Project Big Picture was yet more tiresome self interest, opportunism in a crisis and could have harmed Leeds United - Graham Smyth

I’m tired of the self interest in football, the politics and the implicit belief of the rich and powerful that their place in the pyramid is to have more control and a bigger say than the rest.

This is a truly dreadful time, in a dreadful year. There is no end in sight for the ‘new normal’ robbing us of so many things that made life enjoyable, like being in a crowd at a game being played or being in a crowd of loved ones, playing games. There is no sense that this country has got the virus under control and so we’ll go on existing but not really living, waiting for it all to go away, praying for and craving the ‘old normal’.

Football, the Premier League specifically, was supposed to raise the nation’s spirits, not give our weary heads more cause to shake in despair.

Perhaps when there was no football for that insufferable period of lockdown, something like Project Big Picture might have been slightly more tolerable to discuss and write about as we got tired of nostalgia and how best to conclude the season.

Just like that debate, the idea from Liverpool and Manchester United reeked of self interest.

English football does need to seriously examine the distribution of wealth if it wants the English Football League and the pyramid beneath it to survive. That’s a conversation worth having, but the way in which it was proposed was so tiresome.

Of course the EFL were all ears. Can it really be a surprise that chairmen of clubs, who can barely see a viable future through the financial mire they have become entrenched in thanks to a pandemic, would snap your hand off if it was offering the money they so desperately need?

Why would a club in League Two care that the strings attached would hand control of the Premier League to self-appointed prefects? There are many, many clubs whose ambition is not to climb the ladder to the top but just to stay on it, maybe moving up a rung in a good year. Thanks for the money, good luck with your new Premier League, we’ll talk again the next time we run out.

There are bills to pay, jobs to safeguard and communities to enrich and support. Lower-league clubs are so desperate that they’re a captive audience when someone talks money.

But proposals to kick two teams out of the top flight, to turn the third automatic relegation slot into a play-off place and the ‘special voting rights’ for nine Premier League clubs would have set in stone an order of things that is already nigh on unshakable, owing to the sheer riches possessed by top-flight title contenders.

It was a further greasing of a ladder that, for the majority of clubs, is impossible to scale. It was opportunism, dressed as solidarity, in a crisis.

The owners of Liverpool and Manchester United looked down from their tower, noticed the peasants were struggling and offered to throw them gold coins, as long as they helped raise a drawbridge that would keep them outside the castle.

For Leeds, who would have faced a very difficult, uncertain future had they remained in the Championship without fans coming through turnstiles, these proposals could have endangered their hopes to go after the ‘big boys’ once top-flight status has been maintained for a season or two.

They would have been cast as second-class citizens, unable to operate on a level playing field.

External, independent governance is surely a better way forward than entrusting the running of a competitive league to people earning vast sums from the running of their own club but if top flight clubs are to control top flight affairs, an equal share of power is the bare minimum requirement.

One can only wonder what Marcelo Bielsa made of it all. He’s sounded enough warnings about football’s direction of travel to allow us to guess, with a degree of confidence. His response was probably to look up briefly, over the top of his spectacles, then resume watching a video of Ian Poveda dribbling a ball.

Maybe we should all do that. Everything else, even the good news that bad ideas have been rejected, is tiring.