Unfit and Improper Persons by Kevin Day

Author:Kevin Day [Day, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781399407533
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2023-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

acrimonious andy

Not everyone feels sorry for the big clubs stuck in Leagues One and Two. Andy Holt is the owner of Accrington Stanley, who are doing an amazing job of staying in the EFL on a wage-bill of around £1.8 million a year. Full disclosure alert, Andy is a friend of ours and was a very hospitable host when we did a live version of the pod in 2022. The show was in their brand spanking new Coley’s Bar, which cost around £2.5 million to build, but was already making its money back in matchday corporate entertainment and midweek events like boxing and, the night after us, a gig by 70s legends Showaddywaddy (only one of whom was actually in Showaddywaddy in the 70s, but that didn’t stop them selling even more tickets than we did).

My only regret about that night is that we can’t repeat most of what Andy said about the bigger clubs at that end of the league – partly for legal reasons and partly because he uses a lot of words that my mother-in-law would refer to as ‘unnecessary’ and a Sky football commentator would refer to as ‘industrial’. Quite simply, he swears like a docker’s parrot, but he thinks he has a lot to swear about when it comes to competing with those clubs whose budgets and fanbase he can only dream of, especially as he is relatively new to ownership (he bought the club in 2015) and so doesn’t accept that because those clubs have had a better deal historically, they should continue to do so now.

One recent target of Andy’s ire is something that concerns West Park Rovers now that we are in the big league – live streaming rights and revenue. Older readers may remember a glorious time when you could buy video-recordings of your away matches. If you couldn’t make the game yourself, you’d simply bowl up to the club shop a few days later and buy a VHS cassette with a hand-written label on the front. The quality was terrible, because it was a one-camera shoot and for Palace that camera was operated by the press officer who you could clearly hear dealing with requests for a lift home as he also tried to commentate on the game. Young people will be shaking their heads in disbelief, but in those days the only way to see the goals from an away game was to actually travel to the away game. So, shonky or not, we thought the future had arrived and jet-packs were surely just around the corner.

Live streaming is the (slightly) more sophisticated modern version of those VHS cassettes. As the EFL said, initially, live streaming was simply ‘an added option for those fans who can’t make the game in person’, but it stressed they ‘were very aware of protecting the live matchday experience.’ Which they were, to a point. And for Andy Holt and Accrington Stanley that point was a September weekend in 2018.

The live screening of EFL and PL games was forbidden between 2.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.