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Working as we do in a business that deals with selling football it is tempting to view the greatest game in the world just in terms of pounds and pence.

However on Sunday it reminded us of all its wonderful, glorious majesty. How it can be the finest and most exciting thing there is.

Two goals in injury time to win the league? It’s like the plot of a Hollywood film they rejected for being to far-fetched. Hell, even Roy of the Rovers might have tried it and had to apologise the following week.

In the midst of the unbridled joy on the terraces and on the pitch there would have been no one who was seriously thinking, “blimey, we have just made a lot of money here.”

The point I am making here is that yes, there is plenty of money in football, of course there is – and equally there is plenty of money to be made from it. But the most important thing in football (or indeed any sport) by a million miles are those moments of achievement. Whether it is at the top end with Man City, or at the bottom with QPR staying up, or indeed in the middle where the fans of Norwich and Swansea can justifiably look to their summer breaks with a feeling of tremendous happiness at what they have done, it is about meeting those little personal goals that you set yourself and not the money.

And nowhere in the sporting calendar is this better shown than in two games on Saturday that are reckoned to be the richest in club football. First West Ham take on Blackpool for the right to play in the Premier League again. Apparently this marks the first time that two relegated sides have contested the final, which is some testimony to the teams themselves. Then after that Chelsea take on Bayern Munich to who wins the Champions League final.

The winners of the play-off final will probably swell their coffers by around £70m when you take into account around £40m in prize money then parachute payments if they went down, whereas the Champions League is just an excuse to print money.

But will the fans – or the players for that matter – be thinking about the money on offer at the weekend, or just the glory? There is a theory that the top level players are obsessed by money, but I would question whether that was strictly true.

The reason I say that is if club A and club B both offer £100,000 but club B wins trophies, then I will bet I know where a player would sign. Players want to win things. And the fans? The fans just want to feel, just once, the way the Man City supporters did last weekend.

Of course the owners and Chief Execs will quickly move from euphoria to pragmatism and will be thinking about the benefits to the club (and players too will soon be thinking of win bonuses) but largely its about the moment. It’s about feeling the way that only football can make you feel.

And that is why the football business is a business like no other.

The breaking news on Sky Sports News this morning that Blackburn have sacked Deputy Chief Executive Paul Hunt probably comes a shock to no one given the news this morning that a letter in which he called for Steve Kean to be sacked in December has been leaked.

The letter was apparently written in the wake of Rovers’ game with Bolton before Christmas. You may recall the fixture. It was live on TV. Blackburn lost and Steve Kean was subjected to a non stop torrent of abuse from supporters.

After this, they had a brief upturn in form (drawing at Anfield and famously beating Man Utd at Old Trafford) and Kean was able to keep his job and see the season out.

For a while it looked as though Rovers were going to get out of trouble. They were scoring goals, and it seemed they would live to fight another day in the Premier League, but a pretty abject late run has seen them go down with barely a whimper with a game to spare.

I have seen a couple of their games and it seems like they lost fight altogether, and on Monday night the way they went down was fairly horrible. And there was a pretty poisonous atmosphere for most of the game. Much was said on the night from commentators about the atmosphere not helping the players and in some way blaming the fans for what happened.

Now, at Football Business, Football Franchise and Soccer Business we understand being football supporters as that what we all are here, and I can tell these commentators right now that none of these Blackburn supporters wanted to hate their own team. As a fan you only protest when you absolutely have to and these Blackburn supporters have been driven to act in that way.

The other thing we do at Football Business is know how to make money from football, so we totally understand that club owners (bar a very few tiny exceptions) don’t buy clubs for any form of philanthropy, so we get that when Venky’s bought Rovers they weren’t doing so out of the goodness of their hearts.

However everything they have done since buying the club surely runs contrary to any business sense – business sense they must have to make themselves a fortune in the first place. They have seemingly done everything to alienate the supporters, neglect the history of the club and appoint staff that didn’t seem to be, shall we say, the best.

