In the past few days, there have been rumours that Google and Apple are both considering a bid for the broadcasting rights to the Premier League when they come up for renewal later this year. They remain just that – rumours – and it seems likely that Apple won’t bid, while there is nothing to indicate yet that Google may consider making a sizeable investment in English football broadcast rights. But with both companies expected to move further into the TV and broadcasting industry, it does show other leagues and sports that it may be worth thinking outside the traditional broadcasting methods. Indeed, for some, it may be the only way to grow and survive.

Under the current broadcast rights deal, Sky is paying around £1.6bn to show 115 live Premier League games per season, with ESPN broadcasting the final package of games. Under a deal with the European Commission, the Premier League had to ensure that the six packages were divided between more than one broadcaster. That deal has now expired, although the Premier League is unlikely to risk another legal battle by awarding all games to Sky (or, more unlikely, another broadcaster).

The amounts of money involved are quite staggering and few broadcasters can afford them. Even lower down the English league pyramid structure, where rights are nowhere near as expensive, the cost of producing live games or even highlight shows are still high enough to be questionable in terms of cost-effectiveness. Due to budget cuts, the BBC opted not to show Football League highlights during the recent festive period, despite a full set of fixtures, while in non-League Premier Sports opted to pull out of screening Darlington versus Barrow last season rather than risk sending a crew to a game that stood a possibility of being called off.

And yet with the growth of the internet and the willingness over the past few seasons for broadcasters to snap up as many sport and football rights as possible, fans have been treated to a proliferation of football across a range of platforms to the extent that it’s almost expected that non-Premier League games and highlights will be if not free, then at least readily available. Never mind that football has had its fingers burnt twice in the past with the collapse of both ITV Digital and Setanta, the expectation is there.

This, however, overlooks the fact that if non-Premier League football was thought to be profitable for broadcasters, they would be rushing to show more of it. Ratings for ESPN’s foreign league coverage are low in the UK, while the expense involved for lower league games is high. That none of the commercial broadcasters other than Sky have made a serious play for these live matches in recent years tells its own story. Only the BBC, with its public service commitments, could make a sensible argument for broadcasting lower league football, and with their proposed Delivering Quality First cuts – especially around local radio commentaries – even Auntie appears to be scaling back lower league coverage.

This, then, is the state of football broadcasting in the UK at the moment. Rights for live Premier League games are so expensive to bid for that only a small handful of broadcasters – Sky, ESPN and, given their recent acquisitions of French rights, probably al-Jazeera – are able to offer the vast sums required, while the lower leagues are too expensive to produce to make a serious challenge to Sky for the rights (or, in the case of Premier Sports and their deal to broadcast non-League football, hardly enriching for the clubs involved).

Which is why looking outside of the traditional mediums could be seen as a good thing. For the Premier League, should Apple and Google, two companies with the financial clout to challenge Sky, decide to bid then it could herald the much-needed shake-up of the current near-monopoly on top flight rights. For lower leagues, exploring non-linear options are, quite simply, a must if they are to at least stand a chance of reaching existing fans and new audiences. A new generation of internet connected app-friendly televisions are on the way powered by familiar OS and Android platforms. While it may be a tad hyperbolic to proclaim these will change the way you watch TV forever, we’re already seeing the current generation of IPTVs having a slight shift on the way we consume our television. The world of streaming, tablets, phones and TV is amalgamating as one.

Of the realistic options, Apple appear to be the most curious of those rumoured. The tech company already has a deal in place with Sky to show archive footage through iTunes, while Sky’s successful Sky Go mobile and tablet apps currently offer a slick Premier League broadcasting experience on the iPhone and iPad.

Bidding for expensive UK Premier League rights would also represent something of a risk for Apple, given football’s standing in the US, although globally, given the Premier League’s appeal, it could prove to be a sound piece of business, especially in the long term if it secures the US rights to the competition given the growing appeal of the “EPL” on that side of the Atlantic. But any movement on this, if it were to materialise, would as likely depend on the offerings of Apple TV, how it develops and whether it becomes a mass-market product.

