The Football League – what is the next disaster?

Last updated : 16 July 2002 By Tony Scholes

Retiring London Clarets Chairman Steve Corrigan joins Cambridge and Brighton fans on the picket line
Last year I was somewhat critical of them over signing a deal with ITV Digital for television coverage of the league and predicted then that it would end in disaster. Not for one minute did I think Carlton and Granada would pull the plug and not pay up but it was a deal that was never going to run its full course.

Rightly, and here I agree wholeheartedly with them, they have to do whatever they can to get that money if at all possible but in truth are they really doing very much at all. Instead of launching their own campaign and fighting it they have given the impression that they are happy to sit on their backsides and let others get on with it.

We have this mysterious organisation called the FFU. The League's Director of Communications John Nagle admits to knowing very little about them. He told me that they were not giving them publicity but had simply given them a quote. A look at the official club web sites and the appalling Football League web site will tell you different. They have let this lot run the damn campaign.

Then we had the petition and what a joke that turned out to be. As for the Burnley part of the petition our own Chief Executive Andrew Watson said he wanted the whole town to sign it. Not a lot seems to have been done to achieve that. To get people to sign a petition you need to ask them and at the very least there should have been petitioners out in town and outside supermarkets etc. Instead they chose to have them in their own club shops etc. During the period I went into both club shops, ground and in town, and the petition was not even mentioned to me.

I'm not so sure how close to the whole town we got with the petition but there has been no mention of it which does suggest the answer is probably nowhere near.

Clubs wanted people to write to Carlton and Granada. That would have been easier if people had been presented with standard letters. This is one of a number of things I was going to discuss with John Nagle. I have now been waiting over a week for his promised phone call.

And then there is the picket. Last Wednesday saw the Football League chairmen picketing outside the London offices of Carlton and Granada. Well in truth there were 21 of them with the other clubs sending representatives. Thirteen clubs didn't bother to attend at all. It got some TV publicity although that mainly appeared to centre on the fact that Delia Smith was there. At least the lunchtime sandwiches would have been good.

The supporters' picket started the day after and an embarrassing handful of fans were shown on the first day outside one of the offices on a TV news bulletin. The second day saw the Clarets there and they were supposedly alongside Brighton, Bury, Cambridge and a pair of Bristols.

Three of the clubs didn't even show leaving just Brighton, Cambridge and members of the London Clarets outside Granada. The numbers weren't great but once again where was the massive organisation required for this sort of thing? New London Clarets Chairman Andrew Firmin was less than impressed and told the Lancashire Evening Telegraph,

"It was very disappointing. There were only three clubs there instead of six and we had to stand across the road from the Granada building, which is a pretty anonymous-looking 1960s office block. There was also a heavy stream of traffic between us and the building.

"One of our members went inside with a fan from Cambridge and one from Brighton to hand in a petition but they were told the chairman of Granada, Charles Allen, wasn't there.

"The only people going in and out seemed to be secretaries and so on so it felt pretty futile. And there wasn't really anybody there from the League.

"The communication could have been better. The information we got from the League kept changing. They told us at the beginning of the week that only the Bristol Rovers fans could go to Carlton because of a lack of space and the rest of us had to go to Granada. I don't know if that happened because they didn't tell us any more. [Bristol Rovers did not turn up]

"I think a better way to do it would have been to get all the fans together in London one day for a mass rally around Trafalgar Square. That would have increased awareness and would have got more coverage."

Once again well done Football League. This was supposed to be a major publicity campaign ahead of the court case and to be honest it has won itself very little publicity at all. You are the ones organising this but the general view from supporters is that you have just sat back and let it all happen. Get your fingers out and rescue it before it is too late. You and the clubs have made a complete mess of it from start to finish and are now expecting the supporters to jump through hoops for you. I suppose nothing has changed there then.

And we haven't even mentioned the threat to all the official web sites with the problems with the deal they agreed with cable company NTL. Could that be the next disaster to hit the clubs?