*Interestingly enough, the subsidies were in no way limited to “struggling clubs” or even focused on clubs in crisis. Clubs like OM and PSG, who have greater access to other revenue sources than pretty much any other club in the country, were among the primary beneficiaries.

Like Brian, I am sceptical of State-mandated regulation in this regard (only partially because I live in a State that can’t collect garbage), and therefore look to more voluntary schemes, and especially to UEFA, as I am convinced that any system that isn’t at least Europe-wide is doomed to failure. Access to UEFA competitions, on the other hand, is at least in theory the kind of carrot that could make the stick of some kind of revenue sharing more acceptable, and the expansion of what used to be the G14 to more than 100 clubs would seem to make progress in that regard more likely than it was before.

None of which means that it will be simple, or even that it is likely.

The cultural issue that Brian raises in his latest comment is a fascinating one, and no doubt worthy of several separate discussions. I will therefore limit myself to noting that local and regional government subsidies were a driving economic force in French football in the 1980s that was in many cases more important than either television or commercial sponsorship. Those governments were convinced that the cultural and social standing of their local football clubs did in fact merit the kind of subsidies that had previously been reserved for museums, opera houses and symphony orchestras. An essential part of the reasoning behind that conclusion was the belief that those clubs served a different part of the population than did “high cultural” institutions, and that a less elite-centered and more inclusive approach was in line with the general principles of Mitterand’s France. The supporters also were convinced that having a well known football club increased the profile of the city and region in a way that yielded tangible economic benefits. That period didn’t last (in part due to corruption concerns, in part due to changes in the political and economic landscape), and the practice was eventually banned by legislation, but I would argue that the underlying question is not as easily answered as Brian’s response (likely inadvertantly) implies.

Davyd, your objections seem very important to me and may well be reasons why a revenue-sharing system would be undesirable (for the record, I’m not entirely sure whether I’m for or against the idea myself—I just think the potential benefits match up so neatly with the most common fan complaints that it’s worth a serious conversation).

In particular when you point out that football clubs are subject to historical process and can’t all last forever, you raise a useful point, not just for clubs at the bottom but also for the balance of power at the top. Right now it looks like the structural advantages of the big clubs are so great that they’ll never be challenged, but inevitably they will be, when some development we can’t currently foresee turns the football world on its head. And it doesn’t necessarily make sense to change rules wantonly to try to control or accelerate the natural evolution of the sport. It might, however, if we were convinced that the natural evolution had gone ruinously off track.

Also, when you ask, “Why should Chelsea share its revenues with Kettering Town?”—the answer may be that they should share them because all of football benefits from strong leagues top-to-bottom, and the rewards (for Chelsea, too) would be greater in a system with more competitive balance. But it’s a different question to ask whether Chelsea should be forced to share their revenues with Kettering Town, and I think it’s a question that has to be faced as the chances of their entering into such an agreement voluntarily are slim. Personally, I’m uncomfortable with the idea of using government to force a football club to share its profits with another football club, and I would be much more committed to the idea of revenue sharing if there were a chance of achieving it without that kind of intervention.

The argument in favor of forced redistribution is that football clubs are so important to communities, and by extension to society, that they effectively transcend elements of the social contract, like property rights. If that’s true, then there’s a public interest in preserving them in a certain form, and that would in turn justify a greater degree of state control than currently exists. I don’t believe it, though. The whole idea of football as a transcendent aspect of the cultural order strikes me more as an outgrowth of fan passion than as a defensible position. There are many aspects of culture, even in England, that are at least as important as football, and that no one would approach with the same kind of reasoning without looking completely absurd.

In America, if I understand the history correctly, revenue sharing was entered into voluntarily by individual teams as a condition of joining to the top leagues. They can un-join, and cease to be subject to the agreement, if they choose (though none of them would do so). That same freedom couldn’t be extended in Europe because no revenue-sharing system would work if the top clubs formed a breakaway superleague. I’m not sure how others feel about that, but it’s a sticking point in my mind, at least.

Q: Why should Chelsea share it’s revenues with Kettering Town, or Real Madrid with Chernomorets Odessa?

I think that the relative insignificance of television in the revenues of German clubs is a bit of anomaly, and one that is directly linked to the Kirch collapse. This somewhat out of date chart makes that very manifest: http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/05/business_manchester_united_in_figures/img/1.jpg

None of which means that your points aren’t very well taken, they are. The focus has been on television and UEFA revenues because those (together with gate receipts) are the easiest ones to restructure (at least in theory, we all agree that it would be devilishly hard in practice). The National Football League in the US has a common marketing contract, but the French League’s attempt to impose adidas on all of its First Division clubs failed to survive a legal challenge, and I tend to think the same would be true of a “UEFA Properties”-type arrangement (even if one were possible, the NFL obviously doesn’t have to deal with shirt sponsors, which dramatically change the economics of any such system).

And then: TV money isn’t the deciding factor in every league. It plays a comparatively small role in the Bundesliga. Commercial income plays a greater role. Top clubs like Bayern or Schalke earn €20m a year from their shirt sponsors, while the bottom of the league gets between €1m or €2m. A 10:1 or even 20:1 ratio vs the 2:1 ratio clubs agreed to be the amount separating the best and worst team in the league in terms of TV money. Then there is matchday income. A big club may average 70000 per game vs around 20000 for a smaller team, which very likely won’t be able to sell as many completely overpriced VIP lounges and business seats as the big club either. So the difference should again be at least 4-5:1. Next up is the Champions League, which again pumps far more money into the three or four top clubs (only counting the best 6 leagues here) each year, compared to the rest of the league. Then you got the global market. I’m an FC Cologne fan, which can bank on a quite large fan base in Germany, but doesn’t play any part in the global marketing game unless they play seven consecutive Champions League seasons sometime in the future. Maybe I could come up with more factors separating the clubs.

That’s an awful lot of revamping and redistribution work to be done.

You will recognize this comment, but I thought it was worth repeating over here.

The concept definitely deserves exploring and to my mind would be very much a good thing.

The three most significant factors working against it, in my view are, in no particular order:

1) the absence of any kind of pan-European (let alone worldwide) regulation in this regard, which leads teams like the English big four to see themselves as competing primarily with the likes of Italian Big Three, Spanish Big Two and German Big One, thereby creating a situation in which any league or country that is the first mover will find itself at a disadvantage vis a vis its competitors.

2) Fierce competition across what the French call the “audio visual landscape” for product, which leads media companies (especially new entrants) to try to break apart collective rights agreements in the hope that they can get a marquee attraction and/or bid beyond their means for other contracts. This is at the root of the mess in Spain at the moment, lay at the root of the Kirch debacle in Germany and its ITV digital counterpart in England and can also be seen in the escalation of fees in France and the emergence of Setanta as a player in Britain.

3) The increasing role of financial investors in football clubs, whose business models (and, more importantly, plans for servicing their often massive debt) are predicated on keeping the lion’s share of the revenue they believe that they generate (notwithstanding the fact that they have to play against somebody).

Those factors make the issue a very hard nut to crack, as the Prodi government found when it tried to impose collective bargaining for television rights in Serie A.

Though those obstacles, and the additional ones you describe above (with the “open league” point being especially important in my book) shouldn’t mean that we throw up our hands in despair. Incremental steps can also have positive results, and television revenue is clearly the place to start. If Platini and his team are genuinely committed to the concept (and not to the vapid platitudes that came out of Zagreb yesterday), they can start with the Champions League, and they may have actually have a better chance of doing that now that the G-14 is effectively the G-108.