The search giant Google, however, would seem to be much more of a natural fit for broadcasting rights. They already own YouTube, which signed a two year deal to broadcast the Indian Premier League cricket. Under YouTube’s stewardship, the channel racked up a cool 50 million views. In comparison, current rights holder Times India’s channel, which is produced in conjunction with Google, has just under 15 millions views. The appetite and familiarity with well known sporting brands is, it appears, present online and is not discouraged by a non-traditional media company owning the rights.

For Google, the infrastructure (including Android), not to mention the money, is in place, although one complication may be the ongoing copyright dispute between the Premier League and YouTube. Google have also recently shed many extra projects as they get behind their core offerings (while continuing to innovate), and the video Hangouts on Google+ raise an interesting possibility of shared viewing experiences between friends or fans of clubs through special individual channels. There are so many possibilities for sports broadcasting on Google – be it TV, apps, online or social network – it would be easy to spend a whole article speculating on what these may be, but suffice to say the barriers offered by traditional broadcasters would be broken down should the leagues be willing to do so – itself a big sticking point.

It is also worth, briefly, considering Facebook. The social behemoth may not have been mentioned thus far but they have already shown that, on a smaller scale, they can very competently handle sports broadcasting. Budweiser and the FA’s streaming of the Extra Preliminary FA Cup Qualifying tie between Ascot United and Wembley FC may have been a one-off novelty but was a smooth, entertaining and enjoyable experience. Liking Budweiser’s page was a small price to pay for a professional broadcast and the online viewing figures of 27,000 were more than even ITV4 gets for some Europa League matches.

Facebook’s goal of being at the heart of everybody’s lives would fit with acquiring sports rights (especially as the majority of work making it broadcast-ready would probably be done by the partners). It is not hard to envisage live streaming of games through the social network or via the Facebook app on your TV. Again, the restrictions here are unlikely to be on Facebook’s part but from the Premier League or any other body selling their live broadcast rights.

For the Premier League, they have the luxury of picking and choosing, such is the strength and popularity of the product they are selling. Whether they’d be willing to relinquish their grip and allow any sort of fragmentation from the new media companies potentially interested in their rights is another question. For the lower leagues, it is up to them to seize the initiative.

What would the Football League be worth if the rights were sold to Facebook or Google? Would more people be inclined to subscribe or sign-up to an app on a new generation IPTV? Could revenue be raised through pay-per-view subscriptions as well as longer subscriptions? Would lower league or non-League games attract higher audiences if they were streamed via the official page on Facebook or via YouTube? And if these games were readily available to the casual lower league fan, what impact would this have on attendances? None of these questions are easy or even possible to answer, but need to be asked or considered, at the very least.

Or could we yet see a situation where it is not the league who negotiate the deal for the rights, but an enterprising club? Think of the individual rights that are negotiated by La Liga clubs in Spain, but then fragmented and offered to a range of platforms and tech or social companies, not the traditional broadcasters.

Already the individual leagues risk being left far behind when it comes to mobile or TV app development, if they have even considered it. Broadcasters and other companies know that mobile viewing – be it on a phone or tablet – will provide a significant market in the future. Whether the leagues are following suit is debatable.

We could potentially reach a point where an enterprising club with an abnormal fan base for the division they are in – say Luton or Bradford, for example – decide to cut out the middle man and go direct to Google and stream through the official Luton Town YouTube channel and offer special Luton Town viewing hangouts with post-match viewer-engaged content via Hangouts on Google+. Or perhaps the game will be streamed via the official Bradford City Facebook page and IPTV app, with all the social benefits that this brings, not to mention the marketing advantages such a channel offers to the club.

And if these lower league clubs are successful, the bigger clubs will almost certainly want their slice of the action. Perhaps we may face a future where you purchase the Facebook app but opt to watch through the dedicated Manchester City channel rather than the main broadcast, or a host of other fragmented options, while chatting to other fans of the same persuasion during the match. Fanciful? Perhaps. But you can already see the foundations of virtual stadiums just through this method, and this probably only discusses a small part of what could be achieved.

But this does get ahead of what would currently be required. For both Football League and Premier League clubs, there would need to be a majority vote to abandon the collective agreement on income from these football rights. To do so would be hugely controversial and go against the very fabric of the game in Britain. Yet with governing bodies often some way behind clubs and technology in both adoption and thinking, the question is how prepared clubs would be to miss out if a new route makes them more money.

