Is this the Beginning of the End for the Premiership?

Another season has gone by in the Premiership and another club has been sold to another super-rich foreigner. Not one but two clubs have been taken over by foreign million/billionaires in recent months and it hasn’t come as a huge surprise. No less than seven top-flight teams are now under over-seas ownership, the two most recent being West Ham’s £85million Icelandic takeover by Eggert Magnusson and Liverpool’s multi-million exchange with super-wealthy George Gillette. If you’re a fan of these particular teams then you are probably thinking that it’s great news; your club now has the financial backing to buy the best players, compete with the best in the world and start bringing home the silver-wear. But is it really great news? Could all this foreign money end up damaging the Premiership and eventually make our beautiful game ugly?

Chelsea fans will immediately disagree as they feel that the extra cash is nothing short of a god-send; seeing as they have won two consecutive championships since Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich took command. True, money does mean success and you do need a lot of it to keep the top players happy, but now that seven clubs are financially dominant; could these clubs and their fans expect to be like Chelsea; demanding that the team win every game and every competition with failure unthinkable? Could this extra amount of pressure end up destroying English football?

Lets imagine for a moment that all twenty clubs had unlimited funds to use in the transfer market. The race for the best players in the world will be even more of frenzy. And let’s face it, these players aren’t going to be easy to persuade; knowing that the chairman is a billionaire several times over; he is going to demand stupendous weekly wages and will only accept the highest bidder. The game really could end up just being played for the money. Also, with even more foreign players being imported where does that leave our England stars? On the bench most likely, or even moving country themselves to play for teams that we have never even heard of! With the England team scattered it could spell disaster for the national side.

And what does happen when each team has eleven of the best players in the world? Three teams have to get relegated, so a huge number of people are going to be extremely disappointed. And then we will have three super-powers in the Championship. How are clubs like Southend United, Colchester F.C and Luton Town going to compete with that? Sell out to a foreign billionaire perhaps?

The point is that while we are celebrating a prosperous future, we could be blinded by our greed. Fans may end up getting bored with the game as their team isn’t winning the Champions League or UEFA Cup and they could turn to other sports or just start following lower league teams.

It is good to know that at the moment the Premiership is very popular all over the world, but in ten maybe twenty years time, we could end up hating the game and god forbid- even turn to rugby!