Unfortunately the reality of the bubble bursting won’t be that the premier league stops being a paddock to parade the toys sheiks, oligarchs and hedge funds, but rather the bottom of the pyramid will disappear.
look around the world and we’re the only country to have fully professional football at 3rd and 4th tiers.
we don’t have a larger population or any significantly greater passion for the game than Spain, Germany, Italy, but we have a larger number of people who stick by “their”club and to whom it means the world.
before this, bury and Bolton went pop. Before them plenty of others.
after we return to some kind of normality after this virus goes it won’t be Chelsea, Man Utd, et al that feel the pain, it will be Carlisle United, Preston, Leyton Orient, Barnsley and others.
If sky have to reign in their sponsorship for example, where will they pull it from first? Not the cash cow that is the premier league.
maybe the effects reach a Bournemouth, Norwich or Brighton at premier league level, but they’re not establishment. They are currently borrowing a place at the table as far as the establishment teams are likely concerned.
bubble bursting or not, the biggest clubs will survive and likely prosper as the gap between have and have nots will widen.
it’s no different to the economy overall.
we’ll go through economic hardship here. People will be out of work, businesses will go pop, life will be hard for a good few years, but by and large we’ll come through it. There will be people who lose their homes, and many who lose their lives, but overall we’ll be ‘ok’ because we’re a rich country.
the gap between rich and poor in our country will increase, but nothing like to the extent that the gap between the pain we feel and the pain felt in Africa will increase.
This weekend, in an attempt to feel a bit more normality in testing times, I had a drive out to go to b&q as they’ve reopened some stores.
the queue was too long for me to be arsed with it, so I went to the supermarket to do my shopping instead. It was an inconvenience and I’d rather have been able to do what I planned to do, but on the news at 10 the night before I’d watched African families being crushed in a stampede for basic food which was being delivered.
