The end of football as we know it?

‘How long can football clubs survive without the return of fans in the stadium?’, asks the BBC website, reporting on how COVID-19 will bring about “the collapse of the national league structure that we have known for over 100 years”. EFL and National League clubs are “preparing to “cease playing and put their business into administration”, says a letter signed by a group of well known football folk, including…er…Robbie Savage. The main point they are making is that given that crowds will not be allowed to attend professional football games for the foreseeable future and indeed the unforeseeable future because they have been banned from attending by the government, the government should hand over a wad of cash to help them survive.

It’s obvious that many clubs will go to the wall with no income. Hardly any of them make a profit in the first place so having no income to reduce the losses will soon make things unsustainable. Unless the historical debt and weekly losses are covered by a wealthy individual, as with my old club, Bristol Rovers, who can not only plug financial gaps but also finance lucrative new signings and pay for a new training ground, most clubs will be stuffed.

The culture secretary Oliver Dowden has an alternative suggestion: let the Premier League give lower league clubs a bail out, hinting that he is not going to offer clubs a bean. And, you might think, he has a point. Thanks to overseas and UK TV rights, the loss of crowds on a matchday barely dents the richer clubs. Look at Chelsea, for example, bankrolled by a wealthy Russian who lives in Israel. Despite the likely absence of paying spectators, he simply writes cheques for hundreds of millions of pounds to boost Frank Lampard’s squad. The Abu Dhabi group do much the same thing at Manchester City. I doubt that these clubs will want to use their riches to prop up the lower league, particularly given they have wages to pay.

Spurs provide another stark example. They’ve just signed Gareth Bale from Real Madrid on a weekly wage of £600,000, whilst Harry Kane has to struggle to make ends meet on a mere £200,000. With outgoings like these, there won’t be a great deal left to help clubs lower down the pyramid. Anyway, let’s not forget that the Premier League isn’t like the EFL or the FA. It was set up not to nurture and develop football: its sole aim is to make money for the clubs who own it. And the whole point of its very existence is to redirect money to the clubs at the top away from smaller clubs. Rarely have the big boys shown more than a token interest in lower league riff raff, as they probably see it, so why should they now?

Oh what fun it would be if the Premier League was to chuck money at the lower leagues. Would they just hand out cheques or would someone decide who actually need the money? Would a club like Bristol City, owned by a billionaire, get the same assistance as a club without a pot to piss in? If your club is lucky enough to have a benefactor, do they really need a subsidy? Good luck working that one out.

With the government ending the furlough scheme and so throwing hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, on the dole, how would the public look at the government who were then funding football clubs? I’m not saying they shouldn’t – after all, it is the government that has stopped fans attending – but I wouldn’t envy the person deciding who had what. My guess is the government won’t give them anything.

In reality, we know that there will almost certainly be no fans at games this season and who is to say things will be back to normal for the 2021/22 season? It all hinges on COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, about which there are no guarantees at all and reading today’s reports, it’s entirely possible that a vaccine, if we get one that works, might not be fully rolled out until 2023.

Before this deadly virus arrived, football was already in a mess. Many clubs are hugely in debt and many of them have ownership models that are not ideal. The money is all at the top and very little trickles down. Football, certainly in the lower leagues, will certain be slimmed down in terms of wages, squad sizes and even ambition.

Many football clubs will not survive without the return of fans in the stadium not least because stadiums will be empty for the next six months at least and potentially for much longer than that. And for me, football without fans is nothing.