The richest game in football*

Posted on by
2

Blah, blah, blah…”The richest game in football”….blah, blah, blah.

We’ve all heard it. We’ve all had the “theory” pushed down our throats but it doesn’t stop the speculators keep raising the value of the npower Championship Play Off Final every year. This year, the “biggest mouth in football”, © Sam Allardyce even went as far as saying it was the “Bigger than the Champions League Final”. Yeah, whatever Sam. A global audience of 500 million will probably disagree on that point.

The game is supposedly worth £45 million to the winners for the next two seasons. If that is the case it has hardly done the winners over the past decade any good has it? With such an injection of money surely it would make them a shoe-in to keep their place in the elite? Statistics tell us otherwise.

2002 Winner – Birmingham City – 4th in Championship last season – 4 seasons in Premier League after play off final
2003 Winner – Wolverhampton Wanderers – Relegated from Premier League in 20th Place – Relegated following season
2004 Winner – Crystal Palace – 17th in Championship – Relegated following season
2005 Winner – West Ham United – 3rd in Championship & Play Off Final contender – Relegated in 2011
2006 Winner – Watford – 11th in Championship – Relegated following season
2007 Winner – Derby County – 12th in Championship – Relegated following season
2008 Winner – Hull City – 8th in Championship – Relegated after two seasons
2009 Winner – Burnley – 13th in Championship – Relegated following season
2010 Winner – Blackpool – 5th in Championship & Play Off Final contender – Relegated following season
2011 Winner – Swansea City – 11th in Premier League

So the winners of the “richest club game in the world” in 6 of the past 10 Play off finals have been relegated after just one season in the Premier League. Wolverhampton Wanderers are the only one of these who has since managed to get back into the Premier League (Blackpool could make it two if they beat West Ham) proving that money is not all that it takes to stay in the Premier League. Continue reading →

The Future of Non League Football – Plastic Fantastic

Posted on by
Reply

It seems that every winter we are caught out with inclement weather. We have the wrong type of snow, wind, rain and sunshine in this country and that has an impact on the Non Leagues more so than our professional cousins. Postponed games have to replayed and without any willingness to extend the season, fixture pile ups ruin the competitiveness of the league. But there is a solution, as the guru of Non League cup competitions Damon Threadgold explains.

In the last few seasons a number of leagues have gone to the very edge of ‘the FA sanctioned summer’ thanks to fixture pile ups caused by frozen or waterlogged pitches in the winter months. It’s ridiculous when you get teams having to cram those postponed games into one month at the end of the season [more on that later]. We sit back and think ‘why don’t the FA just sanction league extensions?’ But, as they won’t eat into their valuable cricket-watching time down at their local village green, we have to think of another way.

Synthetic pitches. Hmmm … OK, we all remember the horrors of the 80s, Luton and QPR playing on fruit shop grass where the ball bounced higher than the average space hopper. You want that! No, you don’t, pipe down at the back. Synthetic pitches have moved on a tad since those heady days of big hair and tight shorts, now they are less burn-inducing industrial rugs and more dry-weave-top-sheet and luxury spa resort, threaded with real grass and bedded on a synthetic earth of rubberised peas to get that regular bounce and feel. FIFA sanction their use and England have even played qualifiers on the stuff so what the hell is the problem?

In fairness, the FA have taken some tentative steps in the right direction by allowing the use of One Star FIFA sanctioned pitches in some tournaments. However, for some unfathomable reason they refuse to allow the FA Cup and FA Youth Cup to be played on plastic pitches. So, if, as a club, you see FA Youth competition as a valuable learning asset, you can’t install a synthetic pitch because you will have to retain or borrow a grass one to enter. The FA Cup is a potentially lucrative competition to a number of non-league clubs, particularly those at Step 2, 3 and 4, so installing a plastic pitch is an unwise move because it bars your entry to the Old Jug. Continue reading →

The Future of Non League Football – Ask and ye shall receive

Posted on by
Reply

Continuing our series on what can be done to improve Non League football, the genius that is Beat The First Man raises the subject that clubs themselves are sometimes their own worst enemies.

You know what gets my goat in non league football? Well, apart spurious ground grading regulations, inept officiating, and clubs playing fast and loose with the financing rules. It is clubs, well-meaning so often, not utilising the skills base that presents itself to them on a fortnightly basis.

Clubs need fans. Of course they need their monies over the gate, over the bar, at the tea hut. But they need them in other ways, and all too often they are reluctant, unwilling, or simply too pig-headed to ask.

The old cliche of fans ganging together to pay the wages, or paint a fence, is one which we are all far too familiar with. On the one hand you would hope that clubs learn from the errors of those who went before them. But equally there is something “blitz spirit” about everyone rocking up to the ground in mid June to spruce up the changing rooms. And we do it because we want to help, to be part of the club in any small way we can. Non league football is run by volunteers, after all (at least, the *real* non league is).

