James Lawton: Salary capping would make players foot bill for game's real culprits

Financially troubled football clubs should adopt sound business practices to avert catastrophe rather than squeezing wage packets

Salary capping is not a panacea for football's meltdown finances, which have seen £500m wiped off share prices in the last year, any more than lining your windows with brown paper is an adequate defence against nuclear attack.

If a salary ceiling returned tomorrow to a game which used to peg the wages of Johnny Haynes, Stanley Matthews and Tom Finney, to mention just a few stadium-filling geniuses, at £20 a week, it would still be teetering on the cliff edge. The only difference would be a whole set of new regulations that desperate clubs would try to wriggle beyond if it suited their short-term purpose.

No, the answer is not salary capping. The solution is a retreat from madhouse speculation on the future. Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, is currently making the point with some force in a paper he sent, on request, to the Premiership, the Football League and the Football Association at the end of last week.

He would of course make such an argument. Any born-and-bred union man – as a boy, Taylor used to come home at night from long football sessions with his mates on the pitch behind the bus depot in Stalybridge, to find his father still buried in the business of the local branch of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers – would bridle at the idea that a talented working man could no longer argue for his true value in the marketplace. But then Taylor, as an economics graduate and someone who has spent much recent time helping rescue those many clubs who increasingly find it a strain paying his members, long ago put aside the old union dogma.

"What football has to do now," he says, "is not return to old arguments but survive. We cannot do it if so many people running English football refuse to face facts." Or countenance business practices which some time ago persuaded the banking establishment that English football was no longer a reasonable area of sound investment.

What practices? In his paper, Taylor is particularly hard on the way some big clubs have sold the value of their players to offshore companies, and then leased back their services. In any good business guide this, he rather irrefutably argues, would commend itself about as much as a session of Russian roulette after drinking a bottle of brandy. Clubs involved in such financing, it is understood, include Leeds United, Bolton Wanderers and Everton, which may be one reason why Leeds have entrusted the much-criticised Terry Venables with claiming a Champions' League place while forcing him to sell Rio Ferdinand, Robbie Keane, Olivier Dacourt, Lee Bowyer and, now Robbie Fowler.

Not in the paper, but smouldering on the edges, is the recent revelation that so many leading managers, including Sir Bobby Robson, Martin O'Neill, Howard Wilkinson and Graeme Souness, had cheerfully become stakeholders in the operations of leading agents like Paul Stretford, who recently took control of the career of the prodigy Wayne Rooney of Everton, a club in which Stretford already had more than half-a-dozen player clients.

Taylor's basic message to the Premiership and the rest of football ownership is that his union is willing to making as many compromises as it can in saving embattled clubs – it is advising or financially helping a total of 30 – but that formal salary capping cannot be part of the deal. Not because of what it would do to his members' earnings – they already, and quite dramatically, have become conditioned by an employer's ability to pay – but because the very proposal is a crass attempt to put the blame where essentially it doesn't lie.

Key points in Taylor's memorandum include the one that even if many clubs didn't pay their players another penny this season they would still be operating at a loss.

"At the extreme are the clubs that have mortgaged their futures trying to go into or staying in the Premier League," he writes. "Credit has been easy to come by. Finance houses advance money on future transfer receipts, while other clubs 'buy' (while arranging offshore loans) and lease back players; future TV distribution monies and season ticket sales are offered as security on loans, most of which have already been spent, and any traditional assets such as grounds are mortgaged to the hilt.

"By the time the directors call in the administrators, there is little left. These clubs have been grossly mismanaged and their creditors have little option but to 'buy' into rescue plans that offer little return. The typical short-sighted approach by the very people who have misdirected the clubs in this way is to lay the blame fairly and squarely on players and look therefore to cut salaries, which, in their opinion, would bring the club back to a solvent position.

"However, if we look at cases such as Leicester City, whose debt amounts to £74m, we see that if they cancelled all players' contracts (which are valued at £19m) the debt would still be in excess of £50m. Similarly, York City, whose finances are in such a poor state that if the players weren't paid a penny for the rest of the season, the club would still lose money. Their arguments (for salary capping as a solution to the overall problem) simply do not have a foundation."

It is a powerful case and its thrust can be identified easily enough, as it sits on a mountain of scorn.

Who demanded Manchester United pay around £30m for Rio Ferdinand and set the wages of David Beckham at around £100,000 a week? Only the club's own imperative to be the fattest cat and have the biggest saucer of cream. Salary capping, says Taylor, is an economic illiteracy. Market forces make a nonsense of the concept. Or at least they do as long as Premiership clubs display not a scintilla of understanding of the meaning of the word "league".

A league is a confederation of shared interests, an acceptance that it can only be as strong as its weakest link. How does that square with the working operation of the Premiership? It doesn't begin to, of course.

"Salary capping appears to us to be a knee-jerk reaction to the financial mess the clubs are in," Taylor concludes. "Common sense needs to prevail and clubs need to live within their means, which may well result in players' wages falling, squad numbers reducing and, hopefully, less expensive credit being taken on board.

"The PFA, having reviewed a wide cross-section of clubs, believes that some of them do need some persuasion to mind their affairs better, but to stipulate a set salary cap will create more problems than it will solve; simply limiting the amounts that can be spent on players will not address the problem of credit.

"However, the PFA is committed to a policy of financial viability for the whole Football League and will be prepared in the future, as in the past, to make sure that this is the case if we are given the proper opportunity in partnership with the League.

"For obvious political reasons we cannot approach this partnership under the title 'salary capping'. This, as you might appreciate, is too emotive a word for any union to accept... and does not portray the solution to the problem in a manner befitting our Association and our members."

No, of course it doesn't. It isn't a panacea. It is a placebo not worth the prescription fee. It's a retreat from reality, like living on what tomorrow may bring and hocking the old football ground, not to mention the bodies of your players, offshore.