[editor's note - Ian wrote this before he went on his round the world trip]

It hasn’t been a bad season at Prenton Park, home of my beloved Tranmere Rovers. A dreadful start to the season was on the point of being turned around by manager Ray Mathias, when he was fired anyway and replaced by the more experienced Brian Little. Our best ever cup run followed, and following our exit at the hands of Millwall we’ve picked up sixteen points from six games. We’re hitting form just too late, as usual- we’re on 59 points and need a minimum of 66 to make the play-offs. It isn’t beyond us, but we need other sides to lose points too, and with four games left it probably isn’t going to happen. Still, give Little a few months to put his own team together and I’m sure we’ll be able to build on this season’s recovery next year. But it’s not the same everywhere- working until recently in Leeds, it’s been impossible to escape the tales coming out of Elland Road, and there are similar stories coming out of clubs all over the country. So I thought I’d save the powers that be the bother of setting up task forces and so on, and come up with a few observations, ideas and so on of my own.

I thought I’d start with what seems to be going right in English football at the moment. For most of the season we’ve had a genuine three-horse race for the championship, and I’d argue that Chelsea as the newcomers have adapted best to this situation. It’s vital that we have this kind of uncertainty at the highest level, otherwise we end up with a situation like Scotland where you can tell who the champions are going to be the week after Christmas. The national side are going to Euro 2004 as potentially one of the strongest sides if the Liverpool-based strike force can find some form, although I’d suggest that there’s a gulf in terms of culture between Sven-Goran Eriksson’s background and the traditions of English football which is responsible for much of the doubt about his future. It shows most in friendlies- the average English fan expects a friendly to be a fixture where a Latvian Over-Eighties Select XI turn up to be duly whomped by England, whereas Eriksson uses such fixtures to test his squad in conditions as near to competitive international football as follows. If he tries a certain defensive combination and it fails catastrophically, he knows it’s failed and won’t try those two centre-halves together again in front of that keeper. The England fan merely reflects on a 3-0 home defeat by the Isle of Man and swears off England friendlies. But we have a national side with perhaps more spirit and courage than skill or technical ability- which suits a nation which places as much value on amateurism as the English- and which can give the best in the world a bloody good fright.

But all is not well, and you don’t have to dig deep to find it. Two sides have dominated English football in the last ten years- Arsenal for slightly longer, I suppose, although in and of itself there’s nothing wrong with this. Liverpool had a good fifteen years as the biggest and most successful club in England and arguably Europe. It’s just that the way in which football now works means that the most successful get more and more- it’s breathtaking to see the way in which Liverpool have missed the bus and continue to miss it in spite of their trophy haul in 2001. Manchester United, by contrast, have become a business to which what happens between 22 footballers on the pitch at Old Trafford becomes peripheral to promotion, merchandising and tours of the Far East. In theory they can afford the best players (although high-profile foreign signings will often prefer Arsenal and Chelsea for the London nightlife) and, through repeated Champions League qualification, provide them with the ultimate stage on which to demonstrate their talents. And there’s no doubt that it’s good for English football to have our clubs competing in the later stages of European competitions. You can’t suddenly legislate this away- in American Football, the NFL’s draft system means that the champions get last pick of the new players coming through from college football, but because our clubs nurture their own players, you can’t reassign Wolves’s youth team to Manchester United. A salary cap has been suggested, and tried in the NFL, but while it provides the best players with financial security for the rest of their playing careers, it’s inevitably at the cost of squad players in less successful sides. For every Drew Bledsoe on a 6-year $42 million contract, you have to make economies somewhere else. The solution probably lies in letting time and nature take their course; Ferguson, Wenger et al will eventually retire or die in harness, and their successors will struggle to equal their predecessors’ achievements.

