Put it in the box

January is upon us again, and the scramble for new players is just hotting up. Desperate clubs search for that magic ingredient, Rafa does his usual trick of buying rubbish and selling at a loss, and the more entertaining players poke their heads over their neighbours’ walls in wide-eyed hopefulness looking for a lucrative contract at one of the clubs that is currently throwing the money around like torn-up betting slips.

According to an article published by the BBC Business News section on May 28th last year, Chelsea paid out £132.8 million in wages in the 2006-7 season, United paid £92.3 million, Arsenal £89.7 million, Liverpool £77.6 million and Newcastle £62.4 million. With Premier League clubs now paying over £1 billion in salaries, the average wage is around £50,000 a week (based on twenty clubs employing a squad of twenty players for fifty-two weeks).

It is difficult to pinpoint exact figures for each club – for obvious reasons the clubs prefer to be vague – but if the leading daily newspapers are to be trusted we can put a price on the talents of individuals. Apparently John Terry earns £130,000 a week, Steven Gerrard (who is eager to see quotas controlling the number of foreign players but stays surprisingly silent on the subject of salary capping) earns £120,000 a week, Cristiano Ronaldo around the same, with Michael Owen and Wayne Rooney lagging behind on around £100,000 a week.

Any sympathy for these players, based on the fact that they are paid salaries widely accepted in the sector, fades away when you look at the shelves in any bookshop and find autobiographies “written” by men in their early twenties who have yet to achieve anything in life. This gimmick is a cynical attempt at milking even more money from a society that is in recession and from people that are quite often poor even in a time of plenty.

And all this just for kicking a ball around.

A SENSE OF PERSPECTIVE

Newly-qualified nurses (NHS grade D) in England start on a salary of between approximately £16,500 and £18,250 per year, trainee fire fighters start on around £21,000 per year and the people who pick up the telephone at The Samaritans are volunteers.

Apologists bleat that a footballer’s career may only last around ten years. A teacher, for example, may work from the age of twenty-five to the age of sixty-five (giving a nice round figure of forty years), so if a footballer is supposedly earning in ten years what he cannot earn in forty, he must earn in a week what anyone else earns in four. The equivalent salary for John Terry would be £32,500 a week.

And here’s a quote from http://www.endchildpoverty.org.uk/

"3.9 million children - one in three - are currently living in poverty in the UK, one of the highest rates in the industrialised world. This is a shocking figure given the wealth of our nation."

PUT IT IN THE BOX

It is not necessary to look at any more figures - it is a well-known fact that the money which makes modern football dizzy comes not from gate receipts but from television. So the solution is simple – vote with your pockets. Stop paying for expensive live football and put the money on the table in front of you. In these recessionary times, I’m sure nobody would reproach you for putting half of it back in your pocket.

Then find what you consider to be a worthy cause and put the other half of the cash in the charity box. Twenty quid a month (or whatever figure you are left with) could make a huge difference to a terminally ill child, a homeless old woman or the family of a sick person that is struggling to make ends meet because the government will no longer provide the necessary care.

As for watching the football, if the season ticket prices are too high, don’t buy them either. When the clubs see their grounds empty, they will soon listen to what the genuine fans have to say.

It’s time we started caring about those who need help, instead of insisting on making millionaires richer.

Burnley's cup runneth over - and the vultures are circling

What a week for Burnley! At the start of Wednesday evening, they were 4-1 down on aggregate in their League Cup semi-final against Spurs – they needed to win at least 3-0 to go through. After ninety minutes they were indeed 3-0 up, but in a perverse variation on the rules they had to prove their worth for another thirty minutes before they could go through on the away goals rule.

I have no idea how many people (other than the anoraks) were aware of that rather irrational rule – perhaps it was a case of everybody’s only finding out about it when it suddenly became relevant. On the night it almost seemed like those frustrating playground moments when the boy who not only owns the ball but the jerseys too decides to suddenly change the rules because his team is losing.

