Wrangling between management and players over big-time dollars is not confined to United States.

By Robert Wagman
SoccerTimes

(Saturday, November 24, 2001) -- Proving that big-time professional sports are very much the same no matter where in the world you are, soccer in England almost came to a standstill with players going on strike against the Premier League The issue: the split of television revenues.

Sound familiar?

The Professional Footballers' Association currently has an agreement with the Premier League (EPL) calling for the players to get a five-percent share of television revenues. The contract was signed back in the days when television revenue was kind of an afterthought. That is no longer true. Hence the deadlock.

This year the EPL will earn about $762 million from television, meaning the players’ union would get about $38.1 million, or nearly three times what the league is offering.

The PFA is made up of current and former professional soccer players at all levels, about 4,000 members. It rejected a "final" offer from the EPL of $14.5 million a year for the next three years. After polling all players in the union, a December 1 strike date was set. In return, league officials countered by saying if the players struck, they would be sued.

Cooler heads prevailed, with 11th-hour bargaining producing a three-year $74-million offer the players union said it would accept. The settlement represented a sum nearly double the EPL’s "final" offer.

Richard Scudamore, the Premier League's chief executive, said in announcing the settlement "The good news is there is no strike and an agreement has been reached for the good of the game and everyone. Fans can now make arrangements for next Saturday safe in the knowledge that the games will go ahead and everyone can be proud of that. A three-year agreement worth £52.5 million over three years will now fund the PFA to allow them to work alongside football's governing body. We must never go through this again."

Among other things, the union uses this revenue to help former players and their families who have come upon hard times. Last year, it spent about $980,000 in an expanded effort toward this cause.

Scudamore had argued vehemently that the union simply did not need the kind of money it was asking for.

The union sent out almost 4,000 strike ballots and 99 percent of the 2,312 returned ballots were in favor of the "industrial action," that now has been avoided.

Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the PFA, had been equally vehement in holding out for a five per cent share of the television revenue, but he was quick to express delight at the new offer. "We have compromised and reached an agreement I believe both parties are happy with," he said. "We have a sum that will allow us to improve the service we provide. It's been long and difficult, and I'm delighted that we've reached an agreement."

If more proof is needed that television revenue is the engine driving soccer today, look at an ambitious plan unveiled by UEFA, soccer’s European governing body, at a meeting of the organization’s 51 member national associations in Prague. Every two years, first leading up to the World Cup and then two years later the European Championships, every nation plays a series of friendly matches. They are often very ho-hum affairs, not generating much interest or more importantly television revenues. So UEFA has come up with a couple of alternative plans to turn friendlies into either a new Cup competition or an actual international league of national teams.

The first proposal is for a Cup competition over a three-year period, with qualifying and final phases, which has the working title of the Nations Cup. The finals would take place the year before the current European championship, which occurs every four years in even number years between World Cups. The two other proposals center on league systems, with promotion and relegation, with the working title of the UEFA A-League.

UEFA's chief executive Gerhard Aigner suggested a three-year competition might start in 2004 to produce a final in 2007, the year before the 2008 European championships. Aigner said: "It will depend which model is put in place. We don't really have a fixed schedule but if we were to have a competition with a three-year timetable we would start such a competition in 2004 and finish it with a final tournament in 2007, one year prior to the European Championship."

"This is an embryo for development," UEFA's director of professional football and marketing, Lars-Christer Olsson, told the conference. "Our aim is to get the stone rolling, and we must now all discuss the alternatives."

The proposals could impact countries outside of Europe, including the United States. Under any of the proposals European teams would be very limited in the number of friendlies they could play outside the new system. Countries like the U.S. depend on playing European countries both for revenue raising and to get ready for World Cup competition. The U.S., for instance, is playing both Italy and Germany next Spring.

In the wake of the U.S. victory over Jamaica at Foxboro Stadium, I wrote about both the tight security which resulted in many fans missing a big chunk of the first half, and about ABC’s decision to broadcast news and not the soccer game. I have heard from a large number of you on both issues.

The reaction to the security at Foxboro Stadium was odd in that about half the e-mails I received reiterated complaints from fans who did not get into the stadium until well after kickoff, balanced by those who sailed through security almost without breaking stride and were easily in their seats for the National Anthem even though they arrived only 15 minutes before game time.

I have come to the conclusion it was entirely dependent into which gate you entered. Those who tried to get in through the north gates had a half hour wait. Those entering through the south gates had little or no wait whatsoever.

In echoing the complaint heard from any number of writers that the stadium did not have all its gates open and did not have enough personnel on duty, I said I guessed they were trying to save a few bucks. Todd Smith, the New England Revolution general manager, took rather sharp exception to this assertion.

"In the two weeks leading up to the event, I had many discussions with our stadium and security staff concerning entrance procedures and other issues that would be a concern," Smith wrote. "A decision was made that we would open our parking lots one hour earlier than for other soccer events (four hours prior to kickoff), and our gates would open at 12 noon (two hours, seven minutes prior to kickoff), which again is 30 minutes earlier than we would have opened the gates under normal circumstances.

"As an organization, we proactively added our security policies and entrance procedures to news releases, we added this information to our web site, through conversations between our box office, ticket sales and customers. . . all to encourage our guests to get to the stadium early so that this process would work effectively.

"On Saturday, based on the estimated crowd being just over 40,000 people, we staffed the event to accommodate up to 45,000 fans. The reality was that between the hours of 12 noon till 1 p.m. we processed 20 percent of the guests, and between 1 until after 2, we processed 80 percent of the fans. In the wake of the September 11th tragedy, the number of gates that we opened and staffed were proportionately higher than for a Patriots (football) game with an average attendance of closer to 60,000 guests. The major difference is that Patriots fans are generally conditioned to arrive at Foxboro earlier and the guests enter the stadium in a more evenly distributed manner.

"I absolutely applaud the efforts of our director of security, his staff, local and state police, along with the assistance of federal agencies for taking all necessary tedious steps to ensure the safety and security of our guests for sporting events. In ‘normal’ times these are awesome and quite often thankless responsibilities, but now have an even greater implication.

"The New England Revolution, Foxboro Stadium, along with our staffs will continue to redefine what can be done effectively and efficiently for these types of events, but it is a shared responsibility by our guests to alleviate the stress of this process. This can be achieved by simply having our patrons arrive earlier."

Senior correspondent Robert Wagman's "It Seems To Me . . . " appears regularly on SoccerTimes. He can be e-mailed at bobwagman@soccertimes.com..