But why should it stop there? On any given matchday, there will be an assortment of men and women with all manner of skills standing on the sidelines. All with their own lives, true. And not all necessarily willing or able to give their time to the club for free. But it doesn’t have to be free. Continue reading →

The Darts hit the bullseye of promotion after 26 years of hurt

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve never really hidden my admiration for the progress Dartford have made on and off the pitch in the past few seasons.  Just a year or so ago I waxed lyrical about my upbringing just down the road from Watling Street and my afternoons spent running around the terraces here..  Back in “the day” they were one of the top Non League teams in England, along with the likes of Wealdstone, Altrincham and Weymouth.  In an age when there wasn’t any automatic promotion to the Football League, the top non league clubs had to apply for election to the League each season and hope that the Football League Chairman were satisfied with the contents of the “envelopes”.  Consequently only seven clubs were elected into the league by this method, the last being 1978.

Dartford came close to making the step from the Non Leagues to the Football League on a number of occasions, the last one was in 1974 after they won the Southern League, and reached the final of the FA Trophy.  Ten years later, after the formation of the Football Alliance (basically now the Blue Square Bet Premier), they finished third, the highest place they have finished in their history.  Since then it was a tale of woe that saw them penniless and homeless in a space of a few years.  A nomadic existence followed at places like Erith, Thurrock and Gravesend before a local council with a vision stepped in, finding them a home back in the town. Continue reading →

Gone and forgotten – part 1 – Manchester Central FC

Posted on by
2

“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them” so said William Shakespeare. The final line to bring that up to date is “and then there are those who achieve greatness buy spun king loads of cash on a project”

Let me take you back to 1931. The Empire State Building has just been completed in New York City, A banking crisis threatens the European economy and the first screenings of Dracula and Frankenstein scare the living daylights out of film goers in London. But in a closed meeting room at the Football League headquarters in Preston there was a monumental debate raging.

At the time there was no automatic promotion between the Football League and the Non Leagues. In fact the 92 team Football League was basically a closed shop, with no team ever “elected” to join the league at the annual end of season vote. The process used to be that any non league club could throw their hat into the ring to be elected as a new member club but it would require a majority vote from the Football League club chairman. And unsurprisingly they were a close knit group who didn’t like outsiders. In fact it wasn’t until 1951 that Workington became the first club to join the Football League in this way at the expense of New Brighton. Occasionally an incidence would occur when they found themselves a team short and they would send a telegram to a non league club and ask if they wanted to join the party.

You didn’t have to even prove you were a successful club to apply for election. Take the case of The Argonauts in 1928 who applied for entry to the league without ever actually playing a game. The one thing they had going for them apart from having an eccentric chairman was that they had agreed a lease to play at Wembley Stadium. The excellent Twohundredpercent website tells the story of the most bizarre club nearly to play in the league brilliantly.

In the same year that the Argonauts were making their audacious bid, a new team was being formed in Manchester. Manchester Central were formed by Man City director John Ayrton (at the time there were no rules about having a stake in more than one club) who saw an opportunity to utilise the Belle Vue Stadium he owned in the east part of the city for more than just a weekly speedway meeting. In their first season they joined the Lancashire Combination League, finishing a disappointing seventh. However, this didn’t stop Ayrton applying to take the club into the Football League at the end of their first season. Unsurprisingly their bid failed. Continue reading →

The Future of Non League Football – Time to rethink the FA Vase?

Posted on by
1

Wembley Stadium will host a number of massive games in May. The FA Cup Final between Chelsea and Liverpool will be played out in front of a capacity crowd early in the month before the attention turns to the nPower Championship sell out between West Ham United and Blackpool in the “World’s Richest Club Game” as well as the FA Trophy final. Just a few days after the end of the month the stadium will be full again as we say goodbye and good luck to Roy Hodgson’s England squad as they play Belgium before departing for the European Championship in Poland and Ukraine.

But in the middle of all those mouth watering games Wembley will host a bizarre game that still defies reason as to why a stadium that costs literally hundreds of thousands of pounds just to unlock the doors would deem viable. The FA Carlsberg Vase Final (ironic name given you cannot drink beer and watch the game at the same time) typically gets crowds of less than 10,000 and apart from a “day out” for the clubs involved, it is a strange game to justify being played at such a huge stadium. This years final is all the more baffling as it involves two teams who have already played each other four times this season, play in the same league and are barely 30 miles apart in one of the furthest leagues away from Wembley Stadium.

On Sunday 13th May West Auckland Town will take on Dunston UTS not in front of the 140-odd who saw their last meeting this season but a figure of close to 5,000 (10,000 at a push). They met early in the season in the FA Cup twice as well as in the league with the scores on the door at one win each and two draws.

Is there any real need to expect the fans to make the 600 mile round trip for this game? Couldn’t some sensibility be used here? Surely if the FA deemed the final should be at Wembley then play it on the Saturday as part of a double header with York City and Newport County, who will be competing for the FA Trophy in front of around 25,000. Alternatively, why not play the game at St James’ Park or the Stadium of Light which would undoubtably provoke more local interest and a significantly bigger crowd.  During the “Inbetween” years of 2000 and 2006 the final was played around the country at Villa Park, White Hart Lane, St Andrews and Upton Park. Continue reading →