In one of the corridors in the main stand at Crewe Alexandra’s Mornflake Stadium, there are pictures on the wall devoted to some of the club’s famous alumni.
Bruce Grobbelaar, Steve Holland, Geoff Thomas, David Platt, Dean Ashton, Robbie Savage and Danny Murphy are just a few of the names who have spent early stages of their careers here, all of them symbols of the symbiosis that once existed between the lower leagues and the top flight.
That relationship is broken now. Premier League intransigence over a six-year, £900million New Deal for football has ensured that.
At a time when the top flight is becoming more synonymous with greed and arrogance, the Premier League’s inability to agree a deal for increased financial distributions to the EFL is making it look more dysfunctional than ever.
The Premier League, which won a new host of enemies with its heavy-handed scrapping of FA Cup replays earlier this month, is lobbying hard against an independent regulator, which is likely to pass into law through the Football Governance Bill before the end of the current parliament.
If the Premier League’s hapless chief executive, Richard Masters, had a pound for every time his trite, haughty and insufferably smug line about the ‘unintended consequences’ of the creation of a regulator were trotted out by his acolytes, he could probably fund the New Deal himself.
But the regulator will become a reality in the next few months and it will have the power to frustrate Premier League hopes for a 39th game, as well as imposing a financial settlement on the top flight and 72 clubs of the English Football League that will improve redistribution, enhance the sustainability of EFL teams and tackle the vexed question of parachute payments that distort competition, particularly in the Championship.
Last week, EFL chairman Rick Parry, Crewe chairman Charles Grant, Bolton chairman Sharon Brittan and Coventry owner Doug King met Mail Sport at Gresty Road to discuss whether the enmity between the Premier League and the EFL can be resolved.
OLIVER HOLT: Why should the Premier League pay a penny of the billions it has earned in broadcast deals to help fund the EFL? Isn’t Steve Parish, the Crystal Palace chairman, right when he says supermarkets aren’t instructed to help corner shops?
RICK PARRY: I am not aware that you have promotion and relegation in the supermarket industry. If you want to see the value of the Premier League plummet, then stop promotion and relegation, make it sterile and see what happens then. Good luck with that because look at the reaction of fans to the closed Super League.
There are now 14 clubs in the EFL that have spent the same amount of time competing in the Premier League as 14 clubs currently in the top division, contributing equally to the value creation of English football along the way.
The 14 currently in it are going to get £1.9billion in media revenue this year. The 14 who are with us will get £90m. It’s just madness.
SHARON BRITTAN: I find it utterly astonishing that the Premier League have not made us an offer.
I have worked in the commercial world for most of my life. I work through communication, collaboration, negotiation, getting things done and everybody benefits from it.
It is staggering to me that the Premier League have not been able to work together with the EFL for the greater good of the game.
CHARLES GRANT: We have to believe we can move freely up and down the divisions.
That gives football life and oxygen and sustains what the Premier League is all about. The pictures on the walls at this club are of England players, Wales players, people who have come from this football club and worked their way through a system.
The system isn’t working now. The Premier League has become self-centred.
The model has to be sustainable and the people at the top are responsible for that.
America has to support the world in defence. It’s the No 1 nation on the planet. The same is true of the Premier League.
You can’t be isolationist about this, but that is what they are and we must persuade them otherwise. If you destroy the EFL, which is a competitive part of the football pyramid, then the Premier League is worth nothing.
OLIVER HOLT: What do you want the independent regulator to look like when it arrives?
DOUG KING: There have been some bad owners who have destroyed community football clubs, Coventry being one, and you have to look at these things more carefully.
That is one reason we need a regulator. I want the regulator to be brave. It must say to the Premier League: ‘We don’t want to destroy your brand, but we need to resolve many years of a huge, widening chasm where a lot of clubs have been destroyed.’
SHARON BRITTAN: We don’t want angst. I’d like the regulator to support the EFL and the Premier League, to make it work for everyone. The Premier League have acknowledged they have opened conversations, but then they do nothing. How is that allowed to happen?
If all routes have been exhausted and no deal has been made, someone has to have the power to enforce a financial resolution.
CHARLES GRANT: We are in a position where the regulator must be the answer because we know the alternative doesn’t work. It has to make it better and I think it will.
RICK PARRY: I’m excited about the regulator and happy to work with it. It is not perfect but it never will be. This is a huge opportunity. We should probably be ashamed of the fact that football could not get its act together because we have had 30 years to do it and failed. It’s going to be independent and we have got ourselves to blame, but there is self-interest at every level.
It is not just self-interest in the Premier League. Imagining we could do a deal with them has been one of our greatest frustrations.