Whatever, Burnley hung on for another 28 minutes, but Spurs scored. And scored again, with a sadistic and unnecessary second stab of the Burnley goal. The whole country felt their pain as intensely as they had shared their exhilaration at reaching the impossible score, a collective feeling which will have carried on to some extent to yesterday’s F.A. Cup games. Everybody who followed Burnley’s game on Wednesday will have enjoyed their last-gasp equaliser away at Premier League West Brom.

Why, though?

UNDERDOGS

I don’t support Burnley, and if I’m to be totally honest they have rarely crossed my radar in the past. I can’t remember offhand if they have beaten my own team (Sunderland) recently or even if we have coincided in the same division in the last few years, and with all due respect to the club and the fans I reckon the rest of the country probably felt the same before Wednesday evening.

So why on Earth was everybody so excited about the game against Spurs?

For a start, I suppose it helped that there were no other major matches on that night. There is also the fact that English fans will often support the underdog in any match in which their team is not taking part, and as bad as Spurs are this season, a Championship side should always be the underdog against a Premier League side.

It also helped that nobody – except perhaps the fans of rival Lancashire teams – has anything against Burnley in the way that many fans will always want to see Chelsea or United lose. Of course, nobody – again, except for local rival fans, perhaps – has anything against West Brom, but then the feeling surrounding Burnley had faded a little by Saturday. It was only intense against Spurs. And that is the key.

PUT THE BOOT IN

There is nothing better to break the tedium of modern top-flight football than seeing a big club in a bad way. Unless you are the fan of one of those clubs which wins titles with monotonous (for the rest of us) regularity, the season starts to lose its sparkle very quickly. A modest cup run might relieve the boredom of the mid-table mire, but it would be hard to claim that the joy of winning a relegation stand-off ever compensates for the stress of seeing your team about to drop (and in some cases, seeing them humiliated).

Some people make up for the lack of celebrations by hoping that when one of those big clubs reaches a final they lose it, and everyone has that club that they hate to see win. So when a supposedly big club not only starts the season badly but also continues in a nosedive that not even managerial changes and January signings can correct, local rivals and neutral fans alike gather like vultures in eager anticipation.

It is the natural opposite of being happy for the likes of Reading or Hull when they stay up in the first season – while they are still considered to be small clubs, people are pleased to see them do well, and the fans love it when they stick it to the big boys. And just as people express disappointment every time a newly-promoted club goes straight back down, most fans would absolutely love it if a big club went down instead.

For most people, seeing Man City, Spurs or Blackburn go down this season would at least give us something to talk about. As for Burnley, their season could get even better in the long run if they make the play-offs (at the moment they are seventh). I would be delighted for them if they managed it, but at that stage of the season most fans probably won’t even notice – they’ll be perched on leafless branches waiting to see which club will perish.

Unless Burnley reach another semi-final – what are the chances of that?

Last one in, turn out the lights

It would be difficult to place a finger on the moment when everyone started talking about the “big four”, but what is certain is that almost simultaneously there was born a desire to see the exclusive club broken wide open. The “ABUs” of ten years ago have seen their ranks swelled by the neutral “ABTBFs” – “anyone but the big four”.

Various clubs have been considered possible rivals, including Newcastle United (fifth in Abramovich’s first year in charge of Chelsea following on from third the previous year) but especially Spurs (fifth in 2005-6 and again in 2006-7) and Everton, who not only finished fifth last season, but were also the last team to finish among the “big four”, in 2004-5 (fourth).

However, a glance at the table now shows both Spurs and Newcastle in a position where they look likely to be engaged in a relegation dogfight come the end of the season – anyone can start the season with a couple of bad results, but in the case of both of these clubs there does not appear to be a solution on the horizon. Everton have been hovering just below the last European spot, but the points margin is starting to open up and the team does not give the impression of having the consistency to bridge that gap.

As for the rest of the potential challengers, clubs like Portsmouth, Man City, Bolton, Blackburn, West Ham, Middlesbrough and even Southampton have played in the UEFA cup since Abramovich took over at Chelsea and started pouring money into the club. European football means more money and therefore the opportunity to try at least to narrow the financial gap between the “best” and the rest. Look at Man City and Blackburn now. And look at Southampton.