Steve Kean’s agent was the same one that brokered the deal to buy the club, they lost the Chairman, they lost a finance director who wasn’t replaced. They talked about buying the likes of Ronaldinho and Beckham and actually signed Bradley Orr. It is even said they dint even realise that they couldn’t get relegated from the Premier League as they thought it was a franchise type situation like US Sports – it beggars belief frankly!

Is it any wonder that a club who was so much part of its community – and had a Chairman that was prepared to spend to win things for his boyhood club just 17 years ago - feel quite so bad now?

We have written before these blogs about the responsibility of the authorities to actually make the “fit and proper” persons test they are so keen to trumpet, actually mean something. Because right now it doesn’t appear to be worth the paper it is written on.

Top level sport is a business, of course it is, there are millions and millions of pounds involved, but equally, football is a unique business because fans invest their lives into a club. And these people, whether it be at Blackburn, Rangers or the Dog and Duck down the road, must not be allowed to wilfully ruin a centuries worth of history. And for pundits to blame fans is pretty despicable.

Often on this blog we speak about the way football is the easiest sport in the world to sell.

This of course is good news for you as you are the ones who are going to sell it ultimately. You are not selling a new idea to people. You are selling football, and if you ever needed a case study on how important to people football is, then today is a good day to think about it.

Yesterday there was really big game of football – you might have heard about it. Sky Sports have given it the name “unmissable.”

Sky also used their “Sports News” channel to hype the game up beyond all reasonable sense. As I type this their presenter Jim White has just been on screen paining the penalty spot.

That was bad enough, and at least we have the sound down in the office, but I was driving home listening to Radio 5 to find them coming live from a pub in Manchester. They didn’t even have the game live.

Then, upon leaving the pub they were straight over to Wembley to get “all the latest” on the England Manager situation – I could have saved them the bother, Roy Hodgson was there for talks (I know this because sky had shown me his car getting there).

Then there was the Barcelona situation last week. Pep Guardiola announced he was leaving the club. The speculation that he might was on the National News on Thursday. On Friday the press conference was covered live and before you could blink there was a discussion about who was taking over. Barca, clearly wise to this, moved quickly to stop the frenzy and appointed Pep’s assistant.

So, why are we highlighting this? Primarily because football has a national and global reach that nothing else can match. Football is Hollywood and rock n roll all rolled into one – all of which is great news for you as you try and fill your leagues.

Martin Tyler hit on the important point last night in his commentary: “This used to be a local skirmish, but no longer. There is audience of billions for this game tonight, watching these pictures.”

And this has knock on effects for 5 a side football. One of the firms we work with has last month recorded record figures for its website views. In April, over 125,000 people viewed its pages. Putting them on course for 1.6m views for the year.

These are serious numbers. And that justifies the bluster.

As if to prove it, the hype has now moved on to “Super Sunday” which is the new “Title decider” after they have decided that last nights “title decider” didn’t actually decide anything at all.

Some of us might not like the hype (and as you have probably gathered I am one of them) but when it comes to football it can really help everyone.

In a season where both his public pronouncements and his team have left something to be desired – and seen him get criticism on this blog, Kenny Dalglish did get one thing right.

Last week he was widely quoted as saying that fans were taken for granted in the modern game. Citing the example of his own fans, who not only have to face going to the FA Cup Final for a 5.15 kick off, they do so on a day when there are only two direct trains from London to Liverpool because of engineering works.

Now granted there isn’t a lot the FA can do about engineering works on the Central Line (except maybe plan the FA cup Final for a different day, but the FA’s hateful use of the FA Cup is another blog for another day) but Dalglish’s basic point is a valid one.

In the lower leagues fans – sometimes by necessity – have a much closer relationship with their club, often helping financially when times get tough, whether it be through Supporters Trusts, or rattling buckets when times get hard. Some supporters clubs even pay for a players wages, all laudable, and those clubs most certainly should not take their fans for granted. Although, even here, match costs are driving people away (interestingly the leagues our franchisees run continue to thrive, proving that if the product is reasonably priced it is recession proof.)

