Reward Success not Legacy

Liverpool are leading the charge for the last healthy revenue stream available to European football clubs in general and the Premiership in particular. While domestic gate receipts appear to have been tapped to the limit, sponsorship notoriously variable, while already having been negotiated several years into the future; the lure of foreign fans, fanatic about their club and more than willing to fork over precious lucre to be part of the experience; is becoming more appealing to clubs in England.

Already pre-season tours of Asia and North America have become standard, shirt sales have exponentially in the Far East and India, while broadcast rights for league matches are the most popular item on Asian media outlets' bid sheets. The foreign fan is hungrier than ever for English football and Liverpool chairman Ian Ayre wants to change the way in which that money is divided.

At the moment, as per the rules of the Premier League, foreign receipts, like domestic money, is divided equally amongst all clubs. While extremely fair, this system does reward smaller, lesser known clubs at the expense of popular ones, on whose fame and reach the very rights to broadcast content and commercialize merchandise, is based.  However, while Liverpool's plan of individually selling broadcast rights would reward the more popular clubs at the expense of their less fashionable brethren, it would destroy what little remains of competitiveness and parity in the top flight. The bigger clubs would get more money, exponentially greater than that of the remaining teams, allowing them to exert a monopoly on both talent and ability throughout the league. While this, in turn, would make the big fish arguably more competitive on the continent, it reduces the domestic league to a morass of limited clubs with dwindling potential and lessening ability.

Ayre's idea is to copy the system that is in place in Spain, where Real and Barcelona get to negotiate their own TV rights independently.  However, they are by far the biggest clubs on the peninsula, dwarfing everyone else in La Liga and dominating it remorselessly.  The rest of the clubs feed off the scraps, while relying on healthy youth farms to essentially fight for third place. As a result, the league is poorer to watch, less competitive and Spanish clubs are even becoming less competitive on the continent, other than Real Madrid and Barcelona. On the whole, the league's cubs are powerless to stop the pair from dominating the competition even more and they recently embarked on a plan to stop the monopoly held by Barcelona and Real.  So an existing implementation of the plan is not working.

Ayre may be looking to catch up with the Manchester clubs and Chelsea, but those three are financially, already out of sight. Moreover, while his idea may allow Liverpool to recoup some extra cash on the back of their considerable following outside England, it would only make them stronger than about 14 clubs, without getting them any closer to either Manchester behemoth or Chelsea; and possibly falling behind Arsenal in this regard as well. Arsenal, despite a nightmare year are still extremely popular in both Africa and Asia and command a following every bit as large as Liverpool. More saliently, Manchester United are far more popular than the pair combined and with the ability to demand increased reward for their following, would get even stronger than Liverpool. So, in the end, despite an increase in revenue, Liverpool would be no more competitive either domestically or in Europe. All the while destroying the very competition that a former Anfield managerial great once remarked was their bread and butter.

However, as delusional as Ayre's remarks sound, they are merely the latest in arrogant posturing from a club that has been eclipsed for over a generation. They haven't won the league for 20 years and are bereft of silverware since their FA Cup win in 2006. Although they came close to winning the title in 2009, one title challenge since the inception of the Premiership is a poor return for a club that likes to think of itself as a heavyweight. And Tottenham and Arsenal, who are arguably in the same boat, of being better than most of the rest but not good enough to win the title, at least play exciting football.  The odd player aside, Liverpool's legacy since the turn of the millenium has been stodgy, defensive and boring. Hardly the type of football likely to galvanise a dormant fanbase or even find many viewers in foreign lands.

Of course, this idea has to be voted in and it's likely that most of the premier league's chairmen will veto it. However it opens up a can of worms that has more going against it than for it. But the fact of the matter is that football should reward success, not mediocrity, competitiveness, not legacy. Liverpool may have won the European Cup more than any other English club, but their latest triumph in 2005 was a bolt from the blue that neither reflected Liverpool’s position in Europe nor their domestic form. And prior European Cups arrived when the back pass rule to the goalkeeper was still in vogue. So for all intents and purposes Liverpool have been dining on past success for close to two decades and have paid heavily, and often with poor judgement, to simply retain their position in the top six. They are no closer to upstaging the giants of Europe and extra money from fans in Indonesia whose fathers were massive Liverpool fans during the 1980s is not going to change that.