Who does Phil Gartside think he is?

[Lady Whistledown]

BBC Sport | Old Firm switch up for discussion

Yet again, the completely irrelevant chairman of one of the Premier League's least significant clubs is bringing to the table his proposals to accept Rangers & Celtic into the Premier League.

Does anybody at all, apart from a few greedy chairmen of mediocre top flight teams, actually want this? Or is it just going to be a case of the suits driving through their plans & saying a great big f*** you to supporters? I notice Gartside's plan includes a two tier league: presumably to cater for Bolton's inevitable future relegation without them having to endure the financial hardship that many clubs recently relegated have suffered.

I can see no benefits whatsoever to regular games against the old firm: when is Gartside going to recognise people just don't want it and can see right through him? He'll ruin what's left of Scottish football, & bring absolutely nothing bar occasional bouts of supporter thuggery to the English version.

 

[Mr Banana]

Wouldn't get yer knickers in a twist about it. No chance of it happening. The police will never allow it, let alone most of the Premier League.

 

[Kinky Gerbil]

I cant stand the man.

He is a crook.

Why does anyone want Celtic in the premiership after the sceens on sunday?

 

[Curious Orange]

Gartside is a tit.

 

[Perry Milkins]

I cant stand the man.

He is a crook.

Why does anyone want Celtic in the premiership after the sceens on sunday?

What happened on Sunday?

 

[Was not Was]

I'm worried that the press coverage is covering on the Celtic/Rangers issue.

That's a sideshow. The real issue is: if 'Prem 2' is introduced, what effect will it have on mobility within the game?

If it's set up so that, in effect, the same 40-ish clubs are more-or-less guaranteed the top 2 divisions, then the English football I want to see is over.

This could be achieved by: doing away with relegation to/from Prem 2; or introducting stringent 'facilities and funding' requirements for any team to be promoted to Prem 2; or spreading the Premiership TV funds so that the difference in funding between Prem 2 and the tier below is massive.

This is what I think will happen, and the rest of football should be up in arms about this. The like of the Albion would be stuffed. Forget your dreams of Championship or Premiership football - unless we're inside the castle by the time the drawbridge is pulled up.

Trouble is, it's a rational approach if you're Bolton/Wigan/etc, etc - if you don't question the rationale of the Premiership in the first place. If the question is: how to make the Premership more competitive? and how to get teams playing with less fear (of relegation)?, then a good answer is: pull up the drawbridge and spread the TV money around more evenly. If you're Bolton, this is your protection against 'doing a Charlton'.

So what can be presented as an almost socialistic attempt to curb the power of Chelsea, Man Utd, etc, is, in fact, a way of preserving the status of the new landed gentry.

And this might go through, you know. If the Celtic/Rangers aspect is dropped during negotiations, the proposals could be seen as more acceptable as they would have been 'watered down'.

I'm against, I hope you lot are too.

To the barricades, comrades!

 

[Tricky Dicky]

Wouldn't get yer knickers in a twist about it. No chance of it happening. The police will never allow it, let alone most of the Premier League.

The slight difference is, that in the last week or so, quite a few of the prem managers have spoken out in favour of it - which I don't recall happening before. Whether it matters what they think is a different matter.

 

[Lady Whistledown]

If you read the article, it says that Gartside had "tweaked" his original plans to include promotion & relegation between the two tiers of his new league.

Well that's bloody big of you, Phil, give the man a medal. Presumably that doesn't include any concept of relegation to the scummier areas of the Football League either, does it. What a twat. With one fell swoop this buffoon seemingly proposes to reduce English football's history of competition to ashes, in the name of getting his worthless, tedious club four more "big" games a season and cranking up the TV revenues.

Honestly, I would rather watch Palace v Plymouth live from Selhurst Park than see Bolton rolling up at a half empty Parkhead.

 

[Lady Whistledown]

What happened on Sunday?

A selection of their fans sung IRA songs through the minute's silence for Remembrance Sunday.

 

[Acker79]

Martin Samuel (imo, the best football journalist around) points out how this wouldn't work for Bolton.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/article-1226177/MARTIN-SAMUEL-One-problem-franchise-idea-Phil-Gartside-No-place-Bolton.html

MARTIN SAMUEL: One problem with your franchise idea, Phil Gartside. No place for Bolton

Last updated at 10:29 AM on 10th November 2009

* Comments (14)
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Phil Gartside, the chairman of Bolton, had a bad idea; then he had a worse one. He started by suggesting Rangers and Celtic should join a new two-tier Premier League. Then he went back to the drawing board and returned with the same plan, only as a closed shop. No relegation from tier two.

A licence to be lousy, in other words. It would no longer matter how poor your team became, how hopeless your leadership, because you could never go down. It would turn English club football from a merit system to a franchise system overnight.

Yet Gartside has one problem. Why would anyone want Bolton in this package?
Phil Gartside

Gartside may think it is a simple case of pulling up the ladder after the 38th club and then parachuting in two from Glasgow, but he is talking about a revolution that would shape English football for decades.

Franchised sport is not random, but meticulously constructed. It cannot be right that Leeds are shut out and Barnsley admitted, just because at one peculiar moment in time their traditional standings are reversed.

Franchises are hand-picked, often on a geographical basis, and with two teams in Manchester certain to be selected, plus others to the north in Lancashire, would Bolton not be redundant in his brave new era?

