Smaller clubs reject Kenyon's part-time plan
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Your support makes all the difference.Manchester United's chief executive, Peter Kenyon, was roundly criticised yesterday for saying that English football should be reduced from four professional divisions to two. He was variously accused of "talking absolute nonsense", promoting a scenario that would be "a disaster for football" and suggesting a future for the game that could destroy aspirant players' dreams.
The backlash started almost as soon as Kenyon's comments, made to Radio Five Live as part of a debate on the health of the game, were aired. He said the current system of 92 professional clubs was not viable in a climate of collapsing television revenues. "There are too many clubs," he said. "That's not to say they can't all exist, but they can't all be professional and that has to be reviewed. I can't see much beyond the first two divisions being professional and the third being semi-professional."
Kenyon added that the days when clubs were viewed positively by the stock market had gone. "I am not sure why most football clubs went public in the first place. It was almost a fad," he said. "There is huge uncertainty and all those things are not what the City like to invest in. They don't like shocks. They don't like great peaks and troughs, and football as an industry gives you that."
There was nothing original in Kenyon's pronouncements, which echoed a tired old pattern of knee-jerk doom-mongering in response to hard times. There appeared to be no acknowledgement that a four-division national structure of 92 clubs has survived, with a minimum of casualties, for 52 years. Or that there are now more than 100 professional clubs in England, including an increasing number in the Nationwide Conference.
Or that despite the loss of ITV Digital's money to the Nationwide League clubs – which added to but did not cause the hardship, itself mostly down to rank bad business management and overspending – the vast majority of clubs believe they will survive. Even as Port Vale became the latest club to apply to enter administration yesterday, Barnsley were starting life "back from the brink" on the first full day of new ownership and the administrator at Leicester City was announcing he now has a choice of consortia to take the club forward.
Barry Hearn, the chairman of Third Division club Leyton Orient, accused Kenyon of being condescending and questioned how much he really understood about the lower division game. "I found the comments extremely patronising and way off-target," he said. "How does Peter Kenyon in his ivory towers at Manchester United understand what's going on in football? What does he know about running a community football club?
"We carry the hopes and dreams of millions of people in the Football League. I'm talking about community schemes and youth development – we contribute far more to the game than the so-called fat cats."
Ian Todd, the chairman of the Football Supporters' Federation, said that Kenyon's suggestions of a radically re-structured game would be "a disaster for football". "It's greed again," he said. "They say there isn't enough money in the game to support 92 clubs, but there is if it was distributed more evenly." Todd added that just because some clubs were in financial trouble did not mean there were too many, but that they simply needed to be better run. Such common sense is largely lost on football administrators.
Kenyon also took flak from the Bolton Wanderers manager, Sam Allardyce, who said reducing the number of clubs would not make any difference to individual clubs' problems, merely limit opportunity for young players to fulfil their dreams.
A Football League spokesman added: "The reality is that there are probably more financial problems since the collapse of ITV Digital at the top end of the professional game than there are at the bottom end."
He cited the former Premiership clubs Leicester, Bradford and Derby as examples. The view was backed up by Macclesfield Town's manager, David Moss, who said each lower division club was taking responsibility for its own financial future. Brian Laws at Scunthorpe was more succinct. "Kenyon is talking absolute nonsense," he said.
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