Rage Online

At first glance this has to be one of the few proposals New Labour has ever come up with that I agree with.

Something has to be done about how the free market is hungrily gorging on our national sport - examples go right through the leagues from the Glazers, Liverpool, Portmouth to the like of Chester and Weymouth.

Whether the proposals outlined here will make any difference or will work (never underestimitate the power of 'legality' when the government announces any proposal these days that in any way effect the concerns of the 'free market') are a different matter.

Yes it might stop the next set of Glazers taking over but of course we know that the heavy dead hand of the market has its fingers in many more footballing pies then just the ownership of the clubs. Fundamental to most of the problems stem from the way the Premiership is essentially run by Murdoch, who has no interest in grass routes or lower league football, the same Murdoch who both main parties do their level best to climb up the back passage of prior and post general elections.

&quottomoufc&quot wrote:At first glance this has to be one of the few proposals New Labour has ever come up with that I agree with.

Something has to be done about how the free market is hungrily gorging on our national sport - examples go right through the leagues from the Glazers, Liverpool, Portmouth to the like of Chester and Weymouth.

Whether the proposals outlined here will make any difference or will work (never underestimitate the power of 'legality' when the government announces any proposal these days that in any way effect the concerns of the 'free market') are a different matter.

Yes it might stop the next set of Glazers taking over but of course we know that the heavy dead hand of the market has its fingers in many more footballing pies then just the ownership of the clubs. Fundamental to most of the problems stem from the way the Premiership is essentially run by Murdoch, who has no interest in grass routes or lower league football, the same Murdoch who both main parties do their level best to climb up the back passage of prior and post general elections.

The very same Murdoch that is poised to buy the BBC if the Torys win the election and decided to sell it off, which is the rumour in media circles at present. Allegedly (wouldn't want Boris to get sued now, would we...!).

Save BBC 6music.

The problem with the Glazers and United is that they bought a club with no debt, by raising capital secured against the property of the club. This is absolutely fine - everyone with a mortgage is in the same situation.

What they then did was transfer this debt into the name of the club, and this is where the trouble lies - there's now no risk to them personally, and massive risk to the club. The deadly part of this (and this is where it's the idiot bankers who put these deals together) is that should the club have difficulty, then it's value drops - the very value that the debts are secured against.

You all know my franchise ideas by now - in summary a controlling body (sadly, the FA) owns the rights to every club's name and position, and has the option to remove it from an owner (under limited circumstances).

BTW, the Tories won't sell off the BBC, that's just scaremongering by the Common Purpose lefties. More likely they will stop the license fee going directly to the Beeb, and divert a percentage to the free market of producing public television. This would likely be a good thing - competition drives value for money right up.

&quotrecordmeister&quot wrote:http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010 ... clubs-fans

So Man Utd/Liverpool/Arsenal is put up for sale for £1 billion and the fans have an option to come up with the £1 billion first. I wonder what the likely outcome of that would be? If fans could come up with the money to buy their football clubs then plenty would have been sold to them already. The only way for fans to own their clubs is for fans to form the clubs from scratch and keep the ownership structure as they move up the pyramid.

As for the stake of UP TO 25% to be handed to the fans - How about 0.1% - that qualifies as UP TO 25%.

Anybody would think there was an election in the offing with an announcement like that ..... Oh..... hold on a minute....

&quotSmileyMan&quot wrote:The problem with the Glazers and United is that they bought a club with no debt, by raising capital secured against the property of the club. This is absolutely fine - everyone with a mortgage is in the same situation.

What they then did was transfer this debt into the name of the club, and this is where the trouble lies - there's now no risk to them personally, and massive risk to the club. The deadly part of this (and this is where it's the idiot bankers who put these deals together) is that should the club have difficulty, then it's value drops - the very value that the debts are secured against.

You all know my franchise ideas by now - in summary a controlling body (sadly, the FA) owns the rights to every club's name and position, and has the option to remove it from an owner (under limited circumstances).

BTW, the Tories won't sell off the BBC, that's just scaremongering by the Common Purpose lefties. More likely they will stop the license fee going directly to the Beeb, and divert a percentage to the free market of producing public television. This would likely be a good thing - competition drives value for money right up.

Lisence payer's money already goes to the free market. You'll notice that at the end of prgrammes it is not the BBC that makes the programme - rather a private production company. Now the BBC has absolutly no choice in this matter - it is forced to do it by the government. Therefore millions and millions of license payer's money every year goes not into making of programmes, but to the shareholders of private production companies.

If you think introducing the private sector into the public sectoris a good thing have a good long look at Railtrack, National Express East Coast, Tubelines, the gas companies, at the Carphone Warehouse bidding to run secondary schools and at Oxford City Council having to bid against private operators for the provision of refuse collection. Billions and Billions of wasted public money. But of course we need more cuts, don't we?

Football is not a commodity to be bought and sold. We have to stand by that principle or fantastic non-league games like Stevenage - Oxford tomorrow may be lost forever.