SebastianBlue
President, International Julian Alvarez Fan Club
- Joined
- 25 Jul 2009
- Messages
- 52,402
Essentially, the PL and NL are forcibly arguing that the leagues should be allowed to continue to largely regulate themselves and promise they will do a better job of it than they are now if things are just left as they are. This includes opposition to government involvement in prospective club sale and new ownership assessment, oversight of league management, club licensing and financial reporting, and revenue sharing/distribution across the pyramid.
Whilst there probably are a few valid points about inefficiencies in the current version of the football bill, specifically unnecessary duplication of processes and requirements that could be worked on (via either the leagues or the government giving up their side of the redundant requirements), I think their argument is actually fairly weak and not-so-subtly self-serving, if arguably bordering on highly dubious.
Every argument I have read—in this and several other write-ups regarding the PL’s concerns with the football bill—can ultimately be boiled down to the same argument every industry makes against government regulation: we can do it better than you can, you’ll only fuck things up.
Now, government can absolutely overreach and create detrimental (even destructive) regulation. But the practice of regulation itself is not the cause of that, it is the requirements, implementation, and maintenance of regulation that present those dangers. The free market regularly fails to efficiently and equitably provide high quality, safe and effective, fairly priced goods and services to people, and in many cases it took strong regulation to address pretty dire outcomes of those failures.
Ironically, perhaps one of the best examples of regulation run amok (and the free market fucking up an otherwise good thing) this is VAR, where the principle of the new system is sound, but the design, implementation, and (lack of) maintenance have given rise to deficiencies. It is a case of a market failure, among many others in football.
And, like with VAR, which was devised, installed, and overseen almost entirely by private entities within the football, I think strengthened regulation and oversight is needed to resolve market failures within English football (and beyond). This is especially the case given the PL, EFL, and NL have become protected monopolies—you can’t in one breadth claim you deserve (and require) government protection from the wilds of free market competition and in the next decry increased government oversight.
“We want you to make sure no one can challenge our dominance but you do not have a right to ask how we are achieving and leveraging said dominance.”
That’s not even getting in to the disingenuousness of the argument that the PL and NL have been an “incredibly successful industry”, by “any yardstick” given the vast majority of clubs are currently running at losses and are increasingly financing operations through mounting debt, and the league FFP and Sustainability rules have not only been a complete failure in achieving their stated goals, but are now actually putting additional strain on struggling clubs.
All of this smacks of Masters, Ives, and the other executives across the leagues bellowing “pay no attention to those men behind the curtain!”
—————
I am posting this PL briefing in its entirety as it is effectively a press release, not an article, therefore it is intended to be copied and distributed widely. The direct link is at the bottom in case the content is amended later (or if someone wants to verify this is the same as the original text.
Premier League and National League unite to warn about risks of Football Bill
Premier League Chief Executive Richard Masters, National League General Manager Mark Ives and Dagenham & Redbridge CEO Stephen Thompson MBE addressed Members of both Houses to state their concerns about the Football Governance Bill, which will be debated in the House of Commons on Tuesday 23 April as it receives its Second Reading.
Both the Premier League and the National League - the top of the football pyramid and the essential foundation of the professional game - urged MPs to give the Bill full scrutiny. The organisations issued a stark warning about the potential negative impacts a heavily amended Bill could have on the continued dynamism, competitive balance and success of the English football pyramid, as well as ongoing investment at all levels of the game.
“Very few industries welcome additional regulation but it is here and we will continue to engage with it positively,” Masters said. “By any yardstick we are an incredibly successful industry. But it is not just the Premier League, right down through the pyramid, we have got fantastically successful leagues. It [a regulator] is a first. We can't look to Germany or Spain or France and say, ‘Well, we can see it working.’
“We are taking a big risk with a very successful industry and so we're asking MPs and Peers to look at the Bill very carefully and to look at it with a dispassionate head on and make sure that all of football benefits from it, and we don't bump into unintended consequences.
“Football is successful because it has had investment, investment from all over the world coming into this country and investing on the pitch for fans to really enjoy. We don't want that to be choked off, we want that model to continue.
Ives and Thompson both warned of the potential for the Bill to create “onerous” consequences for National League clubs, not only financial but bureaucratic.
“We are concerned about the costs,” Ives said. “The expectation of how much it is going to cost clubs at a National League level is a huge concern – it may be a small amount of money, but it is a lot to the clubs.
“We are worried about mission creep within the Bill and the additional bureaucracy. There is a lot of duplication of work, such as the licensing system - there’s an expectation for clubs to do two lots of licensing.”
Thompson warned of the impact this could have on small clubs.
