities have dithered over every decision other than the one to evade all responsibility for their sport. From Chelsea on down the pyramid, the situation is coming to a head.
The Premier League, the English Football League and the Football Association have done everything possible to avoid making concrete plans, or even the decisions necessary to make those plans. They have been content to relinquish the helm of their sport over the last month, not even going so far as those leagues further down the pyramid who made unpopular decisions without consulting their stakeholders, but at least made decisions. While Chelsea take positive steps to support the community and Liverpool and Tottenham find ways to shatter their endless reserve of goodwill amongst the media, football is sinking as its authorities sit on the deck watching and waiting for the iceberg to melt.
The major concern of Premier League clubs going into Friday’s meeting is finishing the season before players’ contracts expire on June 30. They do not want to face the situation of having to finish the season with partial squads of those players still under contract plus those who agreed to some form of month-long extension.
The situation is more dire in the Football League. Sky Sports reports that several English Football League clubs are days away from closing down completely.
Several clubs want an agreement to reduce player contracts by 50% for the remainder of the season. This, they say, is the minimum necessary for the clubs to stay afloat.
At least one is pushing for an immediate cancellation of the season. If that happens, they will declare players’ contracts null and void, and take their chances with that decision in the courts. The alternative, as they see it, is the certainty of bankruptcy if they have to finish the season and pay out the full value of contracts without any ticket revenue from the remaining games.
The uncertainty generated by the lack of leadership within the sport is the biggest danger to football right now. These clubs have been unable to plan for various contingencies because they don’t even have a roadmap around which to plan.
Football’s governing bodies in England are all waiting for someone else – someone outside the sport – not only to give them permission to do business again, but to tell them what and how they should be doing, and when. This is an appalling failure of leadership and integrity. Clubs that survived two world wars, the Spanish flu pandemic and the Great Depression could be destroyed in under two months by a government edict that was questionable from the start and is less justifiable by the day.
Many football clubs and maybe even some leagues are being pushed to the precipice by the poor leadership of the sport, who are passively awaiting permission from others whose leadership is not much better.
By the same measure, though, those club chairmen who spoke to Sky Sports are not exactly reclaiming control of their own destiny.
If one or two of them developed their club’s self-sufficient plan to return to training and then re-opened their doors in preparation for resuming the season, they would force their peers and the authorities to act. The clubs would either have to follow the first club – with whom they share a similar plight – or follow the authorities, the ongoing cause of the plight. The authorities would either have to acquiesce – particularly if many clubs were part of the movement – or they would have to sanction the offensively independent clubs. That latter action would show just how far removed football’s authorities are from the people, clubs and leagues under their jurisdiction. Would they rather have control or a sport? Perhaps it would break their hold.
For all those who say the clubs are the fundamental units of the sport, that might not be the worst outcome. That kind of refresher can be quite, well, refreshing from time to time.
Perhaps sports, like polities, get the governance they deserve. If clubs think they deserve something better – starting with survival – they have only a few days to act on it.