Tom Wagner and Birmingham City’s EFL rivals must be patient in their quest to reach a funding agreement with the Premier League, according to Simon Jordan.
The pundit and former Crystal Palace owner believes the Football League has a rare chance to exert some influence over the 20 top flight clubs, with the threat of an independent regulator hanging over their heads.
The Premier League appear to be dragging their feet on handing a bigger slice of their money to the 72 clubs outside to top tier, with a board meeting yesterday failing to even hold a vote on the proposal.
Instead they focused on making changes to the Financial Fair Play regulations that have seen Nottingham Forest, Everton and Manchester City charged with breaches and other clubs concerned about their own positions. The dominant thinking seems to be that the Premier League will tend to the EFL claims once they have sorted out a new Profitability & Sustainability rules.
While Salford City owner Gary Neville is unhappy with that, Jordan has advised Wagner, Blues and the other EFL clubs to make sure they get the best deal, not the quickest.
“If you are in the Premier League you would have no ambition to give the EFL more money and the only reason you will do that is because you’re being leveraged into it by the threat of an independent regulator,” Jordan told talkSPORT’s White and Jordan show.
“And you will do it at the last possible moment that you have to, because all they’re doing is a horse trade to be able to negate the impact of an independent regulator, that’s all they’re doing.
“It’s a commercial negotiation and the bottom line is, they [EFL clubs] are not due. During my time of owning Palace, we spent more time in the EFL than we did in the Premier League and I spent more time campaigning for competent leadership to be able to negotiate deals with no leverage.
“They’ve got leverage now. So what you want to do is allow [Rick] Parry and [Trevor] Birch to negotiate a deal where they can get as much money out of the Premier League as they can. If it takes a period of time to get that, if it takes all the way up to the court steps and by the court steps I mean the day the independent regulator gets the white paper dropped into legislation, then that’s what it takes.
“Because what you don’t do, is you don’t give small-minded people an opportunity to take £180 million from the Premier League or £200m a season – you want to get them to get to £400m.
“You want to get them to get as high as you possibly can If that means you play the game of turning the screw, using government, using the threat, playing brinkmanship, walk up to the court steps yourself, you do because this is this is the one time that the EFL has got an opportunity to get some proper distribution. So you don’t pee it away for small-minded opportunities. You’ve got to wait.
“The only reason there is £3.5 billion in the Premier League primarily realistically and pragmatically, is because of the elite-ness of the league. Now there is a contributing factor, and I’ve always made this point, that 14% of the Premier League’s product comes from the Championship. Three go down, three go up. So I get the value of it but you need to negotiate properly.”
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