Mark Kleinman: English football’s New Deal heads into injury time
Mark Kleinman is Sky News’ City editor and the man who gets the Square Mile talking in his Morning Wire column
New season, new deal? As England football supporters dust themselves down from the disappointment of yet another latter stages defeat on the international stage, their attention switches back to the domestic game.
The most important early season skirmishes may, however, be taking place in the boardroom rather than the pitch. After more than three years of on-off negotiations, a formal deal to distribute part of elite clubs’ income has finally been presented by the Premier League to the English Football League.
As I revealed on Sky News last month, an agreement would represent one of the most significant moments for the game since the Premier League was launched in 1992.
Yet it may still be elusive. The EFL’s immediate reaction was to call the terms inadequate and demand yet more money. The proposal would deliver roughly £1.5bn extra over ten years, funded partly by increasing the domestic transfer levy from four per cent to six per cent. A requirement for the recipients of the money to spend a minimum 20 per cent on infrastructure is sensible, given well-founded concerns that the proceeds would simply find themselves funnelled straight into players’ and agents’ pockets.
A £20m lifeboat fund designed to aid any EFL team which falls into administration feels like a token gesture, though; a vehicle of that size won’t be enough if clubs continue to get into trouble at their current rate.
The decade-long duration of the New Deal also looks engineered to elicit a favourable response from the Independent Football Regulator – although it might also set a dangerous precedent for the Premier League if an agreement proves elusive and the watchdog steps in to use its backstop powers.
So far, a straw poll of football insiders suggests that the EFL’s chair, Rick Parry, is likely to hold out for a bigger sum. Time will tell if that stance is a sensible one, but relying on a regulatory intervention may yet prove to be a dangerous tactic. As we saw during the World Cup, leaving decisions to a supposedly impartial arbiter – whether it’s a VAR official or the IFR – doesn’t always produce a desirable result.
Betfred shop closures are a warning to Burnham
How about this for Manchesterism? Fred Done, the ebullient Betfred co-founder and chairman, might not quite have carried out his pre-Budget threat to close all 1,200 or so of his high street shops in the aftermath of industry tax rises, but the company’s announcement that it is bringing the shutters down on more than 10 per cent of its outlets is damaging enough.
Salford-born, Done now ranks as Britain’s biggest taxpayer thanks to the gambling empire he’s built over a 60-year period. He should, one might think, be exactly the kind of entrepreneur hailed by Andy Burnham.
Strangely, though, the new prime minister has been making hostile noises towards the gambling industry, which seems about as much in favour with the new administration as the water industry.
For bookmakers such as Done, the government’s treatment of the sector is fast rendering the viability of their store estates questionable. Given the preponderance of footfall data demonstrating that gamblers who visit their local shops go on to spend more money in neighbouring retailers, designing policy which hastens those outlets’ closure also seems an oddity from a prime minister who claims he wants to reverse the decline of Britain’s high streets.
Betfred’s closure of 132 shops is probably only the tip of the iceberg. Rising gambling levies and the soaring cost of retail employment since Rachel Reeves’s misguided raid on employers’ national insurance have created a vortex of pain for high street bookies. I suspect Done’s threat to close all his shops was always intended as a bit of hyperbole, but unless it eases the pressure on the industry, Burnham’s high street revival plan has prospects about as healthy as a Liz Truss premiership.
West Ham row has Staveley and Kretinsky in promotion scrap
Given the quality of the fare that West Ham fans had to endure at the London Stadium last season, perhaps it’s for the best that the club’s owners appear to be playing chess rather than football as the new campaign approaches.
Daniel Kretinsky, the Hammers’ third-largest shareholder with a 24.8 per cent stake, performed an apparently crafty trick by offloading 2.2 per cent of the club to an ally, Jakub Havrlant. By selling it Kretinsky believes he has put himself in position to buy out the Gold family’s entire 25.1 per cent holding without triggering the 50 per cent ownership threshold that could force him to buy out other shareholders at a much higher valuation.
That valuation would, I’m told, work out somewhere in the region of £1bn – far higher than the £600m level at which the Gold stake is going to change hands, which itself would be a record for a Championship club. If Kretinsky’s ploy were to pay off, it could thwart Amanda Staveley’s return to English football after she had agreed a deal to buy the Gold interest in West Ham.
West Ham have done well to retain much of the squad relegated from the top flight in May, but days before the new campaign gets underway, off-field events again risk becoming a distraction for Hammers supporters as they seek to make their Championship stay a brief one.