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MARTIN SAMUEL: One problem with your franchise idea, Phil Gartside. No place for Bolton

Daily Mail 09th November 2009

Phil Gartside, the chairman of Bolton, had a bad idea; then he had a worse one. He started by suggesting Rangers and Celtic should join a new two-tier Premier League. Then he went back to the drawing board and returned with the same plan, only as a closed shop. No relegation from tier two.

A licence to be lousy, in other words. It would no longer matter how poor your team became, how hopeless your leadership, because you could never go down. It would turn English club football from a merit system to a franchise system overnight.

Yet Gartside has one problem. Why would anyone want Bolton in this package?

Gartside may think it is a simple case of pulling up the ladder after the 38th club and then parachuting in two from Glasgow, but he is talking about a revolution that would shape English football for decades.

Franchised sport is not random, but meticulously constructed. It cannot be right that Leeds are shut out and Barnsley admitted, just because at one peculiar moment in time their traditional standings are reversed.

Franchises are hand-picked, often on a geographical basis, and with two teams in Manchester certain to be selected, plus others to the north in Lancashire, would Bolton not be redundant in his brave new era?

Start at the top. Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal form the elite, with Rangers and Celtic.

Then the biggest of the also rans: Manchester City, Aston Villa, Tottenham, Everton, Newcastle, Sunderland, West Ham, Wolverhampton, Stoke, Blackburn, Derby and Sheffield United. Each of these teams have been attracting, on average, more than 25,000 fans to their home games this season. Now, with 22 places left, we have to start hand-picking.

Major cities and towns across a geographical spread must have representation, so in come Bristol City, Plymouth, Cardiff and Swansea in the west; Leicester, Coventry and Nottingham Forest in the Midlands; Southampton and Portsmouth in the south; Hull, Norwich and Ipswich in the east; Leeds, Preston North End, Middlesbrough and Blackpool in the north.

This leaves six. There seems to be a large gap between London and Bristol, which could be filled by Reading, while representation in the south of the capital could go to Charlton.

Traditionally passionate derby matches would have to be preserved, too, for the TV audience, affording places for Sheffield Wednesday and Birmingham.

Now there are two. It would seem churlish not to include Fulham, who only fall 212 fans short of the 25,000 benchmark, while Bradford is Britain?s sixth largest urban area, with a population bigger than Liverpool, Manchester or Bristol. These things are important when franchising. Bradford it is, then. Bolton miss out in an already saturated market in the North West. Sorry about that, Phil.

And sorry, too, to Wigan, Burnley, West Bromwich, Queens Park Rangers and all those other clubs who should make our franchised Premier League on merit, but are squeezed out once we allow greed to be the sole qualifying criterion.

This is what Gartside is doing with his new proposal.

He is not a visionary; he does not have what is best for football at heart. He is a frightened man because he sees what can happen to a club that falls out of the Premier League, and he fears it will be Bolton?s turn one day (and maybe this season with many more performances like the one against Aston Villa on Saturday).

He wants to guard against this, to shut the door quickly before it happens and he tosses in the cash bonus of an invite to Rangers and Celtic to sweeten the deal for friends who see only a bottom line.

He fails to comprehend that the only reason his club are even entertained in the top division is because English football rightly exists as a meritocracy, in which it is possible for Bolton to sit at the top table for ever, providing they are good enough, which is exactly as it should be.

Without relegation, without the potential to rise or fall, competitive sport has no meaning.

We curse the way the Champions League has created an elite quartet within our top division, so how would we feel if there was never the possibility of a club such as Wigan rising through four divisions, or Burnley returning to the top after an absence of 33 years?

Not to mention Bolton, who climbed from Division Four in 1988 to the Premier League in 1995, and are perfectly free to remain or go back again, which should concern Gartside considerably more than schemes to seal in the right to be rotten without consequence.

Posted By: Ralf Scrampton, Nov 11, 12:59:07