Some football words from The Times re Premiership

Riches.... copy and pasted

"It is one of those statistics that takes you by surprise. How many teams have played in the top flight since it became the Premier League in 1992? Award yourself a chocolate biscuit if you even got close to 46.
One day you are in the big time, the next you are, well, Swindon Town, Barnsley, Oldham Athletic, Wimbledon, Coventry City, Sheffield United, Ipswich Town, Sheffield Wednesday or Middlesbrough. Or Leeds United, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Bradford City, Charlton Athletic or Birmingham City. You are no longer a top-flight club but a cautionary tale.
In an era when we are so often told that the league tables are effectively a rich list, that is a lot of unpredictability and diversity. It makes life interesting for the rest of us but the figure of 46 should send a chill through Sunderland, Fulham, West Ham United, Cardiff City and the rest of the struggling clubs as they chop managers and try to spend their way to safety.
Some of them will be preserving their Premier League status this January window but others will be digging a hole from which it may take years to escape.
On the surface, this volatility seems baffling, the opposite of what we might expect. Three clubs will always be relegated but the riches just from one season in the top division should provide a huge, long-term advantage.
A senior figure at Derby County explained recently that he would expect the club?s turnover to leap almost instantly from about ?17 million to ?110 million in the happy event of promotion. There would be a further ?60 million guaranteed over the next four years in parachute payments if they were to go down, almost doubling the present turnover.
You would imagine it is pretty hard to screw things up with that golden ticket. You would think there would be a top flight and another handful of clubs bouncing up and down but that number, 46, tells us a very different story of thwarted ambition, bad maths and, of course, mismanagement too.
Of the 39 clubs relegated since the turn of the century, 19 ? almost 50 per cent ? have never returned. Of the rest, nine came back at the first attempt but, of the other 11, it took on average five years, and five changes of manager, to regain top-flight status.
It does not take a club to live the dream extravagantly like Leeds or, as with Portsmouth, an owner suddenly turning off the money tap for relegation to feel like a life sentence. Not much has to go wrong for it all to go horribly wrong, which is what will be haunting West Ham, Fulham and Sunderland.
Take Ipswich Town. They came up for the 2000-01 campaign and finished an impressive and unexpected fifth. They were in Europe and celebrated with a spending spree of ?10 million on three foreign imports. What was the worst that could happen?
Matteo Sereni, a club-record signing at ?4.5 million, proved to be mediocre and was sold back to Italy for a knockdown price. Finidi George was a ?3.5 million flop, way past his Champions League-winning pomp and had to be paid off.
Ulrich Le Pen cost ?1.4 million and played 12 minutes of league football. Funds were misspent, results slumped and Ipswich were relegated the following season. They were in administration within two years and have not been seen in the top flight since. No one saw them unravelling when they were finishing above the Chelsea of Wise, Poyet, Le Saux, Hasselbaink and Desailly.
When the slide starts, panic sets in. Brains are scrambled. Perhaps we can detect signs in the present strugglers. At West Ham, they are reportedly ready to offer Joleon Lescott a wage of ?90,000 a week to sign from Manchester City and ?70,000 a week even if they are relegated. It would be an act of desperation.
Fulham have been a steady, well-run club for years yet, having mistakenly reprieved Martin Jol in the summer when the ownership changed, they are trying to reshape his squad under intense pressure with a highly experimental managerial regime.
West Brom have been the archetypal yo-yo club, which Jeremy Peace, the chairman, would take as proof of sound leadership. They have endured bad campaigns but never disastrous ones. Yet they look unusually vulnerable. Pepe Mel is experienced and resourceful judging by his CV but new to the Premier League.
Sunderland will spend years rectifying the foolishness of giving the job of head coach to Paolo Di Canio although they can console themselves that their high-earners have relegation clauses, reducing wages by as much as 40 per cent.
Even with that precaution, relegation can hit like a contagion, causing an owner to withdraw funding, players to sulk, managers to drown in their problems.
Nine clubs have gone into administration within five years of being relegated from the top flight and many others have only narrowly avoided that fate.
The new Financial Fair Play regulations are supposed to guard against the worst meltdowns but the reality is that promoted clubs, in these days of BT and Sky riches, have at least an extra ?70 million to blow on transfer fees and salaries when they enter the Premier League. The initial parachute payment of ?23 million can seem alarmingly small in comparison.
The disparity is the simplest explanation for that figure, which could grow to 47 clubs if Brighton & Hove Albion are promoted, and it offers plenty of food for thought as Fulham, Cardiff and others try to buy their way to safety in the next, fraught fortnight.
A couple of clever signings may save them but the stakes are high. The statistics show that when it goes wrong, it usually takes years to put right again.
As we know, only referees make mistakes in football and they do so deliberately to spoil everyone?s fun. So quite right that Mike Jones ? or ?blunder ref?as the headlines have it ? gets dropped from officiating in any Barclays Premier League match this weekend. He should count himself lucky not to have been tarred and feathered.
What was Jones thinking? What an outrage that when he saw a Newcastle United player clearly swaying to avoid a goalbound shot while standing in an offside position, the official concluded that there was probably interference.
Did he not instantly compute Joe Hart?s line of sight, using that clever graphic they had on BBC and Sky showing the journey of the ball through a crowd of bodies? Does his brain not have a slow-motion setting or at least an in-built replay device so that he could be totally sure Hart was distracted?
The next thing you know, Jones will be saying that he was forced to make a snap judgment based on one real-time viewing. Hopeless. Let?s keep him from any top-flight match this weekend, because then everything will be so much better."

Posted By: Mozzer, Jan 14, 10:28:30