- Re: League 1 & 2 moving to regional football? Archived Message
Posted by BWScarf
on 22/4/2020, 2:12 pm, in reply to "Re: League 1 & 2 moving to regional football?"
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Once again, you're letting the tail wag the dog. In the grand scheme of things, ending this season now will not save a single football club. Likewise, forcing clubs into regional divisions will not save a single football club. To pretend otherwise is naive. They are knee-jerk ideas that will, in the long term, achieve nothing except to harm the game. If any individual club is in so much financial trouble that it cannot afford travel costs, it is going to go to the wall anyway; without a bailout, there is no saving it. I'll come back to the bailout part in a moment. But first. Regional football. We know, first hand, how damaging being stuck in regional football is. It stunts a club's ability to grow. It drastically reduces a club's ability to attract talent from outside its immediate sphere of influence. It brings down the level of funding a club can hope to attract from sponsorship. And in many cases, it does absolutely nothing to help with travel and logistics. 'Barrow away on a Tuesday night you say? Yeah, dead easy that. Northampton on a Saturday? Unmanageable mate, they're in the south.' A quick study of regional football. In England, we split at sixth tier level into North and South. Attendances are on average lower than 1,000. Gloucester - Blyth is (probably) the longest journey. 280 miles. In France, they split into regions at fourth tier level (National 2) into various regions. Similarly, attendances hover around 900-1,000. In Group A of the National 2, based principally in the North-East of France (and Corsica!!) Leaving aside the Corsican capital Bastia (aberration), Belfort travel to Lille (not that one). 366 miles. In Spain, the highest level to split into regions is the third tier - but this is largely due to the huge volume of clubs. Worth remembering Spain is a massive country. Slightly better attendances - around 2,000 on average. Still lower than the National League average. In Segunda B, Grupo 1, clubs are mainly from the North West, centre and Islands of Spain. Racing Ferrol travel to Melilla, 786 miles. In Germany, the highest level to regionalise are the fourth-tier Regionalliga. Attendances vary, but are generally around 1,500-2,000. Again, lower than National League average. In the Regionalliga Nord, Weiche Flensburg travel to TSV Havelse. >200 miles. The point is, foreign leagues, notoriously less wealthy than the English league system, have regional systems which involve, in many cases, huge, lengthy journeys. Even when you split into regions, long journeys are unavoidable. But we have an extra benefit: we are a very small country. There is no fixture in England where one team cannot arrive in time for a match having left early in the morning the same day. A return to regional football is probably premised on the sunny uplands where every supporter turns up en-masse because every game is on their doorstep. That ignores the fact that it isn't true; the human pschology of people being bored; the fact people don't have the money to travel everywhere every week, no matter how close it is; and the fact that people enjoy a day out to new places. I can't speak for everyone, but you can #### right off if you think I'm going to find perpetual trips to Barrow and Harrogate more appealing than trips to Barnet or Yeovil. It's all hypothetical nonsense. And that's before you get to a point I will repeat from above: saving on travel will not be enough to keep clubs afloat. It's like applying a plaster to the hole left by being impaled on a javelin. Pointless. We've just spent six years in regional football. By the end I was thoroughly bored. I'll get behind anything that blocks a return to that, especially if it's voluntary. I never did get to the bailout thing, maybe that's for another post. But either: money comes from above, or if it doesn't, chairmen dig deep, or if they can't, a central fund is set up and the bailout is proportional to the % of the club that is handed to supporters' trusts. Or, failing that, let them die. Call me mean-spirited, but I'm not interested in tearing up the rulebook because Accrington Stanley's books are in trouble. |