Money Is Ruining Football With Administrations, Massive Wages and Huge Spending

Football is the greatest sport in the world, where anything can happen and it can put you on the edge of your seat. But recently money has flooded the sport, and has corrupted it.  

Massive spending, wage bills, bribery for match fixing have entered the sport and made it less about the football and more about who is in debt and who isn’t, who might go into administration and who won’t. The passion and excitement of just watching and enjoying the game itself has been tainted with other issues invading the sport.

Wages and transfers over the last 2 decades have gone up enormously. In 1987 the world record transfer fee was £6 million (Ruud Gullit, PSV to A.C Milan). Now it is £80 million (Cristiano Ronaldo, Manchester United to Real Madrid).

Of course, if people want to buy a club and spend their own money making it great, then that’s fine. But it's when others spend to keep up, spending money which they don’t have, which then plunges them into debt.

Liverpool and Portsmouth are examples. Liverpool brought in new owners to try and keep up with Chelsea in terms of spending power, and to clear the debt which had appeared after chairman David Moyes loaned about £40m to keep the club going for 06/07 season while he looked for an owner. He found Tom Hicks and George Gillet, two people Liverpool fans now never want to see ever again, as they have plunged the club further into debt with broken promises over the new stadium and bickering with the then manager Rafael Benitez.

Now Liverpool are looking for new owners, and could go into administration if they don't pay RBS hundreds of millions of pounds by the end of October.

Portsmouth, under businessman Alexandre Gaydamak spent heavily during 2006-08 and this resulted in Harry Redknapp’s side winning the FA Cup. However, debt came into the club as Portsmouth owed money to clubs that they had bought players off. Redknapp left for Tottenham and Portsmouth sold a number of their best players, before going through many owners.

They went into administration and were relegated from the Premier League, almost slipping into liquidation.

In the old days, this sort of thing was rarely a problem, however nowadays there is always another club with rumours of debt problems, leading to fans to revolt against the owners, disrupting the club itself and affecting the players (Liverpool and Manchester United being prime examples). UEFA are trying to curb the spending and the rest of the cash problems with new rules, but at the moment football is not the same it used to be.

Some players go into football now for the money and the lifestyle, not for the glory of winning and playing in front of thousands of people. Some players care more about which advertisements to do and what cars to buy, then winning football matches and playing games. Some even don't mind sitting on the bench all the time if they're getting £30,000 a week!

At the moment, money is taking football's soul and passion away.