Trickle-down economics won’t help the EFL

Birmingham City owner Tom Wagner says big clubs “have to be protected at all costs”, in order to help the pyramid. I’ll believe that when I see it.

Yesterday afternoon, a few hours before his side needed a 99th-minute equaliser to avoid defeat at home to crisis-ridden Sheffield Wednesday, Birmingham City owner Tom Wagner gave a speech at The Summit, a Leaders In Sport event at Twickenham Stadium. He was on the Headline Stage, this being a sort-of LinkedIn version of Glastonbury, and spoke about his ambitions for Birmingham as a club and a city. He spoke about a few other things as well.

‘Top clubs should be “protected at all costs” – Wagner’ was the BBC’s dramatic headline, which I assumed must have been taken out of context. Come on, he wouldn’t have been so naive as to use those words as the owner of a Championship club recently promoted out of League One. Surely. He must have known how that would look.

“I think the top clubs in English football have to be protected at all costs. We can’t take too much from the top clubs to support the pyramid.”

OK, that seems pretty clear-cut. Most football fans would argue that the top clubs in English football are extremely well protected, even to a fault, but each to their own(er). The backdrop for this is the impending introduction of an independent regulator, which could impact the unprecedented and unsustainable levels of debt and spending in English football. It’s been met with resistance from owners of a number of clubs in the Premier League and, as Wagner exemplifies, some in the EFL.

He went on:

“If you have a situation where the top teams are not dominant internationally, with the very best players and product, then the interest will wane – particularly from the US market, which will drive interest and capital flows into football.

“I love the pyramid – we have experienced a lot of it – but the top clubs that are highly successful have significant brand value and draw interest. We hope that interest will help grow the entire pyramid.”

In other words: trickle-down economics, but for football.

The concept of trickle-down economics, which had its heyday under US President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s but is still beloved by Republicans today, is that giving greater benefits to the rich, most commonly via tax cuts, will benefit the poor… in some way. And often it really is that vague – there’ll be more money at the top and so, therefore, obviously, it’ll end up trickling down to the bottom in a sewer-type fashion. By the way, the richest 1% of Americans now have more wealth than the entirety of the country’s middle class, and it’s only growing.

The second, crucial step of this plan is always missing. It’s notably absent in Wagner’s plan, and you can tell because he speaks in certainties for the most part (“We can’t take too much… the interest will wane”) but can only say, “We hope that interest will help grow the entire pyramid”.

Worse still, he seems to contradict his own theory, such as it is. Wagner says, “We can’t take too much from the top clubs to support the pyramid” but also that the interest those top clubs draw can “help grow the entire pyramid”. How, if the pyramid can’t ‘take’ from them? Where’s the flow? If anything, developments such as the Elite Player Performance Plan and the abolition of cup replays – both designed to benefit richer clubs at the direct cost of poorer ones – suggest the flow is going the other way.

There was more tell-tale phrasing when Wagner declared the EFL needs its own global broadcasting deal with a streaming network. This isn’t a bad idea in itself. Yet his emphasis was, “If we focus on growing the sport, we all win” – or, more plainly, “Rather than focusing on how we distribute an existing pie, we grow the pie”. Tom, I know you’re new to this sport but let me tell you: we’ve tried that. The pie has been growing exponentially since 1992. It’s now one of those pies you see on Guinness World Records, and just as unappetising.

With his support for playing league matches overseas, and now this apparent opposition to an independent regulator (reducing state intervention and regulation being another key facet of trickle-down economics), Wagner can be seen either as a vanguard of football’s new way of financing itself or a danger to the sport’s traditions. I’m not interested in arguing which is true. What I want to know is why and precisely how clubs in Leagues One and Two are supposed to benefit from English football’s richest clubs getting richer. Because if the idea is to focus even less on how that pie is distributed, where those crumbs fall, then all we’ll see is the gap continuing to widen. What has trickled down to date is in vast disproportion to what hasn’t. The Premier League is watertight.

Fun fact. A hundred years before ‘trickle-down economics’ became a widely-used phrase in the 1980s, the same political concept was known as horse-and-sparrow theory. The logic went that if you feed a horse enough oats – more oats than it could possibly need – then there’ll soon be enough coming out of the horse’s other end for sparrows to subsist on. Some would argue that the new breed of mega-wealthy football club owners seem to be providing a similar message to the rest of the English pyramid. Eat shit.

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