When the Premier League was put on an indefinite hiatus due to the Coronavirus outbreak, clubs were left in an odd limbo of having to organize everything other than the football upon which the sport itself relies for everything from entertainment, to employment and most importantly, money.
With the Premier League a huge operation to shut down mid-season, the immediacy of this need was accelerated by the infection of Mikel Arteta with the Coronavirus. Some clubs put their staff on immediate paid leave, such as Manchester United, who announced they would pay all staff in full for the duration. Other clubs such as Leeds United immediately set about raising funds for those affected by the crisis.
Other clubs didn’t act so quickly or ethically in doing the right thing. Liverpool only reneged on their furloughing of staff last week after calls by former players such as Jamie Carragher criticizing their initial decision. Until the last 24 hours, Tottenham Hotspur Chairman Daniel Levy had resisted multiple similar calls to make the right decision. Thankfully, in a statement made today, Spurs have announced that they will pay their non-playing staff through April and May in full.
The wording of that particular twist is important and limiting to the gesture.
“In our last update we said we would keep our position under review, especially in the context of revised budgets and cost cutting. Having done so we have decided that all non-playing staff, whether full-time, casual or furloughed, will receive 100 per cent of their pay for April and May. Only the Board will take salary reductions.”
The fact that Levy draws it back to himself taking a pay cut on his £7 million-a-year salary is gaslighting in itself. Do staff who are struggling to pay the bills or fans who are experiencing financial difficulties in cramped living conditions by comparison care about a billionaire having to take a dip in salary when it’s in the millions anyway?
It seems unlikely.
The impact of football being furloughed is that the lower league clubs face an uncertain future. As the BBC have reported this morning, dozens of clubs are facing extreme difficulties paying bills and staff.
With only £2m of the £125m Premier League donation package going to the worst affected Football League clubs, surely more has to be done. But just like with Liverpool and Spurs, and to an extent, footballers at the highest level too, why does it need weeks of campaigning or questions being asked for a decision to be made.
Maybe one of the super-rich Premier League clubs could reach out to a club that is struggling. If Manchester City’s owner rang the worst-affected Football League club tomorrow and put together an aid package to help them survive, it would have almost no effect on The Citizens – or Sheik Mansour’s – riches, but it would maintain the weakest brick in the football pyramid.
It is the lowest layer of the pyramid which supports up the whole structure. A gesture such as that from Mansour would put moral pressure on Manchester United to do exactly the same for another similarly affected club. In turn, that might force Liverpool to keep up the same appearance as their deadly rivals. Everton wouldn’t want to be overshadowed in the giving stakes by their neighbours and would respond in kind. Before we know it, every Premier League club might have kept another in operation. Championship clubs with rich owners would feel obliged to do the same.
The 20 poorest clubs could be kept alive by the 20 richest clubs in a matter of days.
It doesn’t always need a hashtag or a public movement for acts of kindness to take place. All around Britain, those acts are taking place every day. They are often unheralded, attached to no social media movement or even reported. But they are happening.
Whoever starts it at whichever club doesn’t really make a difference but they would be looked back on in football history as the club who kept one of the world’s best exports alive during the crisis.
So come on – pick up the phone and make that call, someone. You might be saving another club to your own for now, but ultimately it will save the game and prop up the pyramid from which all of football benefits.
