It must have been a busy time for the RSPCA last week. All those camels with broken backs, courtesy of the barrel-load of straws dropped on them by Richard Scudamore, the Premier League chief executive.
Ever since the creation of the Premier League, we’ve been waiting for the ‘big one’, the final assault on our game which will push the fans over the edge, and put all that’s gone before it into context as merely the preamble to the megalomaniac global expansion plans of our leading clubs.
The end of Saturday afternoon as the focal point of our week; soaring ticket prices; ever-changing football shirts with prices kept artificially high; average football players earning more in a week than most people do in a year.
All these things have served to drive a wedge between the average fan and their football club, weakening the bonds which define football as our national game, and alienating a whole generation of supporters – the average age of a Premier League fan last year was 43.
Not content with this, Scudamore now unveils the ultimate estrangement: taking a game away from us altogether, to be played on the other side of the world, accessible to us only through the omnipresent television cameras. This breathtaking audacity is justified not by the language of sport, but by the language of business: global markets, competitive positions and exporting English football.
Scudamore has attempted to explain this naked pursuit of financial gain through altruistic ambition: the additional money is needed to invest in the development of young English footballers, and to help the game at grass-roots level.
This of course has been the experience to date every time the TV deals have increased in size; there’s a positive bow wave of young English talent coming through now, displacing average African, Eastern European and, yes, Spanish players isn’t there?
Yet the most incredulous illustration of Scudamore’s gall is to be found in the sophistry he employs to defend the fatal damage to the fairness of the competition by the introduction of an additional game determined by lottery.
According to Scudamore, “every team will have an equal chance of being treated unfairly” under this system. Older readers will remember Stanley Unwin making a living out of such gobbledegook. What’s more, apparently “nobody ever said the league was supposed to be entirely fair”.
This truly appalling view of competition, tantamount to rigging the fixture list, surely calls into question Scudamore’s suitability to be chief executive of even the most brutal Sunday League, never mind our most feted.
Of course, where there’s hubris about, Professor Wenger is never far away. He’s declared his ‘in principle’ support for the idea, on the basis that “90% of (fans) who love the club never have access to the games”.
Yes Arsene, these are probably the people of Islington who can’t afford the ticket prices at the Emirates. And the real fans who deserve your consideration are not the hordes in Hong Kong or wherever who buy a shirt and would attend a novelty match in their own back yard; but those who traipse round the country every weekend in all weathers, at inconvenient times determined by the TV companies, spending sizeable proportions of their income supporting the team they grew up with.
In short, the 800 or so Havant & Waterlooville fans who turn up for the average home game, not the other 5,200 who made the trip to Anfield.
The depressing reality is that this abomination will happen, and will expand until the rest of the world realises there’s a reason why even people from Middlesbrough don’t turn out to watch Middlesbrough play. Sydney? There’ll be no-one watching in Kirkby.
