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Do you know what the 9th most
watched sports league in the world is? Well, I’ll tell you, it’s the
Championship. The league that will have Rotherham, Blackpool, Millwall, and my
team, Blackburn Rovers in it. It’s bettered by Baseball in Japan and the USA, North
American Ice Hockey and that weird form of rugby in crash helmets they play in
America – and of course by the major football leagues of England, Spain,
Germany and the USA.
The 552 games in the 2012 season were
watched by an average of 17,738 people. On a league of averages the
Championship ranks higher than the premier leagues of Brazil, Russia and
Switzerland.
Even lowly League One records higher
average gates than the Premier Leagues of Greece, Chile, Bosnia and Uruguay –
all countries who qualified for the World Cup.
I started looking into this when I read The
Miracle of Castel di Sangro, a neat little book by American writer Joe
McGinniss following a team in a small town in southern Italy when they reached
Serie B. It struck me that Italian football had a sort of Premiership Lite,
then a sparsely watched second division and then the equivalents of Conference
North and South.
Football as an ingrained part of our
national culture is unique and special. And they hate it. They. The
London-based marketing department of Manchester United hate it. The directors
of the ‘project’ at Manchester City and the owners of the franchise at
Liverpool. How it must mystify them.
All this talk of a competitive League Three
was said to be motivated by getting match practice for the large squads of the
Premiership clubs. You were encouraged to get excited about Chelsea B getting
promoted into League Two and scrapping it out against Chesterfield and Carlisle.
The example is cited that what’s good enough for Barcelona and Bayern to have B
sides playing competitive matches should be available to our big clubs.
And of course our good English boys would
be the best place to toughen them up on their road towards turning out for the
national team, much better than any three month loan spell at Preston North
End.
Even if the argument for match practice was
a factor, don’t you think they’d just double the foreign intake? You always
retain that suspicion about the deeper, darker motivations of any move which
serves to further the interests of the Premiership, especially the bigger
clubs.
What you suspect they are looking to chip
away at is the season ticket holder at Rochdale and Walsall, who should be
following a “major brand” winning over these fans and selling them all the tat
that follows. You can’t help but wonder that the progress of newly purchased
“franchises” wonder why on earth people would watch other clubs in their
catchment area.
Look at the plans for the Etihad Campus next
to Manchester City’s home, these include a mini-stadium with 7,000 seats –
their reserves, sorry Elite Development Squad, currently attract a few hundred
fans to watch them at Hyde. When that ends, City will be punting the
possibilities of a match day experience against the stiffs of Juventus and
Liverpool.
For all its faults, the popular pyramid
league system we have in this country is nothing short of miraculous. A national
culture of loyalty to a club, a centre of a community – a totem for a town.
Something that matters, even when deep down we know that some of the football
is pretty crap. All the scandals of owners cocking it up, clubs going bust,
foreign players coming in at every level – it still carries on. Something still
sustains it as a spectator sport that thousands upon thousands of people take
part in every week.
Make no mistake, the close on half a
million people who watched non-Premier League Football on one weekend in May is
a barrier to the onward march of the greed league. League Three would just be
another way to chip away at the foundations. That daft idea might have been kicked
into the car park for the time being, but there will be something else equally
as mendacious and stupid soon enough.
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