Start at the top. Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal form the elite, with
Rangers and Celtic.

Then the biggest of the also rans: Manchester City, Aston Villa, Tottenham, Everton, Newcastle, Sunderland, West Ham, Wolverhampton, Stoke, Blackburn, Derby and Sheffield United. Each of these teams have been attracting, on average, more than 25,000 fans to their home games this season. Now, with 22 places left, we have to start hand-picking.

Major cities and towns across a geographical spread must have representation, so in come Bristol City, Plymouth, Cardiff and Swansea in the west; Leicester, Coventry and Nottingham Forest in the Midlands; Southampton and Portsmouth in the south; Hull, Norwich and Ipswich in the east; Leeds, Preston North End, Middlesbrough and Blackpool in the north.

This leaves six. There seems to be a large gap between London and Bristol, which could be filled by Reading, while representation in the south of the capital could go to Charlton.

Traditionally passionate derby matches would have to be preserved, too, for the TV audience, affording places for Sheffield Wednesday and Birmingham.

Now there are two. It would seem churlish not to include Fulham, who only fall 212 fans short of the 25,000 benchmark, while Bradford is Britain’s sixth largest urban area, with a population bigger than Liverpool, Manchester or Bristol. These things are important when franchising. Bradford it is, then. Bolton miss out in an already saturated market in the North West. Sorry about that, Phil.

And sorry, too, to Wigan, Burnley, West Bromwich, Queens Park Rangers and all those other clubs who should make our franchised Premier League on merit, but are squeezed out once we allow greed to be the sole qualifying criterion.

This is what Gartside is doing with his new proposal.

He is not a visionary; he does not have what is best for football at heart. He is a frightened man because he sees what can happen to a club that falls out of the Premier League, and he fears it will be Bolton’s turn one day (and maybe this season with many more performances like the one against Aston Villa on Saturday).

He wants to guard against this, to shut the door quickly before it happens and he tosses in the cash bonus of an invite to Rangers and Celtic to sweeten the deal for friends who see only a bottom line.

He fails to comprehend that the only reason his club are even entertained in the top division is because English football rightly exists as a meritocracy, in which it is possible for Bolton to sit at the top table for ever, providing they are good enough, which is exactly as it should be.

Without relegation, without the potential to rise or fall, competitive sport has no meaning.

We curse the way the Champions League has created an elite quartet within our top division, so how would we feel if there was never the possibility of a club such as Wigan rising through four divisions, or Burnley returning to the top after an absence of 33 years?

Not to mention Bolton, who climbed from Division Four in 1988 to the Premier League in 1995, and are perfectly free to remain or go back again, which should concern Gartside considerably more than schemes to seal in the right to be rotten without consequence.

 

[cannedheat]

It will happen one day, and the reason why is SKY.

Keep the socks out.

 

[Was not Was]

Well done Martin Samuel for focusing on the real issue here.

Celtic and Rangers is a red herring, people.

This would do massive damage to Albion's hopes, whether or not the Sweaties are in!

 

[Lady Whistledown]

That Martin Samuel piece sums it up perfectly to me. It is 100% about insulating Bolton from their own future (& current, to be fair) shit-ness.

Give it a couple of seasons & even fans of the bigger clubs would soon get pissed off with negotiating the arse end of Glasgow on a Tuesday evening.

 

[adrian29uk]

So would this be a closed league so if you are in DIV1 or DIV2 there is no chance of ever making the premiership. If this was to happen, English football would die.

 

[Lady Whistledown]

So would this be a closed league so if you are in DIV1 or DIV2 there is no chance of ever making the premiership. If this was to happen, English football would die.

That seems to be the idea, yes. Hence Bolton would never go down...are you starting to see why Gartside is so keen now?

He is a

 

[Marty McFly]

The bloke is a tosser, and keeps trying to promote this idea. I really hope it doesn't happen.

This is the reaction to his idea last time around Bolton boss, Phil Gartside - what a tosser - North Stand Chat

 

[The Oldman]

Quite simply his ideas must never be allowed to happen. The chance of any club getting to the top division and dropping to the bottom league is what makes Football in England and wales what it is.

 

[adrian29uk]

If it did happen whats the point of having a club anymore. I blame SKY for all of this.

I do hope the premiership falls on it's arse very soon like Italian football did, however I cant see this happening anytime soon can you?

Who is to blame? Its not only Sky but the people who subscribe to it and all the extra revenue from overseas.

All these fake supporters up and down this country that would rather sit in front of their TV and support Man Utd, Arsenal, Liverpool when they should support their local club.

 

[adrian29uk]

Lets say this does start to get more attention, what could we all do as supporters up and down this country to stop this sort of thing ever happening?

 

[trueblue]

Can't really see a problem with the Glasgow clubs coming in. They have massive support and are far too big for their own league. The problem, from their point of view, is that they'd struggle to get promoted from the Championship at the moment and that - at best - is where they should start.

In the longer term, as everyone else says, the real problem with this proposal is the lack of mobility between the divisions which basically destroys the whole point of the Football League.

It's a shame so many of the clubs at the top level are so intent on killing the golden goose with their desperate attempts to reduce the level of competition. Who wants to watch the same clubs win every week?