Increasing The Footballing Standard: Solutions To The Issues

This is the follow up article to my previous one, highlighting three issues facing modern football. If you haven't read the first one this won't make as much sense.

You'll find it here.

No. 1 Competition

Now look, we all know the underlying issue here. The completely uneven distribution of wealth in the top leagues. How much money a club has has a clear link to their success in the league. Clearly what everyone wants to see is at least six or seven teams competing for a title instead of the more predictable three or four.

The restriction of the title race to three or four teams is honestly money related. Sure the top teams have top managers, top coaches and top players. But this is only because the owner of the club has the money to buy them.

The solution to this is probably non existent. You can't stop rich men or women buying football clubs because clubs would find it very it very difficult to finance themselves and I believe that a lot of clubs would go out of business.

However there might be one solution. In the present system winning teams get the biggest share of the television money, or more likely the top four teams as they get featured the most on television.

What if the breadth of television on offer was increased so that every team, in the top leagues at least, will get featured at least every two weeks. This would even up the coverage and mean that the money each club receives is much more even.

Taking this further a system could be employed where the distribution of the money is inverted, so the team who finishes 17th—the last three places get extensive parachute money anyway—gets the most money. The top teams are deemed not to need it as much and so get the least—a measly 30 million or so. Top teams can still be champions next year as their team won't disintegrate over night. However the opportunity will be given to the smaller teams to do well.

No. 2 Refereeing

There's only one way to solve human error. Video technology. Wherever the referee is unsure about which path to take he can all on a video referee who will go through the footage displayed on the big screen and see exactly what happened in slow motion and from different angles.

This way a match will be decided not on a a penalty kick that was wrongly given but on which team was the best. Or where the blame lies in an incident.

I envision a system adopted from Rugby League where the fair decision is reached and displayed to all the fans so everybody knows what happened.

People might say that this video reviewing would disrupt the flow of the game but I would argue that this would only be brought into play in the most difficult decisions and so the game won't be that disrupted.

No. 3 Sportsmanship

To address the sportsmanship issue I would say that sanctions have to be harsher to incentive-ise fair play.

Think about this. Danny Guthrie made an absolute horror challenge on Craig Fagan. Fagan got injured for four months. Guthrie got a red card. A three match ban. Clearly this is unfair as the victim of the foul got "punished" for a lot longer.

Now, if punishments were made harsher this would mean players would think twice before committing such a foul.

Another thing that can be done is the promotion of the role of captain in the team. Here the captain would have more of a responsibility to the rest of his players make sure that if they look like they are going to lose their heads he can take them aside and calm them down.

Obviously, this can't happen in open play but football has enough breaks in play to allow the captain to do this.

These are my personal solutions. You may disagree and if so please comment better solutions.