Money Men Are Buying Up the Glory
When Middlesbrough chairman Steve Gibson recently described his side’s chances of victory against Chelsea as a ‘David versus Goliath’ scenario in terms of resources, it summed up everything that has gone wrong with the English Premiership.
On this occasion Goliath comfortably triumphed 2-0 at the Riverside Stadium, but far from being just a result, it also signifies the monumental gulf between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ in the top-flight - brought about by the invasion of billionaire foreign businessmen.
To say teams like Middlesbrough have nothing is pure folly given that they are run by Gibson, a successful local multi-millionaire. However even he is obviously starting to feel the pinch when competing with the £10.8billion fortune Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich has to boost his club’s chances of glory.
His arrival set the trend which has also seen the likes of Malcolm Glazer take over at Manchester United, while fellow Americans George Gillett and Tom Hicks have pumped in a small fortune at Liverpool. Further down the scale and it is now no surprise to see Manchester City and Aston Villa flying high in the Premier League thanks to the respective billions of Thaksin Shinawatra and Randy Lerner.
These blokes even make the late Jack Walker look like a pauper and many attribute his money as the reason behind Blackburn Rovers‘ Premiership title success in 1995.
You only need to look at the top and bottom of the Premier League to see what impact this invasion of foreign money men is having. Gibson’s Boro, Dave Whelan’s Wigan and Derby, whose chairman Adam Pearson is currently courting foreign investment, occupy the bottom three. Arsenal, with two billionaires vying to get into the boardroom - Alisher Usmanov and Stan Kroenke, Glazer’s United and the Abramovich-led Chelsea occupy the top three.
Are we heading towards a closed shop? How long will it be before the only way a club can enter the Premiership glory stakes depends on the owner’s background and how much money they have to throw around?
Written by Craig Smithson, a Middlesbrough season-ticket holder and a professional sports writer who blogs about football betting at Betfair.
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I don’t understand this. You’ve mentioned one Premiership winner, in Blackburn’s win in ‘95, as having supposedly won it thanks to a rich guy’s millions. But what about Man Utd who’ve won it so many times when they didn’t have a rich owner? What about Arsenal & Wenger’s policies of buying players on the cheap & turning them into stars?
In my opinion the only club that has supposedly ‘bought’ its victories is Chelsea, but at the very least their victories had to be well crafted by someone like Mourinho otherwise it would have been a waste of dough.
I also resent the implication that Arsenal’s success has anything to do with the current controversy of having 2 billionaires ‘fight’ over ownership. They haven’t contributed any significant money to the Arsenal campaign so far & they won’t in the forseeable future. Arsenal’s current & Man Utd’s past successes (before the takeover) are all due to the fact that they built a great staff, picked the players carefully, had good managers who were given time to develop the teams they wanted to play the way they wanted them to play, and managed the funds as best as they could.
What about teams like Everton & Portsmouth who have had very good success rates & are up & coming clubs in the Premier league? Do they have billionaires to credit for their success?
It is still very possible, even in this day & age when instant success is becoming more of a necessity, that clubs can make it big if they just have the right game plan & a little bit of patience.
I think fans who follow middle-ranking teams will know all about what Steve Gibson is talking about. Rare victories over the big four do not paper over the cracks that show the Premiership is becoming uncompetitive. And it’s not just uncompetitive on the field but the transfer market has turned into a joke. Any time a player comes through at a team like Spurs say, Berbatov, or Carrick before him, there is no chance of holding off the big clubs if they are serious. The player wants to play Champions League and they go! End of. While the situation exists there is no chance for a team like Boro to hang onto a Viduka or a Yakubu - and they only went to teams trying to break into the top 4.
I agree Everton and Portsmouth are up and coming teams, like Spurs were and like Boro were before that, but they reach a point where they can’t make the next step. Do you seriously think that Muntari, Utaka, Lescott and Arteta won’t be top of everyone’s shopping lists soon ?
And to suggest Arsenal don’t spend big is pure phallacy. Reyes, Henry, Rosicky, Walcott, Eduardo, Adebayor. If it wasn’t a game for billioanires now, tell me why David Dein quit the board and went knocking on doors for billionaires to finance a takeover of the club ? Whoring his Arsenal shares all over just because he knows the way it’s going!
It’s what happened to baseball here in the States. Salary caps are really the only hope, but given the international nature of football, salary caps seem impossible to implement effectively.
How can you pu the Glazer’s take over of United in the seam league in this stuff. United had operating profit of £33million pounds and £65m in the bank. Now we are barely breaking even with higher ticket prices and have over £500m pounds of debt on the club.