Premier League Clubs Fail the Smell Test by Furloughing Their Staff

 Premier League clubs have been accused of being woefully out of touch with the national sentiment. Photograph: Clive Rose/Getty Images
Premier League clubs have been accused of being woefully out of touch with the national sentiment. Photograph: Clive Rose/Getty Images
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Premier League Clubs Fail the Smell Test by Furloughing Their Staff

 Premier League clubs have been accused of being woefully out of touch with the national sentiment. Photograph: Clive Rose/Getty Images
Premier League clubs have been accused of being woefully out of touch with the national sentiment. Photograph: Clive Rose/Getty Images

Under the shadow of coronavirus new rules are being made and unmade. Things that were unknown and alien a week ago are increasingly part of daily life. But some things do not need explaining. They feel instinctively right, or plain wrong and Premier League clubs furloughing their staff is one.

On Monday Mike Ashley took the plunge, announcing Newcastle would be the first club to stop paying all non-playing staff. Instead they could apply for emergency funding, 80% of their salary up to £2,500 a month under the government’s coronavirus job retention scheme.

Newcastle turned over £178m in their last published accounts. Ashley was estimated to be worth just under £2bn in the lastest Sunday Times rich list. Yet the move did not surprise many; a week previously Ashley had decided his Sports Direct retail business should ignore the national lockdown and carry on trading because it sold essential items, such as Lonsdale-branded flight bags, until government pressure told.

Twenty-four hours after the Newcastle announcement, amid a lengthy statement calling on the world of football to “wake up to the enormity of what is happening around us”, Tottenham’s chairman, Daniel Levy, said he would be also be furloughing staff, with the taxpayer to pick up the bill. Spurs had just announced a profit of £172.7m with Levy confirmed as the highest-paid director in English football, taking home £7m.

On Tuesday Norwich joined the gang, although they would top up their employees’ furlough payment so it matched their usual salary. Norwich operate on one of the smallest budgets in the Premier League but in 2018-19, in the Championship, they gave their highest-paid director £472,000.

Are football clubs going through straitened times? No doubt. Not only have they been suddenly deprived of the revenuefrom playing matches – from tickets and bar receipts to the ads on electronic hoardings – they face the prospect of having to return money to broadcasters should the season not be completed and to sponsors whose logos will not have been seen as often as they were promised.

In losing out on income they had assumed was guaranteed, football clubs are hardly alone. Some, even in the top flight, could be classed as medium-sized enterprises, taking in less each year than a Tesco Extra. But despite that, football clubs are not an ordinary business.

Of late there has been much speculation as to how the Premier League may complete the season and thus forestall some of its losses. The idea of a sporting “mega event” has been floated, with clubs playing lots of football in short order on TV. It has apparently been encouraged by government which, given the unknowable knock-on effects to public health, sounds about right. Such an event, it has been suggested, could boost the nation’s morale.

This idea attests to an obvious fact: Premier League football plays a central role in British life. Clubs and players are put on pedestals, treated as role models and heroes. They did not ask for it to be that way but to say those at the top do not benefit, and enjoy benefiting, from that privilege is nonsense. That is why actions such as those taken by Newcastle, Tottenham and Norwich have immediately and pungently failed the smell test.

In the middle of all this are the players. We are used to the fetishisation of their great wealth and the question, never far behind, as to whether they deserve it. They did not create this problem but their union, the Professional Footballers’ Association, is wrangling with the Premier League over whether their wages should be subject to alteration in order to help clubs stay afloat.

The PFA does not trust the clubs and perhaps rightly so. On the other hand the PFA is an opaque organisation with questions that linger over what it does with its substantial revenues beyond paying its chief executive, Gordon Taylor, a salary comparable to that of a Premier League player.

The players should take this moment and break from their union. Like many others in this crisis they should use it to do good. Bournemouth are pursuing the same approach as Norwich but Eddie Howe and his staff are taking pay cuts voluntarily.

Premier League players should follow Leeds’ example and offer to forgo a portion of their salary, too, so that none of their colleagues are furloughed and to protect as many livelihoods lower down the pyramid as they can.

It’s clear, from listening to individual players, that this is what many of them want. They should set an example to those higher up the football food chain and just do it. The country would thank them.

The Guardian Sport



Amorim is 'Very Excited' about where 14th-place Man United Can Go in 2025

Manchester United manager Ruben Amorim reacts at the end of the English Premier League match between Manchester United and Newcastle United in Manchester, Britain, 30 December 2024. EPA/ADAM VAUGHAN
Manchester United manager Ruben Amorim reacts at the end of the English Premier League match between Manchester United and Newcastle United in Manchester, Britain, 30 December 2024. EPA/ADAM VAUGHAN
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Amorim is 'Very Excited' about where 14th-place Man United Can Go in 2025

Manchester United manager Ruben Amorim reacts at the end of the English Premier League match between Manchester United and Newcastle United in Manchester, Britain, 30 December 2024. EPA/ADAM VAUGHAN
Manchester United manager Ruben Amorim reacts at the end of the English Premier League match between Manchester United and Newcastle United in Manchester, Britain, 30 December 2024. EPA/ADAM VAUGHAN

Despite his team entering 2025 in 14th place in the Premier League, Manchester United head coach Ruben Amorim is “very excited” about the year ahead.
United’s 2-0 home defeat to Newcastle on Monday saw it suffer five league losses in the same calendar month for the first time since September 1962, and a fourth straight reverse in all competitions means the Red Devils have lost six of their last eight.
But in a message posted on his club's official X account on New Year’s Eve, Amorim wrote: “I know it will take a lot of hard work from everyone to get there, but I am very excited about where we can go together in 2025.”
Amorim is yet to halt the alarming slide which led to Erik ten Hag’s dismissal in October, and his team is seven points above the drop zone with increasing talk of a relegation fight, including by Amorim himself who has called it “a possibility.”
But the Portuguese says he's determined to press on with the 3-4-3 system despite the difficulties United’s squad has had in adapting, The Associated Press reported.
“Of course I didn’t choose the players specifically for these positions but that I already knew,” he said. “But I understand they have a lot of difficulties because they spend two years playing one way and then they are playing another."
Amorim did not have the benefit of a pre-season to implement such a major change to United’s tactical model, and admitted that is having a significant impact.
“I think the players are losing everything, the small things that we try to work on in training," Amorim said. "After one goal they lose everything because we don’t have the base, we don’t have time to build the base to cope with the difficult moments so it’s really hard in this moment.”
United has the toughest of starts to 2025 when it travels to play league leader Liverpool on Sunday in what is widely considered English soccer’s fiercest rivalry.