A little further down the professional structure, you start to have real problems. The likes of Bradford, Derby, Wimbledon and so on, all in dire financial straits and apparently because they were too successful- a season or two in the Premiership, buying expensive foreign imports on Premiership wages, then one bad season, relegation and it’s all gone. In Bradford’s case, it need never have happened- both seasons in the Premiership they sold all their season tickets so they should have known exactly how much money they had to spend for the rest of the year. But as ex-chairman Geoffrey Richmond admitted, they had a moment of madness, signed Benito Carbone in the expectation of staying up for a third season and ended up begging somebody else to take him once his wage bill became too much. Relegation is a tough bullet to chew these days- you can’t charge any more for admission because you’re offering a lower standard of football (although you might get bigger crowds winning at a lower level than struggling at a higher one) but you still have the same wage bill. Parachute payments always struck me as essentially unfair when Tranmere were in the First Division- why should clubs relegated from the Premiership basically get help keeping their squad together when the rest of the First Division have to manage as they can?. I can see the logic a little more now, but it’s a tacit admission that the financial gap between the Premiership and First Division is capable of killing a club. To my mind the problem starts when clubs get promoted and can’t start buying players quick enough- you buy mediocre foreigners to keep you up for one season, and then you have to repeat the feat every year. But you have to keep buying to be able to compete with bigger and richer clubs. It’s a desperate situation, and sooner or later we’re going to lose a middle-sized club because of it- the clubs with ambition and steady support but without the turnover to sustain Premiership finances.

And so to the bottom divisions- a world of financial unreality, where clubs carrying heavy debts struggle from year to year with no idea where the answer is going to come from. If your average Second or Third Division club were any other kind of business, say, a factory, sooner or later the accountants would shake their heads and admit defeat- they’re never going to turn a profit and only keep going because the turnover is just about enough to service their debts. A good year means promotion and a little more money; a bad year just means more of the same. This, I think, is where real change is needed. Football clubs at this level can only succeed by cementing their relations with the local community- the towns and the areas they represent. The clubs which have been in real trouble in recent years- York, Lincoln, Darlington, Oldham, Luton, Notts County etc- are clubs from small to middle sized towns with a limited catchment area, so that even when doing well they’re only likely to get a couple of thousand more through the gates. You just can’t grow the brand, in the way that you can do with a Premiership club. So the answer if these clubs are to survive has to be to draw their players and support locally. But what if the town can’t support a club? This is where we have to seriously consider some kind of franchise system. When Wimbledon first raised the idea of moving to the footballing wilderness of Milton Keynes, the fans were naturally dead against it- but the club hadn’t played at its spiritual home of Plough Lane in more than a decade and wasn’t particularly welcome in an area of London accustomed to rather more well-heeled sporting activities. A large town with no natural footballing allegiance seemed to promise more.

It doesn’t seem to have worked out, but the possibility of some kind of franchising shouldn’t be ruled out in future. A club in persistent financial difficulty could hand the keys in to the League, who would then take the club over as a franchise and invite bidders, with preference given to the community where the club was based. It’d be a financial clean sheet with the original club wound up, but the new club would be accountable to the League and have to submit financial proposals as to how it would trade over the next few years. If the new franchise holders couldn’t make it work within, say, five years, they’d be free to relocate it elsewhere or hand it back to the League again. I’d also like to see clubs having to submit a statement of their financial position before the start of the season- confidential between club and League and initially with no action taken, but within a few years to move to a situation where clubs had to prove their solvency and financial stability for the rest of the season before being allowed to participate. If nothing else, it’d make sure that financially competent people were running football clubs rather than sentimental businessmen who take on clubs in dire straits with no real business plan.

So there you have it. I’m not even sure that I have any real insight into the issues here, but it’s clear that football can’t go on forever surviving on a heady brew of wishful thinking and sentiment. It needs its hard-headed businesspeople as well, or else the diversity and tradition of English league football will die. Bill Bryson once admitted to being fascinated by the fact that we have 92 league teams (the NFL has something over 30 to cover the whole USA) and every Saturday they all move up and down in order in their respective divisions. Without this variety and colour, professional football in this country will gradually be whittled down to about forty teams representing the major centres of population. Perhaps the game will be no worse off without a Darlington, but when we lose all the Darlingtons it is, to coin a phrase, a whole new ball game.