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Tell me why … all this Premier League money has made so many fans so miserable

Monday, April 1st, 2013

The Premier League has never been richer – and yet most of its clubs have never been more fretful. When the new three-year cycle of TV deals for 2013-16 begins this summer, some £5.5bn of TV cash alone will pour into England’s top division. That makes it more important than ever for clubs to stay there, and more and more desperate for those who fear missing out. Instead of relishing the riches, the beautiful game has become a nine-month exercise in stress for many fans, and Ian Herbert for one argues there is greater contentment elsewhere.

By Ian Herbert

1 April 2013

I got to thinking about this when I came across one my favourite old photographs (below).

It’s me (far left), my twin brother Pete (grinning, right) and dad in the crowd at Upton Park in January 1992 to see Wrexham’s FA Cup fourth-round tie. West Ham were four leagues above us and the game would end 2-2 but we didn’t know that would be the outcome when the photograph froze the moment in time before kick-off.

The grins were quite possibly about the Monopoly notes floating around on the east London breeze in a mood of fraternity for Mickey Thomas, about whom there had been rumours of involvement with funny money – over which he’d later be arrested.

Most of all the smiles were about knowing that winning was possible and that anything could happen that afternoon, a few weeks after we’d put Arsenal out of the competition, with Thomas prominently involved.

On a week-to-week basis, that much is true in the Premier League; winning on any given day remains possible. Hence Southampton fans can believe in anything after beating Manchester City, Liverpool and Chelsea in recent weeks.

But the broader perspective of playing in the Premier League for a season doesn’t make such a happy story. Could anything happen for teams in this division? Not really. The best that might occur for most clubs is survival and the worst outcome – spending nine months stalked by relegation – has befallen more clubs than ever in the 2012-13 season.

It has been the campaign which the term ‘bottom 11’ has come into play; all of them fighting for the right to stay around for another season of fighting to stay around. The impending new TV deal raises the stakes and only compounds the kind of madness which is now unravelling at Sunderland.

The fans there don’t seem to be protesting much about the inestimably poor decision to dismiss Martin O’Neill in favour of Paolo di Canio, whom the former Swindon chairman Jeremy Wray says will be box office, which isn’t the most encouraging endorsement of a man who has left some managerial carnage in his wake. Few teams have less to grin about than Sunderland.

I’ve been grateful over a number of months for the great work the financial writer Ed Thompson has done on the club, which enabled us to report on the day that O’Neill was presented as manager that the Northern Irishman would need to stem the wage bill as the club were careering towards failing Uefa’s Financial Fair Play test and being denied a license to lay in Europe, if they were actually to achieve such a goal.

A full 16 months on and their picture hasn’t changed. Sunderland quietly slipped out their financial results the Friday before last – a practice now depressingly common among clubs with bad news to bury, as Ed writes here – and the latest £26m loss, taking their own losses to £44m over two years, means that their proprietor, Ellis Short, will need to inject around £30m of equity into the club if they want to meet the financial threshold which allows them to apply for a UEFA license.

As Ed says, the Premier League don’t disclose which clubs don’t apply for a license so it is possible, so if Short doesn’t fancy laying out that money, the club may simply not apply. That would mean the fans turning up to the League Cup and FA Cup games, unaware that the club cannot compete in UEFA competitions even if they are successful.

We were not totally delusional about Wrexham winning the FA Cup that year at Upton Park but at least there were grounds to dream about all outcomes – justified, when the club made the quarter- finals a few years later.

Of course, there’ll be no protests about O’Neill’s sacking, as fans possess that eternal belief that the new man just might be a better man than the last one and that always limits the sense of outrage.

Reading fans have tolerated Brian McDermott’s departure, and the soaring achievements of Southampton’s Nigel Adkins were not enough to provoke much outrage when he went. Harry Redknapp was hailed as a saviour but where are QPR now?

The new Premier League TV deal has simply made the desperate a lot more desperate, in the Premier League and in Championship.

No fewer than 55 of the 92 Premier League and Football League managers have been in work for less than a year.

The concept of changing horse two or three times a year is no longer unheard of. Those in the managerial profession feel like a bunch of freelance sub-contractors now, as LMA chief executive Richard Bevan said a few weeks ago.

It all seems like a fairly desperate place and though Wrexham attest to the fact that there are no guarantees of greater contentment outside of the top flight – they plummeted into the Conference five years ago, shortly after moving out of administration – it seems like an infinitely finer ride.

One of mates my called the FA Trophy final “that FA thing” last week and few will be able to name the finalists but that day out to Wembley, beating Grimsby Town and seeing the trophy cup lifted was sweet. The ticket’s been framed and is on the wall. Not a lot of Premier League fans can say that.

Ian Herbert, who was shortlisted as Sports Journalist of the Year in the prestigious Press Awards, and highly commended in the SJA Sports News Reporter of 2012 category, is The Independent’s Northern Football Correspondent (see archive of his work here). Follow Herbie on Twitter here.

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QPR relish capital gains as Man City and Wigan flop in north-west derbies

Friday, March 29th, 2013

By Brian Sears

29 March 2013

QPR face a London derby this Easter weekend that will partly determine whether their season can be resurrected.

That one is played on Monday, and a week later the two clubs from Manchester – champions-elect United and champions (reigning) City – will also meet in a derby, at Old Trafford.

It has been theorised in the past that clubs who face a lot of derbies, regionally, can be at a disadvantage to those that don’t, because derbies can be closer affairs than ‘other’ games if only because the geographical proximity adds people and spice to the atmosphere.

In looking at the regional derby records this season, below we consider the six London clubs on the one hand (that’s Arsenal, Chelsea, Fulham, QPR, Tottenham, West Ham) and the five north-west clubs on the other: Everton, Liverpool, City, United and Wigan.

And we conclude that QPR like derbies relatively most in London, while in the north-west, City and Wigan both probably hate them – because they’ve flopped so badly in regional derbies this season.

Our table below details the points from the derbies, and compares those with each team’s points from the non-derbies. In London, there’s really not that much difference for any club except QPR, who have won a whopping 0.5 points more per game more from derbies than other games.

And in the north-west, the poverty of results in these games by City and Wigan is startling. City have averaged 2.3 points per game from non-derbies and a derisory (for them) one point per game in north-west games. Wigan’s comparable numbers are 1.18 and 0.14.

Continues below

If QPR had maintained their derby form in non-derbies all season, they would have 34 points and be approaching mid-table.

If Wigan had maintained their non-derby form in all their games, they would be nudging towards the top 10 with more than 35 points.

