Football Wealth: Will it Ever Burst?

[Barrel of Fun]

There are so many bases to cover.

FIFA complaining that they miss out on the real value of the World Cup, despite taking a minimum of £1,300,000,000 for the TV/media rights from the 2010 and being able to pay their 420 employees an average of £9,000 a month.

Prices rising steadily in matches across England with players richer than they ever were before.

The average wage of a top flight player has hit £30,000 per week.

Who is benefiting? Where does all this money go?

 

[Ulloa's Soul Patch]

Corruption.

 

[Tom Hark Preston Park]

There was massive fallout when ITV whatever-it-was pulled out. Just needs SKY to do the same. Not an unlimited number of unlimited pockets ready to step into the breach. Slightest whiff of match-fixing and the whole thing will collapse like FFS Murray in the penalty box. The football crash / readjustment WILL come, nothing's surer.

 

[Black Rod]

Everyone said it would happen when a Premier League team went into meltdown - well, nothing seems to have changed despite Pompey's woes.

At the end of the day, football in this country could go completely down the pan and everybody could lose interest but it is so big in developing countries now that the top teams in the country will be safe no matter what. You English people don't want to pour money into Manchester United? Fine, there are plenty of Chinese willing to take your places

 

[Kosmonaut]

It is all about competition, the owners of clubs are getting richer and richer, so the bidding wars between them for players get higher and higher. The only thing that can stop this is either some wage legislation or the owners to become poorer.

 

[Buckley's Mad Eye]

Look at what Germany does and copy it. If English football continues hotting up, there will be only one result.

 

[Spider]

It won't burst for a long time, sadly.

As a 24 year old, I can see that people in my generation, and especially lower, simply have an entirely different notion of football than the older ones who consider fandom as actually going to games. The Sky Sports fan is in full abundance and the foreign TV market is so massive that there is endless amounts of money to be made in TV rights.

One of the striking things about people going to big clubs is that they treat football as a once or twice a year luxury. Put simply, this will be enough for the big clubs to survive and the rest to falter. The match day fan is little more than a paying 'extra' these days, and the big clubs can afford to have people coming irregularly because they have such a wide pool of fans (again created by the Sky Sports generation).

The 92 professional clubs model is doomed unless the lower clubs break away from the elite. There's a simple model to be made, where a single league competes at the levels we're seeing now, with a limit on squad sizes, and the rest of the league competes at a sensible level with every player who isn't good enough to be within the 23 players of a top squad. It won't happen, though, because the current system works out fine for all the people who matter within the game.