Returning to yesterday’s discussion of B Teams, it’s important not just to recognise why it’s bad for the pyramid, but to understand the underlying motives of the Premier League and just how damaging they are to football generally.
#BTeamBoycott
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The problem in its simplest terms is that the biggest teams want to abolish competition. They desire a situation – as in Spain, Germany, Scotland, France – where who finishes top is preordained.
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That gives predictable access to more TV money and the riches of the UCL. A sport where the winners are a foregone conclusion is no longer a sport, but rather entertainment.
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Given that player talent is the biggest determinant of success, the question is how can they get access to the best players without the cost and risk of signing expensive players? Again, the aim is predictable success without the inherent unpredictability of sport.
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The answer, of course, is invest in youth. On the back of blackmailing EFL clubs into accepting EPPP, which abolished the 90-minute travel rule and allowed top rated academies earlier access to young talent, top PL teams have built huge academies.
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They scout players who are little more than toddlers and, by the time they are young men, they gather them in their hundreds in their academies. The problem is that young players, no matter how talented, make mistakes and can’t reliably and flawlessly step into the first team.
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City and Chelsea have tried to manage this with formal and semi-formal arrangements with overseas clubs. Problem is the players can’t be closely supervised, learn from the first team or get the high level competitive fixtures their development requires.
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The purpose of B Teams, then, is to abolish the bedding in period. They intend to monopolise all the best talent, playing it where they can and profiting by selling the players who don’t make it. They want to be at 100% every game, every year. No rebuilds.
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B Teams are central to this because they allow top Premier League teams to move from having 100+ under 18s aiming to break directly into a first team squad of world class players, to having a bridge – a second squad in the same building playing 50 competitive games a year.
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Only the wealthiest clubs will be able to afford this, which means that B Teams change the current system, where wealth allows clubs to monopolise success, so we have two categories of football clubs and only those in the top category will ever be able to compete for honours.
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They will also create a precedent for what happens when the top clubs join a European Super League: their first team will leave, but they will retain a league place with the aim of hoovering up both the new European league money and what remains of domestic TV money.
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B Teams, then, aim to:
-prevent smaller clubs from developing and selling talent
-allow the wealthiest clubs to spend less on transfers while continuing to dominate the game and its financial rewards
-end change at the top of the PL
-smooth the way for a Euro Super League
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Even if you don’t care about creating a permanent second-class status for 99% of English football, it should be clear that what B Teams represent isn’t just an anti-competitive development in the financial sense, but something that strikes at the heart of English football.
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If B Teams get the go ahead - by exploiting the crisis to blackmail desperate clubs - one of the most unique and important thing about our game will be destroyed. All so a few clubs can make sure no one else ever gets a taste of glory or a chance to grow.
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PS: With so many clubs on the brink, it's grotesque that, instead of focusing on the bailout, different factions are wasting time trying to remake English football to their advantage, either with a PL2 or B Teams. It's time to act like club custodians not disaster capitalists.