“We are worried that the Bill will be so onerous,” he said. “Some National League clubs work on two or three people and some volunteers.
“It does really worry me that some of our small clubs will not survive with the regulation and the reporting that is required.”
Ives also questioned those who saw regulatory intervention as necessary to improve football.
“People are talking about the need for a regulator because of the mess the game is in,” he said. “The game is not in a mess. All the competitions – the Premier League, the EFL, the National League, The FA – they are obviously all doing something right.
“So allow the people to deal with it appropriately and if we are not doing it in the right way, then let the regulator step in. Otherwise, you will put too much bureaucracy, too much burden on the clubs and it will be damaging to them.”
Masters echoed this sentiment, highlighting the redistribution of Premier League funds down the football pyramid as a result of this success.
“In our current three-year cycle, £1.6bn is being distributed – 16 per cent of our revenues - all the way down to the National Leagues and grass roots,” he said.
“We support just about every aspect of the men’s game. The EFL are doing well commercially with new broadcast deals both domestically and internationally. We believe their revenue will increase substantially in 2025/26, and we think that’s positive.
“There are lots of great things happening in the game and I would much prefer if the Premier League and EFL could come to an agreement itself without the use of the backstop power.”
As for what sort of regulator they want MPs to consider with the reading of the Bill, Masters, Ives and Thompson were keen to stress the protection of the opportunity for people to invest at all levels of the game.
“We are asking for light-touch, proportionate regulation,” Masters said. “The backstop power needs to remain as it is. We need long-term certainty - you cannot underestimate how important that is. If the backstop power was to be renewable every three years, we would be in a perpetual state of negotiating and nobody would know where they stand, which could be deeply damaging to the game.”
Ives called for politicians to put more trust in the leagues to run things themselves.
“If we carry on with the Bill as the way it is, it is going to put all of that burden on our clubs instead of actually having an advocacy-first approach,” he said. “Let the leagues take control of it. My desire is for the leagues to do their piece first and if we fail to do our piece then regulate us.
Thompson expressed concern about the regulator adding constraint to the Owners’ and Directors’ Test affecting the attraction of people looking to invest in the game.
“There is not a queue of people wanting to buy National League clubs,” he said. “If the Bill makes it too onerous then people won’t invest in our clubs, and we need people to invest in our clubs.”
http://www.premierleague.com/news/3977130
Whilst there probably are a few valid points about inefficiencies in the current version of the football bill, specifically unnecessary duplication of processes and requirements that could be worked on (via either the leagues or the government giving up their side of the redundant requirements), I think their argument is actually fairly weak and not-so-subtly self-serving, if arguably bordering on highly dubious.
Every argument I have read—in this and several other write-ups regarding the PL’s concerns with the football bill—can ultimately be boiled down to the same argument every industry makes against government regulation: we can do it better than you can, you’ll only fuck things up.
Now, government can absolutely overreach and create detrimental (even destructive) regulation. But the practice of regulation itself is not the cause of that, it is the requirements, implementation, and maintenance of regulation that present those dangers. The free market regularly fails to efficiently and equitably provide high quality, safe and effective, fairly priced goods and services to people, and in many cases it took strong regulation to address pretty dire outcomes of those failures.
Ironically, perhaps one of the best examples of regulation run amok (and the free market fucking up an otherwise good thing) this is VAR, where the principle of the new system is sound, but the design, implementation, and (lack of) maintenance have given rise to deficiencies. It is a case of a market failure, among many others in football.
And, like with VAR, which was devised, installed, and overseen almost entirely by private entities within the football, I think strengthened regulation and oversight is needed to resolve market failures within English football (and beyond). This is especially the case given the PL, EFL, and NL have become protected monopolies—you can’t in one breadth claim you deserve (and require) government protection from the wilds of free market competition and in the next decry increased government oversight.
“We want you to make sure no one can challenge our dominance but you do not have a right to ask how we are achieving and leveraging said dominance.”
That’s not even getting in to the disingenuousness of the argument that the PL and NL have been an “incredibly successful industry”, by “any yardstick” given the vast majority of clubs are currently running at losses and are increasingly financing operations through mounting debt, and the league FFP and Sustainability rules have not only been a complete failure in achieving their stated goals, but are now actually putting additional strain on struggling clubs.
All of this smacks of Masters, Ives, and the other executives across the leagues bellowing “pay no attention to those men behind the curtain!”
—————
I am posting this PL briefing in its entirety as it is effectively a press release, not an article, therefore it is intended to be copied and distributed widely. The direct link is at the bottom in case the content is amended later (or if someone wants to verify this is the same as the original text.