If City had suffered their north-west derby form in all games, they would be in the vicinity of Aston Villa – and in trouble.

And if none of this is anything but theoretical, it still makes you think, no?

Happy Easter, folks.

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From Man Utd at £1bn to Wigan at £43m: what’s your club REALLY worth?

Monday, March 25th, 2013

Recent months have seen some extraordinary numbers bandied around for the values of English Premier League clubs. Arsenal were rumoured to be the target of £1.5bn offer by a Middle Eastern consortium, who have gone strangely quiet since. In January, Forbes said Manchester United had become the world’s highest value ‘sports franchise’ worth $3.3bn (£2.1bn). But on what consistent and rigorous basis are these claims made? TOM MARKHAM, a qualified accountant and former foreign exchange trader with an MBA in Football Industries from the University of Liverpool, has collaborated on projects with national associations, clubs, agencies and sports consultancies. About to complete a PhD in Football Finance at Henley Business School’s ICMA Centre, here he outlines exclusive new research that reveals a new reliable valuation model, universally applicable to Premier League clubs.

By Tom Markham

25 March 2013

Manchester United are the only football club in Britain worth more than £1bn, I can tell you that.

And by ‘worth’ I mean using a fixed set of financial criteria, hard economic data, to look at what they make and what they spend to come up with a ‘rational’ value for the club.

Rational: what somebody would pay for a thing if they arrived on earth with no preconceptions about glamour or otherwise, status for its own sake, what others have said before.

In a moment, in great detail, I’ll explain how my new valuation model works, and provide a link where you can read in greater depth precisely how this model stands up to scrutiny.

But I can also tell you that West Bromwich Albion are currently more valuable than Everton, and that Tottenham are worth more than both Manchester City, the Premier League title-holders, and Liverpool, the 18-times champions of England.

Before we move on, here are what the 20 current clubs are really worth. The prices assume that the buyer, on top, also assumes responsibility for any current debt the club has:

Between 2005 and 2010, twelve Premier League clubs changed hands. Currently, eleven of the division’s 20 clubs are controlled by foreign owners. Despite the dramatic increase in club acquisitions in recent years, it has become apparent that finance professionals within the football industry use vastly differing methods to ascertain a club’s value. This is illustrated in the example below of Tottenham Hotspur, which was listed on London’s Alternative Investment Market (AIM) until January 2012.

These estimates above make you consider, which figure, if any, is correct? A potential investor’s judgment will unquestionably be impaired by the significant discrepancy of £267.5m between the highest and lowest club valuations outlined above. This was the underlying motivation for this research which analyses what methodologies are applicable to football club valuation.

The full research paper, which is linked here where it can be download for free, introduces the Markham Multivariate Model (MMM) developed specifically to value Premier League clubs.

Prior to developing the model, six established valuation methods were assessed for their accuracy in estimating an EPL club’s worth. Of these models, three were general company valuation techniques: Market Capitalisation, Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) and Bankruptcy Value.

Three were contemporary football industry valuation models: Revenue Multiples, Forbes ‘Most Valuable Soccer Teams’ and Broker Values. For comparison purposes the models were calculated for a period of nine seasons between 2003-04 and 2011-12. This coincides with the first publication of Forbes ‘Most Valuable Soccer Teams’ in 2004.

A valuation model needs to be reliable and universally applicable to all Premier League clubs to be considered as the optimal method to value a club. This straight away causes a problem for the Market Capitalisation method as only two of the current twenty EPL clubs are listed (Arsenal) or partially listed (Manchester United) on an exchange. This means that Market Capitalisation cannot be universally used to compare club valuations.

It also proves somewhat erratic for club valuations from the evidence in Table 1 (pages 19 & 20 of the full paper, downloadable free). For example, Tottenham Hotspur’s 2012 market capitalisation of £83.6m (highlighted above) seems extremely undervalued especially given that midfielder Luka Modrić was sold by the club for £33.3m alone six months after this valuation.

Spurs are regularly profitable, owns their stadium and training ground in London and have a strong squad of players including the coveted Gareth Bale. At the other end of the spectrum, Manchester United was valued at £1.49bn in 2012 which is £100m more than any other method calculated the club’s worth to be. This illustrates that the method cannot be universally adapted or relied upon to value clubs.

DCF is recognised to be the most dependable means of valuing a regular company. The shortcomings from football perspective are that it requires regular profitability and accurate predictions of future revenues to provide reliable valuations. The majority of Premier League clubs are not profitable and cannot predict future financial performance due the volatility of a team’s on-field performance. Nevertheless, it was possible to calculate the value of 53 of the 73 clubs under review in Table 1 (pages 19 & 20 of full paper).

The results using DCF to calculate club values are mixed. There are examples of overvalued clubs in almost every season including: Tottenham Hotspur at £684.m in 2011-12, Manchester United at £1.4bn in 2010-11 and Tottenham Hotspur at £1bn in 2009-10.

There are also examples of distinct undervaluation including: Tottenham Hotspur at £7.4m, Manchester City at £8.1m in 2004-05 and Chelsea at £95.9m in 2003-04. It is therefore evident that DCF is neither consistently reliable nor universally applicable to valuing clubs in the Premier League.

Table 1 (in pages 19 & 20 of paper) also contains the club values attributed to the Revenue Multiples valuation method. This is the first technique under review that can be used to calculate the value of all clubs between 2003-04 and 2011-12, but is it reliable? The answer is no.

Although revenue multiples is recommended by academics and professionals in the sporting domain, the truth is that the methodology is far too simplistic. The results show that it tends to work adequately to provide a quick estimate for EPL clubs with lower revenues but provides large undervaluation for the more established clubs with higher revenues.

Manchester United was sold for £800m in 2005 but the revenue multiple for the club in that year was £253.6m. This undervalues the club by over 68% and this is consistent for larger clubs such as Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur throughout the nine seasons under review.

The method also fails to take into account what assets a club has under its control, its debt position, is it controlling costs and its profitability. It is therefore evident that Revenue Multiples can be universally applied to value clubs in the EPL but its results are not consistently reliable. The bankruptcy and broker values were not estimated as the financial distress of a club or sentiment of the owners cannot be realistically simulated and differs on a case by case basis.

This leaves two methods to examine: Forbes ‘Most Valuable Soccer Teams’ results and the Markham Multivariate Model developed for this research.

Forbes have been publishing the 25 highest valued clubs in world football on an annual basis since 2004. These values are based on the magazine’s own valuation methodology which seems to have evolved in recent seasons. Table 1 (pages 19 & 20 of paper) was compiled only to include EPL clubs included in the Forbes lists between 2004 and 2012 as the magazine’s nebulous methodology could not be adopted to value any further EPL clubs.