Certainly the aforementioned Manchester City are already leading the way, digitally. Their website is rightly lauded as one of the best in the country and their YouTube channel is both slick and engaging. Should opportunities open up for exploiting online viewing, it is clubs such as City who are likely to be at the forefront. The infrastructure and planning is in place, it is just the league itself that prevents them from maximising their online potential in terms of use of live broadcasts and highlights.

Given football broadcast rights are complicated enough as it is, perhaps we may see another layer added for tablet or TV apps rather than channels accessed through a browser. Perhaps it is these clubs may look to exploit separately rather than collectively. Could online prove an exception and break the collective agreement? Technologically, there are many attractive and exciting reasons for doing so. Legally it may prove more different, and morally it does not sit comfortably with the idea of keeping the game competitive (and would, as likely, provoke a similar reaction to Liverpool’s executive Ian Ayre raising the notion of clubs individually negotiating their international broadcast rights).

Whether these changes in technology and broadcast viewing habits would improve top flight football, or simply serve to make it more tribal and take it further away from its roots is an another question, although one you feel the clubs and league won’t worry to much about if it proves successful, even if they are unable to negotiate individual rights. In an online medium very much concerned with openness and equality, any success in this area could serve to make the bigger clubs even richer. For the Premier League it’s a welcome addition to have on the table. For the smaller clubs, it may become a necessity.

This information, after all, is difficult to find on the internet for the world’s richest clubs.

One club is going out of its way to help those hopping on their oil-fuelled bandwagon: Manchester City Football Club.

Manchester City have kindly presented a ‘bluffer’s guide‘ to ‘supporting’ the club on their official website presumably for all their new fans blocked from accessing Wikipedia.

Amazingly, this guide – which could have served the same purpose but been less embarrassing for the club if done in a smarter way – is presented without any humour or self-awareness whatsoever.

It begins: “Loyalty, commitment, passion and, during the darker times, a sense of humour has been needed over the years to follow the Blues.”

And goes on to suggest the complete opposite is now needed to follow City:

This brazen toadying to the club’s new legion of customers (obviously needed to even begin repaying the millions pumped into the club) must be depressing for loyal City supporters, who indeed have been known for being down to earth and bearing a dark sense of humour over the club’s struggles in recent decades compared to their Manchester rivals.

City once seemed like the club with the most soul in Manchester. Before I moved there in the late 1990s, my grandmother told me of her brothers, who had followed City down to London to support the club in its 1930s FA Cup finals, when United were the smaller team – and postwar, the johnny-come-latelys to glory.

Maine Road, City’s stadium back then, was embedded in the middle of the city’s toughest area, Moss Side, near the city centre; walking to games there was everything you’d imagine supporting a proud old gritty English urban club would be like. Old Trafford, by contrast, was perched further out in bland surroundings, close to a giant shopping mall, the Trafford Center – almost as big as Old Trafford’s megastore.

Fortunately for City’s newer fans, the bluffer’s guide explains its storied past at Maine Road in great detail: “If asked where we play our football, it’s the City of Manchester Stadium – also nicknamed Eastlands due to the area of Manchester it is in. It’s worth noting that from 1923 to 2003 we played our home games at Maine Road.”

Yes, it’s worth noting all right – and apparently nothing further about the club’s entire existence in that period is even to be bothered bluffing about.

City of Manchester Stadium, February 24th 2010

Photo Credit: notFlunky on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool

Many have been surprised Cook has kept his job despite several public gaffes, and indeed, many were surprised when he kept his job to begin with following the takeover of Manchester City by the Abu Dhabi group in 2008: Cook had been headhunted for his role by the previous owner, Thaksin Shinawatra (who he later regretted praising), and it seemed unlikely he would remain long in his role under new ownership, perceived by many to be an embarrassment and a poor man’s Peter Kenyon.

But Cook is still around. It’s clear that, for all his missteps and disregard for the traditions of English football, his global vision for branding City worldwide matches that of the club’s new owners, and City are implementing a smarter marketing strategy than just the age-old push to sell more gear in Asia.

Cook’s previous role was heading up Nike’s “Brand Jordan”, and when he was hired by Man City the word was — true or not — that Jordan himself had asked Cook not to leave the company. His amazing stream of gaffes aside, and armed with a massive war chest, Cook has turned around the marketing of City very much in the manner of a Nike campaign: like it or not (I know some City fans will be puking in their mouths), “Brand City” is now a credible global proposition.