However, at the top level, it’s a lot different. My team has been in the Premier League for four seasons and its true that when you get that level, it is a world away from the League One where we used to be 10 years ago.

Its not even the fault of the players, if I was on £70k a week I wouldn’t be driving round in a Ford Focus, I wouldn’t live in a little semi detached house and I wouldn’t worry that I was removed from the people that are paying my wages. So why should they?

The fact is though, that at top level the players’ wages are not being paid by the fans anymore anyway. There is a reasonable argument to suggest that a lot of clubs could – such is the commercial, corporate and TV revenues on offer these days that paying customers are an unnecessary inconvenience to clubs.

Certainly that increasingly, is how it seems. All of which backs up Dalglish’s point. There are, as we have said, sky high ticket prices, programmes full of adverts and PR guff, food and drink that is both poorly cooked and too expensive and that is when you can actually get to the game, which given the raft of ridiculous kick off times is easier said than done.

One of these kick off times is the nonsense 5.15 on a Saturday afternoon with a couple of weeks to go in the season that the FA Cup has been reduced to. Making effectively some sort of warm-up for Britain’s Got Talent.

It is things like this that mean Dalglish’s point is a valid one. Fans will be taken for granted, so long as there is better ways to make money elsewhere.

Yesterday Football Players Union Chief Gordon Taylor got criticised for what he said about diving.

Modern footballers, he said “were damned if they do and damned if they don’t” when it came to going down to win penalties and so forth.

The Daily Mirror this morning said that “the comments were likely to infuriate fans,” and maybe they will, as the current media focus returns to cheating in our great game, but if you look behind the headlines and beyond the vitriol that is currently flying about Ashley Young’s way, it perhaps isn’t as controversial a statement as it seems.

What Taylor was saying – I think – is that there is more at stake here than mere fair play. Last week on this very blog, we wrote an article called “Why There Is Always Something To Play For.” In it we mentioned the fact that at top level that each place is reckoned to be worth £2.5m. So viewed in this context aren’t players ALWAYS going to look for an advantage?

If you take Ashley Young as an example (and for the record let us state that on no account do I believe that it was a penalty at Old Trafford) was he not going to use every advantage he possibly could to earn Man Utd the victory and thus restore his team’s five point advantage at the top of the Premier League? Of course he was. It is his job to inch Manchester United closer to the title at Man City’s expense.

We can all get as sanctimonious as we like about this. We can all condemn cheats, we can talk about how diving is killing the game, but can anyone possibly say, hand on heart that they wouldn’t have done the same.

Moreover, if say, Young had stayed on his feet (which in ideal world we would have all liked to see) and then Man Utd had drawn the game 0-0, is it not possible that Sir Alex Ferguson might have been upset that his player didn’t maximise his opportunity to win the penalty? Surely it’s this dilemma that Taylor was getting at?

Ashley Young is far from the only player to, lets say, “make the most of contact” to “win” penalties and, as Jamie Redknapp noted in one of this morning’s papers, there “are potentially 22 cheats at the start of every football match” and he has a point.

That leads us to question of what, if anything can be done to stop it? Well, there could be bans for players, perhaps, but what about the specific case of Ashley Young, about whom Gary Neville said on TV last night, “Was it a dive? Yes. Was it a penalty? Yes.” About the only thing I can think to do is – apart from making football amateur and having players playing for no money – to get people out of the mindset that they have to go down for it to be a foul.

The game would be a much better spectacle if a foul was a foul irrespective of whether player A goes sprawling under player B’s challenge. We have all heard commentators say “he might have gone down there” but surely this neglects the fact that a foul is a foul whether or not the player falls over?

Perhaps we can make this small change to the psyche of everyone concerned we can slightly improve the game. Because, as long as football is professional and people get paid for playing it, you are never going to stop them “making the most of their opportunities.”

With the football season drawing to a close and the major trophies are going to be dished out, together with the pain or relegation and the elation of promotion. It is also a great time for football clichés.