This means that the Forbes method was not universally applied to EPL valuations for the purpose of this research. At first glance at the Forbes results in Table 1 (pages 19 & 20 of paper) seem more credible than any of the previous methods examined. This probably explains why it has been the industry benchmark by default. A comparison of sale transaction prices of North American sports franchises and Forbes valuations found that Forbes values were 27% higher than the actual sale prices.

It became obvious over the course of this research that none of the aforementioned valuation methods were universally applicable and capable of providing a reliable value for every EPL club.

Consequently, it was decided to develop an alternative valuation technique capable of achieving these underlying objectives – the MMM.

After scrutinising all the established valuation models and the niche requirements of the football industry, the components of this model were finalised. The model includes a club’s: revenue, profit (or loss), net assets (all the clubs assets less all its liabilities – including debt) as well as football industry key performance indicators: stadium utilisation per cent and wages to revenue per cent.

The model is explained in detail within Section 5 of the paper available here. The table below compares the actual transaction values of Premier League clubs (where over 51% of the club was sold) to Forbes valuations and the MMM between the 2003/04 and 2011/12 seasons under review.

Although there are only Forbes values available for seven of the fifteen transactions that took place during the sample period, it is evident that their results are even less reliable than those previously highlighted relating to North American sports franchises.

The table above shows that Forbes estimates were between 59.2% lower (Manchester City in 2008) and 69.1% higher (Liverpool in 2010) than actual transaction prices.

Looking specifically at Manchester City which changed hands in 2007 and 2008, Forbes valued the club 51.8% higher than cost in 2007 and 59.2% lower than cost in 2008. The fact that only two clubs were valued within 10% of the actual transaction cost by Forbes illustrates that their method is not reliable or universally applicable to EPL clubs.

This leaves the MMM as the last methodology to be considered. The model uses audited accounting data and industry KPIs to provide a bespoke valuation method designed for the football industry.

Leeds United entered a period of financial distress between 2003 and 2005. Table 1 (pages 19 & 20 of paper) shows that the multivariate model disclosed the club was almost worthless and in need of re-capitalisation whilst Forbes failed to recognise this along with the other valuation models.

The table above reveals that on average valuations using the multivariate model were only 2.8% more than actual club transaction prices. The valuations of Manchester United in 2005 and Sunderland in 2009 were exactly correct to the nearest million pounds.

The Moores and Walker families who sold Liverpool in 2007 and Blackburn in 2009 respectively acknowledged that they sold at a lower price as they felt they were selling to new custodians who would propel the clubs forward which is evident in the multivariate models higher valuations for both clubs. All this evidence suggests that the MMM is the most reliable valuation model encountered of the course of this research as well as being universally applicable to all EPL clubs.

It is only fitting that the multivariate model is used to calculate a Premier League club valuation table: the one at the top.

Unsurprisingly, the commercially dominant Manchester United is top with a value of £1,060.4m. Arsenal, the only club to be profitable for every in every season under review, is a close second at £942.9m; thanks mainly to the development of the Emirates stadium.

Chelsea with its smaller stadium and higher player wages is third at £510.5m. The consistently profitable Tottenham Hotspur is next with a value of £436.3m. Big spenders, Manchester City come in at £401.1m. This valuation reflects the fact that Manchester City does not own its stadium and paid inflated player transfer fees and wages in recent seasons.

English football’s most decorated club, Liverpool, is sixth with a value of £352.2m. This value reflects the fact that Liverpool are earning approximately 40% of what Manchester United and Arsenal make on every match-day. Their value will increase significantly when the club redevelops its Anfield stadium.

Newcastle United is next at £275.8m based predominately on the club’s ability to fill St. James’ Park on a constant basis. The prudent West Bromwich Albion is eighth at £126.9m. Sunderland is next with a value of £121.8m would could be improved upon by attracting more fans to the Stadium of Light.

In tenth place is Everton at £112.3m. Like city their rivals, a new stadium would significantly increase the value of Everton. Benefactor backed Fulham comes next at £108.7m. West Ham United is twelfth at £104.3m but should be worth significantly more if the club remains in the Premier League and successfully relocates into London’s Olympic Stadium.

Subsiding Aston Villa are worth £102.5m according to the model. Now consolidated in the Premier League, Stoke City is next at £94.9m. Norwich City is valued at £90.1m. Strategic Swansea City is sixteenth at £64.8m. Big spending Queen’s Park Rangers are valued at £59.9m.

Reading, Southampton and Wigan Athletic make up the bottom three in the multivariate model valuation table at £58m, £57.5m and £42.8m respectively.

The MMM introduced in this research provides a universally applicable approach that can be used to value any club in the Premier League. It also provides the most consistent and reliable results of any method examined in this research. It is also flexible and allows club valuations to be amended in line with contingency scenarios which is critical given the unpredictable nature of football (e.g relegation or UEFA Champions League qualification).

For an example of the model’s flexibility, let’s take a look at Leeds United. Using figures from its 2012 financial statements, the club is worth £34m according to the MMM. If the MMM figures for Leeds are adjusted in line with projected 2013-14 Premier League revenues and expenditure, the club could be worth £175m if it was promoted to the Premier League.

There are a number of potential benefactors from the model. There is only a very limited amount of academic research in the area sports franchise valuation. Consequently, this research will build on the existing literature in this area whilst focusing on football club valuations in particular.

Secondly, it is hard to believe that an industry that generated £2.9bn in England in 2010-11 does not a reliable valuation technique to value its core assets – the clubs. A reliable valuation method is of benefit to: buyers, sellers, brokers, finance providers and club administrators.

The research conducted could be extended to examine whether the MMM is applicable to value clubs in the English Football League, the Scottish Premier League and Football League, other European league clubs and major North American sports franchises.

Clubs, researchers or other interested parties wanting to know more about the model can contact Tom Markham here, and can download his full academic paper here.

Tom can be followed on Twitter @TMFootyFinance. The research will also feature in the May issue of FC Business magazine.

Tom’s other research papers are available for download here:

The performance of football club managers: skill or luck?

Does managerial turnover affect football club share prices? (Forthcoming in AESTIMATIO, the IEB International Journal of Finance)

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Tell me why … society demands black and white when real life is 50 shades of grey

Monday, March 18th, 2013

IT would be nice to think that definitive answers exist to every question, that truth is absolute and there is only one way to see things – because then we could always be clear and what is right, wrong, true, false. But life isn’t like that, not any walk of life from medicine to the law to sports journalism. As one newspaper takes the rare stance of a prominent mea culpa for getting a story wrong, Ian Herbert explains that the whole story is most often found in the shades of grey

By Ian Herbert

18 March 2013

I’ve been in journalism for 24 years and I admit that I sometimes still deliver information with less than 100 per cent certainty – and sometimes get it wrong.

