Fair Play - only if you can pay...

I haven't written an article for a while, but tonight, on my way home I heard something so outrageous I had to write something!

It transpires that my home town football club, Concord Rangers, from Canvey Island have been banned from competing in the National League South play offs. Not because the football club have done anything wrong, or don't have the right to be in the competition, but because the National League rules are conflicting after they were changed. Concord Rangers have become victims of their own success, and are basically being penalised for finishing in the play off places because the club currently doesn't have a stand with 500 covered seats! And they are not even saying they wouldn't be complying, they just haven't been able to comply yet!

Now, the rules are clear and they have been in place a while, so it could be argued that the seating should have been built by now. However, as most people know, football is played on a pitch, not on a covered seating area! On this basis, the building of 500 covered seats at a small semi-professional football club, where regular attendances are in the hundreds rather than thousands probably isn't a sensible use of very limited funds, particularly when a good number of these seats are likely to be surplus to requirements most of the time! What we are talking about here is a small local non-league side who have progressed a long way, to what is essentially the 6th tier of the national game on a shoestring and are being barred from moving to the next level, based on the size of their chequebook, not on their footballing ability!

When you consider the bigger picture, you start to see the inequity. The 20 football clubs in the Premiership have an estimated combined annual income of ￡315m from shirt sponsorship alone, with a further ￡46m from shirt sleeve sponsorship. That is before a ball is kicked, or a TV is switched on. Even then, the inequity is staggering - as this money is not shared equally; 6 clubs attract almost half of the spoils. These are the teams who pay their star players hundreds of thousands of pounds a week - sums of money that most of us can't begin to comprehend! When a club is relegated from any division, they also drop down with a parachute payment. This is supposed to help compensate for the loss in revenue, but the payments at some levels of the game are more that the total budget for other clubs who have maintained their place in that division - so unsurprisingly these teams are able to attract better players as they can afford to pay better wages. The long term effect of this has created a huge issue, where the rich clubs get richer and the smaller clubs all the way down the pyramid are struggling to stay afloat. Those of you who know me will know that I am a Southen United fan, one of many football league clubs in a perpetual financial pickle. Does the huge level of Premiership funding flow down to them? Er, no! To illustrate the issue, it appears that Sunderland, who were relegated last season from the Championship allegedly received a ￡9m parachute payment - which is more than the entire Southend annual budget, for everything!

And where do the rich clubs send their young player to gain experience and scout for footballing talent? Yup - the same small clubs who struggle on tiny budgets and are unable to compete with the big boys!

So, back to my point. Why exactly are Concord Rangers being barred from playing in a play off competition that they have earned the right to be in through merit and hard work? And why is there not a central fund that all of the smaller lower league and non-league football clubs draw on to help with infrastructure costs? It isn't as though the money isn't there, it is concentrated for a very small lucky few! The National League has made a difficult situation even harder for their little clubs, and they ought to be ashamed. This is a national disgrace!