Congratulations to Liverpool’s Ian Ayre for proving there is still enough room in the modern game for pure unadulterated greed.

€1.6 billion. Surely that’s a big enough cake for all 20 teams to take a slice- James Calvert

The club’s managing director last week called for individual teams in the Premier League to be able to negotiate their own international television deals.

Mr Ayre, who frankly I had never heard of before and wish I still hadn’t, said this was vital for the bigger English teams to be able to compete with their European counterparts.

At the moment all 20 Premiership teams negotiate collectively – both for domestic and international rights. That way the money they receive for both deals is split between all the clubs.

However, while Mr Ayre is prepared to accept the domestic situation, he wants all clubs to be able negotiate independently when it comes to selling their matches to foreign broadcasters.

His theory is simply that people outside England are only really interested in watching the likes of Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester United and Chelsea. The Boltons and Blackburns of the world are merely piggybacking on the big club’s appeal.

And, to be fair, Mr Ayre’s theory is spot on. That is precisely what is happening.

But is that so wrong? The latest contract, which runs until 2013, was worth €1.6 billion. Surely that’s a big enough cake for all 20 teams to take a slice.

Mr Ayre argues that clubs like Real Madrid and Barcelona have an advantage because they get to negotiate their own international rights. Which is also true. But how many Champions League titles have Real won recently? None. So it’s obviously not that big an advantage.

Manchester United, without that advantage, and even Liverpool themselves, have managed to win Europe’s most prestigious competition in the past seven years. So his argument, like his sense of ethics, is pretty weak.

And do we really want the English Premier League to turn into its Spanish equivalent – entirely dominated by just two clubs? I most certainly don’t think so.

I mean, why not go all the way and have all the lesser teams removed from the Premier League so only those that are internationally marketable remain? That should ensure a bigger slice of the cake for the remaining teams, wouldn’t it? But it would be a cake whose international appeal would soon wear decidedly thin.

Luckily for those of us who don’t happen to support a big team, this idea has been quickly dismissed. The government has said it is a non-starter, Wigan Athletic chairman Dave Whelan has described it as ‘scandalous’ and even Manchester United’s Sir Alex Ferguson agrees things should be left as they are in terms of international rights.

“We’d love to have our own but I don’t think it should happen that way. It’s quite fair to all have equal shares,” he said.

Sir Alex knows United could earn considerably more from selling their own broadcasting rights, but realises distributing the wealth is the right thing to do. That’s because he’s a gentleman who is not blinded by bling and whose morals are not corrupted by greed.

If Mr Ayre wants to know why Liverpool are finding it hard to compete at the top level it’s because they spent several years owned by dumb and dumber. And they have had a succession of managers (pre-Kenny Dalglish) who simply didn’t understand what the club was all about.

If he believes that by widening the gap between the haves and have-nots he is going to make Liverpool better off he is massively mistaken. All his plan will do is water down the value of the Premier League. And when the quality of the league is diluted, interest in watching it will slowly wane and the value of the rights diminish.

The Premier League has been going strong for the past 20 years now. It is a business model that works, that has revolutionised football in England and matured into possibly the strongest league in the world.

Then along comes a man who’s prepared to fix something that isn’t broken purely to line his own club’s pockets, and who’s prepared to let the likes of Bolton and Blackburn suffer, struggle and go out of business as long as Liverpool can beat Real Madrid once every few years.

There is, however, a major stumbling block to Mr Ayre’s plans – the current set-up can only be changed if 14 out of the 20 Premier League teams agree to the plan. And that is obviously never going to happen.

Which makes me wonder if Mr Ayers wasn’t just trying to put forward an impossible case in an effort to make the Premier League offer bigger teams a bigger piece of the rights pie.

And while this is also not ideal, at least it has some basis considering it is the top clubs that are the biggest international crowd pullers. How you decide how to apportion the money, of course, is a whole different problem, but that’s not for me to worry about.

Ultimately, if Mr Ayres was just trying to shake things up to make the distribution of wealth more closely reflect the pulling power of the clubs, then I can probably give him the benefit of the doubt.

If, however, he was serious about wanting to take away pretty much all of the international money from the smaller clubs, then he should take a look at himself in the mirror.

The beauty of English football is that it isn’t always about every man for himself. In some cases there is collectiveness to the game which benefits the sport as a whole.

Take that away and the very essence of the game in England could be destroyed forever.

No room for Roon

It pains me to say it but, given his three-match suspension, Wayne Rooney should be left at home next summer.

I’m sure many will disagree with me, none more so than Fabio Capello himself, but I just can’t find a way of justifying Rooney getting a seat on that plane to Poland.

Let’s put it this way. If he goes and England fail to get past the group stage in his enforced absence, everyone will be saying his place should have gone to someone else who could have maybe made a difference on the pitch.

If, on the other hand, he goes to Poland and England do get through to the knock-out stages, how can you justify dropping someone to put Rooney back in the team? Sure-ly that would be rather unfair and send out all sorts of wrong messages.

Rooney’s moment of madness, or rather, his latest moment of madness has damaged England’s chances next summer. With one petulant kick he took all of England’s already shaky plans and tore them up. On that basis he doesn’t deserve special treatment.

However, I don’t think his absence would be entirely doom and gloom. For a start, he has never actually performed very well in major finals, either through injury, form or as result of him having one of his red card moments.

And secondly, teams do have a tendency to pull together and play as more of a coherent unit when they have their star plucked from their midst. In fact, often in these cases, another star emerges to take their place.

Capello has eight months to see what sort of plan B he can come up with. I don’t hold out much hope of it being revolutionary or even effective, but it is still enough time to come up with something.

He has plenty of strikers to pick from. Danny Wellbeck, Darren Bent, Peter Crouch, Bobby Zamora, Jermain Defoe, Daniel Sturridge, Gabriel Agbonlahor and Andy Carrol. Even Michael Owen could come back into the reckoning, possibly in a super sub role.

In short, I don’t subscribe to the concept that England have absolutely no hope of winning Euro 2012 without Rooney. Less hope, yes, but not hopeless.

And let’s not forget that sometimes in football, when you go into things with expectations lower than a snake’s belly, the outcome can surprise you.

Quarter-final defeat on penalties anybody?

sportscolumnist@timesofmalta.com
Twitter: @maltablade