I said that Nicolas Gaitan of Benfica was probably coming to Manchester United; that Kaka was almost certainly coming to Manchester City; and that a Chinese businessman called Kenny Huang had the financial muscle to buy Liverpool. None of it true.

None of those days were my best at the office. I’d like to say that the biggest contributor to these errors was the shifting tide of events – by that I mean the information was right when I wrote it, but things don’t always turn out how they seem – which would ease me of the hook. But that wouldn’t be true. It was the contacts who didn’t turn out to be quite what they seemed to be. I’m not alone in that.

Don’t get me wrong – this is not serial offending. I have written 5,000 newspaper articles and you cannot tell me many of them were wrong at all.

But everyone makes mistakes in good faith sometimes. And this whole area has now become a topical thing to write about in the hours since The Times acknowledged it was duped into running a story about the state of Qatar proposing a lucrative new summer football tournament.

It admits that its London office had not been stringent enough before rushing to publish a story by Oliver Kay, the paper’s chief football correspondent, whose combination of contacts, knowledge, magisterial writing and prodigious output really make you wonder why you bother getting out of bed some mornings.

But it wasn’t this case that sent me off in the direction of writing about this subject. That happened when I found myself bestowed with the privilege of being asked to speak about my job, last week, at the burgeoning literary festival which has become an important event in the calendar of my home town, Oswestry.

I wasn’t sure how the evening would go. This year’s programme, including the writers Rachel Joyce and Michael Morpurgo, reflected the growing reputation of The Oswestry Festival of the Word, now in its fourth year.

I wasn’t much inclined to mention on social media that I was doing a turn, given that football writers rarely feel the love and I didn’t want to bring any hate to the place I call home. But the venue – the town’s very fine library – was full, the discussion was full and frank and the most excellent part took us, unscripted, into the territory of degrees of certainty and uncertainty in football journalism.

The context was easy to communicate. How the days of footballers talking to players – “Treat the press as you would a policeman,” as Matt Busby once put it – are now gone, and that you’re viewing the game as if from the bottom of an ocean and drawing information from around the edges as best you can; contacts twice or three times removed, agents with an agenda, chancers masquerading as something else, and plain chancers.

We had lingered for a time on this topic, knocking it this way and that, with the general message being that readers will take the shades of grey, thanks very much.

So how many in the audience would want a story whose writer was 50 per cent sure of it? About 50 per cent, it seemed, from the show of hands, which didn’t include the man shaking his head in the back row.

“I’m a scientist,” he said. “I can’t work on guesswork. I need certainties.” To which, a reply from across the room. “That would just be boring…”

And so it went on; a bit of spikiness but deference also, given and taken in equal measure. Later, I met the excellent scientist and we’d reached an accommodation on 50 shades of grey, so to speak, before we parted.

Which leads me to ask you: what profession actually does operate on 100 per cent certainty? A lawyer can no more tell a client that 12 good men and true will acquit him than a doctor can entirely predict the future for a patient. We’re all operating in slippery places.

The next morning, I met reporters from North Wales Newspapers and the local Oswestry and Border Counties Advertiser, the title I first worked on in the summers of the mid 1980s, whose editor Susan Perry is to grow the sales of three weeklies simultaneously – while presently seeing off the threat of a competitor who, as far I can see, have got away with pinching the name of one of them by launching a free Oswestry and Border Counties Chronicle.

Talking to her reporters David Lawson, Richard Jones, Jonny Drury, Dominic Robertson and Emily Davies offered a new window onto a fine and indefatigable industry in the post-Leveson era.

The ripples effects of telephone hacking are palpable here, where attempted vox pops elicit more suspicion and the time-honoured practice of working through the phone book can bring questions about hacking.

But these reporters were able to deliver extraordinary papers when the town encountered two cases of filicide barely a year apart because of the reporters’ relationships with that list of people they need to call in a crisis. It is a list to fret over, in constant need of renewal. And the renewal of this list is what Premier League football reporters do – more, I would say, than any other branch of the profession.

Barney Rona y wrote recently that everyone is a football writer now, such is the supporting cast of thousands who tweet, blog, tactically analyse and over populate press rooms. But let’s make the distinction between the ‘writer’ and the ‘reporter’ because the latter category – the ones who ring and build and probe and deliver details previously unpublished – are a very different specimen from those who just expound – and who generally make a lot more noise on Twitter.

“Where are the quotes to prove it? Lazy,” someone tweeted me the other week, as if any of the best information is actually going to come with the source’s name in lights. That was more of the ground we covered last Thursday.

It’s what degree of certainty to publish on that remains the very big question. You can palpably feel how those percentages rose, higher and higher, for The Times, when you read back today’s explanation. And when the fullest version of how Rob Beal played a substantial role in duping The Times is finally told, my guess is the average reader too will realise this wasn’t some slapdash caper by the paper.

There is already some hand-wringing in some parts of the industry, today, about reputational damage, much of it delivered with a heavy dose of schadenfreude.

Should the paper have published a graphic? Should it have shut up shop when immediate scepticism kicked in? Probably not, probably so.

But there but for the grace of God. It’s the world we’re occupying.

Shades of truth and lies and no simple calculus to work through it.

. .

Ian Herbert, who was shortlisted as Sports Journalist of the Year in the prestigious Press Awards, and is shortlisted as the SJA Sports News Reporter of 2012, is The Independent’s Northern Football Correspondent (see archive of his work here). Follow Herbie on Twitter here.

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Swansea face toughest Premier League run-in as Liverpool dream of ‘easy street’

Friday, March 15th, 2013

By Brian Sears

15 March 2013

It’s run-in time in the Premier League with every team having nine or 10 games remaining. Those at the bottom end of the table are nervous, fretful, adding up the possible points that can get them to safety. Those around the top four are hoping to edge into it and gain Champions League football among the runners-up to champions-elect Manchester United.

So who has the toughest run-in and who has the easiest?

Swansea have the hardest set of games, and Liverpool have the easiest – using a simple equation of the average current placings of their remaining opponents.

The smaller the number in the right-hand table below, the harder the run-in:

Article continues below

Swansea’s run-in is truly tough: they still have to play all of the top five: Arsenal, Tottenham and Manchester City at home, and away to Chelsea and Manchester United.

On this basis, Liverpool’s ‘easiest’ run-in sees seven of their nine remaining opponents currently in double figures in league placement.

