OLIVER HOLT: We owe Boehly for reminding us our game is still at risk

OLIVER HOLT: Greed doesn’t sleep. It just waits. And so we owe Todd Boehly a debt for reminding us that the danger to our game still lurks… his openness to reviving the European Super League is a huge concern

• Todd Boehly’s proposals for an all-star game are arrogant but relatively harmless
• There are many concepts from American sports that would be good for football 
• But Boehly is yet to even prove that he can run Chelsea successfully as owner
• His most concerning point was that a European Super League may still go ahead
• It was a reminder that an independent regulator cannot come soon enough

Let’s start gently and cut new Chelsea owner Todd Boehly some slack for his suggestion that the Premier League should ‘take a little bit of a lesson’ from American sport by staging an all-star game. 

As proposals go, it was asinine, arrogant, stale, ill-considered, impractical and patronising, but apart from that, it was relatively harmless.

It did garner some support here and there. One radio presenter decried the opposition to Boehly’s idea and asked pleadingly whether we were not allowed to have fun in football any more. And there were some of us thinking that watching football was already fun. It depends, I suppose, on why you love football and what your idea of fun is.

Chelsea owner Todd Boehly has proposed that a Premier League all-star game should be held

So, sure, if you’re not interested in sport or competition or jeopardy or commitment, if you need to be beaten repeatedly over the head with two hours of confected slapstick in an orgy of fawning and self-congratulation that most of the top players will have swerved anyway, then, yes, an all-star game may well be for you.

I’d get more enjoyment out of watching my dog chasing her tail in the back garden but then I have an aversion to friendlies and anything akin to them. A friendly or an exhibition game, of which an all-star game is a variation, is something masquerading as sport. It’s not real sport. At the core of those playing and watching, no one cares about the result. We need fewer of these occasions, not more.

Oh, and as for Boehly’s contention that the game would raise money for the lower leagues, do me a favour. Forgive my cynicism but we have been here before. We know when owners want to make a land-grab because they start preaching about how much it will benefit ‘the pyramid’. 

Boehly’s idea is is arrogant, ill-considered, impractical and patronising, but relatively harmless

American sports such as basketball, baseball and NFL stage an all-star game every year

If Boehly really wants to help the pyramid, how about he champions a wider revenue-sharing system in English football? I won’t hold my breath.

The all-star game is not even a fresh idea. I saw someone describing it as ‘lateral thinking’. That’s laugh-out-loud funny. Come on, it’s an old, tired idea that has been around for decades, is declining in popularity rapidly in the States and wouldn’t work here anyway. Jurgen Klopp had the right response when he asked whether Boehly was intending to bring the Harlem Globetrotters along.

Look, American sport is full of things to admire. The NFL, the NBA, the NHL and Major League Baseball are all better, more responsibly and more imaginatively run than the Premier League. But isn’t that the point?

American venture-capitalists — run by smart men and women who have made a lot of money in business and want to make even more — look at English football and see a myriad of opportunities that do not exist in their own leagues.

A salary cap in English football, for instance, would stop owners like Boehly, Sheik Mansour and the Glazers stockpiling players. The revenue-sharing system in the NFL, which extends way beyond TV money, would be an impediment to the so-called Big Six clubs perpetuating their dominance of English football and, if extended to the Football League, would breathe life into all of the top four divisions.

Jurgen Klopp laughed at Boehly’s idea, asking if he’d bring the Harlem Globetrotters along

A draft system would revolutionise our leagues by helping the weakest and penalising the strongest. The Rooney Rule, which dictates that teams must at least interview one ethnic minority candidate for a vacant head-coaching role, would help in the fight against discrimination. 

There are so many measures, pioneered by American leagues, that we should be trying harder to emulate but a lot of them would curtail opportunities for club owners here to maximise profit.

Maybe that is why every single one of them was absent from Boehly’s incoherent manifesto for the Premier League that he outlined at the SALT conference in New York last week. Instead, he stuck to proposals like the all-star game, a tournament to decide who is condemned to the third relegation place and a plan to establish a network of Chelsea feeder-clubs around the world, using the Red Bull franchise as his template.

Boehly might have been better advised to keep his counsel until he has at least proved he can run Chelsea successfully. He has not made a particularly impressive start. 

Boehly sacked Thomas Tuchel after backing him with a £230million spend in the summer

The new Blues owner boasted that Kevin De Bruyne was a product of the club’s youth system

He set a new record for transfer spending in a single window, splurged £230million on new players and then sacked his Champions League winning manager, Thomas Tuchel, after just six league games of the season.

Tuchel, it has been reported, began to grow disillusioned with Boehly’s input around the time Boehly suggested he play a 4-4-3 formation and pressed him to agree to the signing of Cristiano Ronaldo. That is rumour. 

What is fact is that Boehly boasted Kevin De Bruyne and Mo Salah were products of the Chelsea youth system when De Bruyne was signed from Genk and Salah was bought from Basel.

Most concerning of all was Boehly’s admission that he had not ruled out the idea of Chelsea reviving their interest in joining a European Super League. ‘I never give hard no’s,’ he said in New York. ‘I like to keep my options open.’ That set alarm bells ringing. Loudly. 

‘The sentiments which led to the Super League fiasco are not dead,’ Jamie Carragher wrote in his newspaper column on Saturday, ‘merely in hibernation.’

I’m sorry, but if you don’t understand the vehemence of the reaction to Boehly’s statements then you have the memory span of a distracted gnat. You have forgotten already about the ESL and the damage it would have done. 

Real Madrid president Florentino Perez led the European Super League proposals last year

Boehly has not ruled out the idea of Chelsea reviving their interest in joining a Super League

The vehemence of the reaction was not about the all-star game, even though that was the headline stupidity. It was about Boehly’s comments on how English football needed to learn lessons. It was about the open-minded attitude to the ESL. It was about the threat of what lay beneath.

Gary Neville was even more robust in his criticism of Boehly’s comments. And he was right to be. The accusations of xenophobia aimed at him, because he had the temerity to remind those who had apparently forgotten of the prominent role played by American owners in this country in the formation of the ESL, were pathetic and absurd.

Let’s say it again: the move towards the ESL, a semi-closed league with 15 permanent members, which was championed by Real Madrid president Florentino Perez and Juventus chief Andrea Agnelli, and was led, in this country, by the Glazer Family at Manchester United and FSG at Liverpool, both American owners, would have destroyed the Premier League as well as the Champions League.

Claims of xenophobia aimed at Gary Neville – who criticised Boehly – are pathetic and absurd

Chelsea supporters protest the European Super League plans outside Stamford Bridge

It would have gone ahead and the fabric of English football would have been laid waste, were it not for a huge popular uprising of fans against it. 

It was only when there were demonstrations outside stadiums that the owners of United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Spurs, Manchester City and Chelsea lost their nerve, withdrew from the ESL and issued grovelling apologies.

The suspicion has always been that it is only a matter of time until the owners of many of Europe’s big clubs try again. Greed doesn’t sleep. It just waits. In a way, we owe Boehly a debt of gratitude for reminding us that the danger to our game posed by Perez, Agnelli and the owners of the Big Six still lurks. 

We owe him a debt of gratitude for reminding us that the advent of an independent regulator for our game to protect it from predators cannot come soon enough.

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