Everton, one of the self-proclaimed paupers in the Premiership complains because they can’t afford to buy new players. Southend last brought a player 2 years ago and I think we paid for him with tuppence and a bag of old rope. We struggle to pay our staff, and by staff I mean the guys earning minimum wage to flip burgers.

My point is this; there is already a massive gulf between the lower league teams and the Premiership and yet in the past couple of weeks we have had the following from them at the top;

A call to make sure the top teams (presumably Ian Ayre means teams that don’t qualify for the Champions League) get significantly more of the foreign television money than the rest.

A call by foreign owners to get rid of relegation and promotion.

The passing of the Elite Player Performance Plan

Fortunately the first two are just wishful thinking but it gives you a little window into the attitude at the top. What this says to me is that the Premiership owners and chairmen are not interested in football. They don’t care about football at all. They are not interested in sport or in a fair competition. What they see is a cash cow, one they want to milk by turning the Premiership from a competition into a Hollywood film in which Goliath always wins. They don’t want drama, they want it to be predictable, a graph that forever points skywards.

My old school had a slogan, ‘make our best better’ – I always had a problem with this slogan. Never mind the best, what about the rest? What about all the people that NEED the help, shouldn’t you be helping them?

That is what is happening with the Premiership right now, they are doing everything in their substantial power to maximise their profit margins and shit on everyone below them. This brings us nicely to the passing of the EPPP.

After our poor showing at the World Cup the FA and the Premier League did a bit of thinking and asked why, with the quality of the Premiership as it is, are we so crap when it comes to our national team? They came up with the Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP). Although the EPPP will affect every league club, it was drawn up by members and employees of just the Premier League. Of the Premier League only six teams were represented in discussions, with Arsenal, Manchester United and Chelsea among them. To call this representative of the whole football league is to call the stork representative of an apple.

Without going into the details of the EPPP, partly because I can find no publication of it on the FA’s website and partly because this post is already in danger of a TLDR tag, the two key points for lower league football fans are;

Clubs with Category 3 or lower academies are barred from working with players until they reached the age of 12. (Category 1&2 academies must have a minimum of 17 staff and will cost around 2mil a year to run)

Under the new compensation formula the selling club would simply receive a set figure for each year the player has spent in their academy. For example, when Everton signed the 16-year-old defender Luke Garbutt from Leeds United in 2009 a tribunal ordered them to pay an initial £600,000; under the new system this would have been capped at a maximum of £131,000.

Other than a few Premiership clubs no one can afford to run these category 1 and 2 academies. So how convenient is it that the EPPP gives these elite teams the pick of the players before any of the other teams get a chance. Under old rules teams were limited to players within a 90 mile radius so there was some protection but that’s been scrapped as well so now the elite can come and steal your kids no matter what part of the country you are in. There is no longer anything local about your local club but that shouldn’t bother Arsenal fans.

Should a young player slip through the dolphin unfriendly net and, heaven forbid, end up learning their trade from the bottom up then the Premier League elite have stacked the cards in their favour here as well.

Under the old system lower league clubs have been able to argue their case and receive fair compensation for their players. It isn’t unheard of for teams to claim six and seven-figure sums when the Premiership comes a poaching. No more, under the new proposals teams with a Category 3 academy will receive £12.5k per year. So Southend, who recently lost youths to Fulham and Liverpool, will go from being compensated with six-figure sums to being lucky to claim £50k.

Teams like Southend rely on receiving decent compensation for the hard work they have put in developing players. We really can’t afford to run a youth academy but we do so because when players come through the system that are good enough the money we receive helps to keep the club alive. Manchester United turnover some £300mil a year, what is it to them if they pay 50 or 500 thousand pounds for a player? Yet this money keeps our clubs alive. We are not talking about lower league clubs trying to hold Premiership clubs to ransom, we are talking about survival.

Speaking of holding clubs to ransom; in order to make sure the EPPP was passed the Premier League withheld part of its annual solidarity payment to the Football League since the summer, until the motion was passed. So in order to get their way, the rich Premier League blackmailed the lower leagues into agreeing to give away their youth team players at a massively reduced rate by withholding money they knew some clubs could not afford to survive without. The word you are looking for is scum. Total and utter scum.

These new proposals will help no one in the long run. Youth development centres will close, lower league football clubs may go under. In the end there will be less young players coming through the system and English football will suffer. Sure we will make our best better but what about the rest of us?

As a Southend United fan I have bitter memories of the Taylor report. In the early 90’s we were establishing ourselves as a second division club (now Championship). To come in line with the Taylor report Southend had to convert Roots Hall to an all-seater stadium by 1994 and found it difficult to invest in players and the stadium at the same time. Our squad suffered as a result and we lost momentum and were relegated in the 96/97 season. We wouldn’t reach those heights again until Steve Tilson won promotion two seasons running from 2004/06. It is unsporting to directly blame the Taylor report for Southend’s downfall but it is fair to say it was a contributing factor.

Promotion for smaller clubs into the top tiers of the football league is difficult but staying there is even harder. It takes some clever investment in the squad, some decent loan signings, a committed squad, a manager that can get the most out of his players and on top of all of that a bit of luck. When I think not that long ago we were happily taking 3 points off Blackpool it really highlights what a fantastic job Ian Holloway has done at that club.