It is often said at this time of year that this team or that team has “nothing to play for” but surely that is rubbish of the highest order. First of all professional footballers would not be professional footballers if they did not have professional pride. The clue there is in the name, surely? And that leads us to the second point; it is that professional pride that means the team that is presently sitting in 12th, say, will do its best against a team that is second bottom or second top.

They are professional footballers – they want to win. They have a hunger to succeed that most of us do not. And even if that isn’t the case, then they owe to the fans of the club, or the people that pay their wages in the boardroom to do the best they can, and moreover they owe to it all the other players in the division to do their bit and make sure to competitive.

The situation is even more pronounced in the Premier League, where not only do the players have to do their best for their own personal pride they are doing their best – or they had better be in case the chairman is watching – for something rather less prosaic.

Cold hard cash.

It is reckoned that at Premier League level each place is worth £750,000 in prize money. Now, that might not be a massive amount to the Man City’s and Man United’s of this world. But even this rarefied Premier League environment, it is a lot of money.

Taking Norwich for example. So bunched are things in the middle of the Premier League, the new boys could conceivably finish as high as seventh (ninth is more likely) or as low as 14th. Or in short, if reported figures are true £6m. This would perhaps mean a couple of new signings, perhaps more the way Paul Lambert can find unpolished gems in the football league.

Still think Norwich have nothing to play for?

The idea that teams in mid-table can go on metaphorical holidays come this time of the year is one that needs to be debunked. In the football league teams can make the play-offs with a good late run, and as Macclesfield are seeing in League 2, if you get on a bad late run you are in serious trouble.

And of course, if professional pride, playing for the fans, the manager, the chairman don’t grab you, then how about something that might just appeal to the average Premier League footballer: naked self interest.

Bonuses, dear boy. And those bonuses depend on where the team finishes in the league.

No, these days the average player doesn’t go on his holidays in April. Why would he when there is an expensive one to pay for in May. So whichever way you want to look at it, there is no such thing as “nothing to play for” anymore.

Often we have spoken on this blog about how football is easy to sell and thus is a better bet than the usual franchise opportunity simply because of the global reach of the sport, which makes it easier to sell.

People know what football is. You really don’t have to convince them. It’s not a flash in the pan, nor is it a new concept.

We know all this of course, but sometimes the sheer scale of the way that football dominates the world surprises even us at Football Business, Football Franchise and Soccer Business.

We saw a prime example of that last week with the announcement of the formation of the Real Madrid Holiday resort, which will open in 2015 on Ras al-Khaimah, one of the less well known Emirates in the UAE.

The announcement of the massive 430,000 square metre new resort – which will comprise sports facilities, a marina, luxury hotels, villas, an amusement park, a club museum and a futuristic 10,000-seat stadium with one side open to the sea – took place at the Bernabeu with all sorts of luminaries from the venerable old club, including Jose Mourinho, Zinedine Zidane and Emilio Buntragueno, present.

The root of the issue, though, wasn’t a desire to see people have good holidays, it was world domination. Like that ill fated idea for game 39, like the myriad friendlies that clubs have in America, Asia and the far East every summer, its all a “brand awareness” exercise.

"It is a decisive and strategic step that will strengthen our institution in the Middle East and Asia," said Real President Florentino Pérez. “"Real Madrid Resort Island will be a major tourist and sporting centre of great dimensions and the highest level. This extraordinary complex will attract millions of people looking for quality leisure services."

Cut through the ridiculous management speak and the subtext is this: “Here’s a way we can make some more money and stay one step ahead of Barcelona.

This, though, is good news for everyone who wants to make money from football – that’s us and you. It means that if football can be used in such a fashion by Real Madrid then it can be used as a money making tool by just about everyone. Football is unique in that everyone, all around the world knows what it is and diversification such as this is proof of that.

More importantly, though. This resort opens in 2015, so we think we had better get saving now!!

While everyone was watching last weekend with baited breath to see what was going to happen to Fabrice Muamba, there was a terrible event taking place in Scotland, which really does show perhaps the most horrible contrast of emotions imaginable.

