Fur coat and dirty knickers

Last Friday morning the inevitable happened for Portsmouth as it was announced that they had gone into administration. Most commentators focused on one interesting question: how could this possibly happen in the richest league in the world?

This reminded me of a comment made by a Spanish journalist about Real Madrid at the turn of the century when one of the Spanish football dailies published a list of the most debt-ridden clubs in the domestic game. The journalist asked something along the lines of this: if your neighbour has a five-bedroom house, three cars in the garage, a yacht and a helicopter, would you consider him to be poor?

The answer must surely be no, the journalist asserted, even though you are sure that your neighbour has all these possessions on a mortgage, on hire purchase, on the never-never. If he has access to these things then he must have sufficient income to justify the banks’ confidence in him. The journalist failed to address what would happen if that income – or even the confidence – disappeared.

The Premier League is indeed the richest league in the world, but it is heavily mortgaged. It is not old money and its wealth has no foundation – it is mortgaged up to the hilt on its own reputation. The Premier League is, as they say where I come from, nothing more than fur coat and dirty knickers.

Almost the worst aspect of this falseness is that the Premier League looks on the clubs as mere playthings, similar to the attractive but expensive toys of the wealthy neighbour, and allows prospective owners to do the same. And by far the worst part of this charade is the fact that the Premier League has absolutely no regard for the fans.

And now one of its toys is broken, and the fans are left to pick up the pieces.