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| On The Ball, City! |
The Lose has always been a believer in the concept of promotion and relegation, because it keeps clubs on their toes and prevents teams from dogging it. In North America, you have franchises like the Chicago Cubs, who’ve made losing a profitable art form. You’ve also seen the rise of deliberate, systemwide tanking in the NBA and NHL so as to try and secure coveted draft picks. The Philadelphia 76ers have basically written off three seasons in some sort of master plan that I cannot quite figure out. They were horrible the last two years, and will likely be horrible again this coming season, and if you’re a basketball fan in Philly, why would you ever go back to watching that team? It’s easy enough to lose in sports without actively trying to be bad. With franchises in scarce supply, with revenue sharing and salary caps and booming TV rights, money is aplenty in American sports no matter whether you win or lose. In fact, there’s never been a better time to be bad. The Houston Astros played some of the worst baseball in Major League history, and then played even more, all the while drawing 0.0 TV ratings, yet somehow seem not the worse for it.
This is not the case in England, where your budget shrinks by about £128 million the moment you get relegated from the EPL. Promotion to the top flite is, therefore, a massive accomplishment. And with the infusion of £130 million into your budget comes the question of what to do with it – which is a question that’s harder to answer than you might think. Two of last year’s promoted sides were quickly relegated, both of which offer up cautionary tales as to what not to do. Queen’s Park Rangers were so desperate to get into the EPL again that they were carrying a club wage bill in 2014 as large as some of the EPL’s top sides – running up enormous debt and doing some curious accounting in the process. Promotion shielded them from some scrutiny – after all, the EPL plays by a number of its own rules – but now that QPR has collapsed in a heap, finishing last and being taken out with the refuse, they may have to answer for some of their spending habits to officials from the English FA. Burnley, meanwhile, took the money from their promotion and stashed it away, spending far less this season than any club in the EPL and getting the results to prove it. They too are going back down to the English League Championship once more, but a year’s worth of EPL TV money will cushion the blow.
And Burnley’s one-and-done EPL act is nothing out of the ordinary. Fans want their team to do whatever is possible to win, of course, and it’s hard to sometimes look at bigger pictures – especially since the bigger picture is, in essence, that it’s probably impossible to win. There are 92 professional football clubs in the four tiers of the English league, and many of them are perfectly content carrying on in the lower ranks. It’s a business that’s both frighteningly competitive and frighteningly expensive. There are plenty of clubs which will knock it about every Saturday before 5,000 diehards in the lower echelons whose boards of directors have no real drive nor ambition, nor financial incentive for that matter, to do much more than that. Moving up a level can often take you far, far out of your comfort zone.
Perhaps this dilemma has been best chronicled, in recent years, in the late Joe McGinniss’ wonderful book The Miracle of Castel di Sangro: A Tale of Passion and Folly in the Heart of Italy, the story of a small, backwater Italian soccer club which almost inexplicably rises up to Italian Serie B – the 2nd-highest level of Italian football – at which point they are immediately and woefully out of their league. Players need to be paid, stadia financed, and with a rise in level comes an increase in scrutiny of the club’s affairs. It becomes apparent rather quickly that everyone involved in the club off the pitch were perfectly happy trawling about in C1.
Over time, many clubs have found that comfort zone and are perfectly content never to deviate from the norm. While there is a core of élite clubs dominating the EPL year after the year, English football also has its share of solid yet unspectacular performers – the Stoke Citys and the West Broms and what have you – who fill out the ranks and define success by Top 10 finishes and by occasionally nicking a game here and there from the bigger sides. And there are also a few clubs like Norwich City who bounce up and down between Divs 1 and 2 on a regular basis to such an extent that their fans, while not necessarily liking it, do possess a certain sense of realism about their expectations. Success is modest and fleeting when you’re not one of the big guns. Earlier this season, the pairings in the always nutty FA Cup saw mighty Manchester United traveling for a match with a 4th Division Cambridge United side. Cambridge held on mightily for a goalless draw to force a replay at Old Trafford – and the gate receipts for a match at 67,000-capacity Old Trafford were enough to cover the club’s entire budget for a year. The 0:0 draw, therefore, constituted a great triumph on many levels, and being inevitably hammered by Man U in the replay meant little. When you’re not one of the big players, you have to change your definitions of success. You pick your spots and make your own meanings. So having the opportunity to descend en masse at Wembley on a Bank Holiday (as 86,000 City and Boro fans chose to do) took on an enormous importance which, in the grander scheme of things probably shouldn’t exist – after all, this was a 3rd-place playoff we’re talking about here, yet the Canaries and their fans celebrated as if they’d just won the Champions League.
The £130 million that comes with it complicates matters. Norwich’s relegation were actually something of a surprise, as they were expected to be much better in the 2014 season, but three years of EPL money, combined with some sound fiscal policy, had allowed the club to remain essentially debt-free. As a result, they were able to keep the core of their team together and not have to resort to the sort of massive sell-off of players many failed EPL sides face in the face of crippling debts. (The QPR fire sale should be starting at any moment now.) Norwich City are a pretty savvy club with a fan base that is both loyal and patient, so it’s unlikely the Canaries are going to do anything rash. Most likely, they’ll be pretty cautious going forward, trying to keep the nucleus together and add a few good buys here and there, hoping to eke through next season and build from there.
And for the other invitees to the big party, this is somewhat unsure territory. A.F.C. Bournemouth has already said they aren’t going to use their infusion of cash to upgrade their meager, 11,700-seat home football grounds, opting instead to spend it on ‘club infrastructure,’ and there have also been some whisperings that A.F.C., who’ve never been to the EPL before, perhaps have run afoul of Financial Fair Play regulations in a similar fashion to QPR (though maybe not quite so spectacularly). Watford, meanwhile, are well-known throughout England for talent development – beat the bushes in search of players, buy low and sell high – but that sort of approach often doesn’t translate very well in the big-money world. It’s similar to the Moneyball dilemma in baseball, where the A’s analytics-based approach worked really well until other clubs like the Red Sox took the same sorts of approaches and backed it with big budgets. Whatever angle you think you’ve discovered to make your EPL team good, Arsène Wenger has probably already thought of it.
So for a day, the Good Guys from Norwich City F.C. get to celebrate and be kings of the world and roll around in a gigantic pile of English pounds. And then, once the hangover has subsided … well, good luck Canaries. We’re all gonna need it.
