Just read this on BBC Somerset and thought that at least there is someone out there who understands the difficulties with getting what you might wish for. For some Yeovil Town fans their victory in the League One play-off final over Brentford is a moment they would never forget, a standout day in their history. But chairman John Fry believes it was the beginning of the end. "When we came into that Championship I could see what was coming," he said. "I was probably the one person that day when looking around at the celebrations and I thought 'hang on a minute, we have to get the money in here'. "Probably my biggest regret is I could not think of a way. My key worry was making sure this club did not go broke. The problems of success summed up in a nutshell, without excuses - how refreshing is the honesty sadly missing from another club I know. Just the facts ma'am.
Some extra honesty for good measure: "We have a board of directors that are very committed to the club and we have had to work to the regulations of the Football League and they are tough. "We have hit the world of Financial Fair Play, you can spend so much, but you can't spend beyond that. "When you've built a team for the Championship and the salaries they would have been paid to the revenues you get in League One and League Two, you have to change things. "You have to terminate contracts, get people off the books and I'm telling you it's an absolute nightmare in trying to develop your business, because all the time you are having to change people." The league needs to step up and do something fast otherwise these situations will continue to occur and make a further mockery of the supposed Football League pyramid and the lack of responsible support for the grass roots of the game that have totally been overlooked by the wealthy clubs and the management system that oversees the running of the sport. On a positive note we can all look forward to the possibility of floods of overseas players hitting our shores to bolster the diminishing numbers of home grown players and owners which will ultimately boost the game beyond it's current sad state and make it worse. Oops, naughty old me for suggesting that our beloved sport could be undermined by foreigners - Oops again, it already has, so please regard this as my usual Monday moan.
The facts are that as the recent world cups have indicated the English game be it Rugby or Football is falling behind the rest of world at an alarming rate. Football in this country is all about the Premier League and sod the rest of them. The Championship is indeed the League of death as you have to spend beyond your means to try and get to the "pot of gold". The worst thing to happen to football IMHO in recent years was the Bosman ruling. Now the rich get richer and the rest go bust. As regards City this season we are in a real dog fight . Survival will be an achievement .
I don't know about rugby as I don't follow it, but it's not just recently. English international football peaked in '66 and aside from glimmers in '70 and '90, we have never looked like emulating our finest hour, and we never will, at least not in my lifetime. Money has ruined top level English league football and has made scores of millionaires out of very average players whose working lives end in their early 30's with some notable exceptions. Greed rules, the sporting element is largely long gone. The Premier League, is, by and large built on debt. The clubs assets are on the pitch and that's about it. It's all fur coat and no knickers as the saying goes, but has a world wide audience that continues to grow year by year. L1 and L2 might as well pack up and go home now, along with the majority of Championship clubs, who will probably never reach the promised land. Chuck in the corruption being revealed as investigations into FIFA continue, and our own often inept FA, and it presents a sour and fractured picture. All very sad, when this naïve kid in the late '60's attending his first matches thought the game really was beautiful, and literally lived for it.
I would not say it was more beautiful in fact I would go as far as to say that some modern football can be breath-taking to watch. The difference is that the old game was sustainable whereas now it is the survival of the richest. Clubs are now businesses seeking the world wide brand audience, with little or no interest in its supporters. Unfortunately its the law of the market place
It was somehow all much more real than it is today. Now we get perfect pitches all year round but back in the 70's at the likes of Derby (Baseball Ground) and Chelsea the pitch would be covered in sand and tamped down to cover the mud and slop. You'd also get teams like Darlington having all of their home games postponed for a month, which cant have helped their cause. Then there were the games played in the snow with orange balls, the crowd surges on the Kop, the mud, etc. Today it seems far more sanitised. Will never forget the performance that Jacky put in at Leicester (Filbert Street) on a really icy pitch, where he almost ran the game singlehandedly and against the odds we won 2-1.