To begin with, City have transformed their online presence. They were quick to jump right on the social media bandwagon: their Facebook page has an impressive 120,771 fans, and is high on “interactivity” with its users, a leg-up on  big clubs in the Premier League: Tottenham Hotspur’s Facebook page, for example, has no recent updates, while Aston Villa only have 16,146 fans — though they’re still a long way behind Manchester United in global awareness, of course, as over a million fans follow United’s page, launched just two weeks ago.

City’s relaunched website, as we’ve commented before, was built at considerable expense and is the best in Britain. Importantly, their strategy is to use online media to engage fans in the club: for example, their “My First City Game” campaign, with its own dedicated website at www.myfirstcitygame.com

This is slick marketing: decades of City history neatly branded with Etihad Airways sponsorship.

Overseas, their aim is to spread their brand by trying to show they do more than sell replica shirts and play the odd friendly, as the strategy surrounding their current US tour shows. The Sports Business Journal this week reported on City’s investment in American youth development, an endeavour that received plenty of press on both sides of the Atlantic to give credibility to the idea the club has a greater purpose to its overseas efforts than raking in fistfuls of dollars:

“There’s a long history of foreign teams expressing interest in the U.S., but candidly, there’s been little to show for it,” said Jeff L’Hote, founder of LFC International, a soccer consultancy. “To gain fans, you have to leave something behind between tour appearances. Chelsea’s been able to do that by linking to youth clubs, and for Man City something similar has to happen.”

The club hopes to overcome that by doing more than playing friendlies. In addition to paying to construct the soccer field at Lexington Academy in Harlem, it signed a three-year partnership with New York’s Downtown United Soccer Club that will see Man City assist with camps for inner-city youth.

“Coming here and playing exhibition games and walking away is not a sustainable model,” Cook said. “People see through that. You have to connect locally and you have to connect locally through youth development and the community.”

City’s online presence matches in this attempt to make their global brand locally-relevant: they have launched a specific version of their website just for US users, www.mcfc.com, hiring a content writer to tailor content for a US-audience. According to the Sports Business Journal, the site already receives over 10,000 daily visitors from the US.

In terms of setting up Man City as a global brand with resonance, like it or not, Garry Cook might just not be a fool after all.

Outside the City of Manchester Stadium. 2 December, 2009.

Photo credit: notFlunkyon Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

Unlike their neighbours in Manchester, who seem to think social media is the work of Satan himself, Manchester City have made an extremely impressive marketing push via their official accounts on Twitter and Facebook — at least by Premier League standards.  They have 11,758 in the former and 78,549 fans on the latter.

Importantly, that presence has grown thanks to some creative work, including letting fans decide on the playlist before the game via a Facebook discussion (a surprising lack of Mick Hucknall on there). Indeed, their online presence as a whole is unparalleled, with the best website design in the Premier League.

An interview on UK Sports Network with Chris Nield, Social Media Executive at Manchester City, is well worth reading for some of the details on how City see the benefits of their investment in social media, and how they’ve rolled it out.

Nield sensibly asserts that this investment in connecting people via social media cannot easily be measured in the short-term for Return On Investment.

How do you measure R.O.I of your social media activities?

The simplest way we measure the ROI of our social media activities is by tracking the rate of growth of members to our social networks (number of fans on the club’s Facebook page, followers on Twitter and members of our Flickr group) however we regularly review analytics, link tracking and interactions using various tools in order to gauge its real value. Unlike other large organisations, I’m of the opinion that social media is not simply a numbers game. Every supporter who has decided to embrace what we’re on these networks has a voice that we must listen and respond to in order for us to be properly utilizing the power and potential of social media.

Yet it’s a little surprising to see other clubs not following suit, and the suggestion from Nield is that most are simply too afraid of platforms they cannot clamp complete control on.

Why do you feel many Premier League clubs have been slow to pick up on social media?

