Finance

[One87One]

If a load of clubs do go under, and taking into account the likely impact on TV (and other) revenue streams (after all, if we have 3 Million unemployed, football season tickets may not be a high priority to many), then I would suggest that this would be the perfect time to do a reorganisation of professional football in England.

They should be looking at fewer professional teams, and regional leagues feeding into the smaller professional league system, in effect, moving towards a greater extension of the non-League pyramid system.

The discussion earlier in the crisis that players in the EFL should be paid a maximum of £6,000 a week - which sounded reasonable - still means that a full back for AFC Wimbledon would still earn approxiamately twice as much as the Prime Minister (regardless of the individual in that role).

I would suggest that such a business model (which was unsustainable before the Covid-19 crisis) is now utterly doomed; the situation had been artficially created by the obscence amounts of money coming into the Premier League from TV deals that club owners in EFL clubs want to get their hands on, and many - like Reading - have over extended themselves financially by over-paying wages to (generally) mediocre players - believing that they would recoup the outlay and more by achieving promotion to "the promised land" of the Premier League.

The reality is, that for many people, and indeed the Country, there is no "going back to normal" after this crisis - why should Professional football think itself so special that things will go back to as it was for them?

Agreed, and in favour of the football league reducing size of the leagues to 20 clubs each. Fixture congestion at our level needs looking at and this could provide a great opportunity to do it.

[3points]

Yeah I know I miss the bleeding obvious but those staffing levels look ridiculously high.Aside from match day staffing.Sixty odd players ? I suppose a lot of that number are “students”;amongst which historically golden nuggets have been few and far between.Coaching and admin staffing levels are also very high. ?

We run a men’s side, a women’s side, Academies, school’s of excellence and a Community trust that is a lot of coaches, many of whom won’t be full time. When you say the staffing levels are ‘high’, what is your benchmark ? Do you know what staffing levels are like at comparable clubs or is it just a wild guess ?

Just did a headcount 46 squad members;albeit a lot are out on loan contracts.

Half of the players are first team, half are deemed to be U23 squad per the analysis done by STAR.

After this crisis it wouldn’t surprise me if we got rid of a load of the older “academy” players who haven’t made it. If they aren’t in and around the first team by 21, then they ain’t gonna make it at 23

[Snowflake Royal]

We run a men’s side, a women’s side, Academies, school’s of excellence and a Community trust that is a lot of coaches, many of whom won’t be full time. When you say the staffing levels are ‘high’, what is your benchmark ? Do you know what staffing levels are like at comparable clubs or is it just a wild guess ?

Just did a headcount 46 squad members;albeit a lot are out on loan contracts.

Half of the players are first team, half are deemed to be U23 squad per the analysis done by STAR.

After this crisis it wouldn’t surprise me if we got rid of a load of the older “academy” players who haven’t made it. If they aren’t in and around the first team by 21, then they ain’t gonna make it at 23

If you want to run an U18s and U23s you need a lot of players. That's 22 with with just enough for the first XI of each side. Now obviously quite a few of the younger ones won't be on pro contracts or very much, but it quickly adds up.

[tmesis]

If a load of clubs do go under, and taking into account the likely impact on TV (and other) revenue streams (after all, if we have 3 Million unemployed, football season tickets may not be a high priority to many), then I would suggest that this would be the perfect time to do a reorganisation of professional football in England.

They should be looking at fewer professional teams, and regional leagues feeding into the smaller professional league system, in effect, moving towards a greater extension of the non-League pyramid system.

I'm not certain if this your implication, but the idea that clubs have problems because there are too many clubs is completely false. It's got absolutely nothing to do with it. Clubs get into a mess because they spend more than they receive, and it wouldn't be any different even if crowds and other income doubled through a reduction in clubs. They spend too much because they are irresponsible.

If the premier league paid each championship club another £10 million or so to cover their annual loss, do you think it would mean they'd be breaking even after that? Of course not. They'd just spend that extra £10 million on players.

[windermereROYAL]

I`ve just finished watching Sunderland `Til I die on Netflix, It`s very good looking into the directors, backroom staff players and fans over their championship relegation season and the fight to get back before losing the play-off final.

In short their finances were an absolute mess, probably a mirror image of us in the Gourley era, the new owners that bought the club from Eliis Short are now trying to steady the ship, I`ve no idea if we have anyone trying to do the same.

It`s really recommended if you are stuck in lockdown, 8 episodes in series one and six in series two.