Kilmarnock defeated Celtic 1-0 to win the Scottish League Cup last Sunday. It should have been a joyous occasion, but one of their players, young midfielder Liam Kelly suffered a tremendous personal tragedy, with the news that his dad had died of a heart attack just after the final whistle.

In an instant what should have been perhaps the best day of his life became perhaps the worst. He was seen running up the tunnel just before the rest of his team mates went to collect their medals, and his Dad died a short time later.

Anyone who has lost a parent knows just how horrible it is, especially when young, but somehow it makes it doubly awful given the circumstances. It should have been a joyful occasion, one for everyone to enjoy and- given what happened, it will be forever be tainted, and tainted for the Kelly family in the most awful way imaginable.

Spare a thought too for his team mates. They too – although not grief stricken of course – were unable to enjoy the day as much as they would like. Killie Manager Kenny Shiels even questioned a higher power after the game when he said: “post-match press conference, Kilmarnock manager Kenny Shiels said: "The dressing room is very despondent and I don't know why the man above sends down these messages to us.
"We are thinking more about Liam than our triumphalism."

Goalkeeper Cammy Bell, a close friend of Kelly, was particularly upset when he said: “"If I could take away my performance I would, if Liam's dad was all right.

The point of this blog, other to send the very, very best wishes of all at Football Business, Football Franchise and Soccer Business to Liam Kelly and his family at this dreadful time, is to say that sometimes we all forget that football isn’t as important as we sometimes think it is.

We all get wrapped up in a bubble. Our teams can be the most important thing to us, our lives can revolve around football – and of course so can our working lives too, but no matter how much importance we place on it, something like this – and perhaps what happened to Fabrice Muamba – does, as Callum Bell said “put things into perspective for me.”

And yet, as we saw last week, the football community can pull together in a way that few other communities these days can manage. The Kilmarnock players wore t-shirts bearing the slogan “we are all with you” before their game at the weekend, but as the Tottenham and Bolton players plan to show their support for Muamba tonight at their re-arranged cup game, so hopefully Liam and his family can find some comfort from that.

Sometimes, as we have been reminded recently, it isn’t just what happens on the pitch that makes football a beautiful game, but equally the “game” part of that phrase is one we would do well to remember.

The news the Fabrice Muamba has today had a “brief chat” with his Manager Owen Coyle is a great fillip to everyone who cares about football, or who was watching the game on Saturday either at White Hart Lane, or as I was, on TV.

What we have seen in the last few days really shows that football, for all its faults can still be a tremendous force for good. It can bring people together in a way that other sports, and indeed pretty much anything else, cannot.

We have seen football fans put aside their petty – and sometimes nasty – rivalries in order to support a player with which, perhaps, we can all identify, we have seen opposing players, often as we all know guilty of appalling acts of cynicism on the field genuinely care for Muamba, and we can only hope that the players himself when he is well enough, and his family and friends now can derive great comfort from the emotion.

And while making his recovery, if Fabrice is looking to draw strength from recent events he could do worse than have a look at the tale of one time Irish international Clive Clarke.

Clive Clarke was a full back or midfielder, primarily at Stoke City, for whom he made 262 appearances in between 1998 and 2005. In 2007 he was at Leicester on loan from Sunderland when he collapsed at half time in a Carling Cup Match between The Foxes and Nottingham Forest.

Just like Muamba, he was a young, fit footballer, slightly older than the Bolton man, he was 27 and too he had suffered a cardiac arrest however, like we all hope that Muamba will, was recover and carry on a normal life.

Clarke spoke to the BBC the other day and told how the dreadful events at Tottenham had echoes of what had happened to him four and a half years before. “"I came down the tunnel at half-time feeling a little bit dizzy, light-headed," he said. “"I went into the changing room, sat down and the next thing I knew I woke up in the back of an ambulance.

"I think the players and management staff probably feared the worst. They thought that I had probably died in the changing room.

"I was lucky I had good people around me who acted very quickly and saved my life."
And the story is much the same for the Bolton man – largely due to his position as a Premier League player thankfully, he was able to receive the best medical care available and perhaps more immediately than most would have done in the same situation.