I think a lot of that is down to how the club perceives itself within the footballing world. Some clubs may see themselves simply as a brand that exists separately from the day to day lives of their supporters and because there are no real direct revenue stream, do not see the value of social media. For various reasons, others may feel that social media is not a worthwhile endeavour for them and somewhat of a minefield that is best steered clear of. At City we’re proud of the way that the club is able to reach out to supporters and we’re proud of the way the fans have reacted and embraced what we’re trying to do. We’re also keen to ensure that the club remains at the forefront of new developments in the field of social media whilst it is imperative that the club’s soul, the very reason why people fall in love with Manchester City, is retained.

Of course, all this stems back to the extraordinary investment made in the club since the takeover by the Abu Dhabi United Group. City can afford to do this, and at the end of the day, it’s about branding for them too. It’s all part of an extremely expensive campaign to make City as one of the world’s leading club’s and buy instant success.

But it’s one that they do seem to understand takes some smart use of social media to keep connecting to the community of City fans online, and many other clubs around the world could learn from it.

Big Story
The fallout from Mark Hughes’ sacking continues to dominate the headlines, with two different schools of thought emerging (though everyone agrees Man City Garry Cook is a bumbling, unpleasant man): one says football is now operating like any other business, and one says it isn’t.

Martin O’Neill says the pulling of the trigger on Hughes shows football is not just like any other business:

I suppose it is a microcosm of our game,” O’Neill said, reflecting on Hughes’s departure. “Manchester City have lost fewer games than anyone else in the league, they are in the semi-finals of the Carling Cup and seemingly this decision was taken three or four weeks ago. As a manager, it doesn’t inspire you with great confidence. Unfortunately, it happens in the game and that’s the nature of it. It’s a sad indictment. It’s crazy.

In any other industry, you would be given the time to do the job, you really would. But football is not like any other industry and more so than ever before. I must admit that very little surprises you but I was half-surprised about this, due to Hughes’s record and the fact he has lost fewer games than anyone else.

At the same time, Ian Herbert in the Independent explains that Garry Cook is bringing the world of business to football:

Cook believes that what passes for good business planning in any other organisation should also apply to the world of football – though his decision to reveal as much in such detail is extraordinary. “We did our scenario planning, mapping out the season, the results we were seeking and in those plans we looked at the options open to us if we were in a position when we needed to look for a new manager before Christmas,” he said. “Even at that point we looked at the managers who could be available in a World Cup year, and those who might definitely be available. We had no intention of replacing Mark Hughes – but surely as a business we are entitled to examine all the options?”

Paul Wilson in the Guardian seems to concur, saying clubs “have to be hard-nosed and businesslike about the matter” when it comes to replacing managers. But if this was a normal business, Garry Cook wouldn’t still have a job in such a prominent position in the first place, would he? I’m not sure the way Cook has handled all this can be considered “businesslike” in any commonplace understanding of the term. The Manchester Evening News has had an unprecedented response to City’s handling of the affair, and offers 12 questions Cook should answer.

Worldwide News

• Some interesting details here on the Football Association’s finances in the years ahead, and their plans for further streaming of games online, as they explore new media options ahead of the Premier League.
• It seems rather harsh for the AFC to demand leagues average at least 5,000 attendances to qualify for the AFC Champions League, threatening to derail the development of the sport in the smaller countries. Singapore’s participation, for one, is now in doubt.
• Via Footysphere, a fantastic French-retro football blog has come to my attention, and the image accompanying eleven questions with Jean Tigana is worth visiting for alone, whether you speak a word of French or not.
• Fake Sigi rips apart a fake band “created by ESPN and their brain damaged ad agency Wieden+Kennedy” for the World Cup.

The Sweeper appears every weekday, and once at the weekend. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

Big Story
With an air of grim predictability, Mark Hughes was released from Manchester City FC yesterday, forced to watch over his former team’s scrappy 4-3 victory over Sunderland in full knowledge (or not) the game would be his last.  To replace him: former Inter Milan manager Roberto Mancini on a three-and-a-half year deal (do these deals really mean anything anymore?).

Yet outside of the various op-eds slaying the blame at Hughes’ player management (one wonders how much say he really had in any of City’s more infamous transfer acquisitions), the most interesting aspect of this story is the cacophony of outrage from other Premier League managers, past and present.

Harry Redknapp: “It’s different now. You’ve got multi-millionaire owners who all want to be No1, and the more that come into the game, they’re not going to understand that they can’t all win.”  Kevin Keegan: “When you read the statement (which announced Hughes’s sacking), it’s not that of a real football club, it’s that of a business.”