[Sebastian the Red]

If a load of clubs do go under, and taking into account the likely impact on TV (and other) revenue streams (after all, if we have 3 Million unemployed, football season tickets may not be a high priority to many), then I would suggest that this would be the perfect time to do a reorganisation of professional football in England.

They should be looking at fewer professional teams, and regional leagues feeding into the smaller professional league system, in effect, moving towards a greater extension of the non-League pyramid system.

The discussion earlier in the crisis that players in the EFL should be paid a maximum of £6,000 a week - which sounded reasonable - still means that a full back for AFC Wimbledon would still earn approxiamately twice as much as the Prime Minister (regardless of the individual in that role).

I would suggest that such a business model (which was unsustainable before the Covid-19 crisis) is now utterly doomed; the situation had been artficially created by the obscence amounts of money coming into the Premier League from TV deals that club owners in EFL clubs want to get their hands on, and many - like Reading - have over extended themselves financially by over-paying wages to (generally) mediocre players - believing that they would recoup the outlay and more by achieving promotion to "the promised land" of the Premier League.

The reality is, that for many people, and indeed the Country, there is no "going back to normal" after this crisis - why should Professional football think itself so special that things will go back to as it was for them?

I'm very happy to volunteer Reading to be the first against the wall

#stopfootball

[Forbury Lion]

If a load of clubs do go under, and taking into account the likely impact on TV (and other) revenue streams (after all, if we have 3 Million unemployed, football season tickets may not be a high priority to many),

Season Ticket holders who can afford it and want to go to games might also opt out of renewing due to the uncertainty - no point having a pre-paid ticket to a game that's going to be held behind closed doors when there's no chance of the stadium selling out any games next season.

As things stand, I'm not renewing my ST - perhaps if there was some kind of guarantee in place that ST holder will be compensated for games played behind closed doors/not taking place I might renew.

[Jagermesiter1871]

I personally think bang average Championship players should be on £100,000 a year. Maybe £500k for the exceptional ones. The levels we're at now are bonkers.

[One87One]

I personally think bang average Championship players should be on £100,000 a year. Maybe £500k for the exceptional ones. The levels we're at now are bonkers.

That's one hell of a difference though. And in 2018/19 the average League 1 wage was £2000 a week, just for reference (via Sunderland Till I Die).

[Notts Royal]

It’s going to be really interesting to see what football looks like after all of this.

A salary cap as others have suggested would be welcome...say £2k a week in the Champ. We might struggle as players would likely pick more fashionable clubs than us, but it would sort clubs out financially.

Biggest issue for me is the gap between the big few clubs and then the rest. And the gap between the Prem & Champ is too big. And the gap between Champ & League 1 is growing in recent years.

Watching a lot of the highlights of FA Cup games on BBC recently made me realise how much variety there used to be in the clubs that went far. Surely we want to see that back again, and clubs having more of an opportunity to compete for honours.

Scrap the UEFA Cup and make the Champions League what it says in its name...just the champions (maybe 2nd place) of the respective leagues. Why should a team coming 4th compete in it?

Ticket prices - £20 max for Champ, £30 max Prem, £15 L1 etc

Programmes - as someone who likes to collect them, especially for grounds ive not been to before. Reduce the size by half and cut the cost to £2 if that. Don’t need 80 pages of detailed content like previous games reviews.

Not sure about league sizes. Maybe each league should be 22 teams? However the same number of teams should go up/down across the 4 tiers. Never understood why 4 teams go down from L1 and 4 up from L2. And then 2 down from L2.

[Jagermesiter1871]

I personally think bang average Championship players should be on £100,000 a year. Maybe £500k for the exceptional ones. The levels we're at now are bonkers.

That's one hell of a difference though. And in 2018/19 the average League 1 wage was £2000 a week, just for reference (via Sunderland Till I Die).

That doesn't seem too crazy. If Prem players were on current Championship wages, Champ players were on League 1 wages etc

[tmesis]

It’s going to be really interesting to see what football looks like after all of this.

A salary cap as others have suggested would be welcome...say £2k a week in the Champ. We might struggle as players would likely pick more fashionable clubs than us, but it would sort clubs out financially.

How would a salary cap work for relegated teams? I can't see the players agreeing to it either. We had the same thing with the maximum wage up until the 1960s, and that had to be scrapped.

Watching a lot of the highlights of FA Cup games on BBC recently made me realise how much variety there used to be in the clubs that went far. Surely we want to see that back again, and clubs having more of an opportunity to compete for honours.