Clarke said that it was only a couple of days after the event that he began to reflect on what had occurred that day. Doctors did tests, but no one knows why a fit young athlete should be struck down with a Cardiac Arrest in the first place.

And, that perhaps is the biggest mystery of them all and one of the reasons why there has been so much emotion towards Muamba. It just shouldn’t happen to one so young, and so fit. On the flip side of that, though, that natural fitness and youth is probably what saved both Muamba and Clarke before him.

The Irishman was unable to resume his football career at top level. He was advised not to by Medical Staff, but remains in the game as a part time agent, and just last month was calling for routine heart scans to be brought into the game as a matter of course.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, given what he has been through Clarke is heavily involved in a charity called Cry (Cardiac Risk In The Young), something he admits he wasn’t aware of before it happened to him.

It’s fair to say that, perhaps the story of what happened to Clarke perhaps isn’t as well known as that of Fabrice Muamba, but it is easy to forget that, even in 2007 the world was a very different place. The place most of us followed the news of Muamba on Saturday night was on Twitter, which was relatively unknown even five years ago.

If the fact that so many millions of people around the world are now aware of the risk of health problems amongst young people because of the terrible things that happened both to Muamba and to Clarke then we can all be thankful that something with a long term positive effect has happened.

Everyone at Football Business, Soccer Business and Football Franchise would like to send our best wishes to Fabrice Muamba and his family and friends at this difficult time.

There was an excellent film on TV last week. Following Queens Park Rangers from the time of the first takeover of the club by Flavio Briatore, Bernie Ecclestone and Lakshmi Mital, the new owners wanted their Four Year Plan (which they referred to as a “project” for Premier League football documented.

The film explained at the start that, although the camera crew was paid for by the new men, they were not exercising any editorial control over what was shown in the final cut. And it was clear to any of those that watched the film that they were as good as their word.

It is fair to say that, whilst it was gripping TV, it was also cringeworthy on occasion and also that no one (barring perhaps the Mittal brothers, who were appointed to the board by their Father and at least had the clubs best interest at heart it seemed) came out of it with any credit.

We saw bust-ups with the Managers, we saw Briatore shouting and swearing at players in reserve games as well as almost picking the team when the mood took him, we saw Gianni Paladini, who was first Chairman and then Consultant, racing up and down corridors and seemingly endlessly on the phone to Briatore informing him of some disaster or other.

The 90 minute TV show led me to think: if it happens at QPR then surely it goes on at other clubs and is it this style of Management that is causing the sort of problems we are increasingly seeing in British Football – and of course the sort that this blog has concerned itself with in recent weeks?

We all understand two things. First we know that the days of the locally based, philanthropic owner are largely gone at top level (there are some exceptions to this – Dave Whelan at Wigan and Peter Coates at Stoke spring to mind) and second we understand that the people that buy these clubs are successful businessmen. This is self evident, perhaps, given that they can afford to buy the club in the first place. However, surely, if they have achieved the level of success they have, they haven’t done it running their businesses in the way they seem to be running football clubs?

It is often said that football is a business just like any other, and whilst increasingly that might be the case in the Premier League, surely no business other than football would see such an amount of Senior Managers sacked? Not many other Businesses have the Directors screaming, shouting and swearing at young staff (as Briatore and Paladini were pictured doing during a Reserve team game – indeed Paladini was told by Mittal to stop doing it the following season) and, crucially no other business could count on the unswerving loyalty and devotion of its customers.

And its these customers – fans – that pay the price when these aborted “projects” go wrong – as QPR was about to before Neil Warnock was appointed to sort things out. Perhaps the cameras should have followed a QPR fan of 50 years standing on his “project.” Because long after The Mittal’s and new Chairman Tony Fernandes have gone, that QPR fan, and those of Port Vale, Portsmouth and countless other clubs that are in trouble, will remain (assuming of course, in the case of the latter two, they survive at all)

Here at Football Business we reckon there is a simple rule of thumb: the minute the chairman of a football club starts sitting in with that clubs fans, it means he is the wrong Chairman.