For the past two evenings I have watched back-to-back episodes of what I consider to be the most fascinating and gripping of football fly-on-the-wall documentaries. Sunderland ’Til I Die (STID) - currently aired on Netflix - is a warts-and-all journey through Sunderland’s 2017/2018 season in the Championship and I am sure that no one reading this post will consider it to be a spoiler if I reveal that it concluded with the Black Cats running out of lives and being relegated. What a result for the documentary makers, though! I have no doubt that the project was undertaken in the expectation that the ‘fallen giant', just relegated from the Premier League, would be pushing for promotion back into the promised land. They surely had no idea that their agreement with the club for ‘access all areas’ would have provided such a wealth of drama, pathos and car-crash viewing in what proved to be a further slip into the abyss of league football - the dreaded League One! If you haven’t seen it yet I urge you to do whatever it takes to access what I feel is the best football documentary I have ever seen.
BUT, from an Argyle perspective I have to admit that it put the fear of God in me! For me, comparisons with all things Home Park are impossible to avoid when seeing, watching, reading or thinking about any football related subject. And the parallels in STID were spookily similar to our own ignominious demise following relegation from the Championship a few years ago. Like Sunderland, we had financial difficulties (understatement!) related to a wage bill out of kilter with our new surroundings and, also like Sunderland, this resulted in a second successive relegation. There the similarities cease, however. I know everything in life is relative - even more so at different levels in the world of football - but some of the information revealed in STID was eye-wateringly staggering. The financial numbers being bandied about by the Sunderland CEO made any comparison with Argyle laughable. It was like comparing the most expensive Dom Perignon champagne with a magnum of Prosecco from Lidl (other supermarkets are available).
Apart from the actual infrastructure of Sunderland AFC - the 49,000 state-of-the-art stadium with the entrance halls, backstage offices, kitchens etc looking like they should be in a five-star hotel, the vast training grounds with nail-scissor-manicured pitches, the treatment rooms that would not be out of place in a Harley Street clinic - the money associated with the business of football was the most jaw dropping. I was still drooling with thoughts of what Argyle would be like with this financial background, so I might have missed the actual figures involved but the CEO, when being asked about the impact that relegation from the Premiership had had, said something about instead of ‘earning’ £100 million, they would only get £40 million in the Championship. Thinking of Argyle and the sacrifices and penny-pinching that have involved the outlay of a ‘mere' £6 million on building a complete stand I nearly rolled around the carpet wetting myself at the CEO's earnest and pained expression when using the word ‘only’. And then there were the wages. A lot of play was made of Jack Rodwell, who had been signed on a reported £70,000 a week, five-year contract. Someone must have thought that to be a good idea at the time but had not considered writing in a release clause in the event of relegation. Thus, Rodwell was shown as some recalcitrant bogeyman who wasn’t particularly interested in turning out for Sunderland on a Saturday afternoon but, funnily enough, was quite prepared to sit tight and count down his contract as the limitless tenners floated down around him, unceasingly. It had me in mind of those Argyle players on ‘long term’ contracts during the administration months. Thankfully, a lot of them were prepared to ‘do the decent thing’ and negotiate a settlement that didn’t bite the hand that had previously fed them.
The most terrifying thought, however, was how the money spilling around the Championship (and the seeming necessity of being bankrolled in order to compete there) bears as much of a resemblance to Argyle’s financial muscle as a manned flight to Pluto. In a deeply depressing insight I realised that as things stand now (and, admittedly, they could change for the better - possibly?) we wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance of competing on equal financial terms with the likes of Villa, Derby, Leeds, Forest, Rangers, the Sheffields etc etc. - even if we were to storm League One. In the earlier stages of my Argyle life the holy grail was always considered to be the top flight (the First Division) and it was tantalisingly (and fleetingly) a possibility under the guidance of Dave Smith and even Holloway. At that time our natural and relatively comfortable surroundings appeared to be the second tier. Sadly, we now seem to have settled for the norm being the third tier (hopefully!) with as much likelihood of successfully competing at the next level up as I used to dream about as a younger man. Still, never mind, I shall be out there on Saturday cheering on my team against the might of Accrington Stanley and thinking that things could always be worse...