So the excitement surrounding Aston Villa’s performances this season is more than understandable. At last there appears to be a club that can break the hegemony at the top.

LAST ONE OUT, TURN OUT THE LIGHTS

Since Martin O’Neill took over at Villa Park in August 2006 he has taken the club from sixteenth to eleventh to sixth and the UEFA Cup (via the Intertoto Cup). In O’Neill’s first season in charge they finished eleventh thanks to their seventeen drawn games; if only three of those stalemates had been turned into victories they could have been in the UEFA Cup.

Again last season, they drew far too many games (twelve), and only three draws turned into victories would have seen them take the automatic UEFA Cup spot. This season, however, in spite of drawing five games at home already, they are not just floating hopefully around sixth place but rather they have driven a stake right through the heart of the “big four”. They currently lie fourth, and in five games against the “big four” they have lost only once.

Of those five matches, they have also drawn three – there’s those draws again – but last season they lost four times and won only once against the “big four”. Just as the final league positions of the last three seasons have shown, that is the key to Martin O’Neill’s management of the team – gradual, sustainable and realistic improvement.

Now they are in the Champions’ League places and look likely to stay there. But what does that mean for the rest of the table – has the “big four” become the “big five”, and if that is the case, does that mean that all the automatic European places will be sewn up for the foreseeable future?

LOSING BALLAST

I’d love to see both O’Neill and Villa do well, but not to the detriment of all the other clubs, and I imagine the “ABTBFs” who want to see Villa break into that group, by their very nature would hate to see another exclusive group formed instead (except for the Villa fans, obviously!). It would be far better to see one club drop away to leave a bit of breathing space – but which club should that be?

Which team has taken least advantage of their time at the top and has the least to show for their privileged exclusivity? Which team should forfeit their position and give someone else a chance?

Obviously not Manchester United. In spite of the criticism levelled at Sir Alex Ferguson because of his relationship with referees and other figures of authority, there is no denying he is an excellent manager, by the far the most successful in football. His team’s answer to Chelsea’s new dominance of the domestic game was one F.A. Cup, a League Cup and consecutive league titles, and – crucially – the ability to translate domestic success into a European trophy.

What about Chelsea? I have no sympathy for the reactionaries who resent a new kid on the block – who wants a dictatorship in football? Why preserve the stuffy old guard when you can breathe some fresh air into a system? The fact that their success has been bought with big money is irrelevant – are the other clubs charities? Has everybody forgotten Parma and Villarreal? Anyway, two league titles, one F.A. Cup and two League Cups are probably the reason for the resentment.

A definite candidate to be removed from an undeserved privileged perch is Liverpool. Granted, they won the Champions League in 2005 when AC Milan threw the match in the second half, but apart from that they are living on past glories. Their response to being classed as one of the “big four” has been one F.A. Cup. They have hung around the top end of the table for nigh on twenty years now without ever appearing to justify their position.

However, even Liverpool, with their ragged reputation, almost look like a small team trying to break into the rich boys’ party. Arsenal have painted a self-portrait of football aristocracy with extremely elegant but ultimately narcissistic play, well-kept but rather secretive accounts and a manager whose nickname is “The Professor”. This self-created image has given the impression of a club trying to hold the riff-raff at arm’s length, and has done nothing to endear neutral fans to their cause.

And at the end of the day, Arsenal must undoubtedly be the team which has least fulfilled its own promise. Over a period of ten years they seemed to be leading up to greatness without ever actually arriving. When they reached the Champions’ League final in 2006 it seemed that they had finally arrived at the gates of legend, but they couldn’t find their way in, and since then they have even lost sight of the gates.

Ten years of a manager widely regarded as being a football genius have given three league titles – but five times they were second-best. They may have a few more F.A. Cups, they were only second-best in the only League Cup final they have reached in that time, and second-best in their only Champions’ League final. And since Abramovich made Chelsea “big”, they have won just two trophies, both domestic.

It is time they climbed down from their perch and allowed somebody else the chance to be second-best. Step up Aston Villa.