Clipping the wings of the golden goose

You can bet your life there are a few football club owners with very twitchy sphincter muscles at the moment. Such are the riches on offer with the new TV deal no one wants to miss out; staying in the premier league means getting your hands on the golden goose of football. The new deal, some £5.1 bn, is truely eyewatering even after you allow for 5 percent going to grassroots football and community projects and charities, it still leaves £4.9bn going to Premier league clubs. I personally feel the 5 percent to grass roots is not enough, the whole package needs to be shared out much more fairly throughout the leagues. We have gotten to the stage now where this deal makes the champions league money look like small fry and as for the Europa league, forget it. At the end of the day few clubs below the top 6 in the premier league will have much appetite for a run in Europe if it risks their Premier league status and the money on offer. No, they'll be content with a good cup run to keep the natives happy and the ultimate aim of safety. This is a scenerio we as Newcastle fans are all too familiar with, with the exception of the good cup run. It's starting to feel like the perfect storm has arrived with different elements all coming together to finally kill off the game as we know it. If it wasn't before then it certainly is more business than football now, as we have seen with our own clubs owner. I predict more and more that Ashley's entering the world of football because, for the first time, there is real money to be made if you do it right. My big concern though is that he won't utilise the new TV money to fund a couple of quality signings, instead keeping to our 'wipe our own nose' philosophy that he has in place. All very admirable but what happens when the so called lesser clubs start throwing their new financial weight around buying up quality players and leap frogging us in the league in the process? I feel he really needs to loosen the purse strings before we start to drift away, and a good start would be using some of our windfall to land a quality coach. A good coach, two or three quality signings and some of our up and coming youngsters should see us look much healthier next season. I really don't see the point in clipping the wings of the golden goose, do you?

By KIMTOON