Welcome to the forum.
The Premier League is *already* a closed shop so far as the vast majority of clubs are concerned. There is no way that most clubs can compete financially (and therefore on the pitch) with the teams at the top of the Prem, and increasingly most of the rest of them as well. Even getting into the Prem needs a lot of money, and to stay there for any length of time takes even more. The chances of a club of the size of ours doing what we did in the eighties is pretty negligible now unless you suddenly have a huge injection of cash from an owner who (as the phrase goes) wants a train-set to play with for a few years, and even then you can get into huge trouble financially when that cash goes away. I don't think that *any* team *can* get to the Prem.
And of course now those same clubs are desperate not to play 'smaller' clubs at all, having devalued the League Cup to a degree where they can propose to do away with it and trying to do much the same for the FA Cup. It's all about 'getting into Europe' - and that's primarily because of the money. Which is of course TV money. But the amount of TV money we (and clubs like us) get is of course strangled by the lessening opportunity of playing one of the 'larger' teams in a cup game.
The Premier League is not at all bothered about the lower leagues or the pyramid structure in this country, except as a place to develop their own young talent (which of course they hoover up from lower league teams and pay as little for as they can in the first place) - they'll do this by introducing B-teams if (when?) they can. If they cannot do that, they will make sure they are allowed to retain and loan out as many players as possible so that existing lower league clubs become zombie clubs populated with youngsters from the Prem playing U23 games against each other.
What to do about it? The Prem aren't really going to voluntarily give up their monopoly and money grabbing ways any time soon. The Championship clubs would quite like to be the Premier League 2. Most clubs are too busy (especially at the moment) scrabbling to survive and will, I fear, accept any forty pieces of silver they are offered just to do that and will close their eyes and ears to what that might mean just a little way down the line.
