'B team' threat hangs over football’s future

Now technical director at Premier League Brighton – having previously held the same job with West Brom – Ashworth was discussing how football exits the coronavirus crisis long term.

“Everyone starts by looking at their own house,” he said. “Our budgets, what our outgoings and incomings are.

“A few years ago, we explored strategic loan clubs, B teams, partner clubs, those sort of things.

“Maybe things like that come back on the table because if there is a shortage of money and everybody has to cut their cloth accordingly. Maybe there’s some ways we can form partnerships that we can share resources and help one another.”

There are many things fans of lower-league clubs would take issue with here, the main one being the ‘sharing’ of resources in the context Ashworth refers to.

Replacing a Walsall or a Shrewsbury or a Gillingham with Brighton B – or even allowing them to play at the Amex Stadium while keeping their name – is not ‘sharing’.

Even my five-year-old daughter would understand that is not sharing.

It is like her telling her brother: “You can play with this toy, but only when I want and how I want you to play with it – and you can’t play with it in your bedroom with all your other toys, you must play with it where I tell you.”

I do agree that resources need to be shared – but perhaps this should come more in the form of spreading the ridiculous wealth accrued at the top of the game.

Because what Ashworth – and he’s not alone here – fails to realise is that the Premier League’s global success is built atop the greatest football league system in the world. No other country can boast even the same number of professional clubs or leagues, never mind the hundreds of semi-professional and amateur teams that prop those up further.

Yes, lower-league football needs reform as much as the Premier League because owners are pushing their clubs way beyond their means – but you should not cut those adrift below you just because the time suits.

Nobody was blaming Bury or its fans when they went out of business earlier this season – it was all laid at the door of the owners.

Ashworth’s statement would all be pretty hard to swallow from anyone, especially someone who has worked in one of the most high-profile roles in the Football Association, the body that is supposed to protect its members. But coming from a man now at a club that almost went bust not much more than two decades ago, it is a particularly bitter pill to swallow.

The Seagulls relied on bucket collections at games to keep going in the 1990s after finding themselves homeless.

The fans of other clubs who dropped a few pennies or a few quid in a bucket – whatever they could afford – were not ‘looking at their own house’, they were protecting the greater good.

If I was a Brighton fan, I would be disgusted.

If I had been one of those holding a bucket in the ‘90s, I would be ripping up my season ticket, burning my club membership and disassociating myself from the club until such a time the bosses in charge of Brighton remember its relatively recent history.

Because if this was 1997 with the Seagulls cut adrift at the bottom of the league without a home to play in the following season – they ended up sharing with Gillingham, 70 miles away, for two seasons – then they would be faced with the prospect of becoming Crystal Palace B.

Or, if they were ‘lucky’ enough to keep their name, playing at Selhurst Park with half of Palace’s youth team.

And you can only imagine the uproar at that.

The more squabbling that goes on and the more selfish words that come from the mouths of those at the top, you realise the lower leagues are heading for the apocalypse.

If next season begins without fans, I doubt there is a single club in Leagues One or Two with a sustainable business model to get through it.

Only those with big cash reserves will be able to keep going until those run out.

No help can be expected until the Premier League gets its own house in order – if at all – but unless it does and finally thaws its icy heart then Bury won’t have been the only football club casualty of 2019/20.

But never mind, eh? There’s always Brighton B...