There is a sense that it’s still dawning on everyone that the Premier League is, in fact, a very large, aggressive international business; many are clearly clinging to comfy, old notions of managers being given the time to lay the foundation to build a successful club, like Sir Alex Ferguson was able to in the late eighties with Manchester United.  Similar to the appalled gasps (many from aggrieved supporters of the other three Top Four sides) at Wolves’ manager Mick McCarthy’s decision last week to put out a reserve side against Manchester United to keep his first team fit for the more winnable tie today against Burnley, the canned outrage rings a bit hollow in a league where the same four increasingly debt-leveraged teams finish top every year, almost without fail, while newly-promoted sides face much higher odds of relegation in their first season.

Sheik Mansour is a smart enough business person to know there is nothing about the current Premier League that suggests the league hierarchy will be any different from years’ past, despite losses for Manchester United and Liverpool yesterday.  Cracking that crowd involves big money, big players, and big managers—of the latter group Hughes certainly did not belong—with time being of the essence as each year without Champions League money is transfer fees and player wages down the drain.  The only “shock” about yesterday is that the decision to can Hughes wasn’t made sooner.

Worldwide Stories

• Speaking of clinging to the past, British PR advisor, Max Clifford, says there are two high-profile Premier League footballers who he advised not to come out as gay for fear of football’s homophobic culture: “”It’s a very sad state of affairs. But it’s a fact that homophobia in football is as strong now as it was 10 years ago.”
• Harry Redknapp will be charged in January by the HM Revenue and Customs office for tax-related issues related to his time at Portsmouth FC.
• Fake Sigi gives his two cents on the strange noises coming out of Seattle Sounders regarding the Collective Bargaining agreement.
• The Daily Mail says England’s 2018 World Cup bid is on the verge of total, absolute collapse, with FA chairman Lord Triesman on the verge of stepping down as main bid organizer.

Richard Whittall writes A More Splendid Life.

Football agents are not this cool.

Due to the new requirements in the Football Association’s regulations on agents put in place this summer, the Premier League has released its first public report on the amount spent on club payments to agents, totalling £70,692,513 for 803 payments made to agents from 1st October 2008 to 30th September 2009.

No-one will be surprised by this astronomical figure, and I’ll give you one guess to figure out who spent the most in this period (hint: they play in Manchester and didn’t win the Premier League).

An interesting wrinkle is that the Premier League’s numbers don’t always match the club’s own figures. Hull City, for example, were listed by the Premier League at £1,599,188, but an official release from the club stated that “From 1st October 2008 to 30th September 2009, Hull City has actually paid £1,820,250.80 in agents fees. The total agents fees agreed and contracted in the year to 30th September 2009 was £4,392,250.”

Curiously, the numbers being reported are also changing: earlier today, many outlets (including the Guardian) were reporting West Ham United had spent £3,576,972, only for West Ham’s official site to say £5,527,548 had been dished out.

I’m not sure whether there’s anything other than lazy PR folk behind these discrepancies, but it doesn’t give me a 100% confidence in the accuracy of all the figures: the clubs report them themselves, after all.

But there is something in it for the clubs to release this information: a little more pressure on agents and players to sort out their own deals, as Sunderland Chairman Niall Quinn said in their release: “At an average of around £40,000 per deal, this figure is acceptable from our point of view, however we continue to hope that we can work towards a time when the payment of agents will become the responsibility of the individual player, not the football club.”

In general, this public accountability for the amount they spend on agents is a good step forward for openness on how much money in the game is leaking out to agents, following the lead set by the Football League lower in the pyramid — which since it introduced the same transparency five years ago, has seen the amount spent on agents decline.

Yet this welcome development comes just a couple of weeks after FIFA suggested they will give up attempting to require national associations to regulate football agents, a move somewhat gleefully described by one agent as a return to the “wild west”.

The Football Association’s attempts to regulate agents with disclosures such as this being made required has made it a leader in public disclosure on agents, but we may see less of this around the world, rather than more.