One big difference in the past was squad sizes. Even top clubs would really only have maybe 18 true senior players, and some promising youngsters. Top clubs couldn't rotate their squad for cup ties and lesser league games. They had to play their best XI every single game. It's why it was so hard to do the league and cup double in the past. The fixture congestion would just wear teams out.

Not sure about league sizes. Maybe each league should be 22 teams? However the same number of teams should go up/down across the 4 tiers. Never understood why 4 teams go down from L1 and 4 up from L2. And then 2 down from L2.

Simply because when the football league brought in relegation from non-league for the first time, there were doubts as to whether it would work. Crowds were much smaller, and grounds more basic in general.

It was thought the step up could be a step too far for most clubs in the "GM Vauxhall Conference", while the step down was seen as possibly fatal to anyone who dropped.

[Nameless]

How would you actually implement a salary cap ?
If a club has players under contract for varying lengths of time you couldn’t impose a cap until all existing contracts expired.
You couldn’t allow new contracts to be signed that took players beyond any existing deals.
You would have to invalidate options to extend.
You coukdn’t Restrict new deals without creating a huge imbalance between players.
You would then have to negotiate new deals simultaneously with every single player, they would all have to take a pay cut and you would have the complexity of working to the cap. Good luck with that !
As all players would be out of contract you would also have a massive amount of movement with no transfer fees. Trying to work out your cap whilst not knowing which players you might actually end up with would be horrendous.
Then factor in that overseas clubs might have no cap, or a different cap. Inevitably Welsh clubs would decide to follow different rules to English ones !

I’m really not sure how you would get from now to a cap system

[Notts Royal]

How would you actually implement a salary cap ?
If a club has players under contract for varying lengths of time you couldn’t impose a cap until all existing contracts expired.
You couldn’t allow new contracts to be signed that took players beyond any existing deals.
You would have to invalidate options to extend.
You coukdn’t Restrict new deals without creating a huge imbalance between players.
You would then have to negotiate new deals simultaneously with every single player, they would all have to take a pay cut and you would have the complexity of working to the cap. Good luck with that !
As all players would be out of contract you would also have a massive amount of movement with no transfer fees. Trying to work out your cap whilst not knowing which players you might actually end up with would be horrendous.
Then factor in that overseas clubs might have no cap, or a different cap. Inevitably Welsh clubs would decide to follow different rules to English ones !

I’m really not sure how you would get from now to a cap system

I’m not saying I know the steps for how one would be introduced but if, as others have suggested, lots of clubs are going to go under, I’m sure introducing a widespread salary cap would become a lot more of a focal point in how to address this.

Anyone know how it was introduced in Rugby?

Also - when squad sizes were much smaller and we had that variety in teams being successful, was the amount of competitive games much fewer than now? I can only talk from my experience of following football since the early-mid 90s. I remember there being 24 teams in tiers 2-4, the same amount of FA Cup games and even more League Cup games! But our squad was much smaller and managed to cope (apart from when Jimmy Quinn had to go in goal haha).

Are there considerably more games in the top flight than previous? I can only think that the European competitions have grown considerably to what they used to be

[Forbury Lion]

Programmes - as someone who likes to collect them, especially for grounds ive not been to before. Reduce the size by half and cut the cost to £2 if that. Don’t need 80 pages of detailed content like previous games reviews.

For some without the internet that's their only way of reading that information..... maybe ditch some of the photos/make it black and white to reduce cost, but don't remove actual content?

I stopped buying programmes years ago, stopped buying food at the stadium and for a while stopped buying anything in the megastore - I did get a shirt a while back when ST Holders got a 50% off voucher... it does help reduce the cost of attending a game significantly making it possible to attend more games on the same budget.

[SCIAG]

The maximum contract length is five years. In practical terms the very straightforward way you could do it is say that in five years we are bringing in a salary cap. That way, clubs will have the opportunity to insert a clause into players’ next contracts to have a wage drop if the cap comes into place. (You’ll occasionally hear about six or seven year contracts - these are five years with an option for the sides to agree an extension, which is pretty empty given there’s always an option to agree an extension)

In reality a wage cap is a stupid idea for all sorts of reasons.

- It’s ethically outrageous.

- It would probably be got around using other forms of payment such as performance bonuses, image rights payments, and so forth. You could see players simultaneously employed as “football consultants” or some such.

- It would probably hugely lower the quality of English football as players took their trade elsewhere.

