Robert Johnson Did It First But Football Sells Its Soul To The Devil Says Sir Alex

No sooner has Alex Ferguson Alex Ferguson started talking to the BBC again he is making the headlines for them too.

He has finally buried the hatchet with the Beeb, after you might recall they made a series of allegations about one of his sons, and yesterday he gave his first major interview to the corporation for seven years.

The wide ranging chat, which took place on BBC’s Look North show and was given to Gordon Burns. Once you got past the “blimey, isn’t that the fella that used to present Krypton Factor when I was a kid?” moment (it is by the way) Fergie certainly didn’t disappoint and had plenty to say.

Most of his ire was reserved for TV and he returned to his hobby horse of Football dictating the days and times of the fixtures.

And rather like the old tale that Blues Guitar music started when Robert Johnson went to the crossroads and sold his sold his soul to Beelzebub, Fergie suspects football changed after a satanic pact.

"When you shake hands with the devil you have to pay the price," he said. "Television is God at the moment. It is king.

"When you see the fixture lists come out now, they [the television companies] can pick and choose whenever they want the top teams on television.

"

You get some ridiculous situations when you're playing on Wednesday night in Europe and then at lunchtime the following Saturday. You ask any manager if they would pick that themselves... there'd be no chance."

And he’s probably got a point.

However the crux of the issue wasn’t, you suspect, that Sir Alex wants to spend his Sunday’s with the grandchildren rather in the dugout. The real meat of what he had to say was tucked in the next part of the interview.

Sir Alex was upset that that the Premier Leagues overseas TV contract (currently valued at £1.4bn is split equally between the 20 clubs. He is angry that United appear on the TV more abroad than say,
Wigan, and he added: “When you think of that, I don't think we get enough money."

And there you have it. As the BBC Sports Editor David Bond puts it on his blog: “No matter how many times Manchester United appear on TV in Singapore or America and no matter where they finish in the table, each of the 20 Premier League teams splits the overseas television cash equally.”

And that, lets be honest, is the real reason for the outrage. Not out of any concern for his players, or indeed the fans. Just plain old filthy lucre.

There’s not much that is fair about the Premier League, but the way the overseas TV deal is structured remains so. It has long been suspected that the top Premier League clubs want to be able to do separate TV deals – similar to those in other countries (see Spain for example) but as of now the 20 clubs bargain collectively.

And hopefully that will remain the case. It would be nice, of course, if some of this wealth filtered down the pyramid, but unfortunately such is the rampant greed at the top level that’s about as likely as Sir Alex Ferguson saying something to the press that he hasn’t thought about long and hard.

And so it is here, as always with Sir Alex, it might be worth looking not so much at what he says but the reason why he says it. He is, after all, the master of mind games.

 Especially when it comes to the Football Business