It is not the amount of cash that is problematic – with bonuses on top of his £2.5m salary the retiring executive chairman of the Premier League will most likely have pocketed similar sums in the past – but the ostentatious nature of the package sends out a terrible message to supporters struggling to meet the cost of their season ticket or grassroots organisations having to make do with inadequate facilities. Scudamore had plenty to do with that transformation, and on that basis alone he probably deserves the send-off his pal Bruce Buck is proposing. The only vestige of continuity left is the permanent surprise that something which within living memory was so cheap and freely available that in some cases it was quite hard to give away should have morphed into a magnet for petro-dollars and gated exclusivity. Dinnage will be one of most powerful women in sport as Premier League chiefįootball lost its soul yonks ago, if its soul had anything to do with working-class communities and a sense of pride in local identity. The whole point about modern football, a case in point being Manchester City’s alleged infractions of the Financial Fair Play rules, is that so much money is now involved, with its provenance repeatedly proving difficult if not impossible to track down, that there is little the ordinary guy in a striped scarf or replica shirt can do except shrug and hope the global concern he happens to support buys a better centre-forward than the opposition. Not that anyone will necessarily notice the difference. Note the date of 13 November 2018, because with the announcement of plans for Richard Scudamore’s parting gift of £5m – £250,000 to be volunteered by each Premier League club – it marks the formal end of football’s 140-year life as the people’s game. Here is a handy memo to future historians of the national sport in this country.
0 kommentar(er)
