Money makes the football world spin around

You’ll forgive me for not reading all 2,954 ‘comments’ on the BBC Football website. I did get beyond the 50-mark, but there didn’t seem much point going on (writes Dave Thomas).

‘The game’s going down the pan’, ‘Plumbing new lows’, ‘It’s getting like a circus’, ‘Absolutely pointless’ and ‘I hope they refuse’ were just a few of more restrained ones.

I liked ‘Thank God non-League is holding out against guff like this’. Except that Tier Five (National League) and below have, to our enduring relief, not been dragged in. Yet.

There was one reader who said he or she was in favour – until you realised that they were massively taking the mick.

We’re talking, of course, about the news that, as a result of the latest £6.6 billion (yes, you read it right) four-year deal struck between the Premier League and its TV ‘partners’, certain new features will be allowed.

They include touchline interviews with substituted players and cameras admitted to dressing rooms.

It’s not apparently enough for TV, satellite and terrestrial, to have bent the game to its insatiable will in most areas.

Let’s face it, nothing major happens in football now without the say-so of Sky Sports, TNT et al. He who pays the piper calls the tune, down to every last note, crotchet and kick-off time.

The ‘Show’, the product is everything. The game is just the meal to be devoured and, if necessary, respiced and reheated.

Interviewing players who’ve just been taken off, and pushing cameras into dressing rooms, isn’t about adding insight. It is about exploitation and pantomime emotion.

They say that substituted players will be given time to ‘calm down’. And cameras will not be allowed to film team talks. Really?

Wondering how Messrs Shankly, Clough or Busby would have reacted to all this nonsense may smack of old-fartism, I know.

But don’t you wish they were here to tell us?

A slammed door doesn’t make for great viewing after a second or so. And neither does the back of a muddy, sweat stained shirt.

Back in the early 1980s, fresh from seeing how American TV covered sports during his time with the Seattle Sounders, Torquay United manager Bruce Rioch used one of his midweek press conferences to make an announcement.

In future, rather than Rioch doing all the talking, we reporters would be allowed into the Gulls’ dressing room to interview the players after matches.

And by ‘after’ I mean, like, ten minutes after.

How did it go?

Well, the players hated being accosted, with towels still wrapped round their waists. They were embarrassed in front of their team-mates.

They were nearly all nervous about saying anything that might rebound on them later. And we quickly realised that any pointed questions were met with pursed lips, knowing grins or something a little less polite.

Rioch soon drew a diplomatic line under the experiment and abandoned it after a few weeks, to everyone’s relief.

Shankly, Clough & Co may have long gone, but let’s hope that there are still one or two of their present-day successors with the guts to do exactly what they would have done with the cameras and microphones. In the nicest possible way, of course.

I’ll bet Daniel Levy knew all this was coming. That’s why he sacked Ange Postecoglu!