Vital Spurs Debate Section

Playing With A Deflated Ball.

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Football, world-wide, survives on money that has created a bigger budget than many small nations (pretty much). The snow-balling increase in every financial aspect to do with the sport is truly mind blowing. Football appears to have become ‘an empire unto itself’. One has to wonder how sustainable it all is.

Long gone are the days when a footballers’ maximum wage was 100 pounds per week. And that’s fair enough because the top players certainly deserved more. Every day, the survivors of the 60/61 ‘Double’ team must regret being born too early or not being recognised for their true worth.

In 1962 Jimmy Greaves was ‘almost’ the first 100 thousand pound footballer. That amount of money would not even buy a chronically ungifted player these days (probably).

Given the continual and rapid financial growth in all aspects of football, which appear to be spiralling out of control, it seems to me that at some stage in the future the football bubble has to burst.

It has already surpassed the point where many grass-roots supporters, the people that the game was created to entertain, can no longer afford the match-day experience. Any football ‘outsider’ could be forgiven for thinking that administrators have created a beast that will eventually become their downfall.

Surely there must come a time when only a handful of clubs in all of the major leagues will be capable of having the financial resources to compete for trophies. Surely the vast majority of lower and mid-table clubs in every major league will slowly disappear from the face of the earth as, one by one, they sink into the abyss of liquidation. Surely there has to be some kind of financial ceiling to prevent this before it happens; some kind of realistic control. Surely it cannot continue along the road it is currently travelling. Can it?

It seems to me that the administrating bodies of world football do not realise that they are creating a situation in which the sport is playing with a deflated ball. At what point will people start to understand that the obscene amount of money going into football could be of far greater benefit if directed at more needful issues affecting humanity.

Or, is it simply a matter of human greed where ‘the few’ seize the opportunity to accumulate wealth and power without any thought of the future or the well-being of others?

Just a thought! What do you think, VS?

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