The contrast on Merseyside is clearest when it comes to away games facing Liverpool and Everton. All five Liverpool away games are at clubs currently 10th or lower but four of Everton’s five away days will be to clubs in the top six.

When it comes to clubs apparently most vulnerable to relegation the paper run-in seems to favour QPR and Aston Villa.

Our next table looks at the points amassed by each club they still have to face in the earlier reverse fixtures this season. The Manchester clubs are clear of the rest, but then Liverpool also had decent results against those still left to play – and arguably at a time when their form was poorer than it is now.

Sunderland, Reading, Southampton and QPR are the four clubs last time round to have managed less than a point per game from the clubs they still must face. They managed just a single win each over their nine opponents still to come: Sunderland won away to Southampton, Reading won at home to West Ham, Southampton won at home to Reading and QPR won at home to Fulham.

Article continues below

And another thing …

Wigan seem to have been in our statistical eye of late. Perhaps they deserve the attention. After all they only became a Football League club in 1978-79; then 27 seasons later they made it to the Premier League where they have stayed for eight seasons and already they are in the semi-final of this season’s FA Cup.

This Sunday they welcome Newcastle to their DW Stadium. No club has found life so difficult there as have Newcastle.

Our table of Wigan’s home results clearly shows that. Wigan have more home wins and more home points gained than against any other club.

The only blemish at home for Wigan was in January 2011 when Shola Ameobi scored the only goal of the game for Newcastle.

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Indian Wells: the gift that keeps on giving

Thursday, March 7th, 2013

ALEXANDRA WILLIS is a multimedia tennis journalist who flits between Wimbledon, SportingIntelligence, the TennisSpace and a few other outlets, while tweeting copiously and trying to improve her (terrible) backhand in her spare time.

“If I were to go to a tennis tournament, it would be Indian Wells. No question.”

That statement was not uttered by an employee of Desert Champions LLC, the company which owns and runs the 10-day hard court tournament at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden. It wasn’t anyone employed by Larry Ellison, one of the most popular benefactors in tennis, whose seemingly limitless chequebook has turned Indian Wells from the brink of a yard sale to its current position of strength.

It wasn’t a tennis player, or member of the press, or anyone else associated with the game. Instead, it was an unsuspecting nameless member of the public, whom I happened to hear in the boarding queue at San Francisco airport. How and why Indian Wells came up in his conversation with another unsuspecting nameless member of the public, I don’t know. But the sentiment rings true.

I had my first pootle about the Indian Wells Tennis Garden two years ago, and ever since then, it is a tournament that I would put on my go-to list every year. I feel almost as strongly about it as I do about ice cream.

But there is a very real reason that players, press and public wax more than lyrical about tennis in the desert. Because the BNP Paribas Open is a tournament that is constantly nipping and tucking at itself to be better. With one of the most powerful men in the world at its helm, that may not be a surprise. But you could see the temptation for Tournament Director Steve Simon and his crew to rest on their palm-shaped laurels. And yet they do exactly the opposite.

The Indian Wells Tennis Garden

True, Indian Wells benefits from one of the most stunning backdrops in the tennis world, the sandy-coloured mountains meeting the sky head on in a blur of bumps and crevices. Rows upon rows of green hard courts, decorated by palm trees, somehow look picturesque rather than like an overflow of concrete. And then there’s all the grass. In a desert.

But a nice view does not win approval on its own. The Foro Italico in Rome is a setting steeped in history. And yet the poor Romans bore the brunt of a lot grumps last year.

The reason Indian Wells has become a tennis fan’s nirvana is in the attention to detail that has turned the dilapidated into the dignified. What has become one of the largest tournament sites in tennis is an open and inviting space that benefits from 350 days of sunshine and a constant 70-odd degrees. But beautiful weather can soon become a burden if there is no shade. Sunburnt people are not happy people. Cue the building of a 19,140 square foot shaded structure in the public area of the grounds last year, a principle that has been applied to the player and media dining area this year. Another is planned for next year.

Two years ago, seating was installed around the practice courts, recognition of the fact that fans can learn just as much from players having their daily or twice-daily hit about as they do from watching them compete, and allowing them to do it in an orderly, controlled fashion, rather than a pressed-up-against-a-fence type scrum. And, crucially, information towers around the grounds were put in to tell the fans who was practising when.

Another example is the provision of additional parking in 2013. No matter how much someone is looking forward to their grand day out, if they’ve been waiting in a parking queue for an hour, even the sight of Rafael Nadal playing football might not enthuse them immediately. Thus, there are plans to add to the already extensive 55 acres of outdoor parking with spots for 2,000 more cars.

It is with learnings like these in mind that Indian Wells, with the support of the local council, has announced an onsite expansion plan worthy of the four Grand Slams. Which other tennis tournament has the luxury of being so secure in its plans for the future? Most spend the majority of their efforts recruiting players and selling tickets.

The biggest and boldest enhancement will be the construction of a brand new permanent 8,000-seat second court to join the 16,100-strong Stadium 1, the second-largest tennis stadium in the world behind the goliath that is Flushing Meadows’ Arthur Ashe. Then there are the two new restaurants, a new marquee site entrance complete with new box office, four additional practice courts, and

“We are extremely excited about our expansion, and thrilled that the City of Indian Wells has approved our plans,” said tournament CEO Moore. “Larry Ellison’s vision for this tournament has been nothing short of incredible, and the innovations and enhancements he has put forth have benefitted fans and players alike. These tournament-specific changes will continue to put this facility on par with the best in the world, deliver an unparalleled experience for fans and ultimately make the BNP Paribas Open better than ever before.”

There are the headline-grabbers, too. Two years ago, the installation of Hawk-Eye on all eight match courts, the only tennis tournament in the world to offer the player challenge technology on every court. This year, the record $11million prize money pool. Next year?

Work is also being done to raise Indian Wells’s international profile. Stuck in a tough spot in the American sporting calendar, sandwiched in the middle of March Madness (that’s college basketball to the non-American), getting a proper profile on the American TV networks has been tricky. So, instead, 2013 sees the introduction of BNP Paribas Open Radio, a live radio presentation from all around the grounds staffed by the voices who bring Wimbledon to life on BBC Radio 5 Live, available to tennis fans around the world online.

Then there’s ‘Live at the BNP Paribas Open,’ which bears an uncanny resemblance to the All England Club’s Live @ Wimbledon, and not just in the name. A live online preview show from inside the tournament grounds, fronted by Tracy Austin and other assorted tennis stars, it aims to bring Indian Wells to life in a different way.

