If the Sky money goes the whole of English/Scottish football will be in the crap. They have invested a lot more into British football than ITV Digital ever did. I said on this forum a few weeks back that football in England was in danger of going bankrupt, referring to the ridiculous sums clubs at our level were spending just to keep up. If the Sky pot disappears almost all clubs in the Championship and PL will be buggered (including us) as well as many below us. However much we may hate Sky (and I'm among those that does) there's no denying that the money they've been pumping into the game is relied upon by the majority of clubs to keep them above water
It would depend a little on the lead time - if the Sky money went, but the clubs had a few years to prepare (i.e. the European Super League happened at the beginning of a TV deal cycle) then they could survive. A lot of players would not get new contracts, and teams would be full of academy products playing on a tenth of what players get now - but I'm not entirely sure it's a bad thing.
Granted - if the Sky money disappeared with no warning, then we'd lose half of the clubs in the football league.
I understand this, but I have to disagree.
For a few reasons.
First off - who are the 'Big Six'? Isn't this fluid? Liverpool, Manchester United - massive clubs at any time. Chelsea, Manchester City? Questionable. I assume this omits, for example, Leeds? Massive club but probably not included. I don't care who is or who isn't, but it's not like the situation north of the border where there is a natural and massive discrepancy so it doesn't feel inevitable.
Secondly, and linked to the above, what's to stop it happening again in twenty years even if you do allow it now? You siphon off the so-called big ones - Chelsea Cheetahs enjoy massive success vs Barcelona Buccaneers and the Thai population love it, but meanwhile the real passion is still found at Sunderland v Middlesbrough and so some other charlatan 'entrepreneur' comes up with a new dream and siphons these off? Rinse and repeat.
Thirdly, and most importantly (you touched on it, to be fair) we can all look at these 'Big Six' clubs as vehicles for foreign support or 'ballers league' cretins in the UK - but they all have proper supporters like us, too. They don't deserve this.
The problems and excesses in the football industry are not remedied by cutting loose those currently most infected - we need to deal with the issues at source. Even if that's the economic crash of the English football 'market' by some sort of government intervention that leads to 'investors' f*cking off to a 3rd rate Spanish club instead.
Which brings me to your last point (where we clearly agree) - let it go tits up. I would love nothing more than the foreign investment to run for the hills (or La Liga - where they have a mere fraction of our football culture) and be left with slightly fewer imports and slightly less wealthy players - but a Football League perfectly intact...
So on a purely technical level - the Big 6 would be Man U, Liverpool, Man City, Chelsea, Arsenal & Spurs. Those are the clubs that got invited to start the European Super League. Those are also the clubs that are in the top ten in the world by value (according to Forbes -
https://www.forbes.com.au/news/sport/the-worlds-most-valuable-soccer-teams-2025/). So if it happened today, those are the clubs that would go. Newcastle are obviously trying desperately to get into that club, but despite their owners they are still absolutely nowhere near in terms of either revenues or brand value.....and those are the things that would matter most to whatever financial entity was pulling the whole thing together.
(we all like to laugh at the notion of Spurs as a big club, but their matchday revenues last year were about four times as high as Newcastle, and their commercial revenues about six times as high. They're a well run business with one of the best stadiums in the country, even if they're often a punchline on the pitch)
What's to stop the cycle happening again? Probably nothing. But if we had a couple of decades of concentrating on the football before money distorted it all again......wouldn't that be great?
I wouldn't mind your proposed alternative at all - the government regulating the industry to hell so that the foreign investment all left. That just feels massively less likely to me. It relies on the government acting in support of community and cultural matters to the detriment of big business. Seems a lot less likely to me than greed leading a bunch of football corporations to abandon their roots.
etc and you still have a decent base. You would always lose the very best players to the super league but they essentially only play for those clubs in most of their prime years anyway.