Here’s the Premier League list in full:

Arsenal     £4,760,241
Aston Villa     £1,708,374
Birmingham City     £974,982
Blackburn Rovers     £1,610,885
Bolton Wanderers     £3,166,611
Burnley     £468,398
Chelsea     £9,562,223
Everton     £2,008,407
Fulham     £1,469,258
Hull City     £1,599,188
Liverpool     £6,657,305
Manchester City     £12,874,283
Manchester United     £1,517,393
Portsmouth     £3,184,725
Stoke City     £716,042
Sunderland     £2,007,040
Tottenham Hotspur     £6,066,935
West Ham United     £5,527,548
Wigan Athletic     £3,576,972
Wolverhampton Wanderers     £1,235,703

Big Story

The fallout from FIFA’s ruling against Chelsea in the Kakuta case continues to dominate the headlines. Of course, it took that case for the British press to notice that several similar cases were also working their way through FIFA, and today it’s Manchester City under the poaching spotlight, with French club Rennes accusing them of luring away teenager Jeremy Helan. And domestically, Everton are being forced to pay up to £1m for 16 year-old Luke Garbutt, snatched away from Leeds. Such deals may in the future be illegal: UEFA are looking into Michel Platini’s proposed ban on transfers for under 18s, a move which would have to be carefully pursued to abide with European law.

The issue of youth transfers is a more complicated one than the simple morality tales being peddled around, however. Brian Phillips at the Run of Play interestingly raises a forgotten part of this debate: the child himself. “The big-club-vs.-small-club narrative is so ingrained in football that we reflexively see anything that benefits a smaller club at the expense of a bigger club as “fair.” But this isn’t fair. We’ve gotten so used to seeing Premier League clubs as wicked developers strip-mining the talents of poorer continental clubs that we’ve started thinking the latter have some kind of moral right to control the futures of their very young trainees. But players that age ought to control their own futures. In any other field, we’d look at this story and see Lens standing in the way of the right of a child and his parents to decide what’s best for him. In football we see the kid as a strategic weapon in a quasi-declared class war in which his preferences don’t really count.”

Meanwhile, Trevor Brooking asks what damage the influx of foreign talent into British youth academies is doing to the national team’s chances, and the Independent looks at the network of scouting that goes into the Premier League’s poaching strategies. Ian Wright and other former players are also under the spotlight for their academy in South Africa. This story is not going to die any time soon.

Worldwide

• Sheffield United goalkeeper Paddy Kenny received a nine-month ban for failing a drugs test after taking over-the-counter medication, even though the commission accepted he had taken it innocent of any performance enhancing desires. While this might seem harsh at first glance, the commission’s ruling that Kenny had shown a “complete disregard” for his professional responsibilities by failing to consult with anyone at the club before medicating himself does have some merit.
• England’s women are on the verge of glory, where they’re forced to face “perennial nemesis” Germany in the European Championship final this Thursday. The Guardian has a good rundown of who’s who, Richard Williams praises coach Hope Powell to the skies and Tony Leighton profiles up-and-coming England star Eniola Aluko. It’s great to see all this coverage from the Guardian, and lets hope this translates into more regular coverage of the women’s game in general going forward. Oh, and a special good luck from here to England’s Karen Carney of the Chicago Red Stars.
• Thierry Henry ripped into French coach Raymond Domenach with some aplomb at the weekend.
• Perhaps no team will feel more pressure than Bahrain in the World Cup qualifier’s this week. Having never qualified for a World Cup, Bahrain will head to Saudi Arabia — in front of an expected crowd of over 65,000 — in the Asian Football Confederation play-off, with the winner to face Oceania Football Confederation champions New Zealand home-and-away for a place in the World Cup finals.
• There’s a very interesting interview with Blackburn Rovers chairman John Williams in the Lancashire Telegraph. It’s notable not just for some very interesting nuggets of information about Premier League finances, on budgets, wage bills and profit/loss, but also just because Williams is so open about the numbers, explaining plainly to the public why Rovers have spent what they have (and haven’t) this summer. It’d be good to see more of this from other top executives.
• Footiebusiness looks at the disappointing attendance for the New England Revolution, who had their second successive sub 10k turnout at the weekend. A 16,700 average in 2007 declined to 14,300 in 2008, and around 12,000 so far this season. There are a myriad of reasons for the decline, but the fact is despite some solid performance, New England have never gone full throttle on or off the field as an elite club. At the end of the day, much of the blame has to lie at the door of the ownership, the Kraft family.

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.