Premier League given a grim warning by the FA Cup fairytales
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Version 0 of 1. It was a weekend for football’s frog princes and ugly ducklings, when every fairytale seemed to come true. Bradford’s rags-over-riches comeback at Stamford Bridge provided the FA Cup with its greatest Cinderella story for years, but Middlesbrough’s surgical giant-slaying of Manchester City will linger in the memory too. While at the Abbey Stadium and Anfield, all the Manchester United and Liverpool huff and puff still couldn’t blow down the Cambridge United and Bolton defences. And all this just days after Deloitte revealed that, for the first time, all the clubs in the Premier League are on its list of the world’s 40 highest-earning clubs. It was as if football’s storywriters were with one breath saying: “Look at all these riches swashing around the top flight,” and, with the next, bemoaning: “Is this the best you can do?” Of course it was a freakish set of results: the footballing equivalent of sticking a quid in a one-arm bandit and hitting the jackpot. Even so, given the Premier League clubs’ increasingly fattened budgets compared to the rest of Europe, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to ask why its top teams aren’t better – particularly given that the golden age between 2004-05 and 2007-08, when Liverpool and Manchester United won the European Cup, Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea were beaten finalists and Middlesbrough made the Europa League final, is long gone. Since then, however, La Liga has taken charge: winning six European trophies to the Premier League’s two and the Bundesliga’s one. Since the 2008-09 season, La Liga clubs also have a higher win rate (52%) in Europe compared to the Premier League and Bundesliga (both 49%). Real Madrid and Barcelona dominance – on the balance sheet and on the pitch – has a lot do with it but the Premier League’s record against Spanish sides over this period is unimpressive: played 47, won 12, drawn 16, lost 19. We have to be careful here, given that most English clubs don’t care a hoot about the Europa League until the knockout stages. Even so, it is not hard to find voices within the game who believe that Premier League teams could strive harder to be better. One executive at a Premier League club cautioned against reading too much into English clubs’ performances in Europe – in his view, the more equitable distribution of Premier League TV money compared to La Liga made it harder for English clubs to coast before European matches because of the greater competition. However when it came to English clubs’ spending habits he was blunt. Too many teams, he believed, were “pissing away” money on transfer fees and wages and didn’t do enough to develop homegrown talent. An English coach had similar concerns. “Football is still too much about the old boys’ network and buzzwords – DNA is the latest – and not enough about finding best practice,” he said. “We spend more money on transfers because the players we produce are not capable or ready.” He pointed to Bayern Munich’s model of setting annual targets for getting homegrown players into their first-team squad and into other Bundesliga clubs, and suggested more English clubs should do likewise. But he also thought that English football was too complacent and forgiving. “Why do we all accept that Manchester City need time to ‘progress’ in Europe considering all the investment in the club?” he asked. “And why should Manchester Utd be in transition given they have spent £150m this season?” My colleague Sid Lowe tells of conversations with Spanish managers who remain unconvinced by how attacking football is coached in England. More than one of them wants a move to the Premier League, not only for the experience but because they believe they would stand out when pitched against English coaches who aren’t tactically or technically at their level. One Spanish agent recently told Lowe that even after Cesc Fàbregas, Santi Cazorla and David Silva’s successes, the most common question English clubs ask him about a potential La Liga recruit is “how tall is he”? Could the abundance of money also be stifling innovation? Blake Wooster, who worked for Prozone before co-founding 21st Club, which works with teams across Europe, thinks so. “I’m a big believer that constraint breeds creativity, and some overseas clubs are overperforming because they have to think in more innovative ways in order to get an edge,” he says. “We already know that – in the Premier League it is possible for the ‘poorer’ clubs to achieve an edge by thinking in different ways – Southampton, Everton and West Ham have all shown this over recent seasons.” In Wooster’s view, the disconnect between revenue and performance shows there are inefficiencies in the way Premier League clubs are run. In England, he notes, the culture is to spend revenue on new talent, whereas the best overseas clubs cultivate and develop players, either through necessity or because they are smart enough to know that this strategy is a recipe for sustainable success. But how many Premier League clubs are doing this? Or striving for every coaching, analytics and diet edge? Instead, as the transfer window nears its close, the discussions fall back on which players should be brought in. They are seeking a panacea but, too often, it does not even have a placebo effect. |