And, from 2014, with an expanded and relocated TV production compound, ESPN could be wooed back to the garden full-time.

And this is without even mentioning what the tournament does for the players. The grassy area for football, stretching, and whatnot one of those things I’ve never seen at a tournament anywhere else.

“Anyone who knows me understands how much passion I have for the sport of tennis,” Larry Ellison has said. “My goal was to build upon the legacy that this event created before I owned it, and push the boundaries about what is possible in the future. I am certain we will continue to cement ourselves as one of the best sporting events in the world.”

With what Ellison has achieved in just three years, his statement seems unfailingly true.

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Tell me why … the abuse I get from Manchester City fans surpasses all other

Monday, March 4th, 2013

Social networking has myriad upsides, few would disagree. And no journalist working on a national platform can expect that their work will pass without criticism. It’s never been quicker or easier for readers can make summary judgement, for good and ill – and many routinely hurl abuse. Getting that kind of feedback is par for the course for most writers. That’s free speech. But Ian Herbert wonders what on earth he must have done to enrage fans of Manchester City, given acres of positive coverage over numerous years, when the smallest thing can set some of them off into paroxyms of rage and bile. Is it just his name? Or his beard?

By Ian Herbert

4 March 2013

Tell me why the abuse I get from Manchester City fans surpasses all other.

“Because you’ve got a name and reputation for dissing our club,” is no doubt one response.

“And you’ve got a beard for it.”

Yes, they’ve certainly been cropping up on Twitter in the past week.

One soul took the time and trouble to share the view that I embody nominative determinism. Herbert by name, herbert by nature. Nice one.

It’s strange, though – the things that can invite rebuke in these days of Twitter which, to quote a mate of mine, would a bit like having all your favourite people in one room if you could only shut the leery gatecrashers who just want to have a go.

One of my heinous recent offences was tweeting a link to a match report on City’s 2-0 win over Chelsea about a week ago and, often lacking originality, I copied out the headline that the folk back in the office at The Independent has used on the paper’s website.

It mentioned that Toure and Tevez had settled ‘El Cashico’.

It wasn’t exactly meltdown – I’ve not got that kind of following – but the red light on the phone did look like it might melt the thing as the tweets came in.

It’s naivity, I’m sure you’ll tell me, but I just didn’t get the Twitter semantics. The case against (me) is that El Cashito is an insult and a putdown, which fans believe define City as the height of chav. “We’ve been waiting all day to see who’d use it,” someone said. Honestly? You did that?

Then I wrote about City’s plans for world domination. This is a club who’ve always been ambitious and resolute about breaking new ground, ever since Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan took over and appointed individuals like Khaldoon al Mubarak and Simon Pearce – people who run global businesses and invest petrodollars on a scale way beyond the purlieu of Premier League football – to accomplish the task.

There were serious details in there about how the club will seek partnerships in at least three continents, are overhauling merchandise and re-ordering the business. I’d been poking around at it for three weeks. Just ask the City people I’ve been mithering.

That story got some red light responses too, all right – but not a single one of them about City’s pursuit of globalization.

Every last reaction related to me reporting what I have been privately told about the club – that despite a feasibility study they’ve not been ready to expand the size of the Etihad stadium until they know they can fill the thing. City’s gates a very good, in the league at least, but they don’t sell out every game in every competition.

The club is still growing but there’s not an Arsenal-type fan base just yet. Which intensifies the need for global revenue.

“Why lie?” I was asked, as if I’d invented the fact that seats have been available for some City games this season. “Why didn’t you research?”

I was even getting links three days later to stories of City’s forthcoming game with Newcastle being a sell-out.

The process of establishing facts doesn’t always entail being able to tell who told you them. It’s not every executive who wants his name in lights and speech marks. City’s official capacity from Premier League games is 47,805. The biggest attendance this season is 47,386.

They sometimes manage to re-sell the away quota of tickets which are returned to them but not always. The cup attendances are less than the League: 28,015 against Aston Villa in League Cup, even with discounted pricing. Source: Manchester City’s match programmes. More details here.

City are trying to expand in innovative ways. Social media means we can discuss that, if anyone wants to. Yet all anyone wants to talk about is home attendances. Tell me why?

Because of all that public criticism City got from certain members of the commentariat when they became wealthy overnight?

Because Manchester United happen to be the best example of the way to go and tend to be a point of comparison?

Because Twitter is an overrated pit of abuse? Any one of the above.

I’ve been writing about City for five years. The Sheikh arrived not long after I started writing about football. The club are also one of the most open and willing to engage, which has nurtured a better understanding of what they’re about than any other club, for many of us.

They’ve had managers who’ll talk and who don’t resort to ridicule ands put-down, like Sir Alex Ferguson does, when an individual’s questions are uncomfortable ones.

So I’ve written about their Etihad Campus, their excellent former technical director Mike Rigg – who was installed by Mark Hughes. I’ve always felt that the public ridicule heaped upon former chief executive Garry Cook disguised his brilliance. And I think that Roberto Mancini is too exacting of his players and too willing to censure them publicly to take the club on.

I’m not a Manchester United fan. I was brought up in North Wales and support Wrexham, who do not fill their stadium.

I do have a ridiculous surname . That’s it: off to trim the beard.

Ian Herbert, who has been shortlisted as Sports Journalist of the Year in the prestigious Press Awards, notably for his coverage of the Hillsborough Independent Panel, is The Independent’s Northern Football Correspondent (see archive of his work here). Follow Herbie on Twitter here.

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Chelsea fans’ solace: Super Rafa goes ballistic but Baggies are atrocious

Thursday, February 28th, 2013

By Brian Sears

28 February 2013

So Rafa Benitez isn’t feeling the love from the Chelsea fans, who have made plain their disdain for their Spanish manager.

He doesn’t like being interim, or at least hates being called ‘interim’, and the animus aimed at him is damaging Chelsea’s chances of a top-four finish.

So he said on Wednesday evening in a ‘rant’ that most people agreed was actually a sensible articulation of the short-termism and poor choices made by a Russian plutocrat.

Benitez and Chelsea return to action this weekend with these distractions blurring their focus, so it is perhaps a good thing they face opponents, West Brom, who have been poor against them in Premier League matches.

How poor? None have been poorer among the current Premier League teams when facing Chelsea at Stamford Bridge.

As our graphic shows, Chelsea have a 100 per cent record against the Baggies in Premier League meetings, playing six and winning them all.

It is no surprise that West Brom also have a worse away record in the Premier League against Chelsea than against anyone else.

Chelsea least like facing Arsenal at the Bridge, having won only 48 per cent of points available in 21 meetings in the Premier League at home.

