Terrible things happen to sporting championships when you start messing around with the format.
Just ask the Scottish Premier League or – sorry – the Scottish Premierleague – whoops, no – the SPL. Back in the 90s, not content with being unfairly branded a “Mickey Mouse league” by anyone south of the border, Scottish football’s finest minds set about proving their tournament was a farce. They changed names. They changed the size of the league. They changed the size of the league again. They abandoned relegation for teams called Aberdeen. This year’s wheeze: they told a perfectly good side they couldn’t, after all, get promoted – but only at the end of the season, once they’d actually won their championship.
Short of demanding players donned big ears and talked in squeaky voices, they couldn’t have done much more – although they did get the refs’ and linos’ shirts sponsored by Specsavers. Really. They did. No shit.
So it’s with some dismay I read about Brian Mawhinny’s plan to “rebrand” the English football league – the league which, thanks to the mighty Robins, I have most emotional investment. Great news! It looks like we’re going up to the first division anyway, despite our play-off misery. Or, rather, up to League One.
Not that we’re really going anywhere. Every other club jumps one division too, in the name of appealing “to our core audience” and “also to a new generation of youngsters on the brink of discovering the game”. That’s a curious point; a “new generation” simply used to be taken along to a game by their dad, and would – on emerging onto the terrace/stand – instantly fall in love with the whole shebang, dodgy mutton pies, stinking toilets et al. Why doesn’t this work any more? Maybe even kids spot the league’s graceless decent down a slippery slope first embarked upon when “Wimbledon” upped sticks and moved their franchise to Milton Keynes.
Mawhinny continues. “We also want a commercial audience to be encouraged to re-evaluate its perception of the League.” Which, basically, means that by calling the first division “the championship” some second tier brand, with a desperate desire to attach its sugary drink or fattening food, or a first tier brand that simply wants to own everything going in order to promote its sugary drink or carb-packed food. Welcome to the era of the Coca-Cola Championship, or the Pringles League One.
At least you can still taste failure in the sugar-coated, trans-fat filled world we’re moving into – unlike the SPL. But, equally, isn’t the joy of winning the league going to be somewhat tempered by the fact you’re lifting the Dunkin Doghnuts League Two Trophy?
