Methuselah wrote: ↑Fri May 20, 2022 9:37 am
I think the problem Barrow have as a club is that it is having to compete with clubs who have owners who have millionaire owners who for them £250000 is nothing when it comes to signing a player.These clubs are buying success and it's not a level playing field out there.Some if these clubs will go to the wall eventually,because of their spending.
You cannot have a situation where a club is allowed to poach a player or manager who is still under contract to their parent club just because they offer a wad of money.Rules need to be put in place whereby employees of the club have to work a set amount of notice as applies in industry and where a player thows a strop and refuses to play,because they want to move to club which is trying to poach them,the parent club should stop paying their wages as they have breached the terms of their contract.
With proper rules in place it might bring an end the situation where a lot of clubs are living above their means and end up going bankrupt and create a more level playing field for all lower league clubs,who might have a decent side and find their best players being poached at the start of a season and ending up in a similar situation as Barrow when we came back into the EFL with no manager with all the instability it created,a situation we have still not fully recovered from and we are about to start a third season in the EFL.
Fell like another rant coming on.. In summary I dont think you need to add more rules to the ones we already operate under. You simply have to enforce the rules that exist.
We have two competing entities in play. Market forces and Legal constraints. When one is enforced to the detriment of the other, as is the case now then what you see is what you get. Boom and bust, the biggest thrive, the smallest struggle to survive. Players dropping divisions for twice the salary. Some might say that this is a reflection on our society as a whole. However it manifests itself in a particular way in professional football.
Firstly if a bored bloke with tens of millions of pounds wants to blow it on owning a football club there's nothing to stop them from doing so and I dont really have a problem with that per se. However as we know what many then do is manipulate the commercial legal framework designed to control business management in order to exploit conditions in their favour. Thus we end up with clubs treated as personal assets or in ways in which limit the liability of said owner in the event that he/she no longer wishes to be the owner. This enables the boom and bust culture to thrive. So Stockport (allegedly) are now buying players for £250k. A few years ago a fee of £25k would have bankrupted them. They were poor and now they are rich. A success story? But bear in mind that in those bad years, all the forces of the community, the FA, the local media, the National League were being used to find ways of propping that club up. To save a club with a long and proud history from oblivion.
The alternative is to actively seek to terminate these clubs when they fall into a level of debt that would otherwise have them wound up. That sounds harsh and the natural reaction of the fan is want to support rather than bury or reinvent their team. But these are the conditions that create the "shells" that then become the play things of people with a lot of accumulated wealth but with a poor appreciation of risk. We have 100+ professional football clubs in the UK. All producing the same product. Its too many. But we all know that and we all still prize the Pyramid. Me included.
Oh and why not at least try and enforce Fit and Proper person rules to those owning football clubs.
The other issue - that of contracts is really where the entire industry is (IMO) criminally culpable. The plain fact of the matter is that for any club there will be times when enforcing the terms of a contract will hurt them and times when they will benefit. Thats the purpose of legal contracts. Clubs want a player to fulfill a contract unless he is crap and then they want to find ways of getting rid without paying out on the remaining contract term. Then they exploit the rules by enticing players from clubs whilst they are under contract. Players ignore their contractual obligations when they want to leave forcing a sale and knowing that their market value decreases with every day they are in dispute. In this they are more than aided and abetted by independent unregulated agents who are then paid by the same clubs for the privilege of perpetuating the system.
So whilst at face value the business has a contractual framework like any other it operates to a fractured and fragmented set of rules in which each stakeholder is complicit is bending and manipulating them. Including the Premiership and EFL who's prime directive is to support the needs of their members. Jesus - I seem to making a case for the FA to do the job it was created to do. I must've gone wrong somewhere. In truth the FA owns the technical rule book but has been totally pushed out of commercial business practice including the legal frameworks governing them.
Its all there Methuselah. Everything thing you need to make the business of football operate close what you might consider to be acceptable business norms. It just requires those with power to exercise it equitably. Unfortunately as we know power does tend to corrupt.
