Premier League – A runaway success, but at what cost?

The feeling around many teams in the lower leagues, is simply that the Premier League doesn’t care about anyone else.

It’s an elitist group of clubs where the majority hope to better themselves, but sit back knowing that the top four or five clubs will just get fatter and fatter, taking the money as it comes.

It also couldn’t care less if the England national team does well. This just doesn’t matter to them. What matters is brand, marketing and money. Nothing else. If there’s a scheme or an FA project, then as long as it happens in League Two and away from the upper echelons, that’s fine.

Mark Lawn, Bradford City co-owner, has hit out at chief executive Richard Scudamore for ‘bastardising’ the top flight. He claims the financial rules have made it almost impossible for a club to win promotion through the lower divisions and reach the richest division in world football.

Lawn told Starsport: “I don’t think any smaller club will get into the Premier League. The Premier League have bastardised the whole league now.

“I think the new TV deal is obscene. Whatever money they (PL) give to the lower leagues, 80 per cent of it goes to the Championship.

“It’s ridiculous. It’s like a handicap for all the club below that level.”

The root cause of England’s failings is also why the broadcasters’ £5.1bn won’t benefit the sport. By selling off the Premier League the FA has turned itself into something unique: a governing body that has no control over its elite performers. Foreign owners and players who benefit from the TV millions aren’t really the problem. It’s the fact that the Premier League clubs and their squads are an independent entity, divorced in any meaningful sense from football as a sport.

On what basis is that money dished out? The Premier League used to invest in research about the changes in class, gender, race and location of the fans. This was quietly abandoned five or six years ago.

Could it be that they didn’t like the answers: the fan base was becoming older, whiter, maler? Meanwhile, participation in 11-a-side football, the bedrock of the sport, continues to plummet. Football needs money to survive, but there is no evidence that more than a token investment will reach the sporting end of the game. Instead rich clubs, rich players and their rich agents will go on getting wealthier. Never mind the rest.

Are fans bothered? Provided the well-paid players deliver what is expected of them – continuing Premier League status, victories over detested rivals, cup runs and trophies – the level of discontent will be low. There will be rumblings, though probably not enough to change the rotten set-up that football has become.

The gap between the leagues will widen and lower league teams will continue to struggle. According to Dagenham & Redbridge manager John Still, it will also be the end of the cup upset. He said: “If a League Two side beats a League One team it is not too much of a shock. Sometimes maybe a Championship side, but to beat a Premier League club – I am not sure it is going to happen that much now. Their squads are so big. They can make seven or eight changes and they are all internationals.”

The bleakness of the scenario remains inextricably linked to the chasm in wealth. Dagenham expected to earn about £100,000 from their trip to Goodison Park in this year’s F A Cup, but Everton, like all top-flight clubs, will bank about £80million when the new TV deal kicks in this summer.

The Premier League to some people has prostituted itself to television, the loss of Saturday 3pm kick-offs, the abandonment of English identity, the decline of the England team, rampant corporatisation, rising ticket prices and the exclusion of the working class.

In other ways, the Premier League has been a total success story, but for its own gain, of course. Deals have transformed stadium facilities, established the Premier League as a global success story, created the conditions where our clubs have dominated Europe, encouraged clubs to reassume a position at the heart of their communities, brought an end to hooliganism and ended the era where clubs treated their supporters like animals.

It’s Chief Executive, Richard Scudamore once said in a Daily Mail interview when asked about the word greed: “I don’t like ‘greed’ because I don’t know what it means.” Really? Ask the remaining teams outside of the Premier League and they will tell you.

The disconnect between leagues that once shared a mutual existence has never been greater. The Premier League really doesn’t care what happens anywhere else in football and one day they may regret that.

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