Premier League and National League unite to warn about risks of Football Bill
Premier League Chief Executive Richard Masters, National League General Manager Mark Ives and Dagenham & Redbridge CEO Stephen Thompson MBE addressed Members of both Houses to state their concerns about the Football Governance Bill, which will be debated in the House of Commons on Tuesday 23 April as it receives its Second Reading.
Both the Premier League and the National League - the top of the football pyramid and the essential foundation of the professional game - urged MPs to give the Bill full scrutiny. The organisations issued a stark warning about the potential negative impacts a heavily amended Bill could have on the continued dynamism, competitive balance and success of the English football pyramid, as well as ongoing investment at all levels of the game.
'A big risk with a successful industry'
“Very few industries welcome additional regulation but it is here and we will continue to engage with it positively,” Masters said. “By any yardstick we are an incredibly successful industry. But it is not just the Premier League, right down through the pyramid, we have got fantastically successful leagues. It [a regulator] is a first. We can't look to Germany or Spain or France and say, ‘Well, we can see it working.’
“We are taking a big risk with a very successful industry and so we're asking MPs and Peers to look at the Bill very carefully and to look at it with a dispassionate head on and make sure that all of football benefits from it, and we don't bump into unintended consequences.
Richard Masters, Chief Executive of the Premier League
"We are taking a big risk with a very successful industry"“Football is successful because it has had investment, investment from all over the world coming into this country and investing on the pitch for fans to really enjoy. We don't want that to be choked off, we want that model to continue.
Ives and Thompson both warned of the potential for the Bill to create “onerous” consequences for National League clubs, not only financial but bureaucratic.
“We are concerned about the costs,” Ives said. “The expectation of how much it is going to cost clubs at a National League level is a huge concern – it may be a small amount of money, but it is a lot to the clubs.
“We are worried about mission creep within the Bill and the additional bureaucracy. There is a lot of duplication of work, such as the licensing system - there’s an expectation for clubs to do two lots of licensing.”
Thompson warned of the impact this could have on small clubs.
“We are worried that the Bill will be so onerous,” he said. “Some National League clubs work on two or three people and some volunteers.
Mark Ives, National League General Manager
"The expectation of how much it is going to cost clubs at a National League level is a huge concern"“It does really worry me that some of our small clubs will not survive with the regulation and the reporting that is required.”
Ives also questioned those who saw regulatory intervention as necessary to improve football.
“People are talking about the need for a regulator because of the mess the game is in,” he said. “The game is not in a mess. All the competitions – the Premier League, the EFL, the National League, The FA – they are obviously all doing something right.
“So allow the people to deal with it appropriately and if we are not doing it in the right way, then let the regulator step in. Otherwise, you will put too much bureaucracy, too much burden on the clubs and it will be damaging to them.”
Masters echoed this sentiment, highlighting the redistribution of Premier League funds down the football pyramid as a result of this success.
“In our current three-year cycle, £1.6bn is being distributed – 16 per cent of our revenues - all the way down to the National Leagues and grass roots,” he said.
“We support just about every aspect of the men’s game. The EFL are doing well commercially with new broadcast deals both domestically and internationally. We believe their revenue will increase substantially in 2025/26, and we think that’s positive.
“There are lots of great things happening in the game and I would much prefer if the Premier League and EFL could come to an agreement itself without the use of the backstop power.”
As for what sort of regulator they want MPs to consider with the reading of the Bill, Masters, Ives and Thompson were keen to stress the protection of the opportunity for people to invest at all levels of the game.
Steven Thomson, Dagenham & Redbridge
"If the Bill makes it too onerous then people won’t invest in our clubs, and we need people to invest in our clubs"“We are asking for light-touch, proportionate regulation,” Masters said. “The backstop power needs to remain as it is. We need long-term certainty - you cannot underestimate how important that is. If the backstop power was to be renewable every three years, we would be in a perpetual state of negotiating and nobody would know where they stand, which could be deeply damaging to the game.”
Ives called for politicians to put more trust in the leagues to run things themselves.
“If we carry on with the Bill as the way it is, it is going to put all of that burden on our clubs instead of actually having an advocacy-first approach,” he said. “Let the leagues take control of it. My desire is for the leagues to do their piece first and if we fail to do our piece then regulate us.
Thompson expressed concern about the regulator adding constraint to the Owners’ and Directors’ Test affecting the attraction of people looking to invest in the game.
“There is not a queue of people wanting to buy National League clubs,” he said. “If the Bill makes it too onerous then people won’t invest in our clubs, and we need people to invest in our clubs.”
http://www.premierleague.com/news/3977130
Last edited: