Posts Tagged ‘money’
Everyone involved in football wants more money, not just Ian Ayre.
Ian Ayre took a lot of criticism earlier in the week for suggestions that clubs should be free to negotiate their own foreign TV deal, a move which would help clubs with a larger overseas fanbase maximise their earnings from TV rights.
Most of the criticism has been in the form of comments accusing him and Liverpool of being greedy. Perhaps the critics are unaware of the fact that since the formation of the Premier League, making money has appeared to be at the very top of the agendas of virtually everyone involved.
From the broadcasters, to the clubs and players, few seem to be in the game purely for the fun of it. Television companies pay huge money for the rights to the ‘product’ being sold by the Premier League, and will in turn aim to make money from advertising and customer subscriptions.
Clubs receive colossal sums of money from those TV rights, but that only leads to the players fighting over as much of it as they can possibly take in wages. Some players even have rights deals, believing that they are owed additional payments due to their name/image being used to sell official club merchandise.
There are outrageous sums involved, and as it filters through the sport, everyone is out to take as much of it as they can get, unsatisfied until they’ve explored every possible avenue of income.
The only financial losers are chairmen whose gamble into the big money world of Premier League football fails to pay off. And, of course, the fans who are required to contribute ever increasing amounts of money to attend games, which is needed to offset clubs’ debts caused by ever increasing wage bills.
The comments made by Ayre may not be liked by many, but if anyone thinks Liverpool are the only club wishing to generate extra funds to help compete, then they should look around at all corners of the league.
Man City’s spending spree was hastily conducted in order to earn Champions League football before UEFA’s financial fair play rules came into force. The owners may well be interested in sporting success, but it would be naive not to think that a long term plan is to catapult the club to the very top of European football, and then to reap the commercial success which would inevitably follow.
From a financial perspective, Liverpool cannot compete with Man City, yet have been attacked for looking to maximize their own income, while the fact that Man City have spent upwards of £500m on players since 2008 is overlooked in favour of admiration for the squad which they have put together.
Elsewhere in the league, the likes of QPR and Wigan may not be talked about in the same breath as Chelsea or Man City, but their rise to the Premier League was helped in no small part to the wealth of their owners compared to that of their lower league rivals.
And only across Stanley Park, Everton chairman Bill Kenwright is still trying to attract new owners. Owners with a lot more money than he has. Specifically, he’d like a “billionaire”, in order to help Everton compete with the top clubs.
These days, it’s all about the money. Anyone who thinks Liverpool are worse than any other club needs to open their eyes.
No accountability for MPs?
The recent news that the government has scrapped a news NHS IT system has unsurprisingly caused a lot of anger.
Not anger caused as a result of abandoning a project which has been doomed to fail for some time, but anger at the amount of money thrown away on the scheme already.
Of the £12bn total cost of the system, at least £2.7bn of public money had been spent as of last month.
It’s a huge amount of money under any circumstances, but particularly so when the economy is struggling and when a process of cutting NHS staff is already underway.
To illustrate the scale of the waste, it would be enough to pay a £25,000-a-year salary to 21,000 NHS workers. For five years.
In most sectors of employment, the people most responsible for making such catastrophic decisions would find themselves looking for work, probably nursing a severely damaged reputation. Something which seems not to apply to those running the country.
Sure, we’re all capable of making mistakes, and we can’t expect our MPs to be perfect. They have difficult jobs, despite half of the country believing they could do better.
But when mistakes are made by a government on such a scale, is it not right that those at fault are held to account rather than carrying on regardless, taking no responsibility?
It was a similar story with the failed FireControl project which intended to replace local rescue control rooms with nine regional control centres across the country.
Only one has been used, with the rest lying empty but still costing £4m a month to maintain. Almost £500m will have been wasted on the project in total.
Again there is no-one being held accountable for the disastrous outcome, and highlights how utterly untouchable those in government currently are.
Parliament endorsed prison sentences for looters involved in the rioting, though when many MPs themselves were guilty of theft – though obviously not officially described as such – they offered a quiet apology, gave back some of what they had taken, and then hoped for the fuss to die down. Which it duly did. Only two MPs found themselves jailed.
It’s time that our MPs were treated the same way as any regular person on the street when they get things so badly wrong.
And not many of us would stand a chance of getting away with explaining to the boss that we’d just wasted £3bn of company money.
The rising cost of heating up beans.
So British Gas have announced further rises to their energy prices.
The most pleasing aspect was that it made so much news coverage on the radio, that I was actually able to know about these rises in advance. Without such coverage on BBC’s finest, one wonders whether customers of British Gas would be told at all.
Despite the increase though and the criticism that has been aimed at British Gas, I will jump ever so slightly to the defence of the company by pointing out that in the three years since becoming the proud, but cash-strapped owner of my own home, I’ve also benefited from sizeable energy price cuts too, at times when wholesale costs have been lower. Not too many companies pass on savings to the customer which they themselves are benefiting from.
It’s also true that while British Gas are generally the subject of more negative headlines than their rivals, those very companies are never far away from increasing their own energy prices.
So for the meantime, I shall remain a customer of British Gas. And continue to enjoy hot beans.