How do we do a deal? What have we got to negotiate with? We can’t go anywhere. We can’t say to the Premier League: ‘If we don’t do a deal with you, we’ll go off to the Bundesliga.’ We are stuck where we are.
The idea that we have got some form of commercial leverage is just not there. We are excited that finally we have got the bill and we are working hard on getting our own house in order.
We see the Bundesliga has got five clubs in the Champions League and the Premier League hasn’t. Its wage bill is two-and-a-half times the Bundesliga’s, so in Germany they are spending it well and effectively.
If we had got our 25 per cent of revenue that we were pushing for four years ago, that would have cost the Premier League £300m in 2021 prices. Over the four years in which they have been prevaricating, they have increased wages by £800m so to say they cannot afford to help us is just lack of desire.
The regulator is only going to deal with financial regulation. It is not running football. For financial regulation, you need independence. The regulator will have that. It will also have statutory powers — the owners’ and directors’ test, the ability to compel people to produce information, the threat of imprisonment if they don’t — so it’s a regulator with teeth. There will be increased transparency.
Football loves to live in the dark and darkness is the enemy of good governance, so having that greater transparency is a big plus. Well-run clubs have nothing to fear and we can get on with running the game.
It’s all about making clubs sustainable. There are two elements to sustainability — one is redistribution, to make them solvent, and the second is better regulation, to make sure they are not profligate and waste the money.
OLIVER HOLT: Many in football seem astonished by the Premier League’s unwillingness to do a deal, especially as the expectation is that the regulator will hit them far harder financially.
CHARLES KING: They couldn’t get their act together, so they’ve decided to defer it. The regulator has got a good solid brief. I think when the regulator looks at what has gone on over the last few years, they will say to the Premier League, ‘Wow, why didn’t you do a deal?’
OLIVER HOLT: They’re clearly lobbying the hell out of Keir Starmer and the Labour Party.
SHARON BRITTAN: That makes my blood boil. I don’t play political games. Maybe the Premier League clubs aren’t being briefed correctly.
OLIVER HOLT: What did you make of the announcement by the Premier League and the FA that they were scrapping FA Cup replays?
SHARON BRITTAN: Diabolical communication yet again. Staggering. It shows you how out of touch they are. To think someone would think that’s good for our game. I can’t even comprehend it. It was catastrophic leadership.
CHARLES GRANT: Really grubby. It was self-serving and breathtaking.
DOUG KING: It was odd that it was just chucked out. It wasn’t joined up.
CHARLES GRANT: We used to have an FA that looked after the whole game, but what we had in that announcement was a detachment from reality. It summed up why we have to have a regulator.
OLIVER HOLT: Are you optimistic about the future of the English game?
SHARON BRITTAN: I’m an eternal optimist. I would like to be optimistic that governance conducts itself in the right way. To have not got round the table some time ago to conclude the deal is staggering. Somebody, somewhere, needs to be accountable for that.
In the EFL, we see ourselves as custodians of these clubs. As a custodian, we have a responsibility to do the right thing. In the Premier League, it’s a business.
CHARLES GRANT: I’m optimistic. We know our place in football. If things aren’t done over the next year or two, I fear that the Premier League, the goose that lays the golden egg, will die and it won’t be us that kills it. It will kill itself. I hope that can be avoided.
DOUG KING: I’m realistic. Sport content globally is valued. Interest is moving really strongly. We have massive teams with massive fan-bases in the EFL. I like those trends.
If I was in the Premier League, I would be speaking like this. I wouldn’t turn poacher. The top people in any industry have a duty to make sure that things work below them.
Tesco or Lidl, they can’t monopolise it because they take all the pricing power and then the customer ultimately will tell them where to go and find an alternative route. That is why monopolies need control, they all fight amongst themselves.
Let’s go to the regulator and we will take our chances.
RICK PARRY: There is a lot of good stuff happening in the EFL. Attendances are rising. The paradox of the Championship is that it is hopelessly anti-competitive but it is incredibly entertaining.
We are doing well with our own TV deals so we are doing well with self-help and are valued by Sky. The regulator will definitely help and getting it through by the end of this parliament is going to be transformational in terms of redistribution. We are heading now for the commencement of the State of Football Review, which we are hugely optimistic about.
It is the first time somebody has done a proper independent study to look at the facts and the economics. It will take a lot of our arguments on board in terms of the imbalance caused by parachutes. There is nothing for us to fear about the owners’ and directors’ test being more rigorous and transparent if we have good owners.
SHARON GRANT: The FA is a great disappointment, isn’t it? The game of football has been let down. It deserves better. The Premier League and the FA seem to have failed the game.
The question is how do you resolve that? The answer is reform and reform is coming.