West Brom most like traveling to QPR, Sunderland, Norwich: places where they have won half or more of the points available.

Article continues below (click graphic to enlarge)

West Brom’s record in their six defeats has involved shipping 17 goals and scoring one:

26 Oct 2002 Chelsea 2 West Brom 0

15 Mar 2005 Chelsea 1 West Brom 0

24 Aug 2005 Chelsea 4 West Brom 0

26 Dec 2008 Chelsea 2 West Brom 0

14 Aug 2010 Chelsea 6 West Brom 0

20 Aug 2011 Chelsea 2 West Brom 1

West Brom have managed to gain some reward from every other current Premier League club except Swansea (in only two visits) and Reading (only one visit.)

More on Man Utd / Arsenal (or search for anything else in box at top right)

125 years ago this Saturday, a Scottish draper from Aston Villa wrote a letter that made history (and football as we know it)

Tuesday, February 26th, 2013

By Nick Harris

SJA Internet Sports Writer of the Year

26 February 2013

It was 125 years ago on Saturday, or 2 March 1888, that William McGregor, then the president of Aston Villa, wrote a letter to a small group of other football clubs, floating the idea that they should organise a league.

In doing so, he changed the world, or at least the large parts of the world that know football as the only truly global game.

McGregor, a draper by trade from Perthshire in Scotland, wrote to Blackburn, Bolton, Preston and West Brom saying: “I beg to tender the following suggestion as a means of getting over the difficulty: that ten or twelve of the most prominent clubs in England combine to arrange home-and-away fixtures each season.”

Football had become a messy and uncertain business, popular with the masses especially as the half-day holiday each Saturday took hold, but structurally uncertain and based around cups and friendlies.

McGregor could see that a league – or “association football union” as he termed it – might bring stability. His letter in full is here; it is a reproduction because the original’s whereabouts is not known:

Article continues below

The clubs met three weeks later, on the eve of the FA Cup final, at the Anderton Hotel on Fleet Street in London to discuss the idea.

A further meeting in April at the Royal Hotel in Manchester agreed upon a name for the competition – ‘The Football League”.

The 12 founder members of The Football League were Accrington, Aston Villa, Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, Burnley, Derby County, Everton, Notts County, Preston North End, Stoke, West Bromwich Albion, and Wolverhampton Wanderers. The inaugural season kicked off on Saturday 8 September, 1888.

“The fact that 125 years later The Football League continues to thrive and that league football has become a sporting phenomenon across the globe is the greatest possible tribute to McGregor’s foresight,” says the League’s spokesman John Nagle.

It wasn’t until 21 November 1888 that the League even decided to award two points for a win and one for a draw. So there were no early league tables. There was also no separation in reporting of games between association football and rugby football.

Here is how The Times of London reported the action from the opening weekend of the league, on Monday 10 September. Note the reports of those first league games (Villa v Wolves, Preston v Burnley, Derby v Bolton) are mixed in with rugby reports and friendly games, including one between Canada and Rangers in Glasgow.

These reports come from the Sporting Intelligence section of the The Times (the sports section). This is where the name of this website comes from.

Article continues below

Football had been played in organised fashion for several decades before the Football League began, of course. The English FA has been started 25 years earlier, and clubs had sprung up around the world, many formed by British expats.

But it was the League – and copycat leagues globally – that formed the bedrock on which football became the people’s game all over the planet.

Here are the details of the world’s earliest football leagues, in chronological order of formation, with notes on direct English / British influence.

This list contains detail on every league of more than 100 years old, and the extended list below gives the start date of every major league in the world, including all those countries that have ever won a World Cup or European Championship, and every country currently in Fifa’s top 50 rankings.

1888 – ENGLAND: The world’s first football league begins, with the ‘Invincibles’ from Preston the first title winners in 1888-89, a season when they also completed the first Double.

1890 – NORTHERN IRELAND: The world’s second oldest national football league, beating the Scottish Football League to that honour by a week. The first winners, in 1890-91, were Linfield, who have amassed a record 51 titles in their country altogether to date.

1890 – SCOTLAND: Organised football started in Scotland in 1873 but the formation of the English Football League in 1888 led to an exodus south of players, variously known as ‘Scotch Professors’ and ‘Scottish ball artists.’ This worried the Scottish clubs; Scots played a passing game, not kick and rush, and they were integral to early successful teams in England. The secretary of Renton wrote to 13 fellow Scottish clubs in March 1890 suggesting a league. Most accepted. Dumbarton and Rangers were joint champions in the 1890-91 season.

1890 – NETHERLANDS: The Netherlands first ‘official’ league season starts, after two incomplete campaigns previously. HVV were the first champions, and in second place were Haarlemse FC (HFC) who had become the first football club in Holland in 1879 after a teenage sportsman, Willem ‘Pim’ Mulier, returned home from a trip to England with an (oval) football. HFC played a code of rugby in their early seasons but then switched to football.

1891 – ARGENTINA: The Association Argentine Football League becomes the first football league outside Europe. It was established by Alex Lamont, a Scot working at St Andrew’s Scots School in Buenos Aries. The inaugural season involved five clubs, with St Andrews winning the first title in what is now the Primera Division, where River Plate (34 times) and Boca Juniors (30) have been the most frequent champions.

1895 – BELGIUM: The inaugural Belgian season involve seven teams and was won by RFC Liege.

1897 – SWITZERLAND: The first Swiss championship was played in 1897-98 as a competition with regional games and a national final. The first champions were Grasshopper Zurich, formed in 1886 by a group of English students led by Tom E Griffith. A full league was introduced in 1899. Grasshoppers have won the title a record 27 times.

1900 – URUGUAY: The Uruguay league is formed by four clubs including the Central Uruguay Railway Cricket Club (CURCC), which had been established as a cricket and football club in 1891 by British railway workers. CURCC won the inaugural title, and later evolved into Penarol, who have won a record 46 Uruguayan titles to date.

1901 – HUNGARY: The inaugural season of the Hungarian league involved five teams, all from Budapest, and was won by Budapest TC.

1906 – PARAGUAY: The league was formed after the owner of the El Diario newspaper, Don Adolfo Riquelme, called in representatives of Paraguay’s five clubs and suggested a competition. Those gathered included William Paats, a Dutch co-founder of Olimpia, Paraguay’s first club in 1902. Olimpia remain Paraguay’s most successful club with 39 titles.

1912 – PERU: The Peruvian Football League began as a 16-team competition split into two eight-team divisions. The first winners of Peru First Division were Lima Cricket, the oldest sports club in Peru, founded by English immigrants in 1859. The initial focus on cricket switched to football.