- The excess money that clubs would now generate isn’t going to go into a rainy day fund or their community trust. As things stand, you’d basically be taking money away from players and giving it to agents, broadcasters, betting companies and other advertisers, and billionaire owners.

The only way a salary cap makes sense (even just in theory) is if you radically overhaul football so that clubs all have to be member-owned non-profit organisations, similar to how things are done in Germany, or the iconic Spanish clubs. These would be given different legal responsibilities, including perhaps a responsibility to keep two years of cash flow in investments. You could simultaneously bring in a requirement that all matches be broadcast over BBC iPlayer. But those moves would have huge cultural, financial, practical, ethical, and almost certainly legal barriers. While I’m sure aspects of that appeal to people, I don’t think it would necessarily be as utopian as you might imagine.

[Nameless]

How would you actually implement a salary cap ?
If a club has players under contract for varying lengths of time you couldn’t impose a cap until all existing contracts expired.
You couldn’t allow new contracts to be signed that took players beyond any existing deals.
You would have to invalidate options to extend.
You coukdn’t Restrict new deals without creating a huge imbalance between players.
You would then have to negotiate new deals simultaneously with every single player, they would all have to take a pay cut and you would have the complexity of working to the cap. Good luck with that !
As all players would be out of contract you would also have a massive amount of movement with no transfer fees. Trying to work out your cap whilst not knowing which players you might actually end up with would be horrendous.
Then factor in that overseas clubs might have no cap, or a different cap. Inevitably Welsh clubs would decide to follow different rules to English ones !

I’m really not sure how you would get from now to a cap system

I’m not saying I know the steps for how one would be introduced but if, as others have suggested, lots of clubs are going to go under, I’m sure introducing a widespread salary cap would become a lot more of a focal point in how to address this.

Anyone know how it was introduced in Rugby?

Also - when squad sizes were much smaller and we had that variety in teams being successful, was the amount of competitive games much fewer than now? I can only talk from my experience of following football since the early-mid 90s. I remember there being 24 teams in tiers 2-4, the same amount of FA Cup games and even more League Cup games! But our squad was much smaller and managed to cope (apart from when Jimmy Quinn had to go in goal haha).

Are there considerably more games in the top flight than previous? I can only think that the European competitions have grown considerably to what they used to be

Rugby turned pro in 1995 and thesalary cap came in in 1999 so dealing with a much less established system and less money. Not even sure if all players were professional at that point.

[Nameless]

- It would probably be got around using other forms of payment such as performance bonuses, image rights payments, and so forth. You could see players simultaneously employed as “football consultants” or some such.
.

This wouldn’t happen.
Take a look at the rules for the rugby cap. It covers a wide range of ways of trying to get round the cap. Payments or benefits to spouses, children, family members, agents etc etc are all counted. You can’t loan money to players unless it’s paid back in the same year, you can’t make payments through third parties or through second jobs.

[Notts Royal]

Programmes - as someone who likes to collect them, especially for grounds ive not been to before. Reduce the size by half and cut the cost to £2 if that. Don’t need 80 pages of detailed content like previous games reviews.

For some without the internet that's their only way of reading that information..... maybe ditch some of the photos/make it black and white to reduce cost, but don't remove actual content?

I stopped buying programmes years ago, stopped buying food at the stadium and for a while stopped buying anything in the megastore - I did get a shirt a while back when ST Holders got a 50% off voucher... it does help reduce the cost of attending a game significantly making it possible to attend more games on the same budget.

I barely buy stuff apart from programmes either - and if I was a ST holder I don’t think I’d fork out £3 for one every time. Not convinced there’s many if any without internet nowadays.

It’s a minor aspect of football but I know a while back the EFL made publishing programmes as non-mandatory due to it not being profitable for many clubs. I just see it as another aspect of football that has multiplied perhaps unnecessarily- they used to be a lot smaller and weren’t necessarily any worse

[SCIAG]

- It would probably be got around using other forms of payment such as performance bonuses, image rights payments, and so forth. You could see players simultaneously employed as “football consultants” or some such.
.

This wouldn’t happen.
Take a look at the rules for the rugby cap. It covers a wide range of ways of trying to get round the cap. Payments or benefits to spouses, children, family members, agents etc etc are all counted. You can’t loan money to players unless it’s paid back in the same year, you can’t make payments through third parties or through second jobs.

That’s good to know. I would still be concerned about clubs getting around it. I think abolishing the whole concept of second jobs or employing family members potentially has undesirable knock-on effects but maybe if you do really want to pay players less for some reason then that’s a price worth paying.