As it stands Scunthorpe is the only club in the top two tiers of the football league to still have terracing. The rules are relaxed slightly for clubs that win promotion and have terracing. But by the time Scunthorpe reach their third consecutive season in the Championship the terraces have to go. This is a ridiculous state of affairs; a club in 23^rd place, struggling to avoid relegation with an average attendance of just over 5000 (about half that of the second lowest attendance in the Championship), not only have to try and invest in the squad but, should they succeed in staying in the league, also have to invest in converting their terraces to seating to satisfy a report written 21 years ago.

It is no surprise that the Premier League are apposed to terracing. I suspect the main reason being money, you can’t really charge as much for standing, but they aren’t going to admit that. Premier League chief spokesman Dan Johnson said:

“Our view is that the benefits of all-seater stadia far outweigh the return of standing areas. They have led to more women and more children attending the games and no matter how safe standing can be made, seating is always safer. We will not be encouraging the Government to change the law.”

So the Premier League’s argument is essentially ‘won’t somebody please think of the children’ and no matter how safe it is standing-up it isn’t going to be as safe as sitting down. You can see their point, people might trip over or their legs might get tired or something. It’s a wonder humans have been standing on two legs for 200,000 years without collapsing in a fit of panic from all the danger this upright position clearly presents. Thank Cthulhu the Premier League are there to make sure when we are in their stadiums of false dreams we can at least watch Arsenal fail to break down Stoke in the comfort of a cushioned seat lest we fall over from all the excitement.

Opponents of standing areas will often cite the Hillsborough disaster as an example for why standing areas aren’t safe. This is a lie; the Taylor report (pdf link) primary blamed overcrowding for the Hillsborough disaster and also pointed to crowd misbehavior (not Hillsborough), bad policing and poor stadium design as contributing factors in similar disasters. It is not standing areas that are dangerous, it is poorly controlled stadiums that are.

There is a reasonable debate to be had about terracing. How you manage and police standing areas, what the demand is and the technicalities of building a modern terrace. Keeping those terraces safe is obviously important but the notion that terraces are fundamentally unsafe should be sent to the scrapheap where it belongs.  We should look to the Bundesliga where case studies could be made of how terracing can work. If you think that somehow British crowds are culturally different to our German neighbours then there are plenty of concerts happening in stadiums throughout the UK where people are standing, jumping, cheering, singing and dancing in the very stadiums standing is banned during the football matches they are purposely built for. During a football game you’re going to see that kind of out of control behavior only a few times every 90 minutes if you’re either very lucky, fortunate enough to support someone good or if you’re playing Hereford.

The Football Supporters’ Federation (FSF) believes that football supporters should have the choice to watch football from a safe standing area, if they so wish, and I support them. If you agree, get over to their website and sign the FSF’s petition.

Update

@TSR_Blogs kindly sent me this picture of West­falen­sta­dion, home to Borussia Dortmund. He tells me that this 25,000 ‘Südtribüne’ ter­race is the largest terrace in Europe. And as you can see from the picture it is glorious!

People standing watching football and not getting injured. A picture the Premier League would have you believe is impossible.

Winners: Brazil

England: Semis

Golden Boot: David Villa

Great Expectations Fail: Ronaldo

Team to Flop: Italy

Best Scoring Average (gpg): Spain

Highest Scoring Team (over whole tournament): Spain

Best Defensive Record (least goals conceded per game): Germany

Player of the Tournament: Rooney

Best disciplinary record (cards per game): South Africa

Worst disciplinary record (cards per game): Argentina

For the record if all these come true I may abandon the sceptical community for the far more lucrative psychic one. I’ve never really got that though, how psychics also seem to be associated with divination, and then how would you tell if something is going to happen to someone or if you are just seeing something that has already happened to them? It all seems very messy; maybe it’s all just a load of old bollocks.

Feel free to add your predictions below.

I first became aware of this when one of his players, Van Persie, wanted to visit the Serbian doctor Marijana Kovacevic whose treatment involves rubbing placenta into the wounded area. The efficacy of this treatment is unproven and is without doubt firmly in the ‘alternative medicine’ realm. Despite being sceptical of alternative medicine Arsene Wegner indicated his knowledge of the placebo effect and its possible positive influence on his player’s psychological well being during his recovery while shrewdly failing to endorse the treatment itself;

“I asked my medical people if there was any danger to the treatment and, when they said there wasn’t, I was happy to let him go,” said Wenger. “Van Persie wanted to go. It’s sometimes psychological as well, for the players to feel that they can be helped. It can be a problem of confidence. But since I’ve been in sport a muscle problem takes 21 days [to heal], a damaged ligament is four weeks, and I’ve never seen it any shorter. You can only play with injections and there’s always a recurrence of the muscle injury.”

Since then I have been paying more attention to Wenger’s comments and he has not disappointed. During the Liverpool game at the weekend Wegner made a particularly impassioned team talk at half time when Arsenal were trailing 1 – 0, they subsequently went on to score two goals and win the game. The media and his players have credited this team talk with the victory but Wenger is all to aware of the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy and was keen to play down the significance of his emotional outburst;

“Maybe if I had not said a word we would have won the game as well,” he said. “Sometimes the emotional side overtakes the rational but you cannot live only with the emotional. You have to be rational most of the time.”

The second half of that statement wouldn’t be amiss as Jay Novella’s quote of the week on The Skeptics Guide to the Universe.

So what is the point of all this you rightly ask. I think it is important to take note of scepticism where you least expect it. Football attracts a massive audience and Wenger’s comments will have been read by millions of football fans around the world. He might not even realise it but he is bringing a sceptical view point to people that might not have been exposed to it before in the world of sport that is rife with superstition for this Arsene Wenger is worth praising.