Note that organised football was played in many countries on a regional basis, not least Italy, Spain and Germany, before national leagues were formed much later. This list includes the years that national leagues began in each country.

1888: England. 1890: Northern Ireland, Scotland, Netherlands. 1891: Argentina. 1895: Belgium. 1897: Switzerland. 1900: Uruguay. 1901: Hungary. 1906: Paraguay. 1909: Romania. 1911: Austria. 1912: Peru. 1921: USA, Ireland, Tunisia, Venezuela. 1924: Sweden, Bulgaria. 1925: Czechoslovakia (then 1993: Cz Rep & Slovakia). 1927: Greece. 1929: Spain, Italy, Denmark. 1932: France. 1933: Chile. 1936: USSR. 1937: Norway, Haiti. 1938: Portugal. 1943: Mexico. 1948: Colombia. 1956: Ghana. 1957: Ecuador. 1959: Brazil, Turkey. 1960: Ivory Coast. 1962: Algeria, Zambia. 1963: Germany. 1965: Japan. 1966: Mali, Nigeria. 1977: Australia, Bolivia. 1983: South Korea. 1988: Panama. 1992: Croatia, Ukraine. 2000: Bosnia. 2001: Russia. 2006: Montenegro, Serbia.

Tell me why … the South Yorkshire Police can’t stop distorting the truth on Hillsborough

Monday, February 25th, 2013

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David Crompton, the Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police, had apologised for “inappropriate and insensitive” remarks in an email last year that essentially accused the families of the Hillsborough victims of lying about the disaster. Ian Herbert reflects on another depressing setback in the struggle for truth and transparency about a disaster that claimed 96 lives – and reveals what the principal author of the HIP report, Professor Phil Scraton, says Crompton’s email tells us about the police’s attitude.

By Ian Herbert

25 February 2013

Tell me why the South Yorkshire Police force can’t stop trying to manufacture a version of events about what happened at Hillsborough – and instead let the truth speak its own name.

The force has been compelled to release under Freedom of Information legislation an email that South Yorkshire’s chief constable David Crompton dispatched early on a Saturday morning last September, four days before the publication of the Hillsborough Independent Panel’s report.

Crompton was seeking a meeting with his assistant chief constable, Andy Holt, and head of media, Mark Thompson – or “Gents,” as he calls them.

Mr Crompton posits the idea of establishing a website called ‘Hillsborough .… did you know?’. (“I’m trying to think of a non-threatening title,” he says.)

It would include previous police apologies, a memo from Peter Wright, chief constable at the time of the disaster, “saying we would not criticise the fans” and more. The chief was keen on this idea. “I think we might be missing a trick,” he says.

It is not unreasonable of the police force to be preparing their response for the publication of a report which was bound to condemn them – just how comprehensively, they were about to find out. Spin and crisis management is a fact of life, however unsavoury that might seem when set against the fabric of the 96 lives lost at Hillsborough.

But the language and unexplained details of the memo (extract below) shows it to be something more malign than an act of media management.

There is a suggestion that the Hillsborough families have – in some way which the force has not explained – told lies. “Their version of certain events has become ‘the truth’ even though it isn’t,” Crompton tells his men in his email.

There is also an implication – again, not explained – that the very significant testimony of WPC Debra Martin might potentially be undermined by the force on its new web page. “The conclusions about Deborah [sic] Martin” might be published therein,” Crompton suggests.

WPC Debra Martin was the junior officer who testified that Kevin Williams, who died in her arms at Hillsborough, had said or mouthed the word “Mum” as she cradled him before life ebbed away. The young officer’s testimony fundamentally undermined the decision of Stefan Popper, coroner at the initial main inquest, to impose a cut-off time, claiming all the victims had suffered instantaneous, pain-free death before 3.15pm.

Many of the junior officers on duty that April day in 1989 have lived for years with the memories and the ‘what-ifs’ which come from presiding, at ground level, over a disaster that their superiors were incapable of employing an strategy to prevent.

WPC Martin, whom we also know was also coerced into changing her statement, is one of them. God knows how she would have perceived the intended web page’s links to “the conclusions about Deborah Martin.”

Professor Phil Scraton, the principal author of the Hillsborough Independent Panel (HIP) report, has been left astonished by the defensive tone of Crompton’s email, which reflected the force’s response to the disaster right across the course of the past 23 years and revealed Crompton’s priorities just days before the HIP report was published.

Professor Scraton tells me: “It is astonishing that the Chief Constable should express his concerns in this manner.

“In content, language, presentation and style his comments reflect the defensive, disingenuous damage limitation that typified senior officers’ responses in the aftermath of the disaster and revealed by our research

“Whatever his eventual public statement of apology, just days before the Report was published, behind the scenes he remained concerned only with preserving the reputation of his Force. It was a reputation so severely impugned by senior officers at the time.”

Referring to the tone and language used by the Chief Constable, Professor Scraton also tells me: “As the Panel’s Report showed, the phrases used by the Chief Constable such as ‘missing a trick’, ‘case for the defence’ and ‘fighting chance’ demonstrate a mind-set that prevailed in the Force at the time of Hillsborough.

“This impacted on the investigations, inquiries and inquests. In a most offensive choice of words he denied that the families’ ‘version of certain events’ constituted the ‘truth’. He feared that the ‘media machine’ now ‘favoured the families’ and without a counter strategy the South Yorkshire Police would ‘just be roadkill’.

“While the [South Yorkshire] Police Commissioner explained that his Chief Constable’s response was made at a time of ‘intense public scrutiny and pressure for the South Yorkshire Police’ this did not mitigate the intemperate language used. Further, it is not that this language could be construed as inappropriate an offensive, as stated by the Commissioner – it was.”

The long journey towards new inquests on the 96 who died at Hillsborough is now under way and there are already grounds for encouragement.

A significant change to the Coroners Act announced earlier this month means that the inquests can be held anywhere in England and Wales, if it is in the best interest of the bereaved family and others, such as witnesses. That means that the families will not be heading back to Sheffield, or indeed Doncaster, which is within the same coronial jurisdiction.

Lord Justice Goldring, who sat on the trial of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor’s killers, has been appointed as assistant deputy coroner, but for the purposes of the new inquests he have the same powers as a coroner.

But what the process requires as much as anything is a South Yorkshire force which is willing to divorce itself from the dissembling of 24 long years, during which attempts to get to the bottom of Hillsborough have been written through with a lack of transparency.

It requires modern a police force; one which will build on the liberating force of truth which made the publication of the Hillsborough Independent Panel report such a source of celebration.

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