Gap between the rich and poor will get even wider

ANOTHER football season, another gold rush, and woe betide those who get left behind with the dead mules and broken wagon wheels. The Premier League has never had it so good. The rump of the old Football League has simply never had it.

While Newcastle prepared to welcome Alan Shearer to St James' Park this week Gillingham had to cancel a friendly against Portsmouth because the newly promoted Second Division club could not afford an estimated police bill of £8,000, which is less than a third of Shearer's new weekly wage.

The £15 million Newcastle have paid Blackburn Rovers for Shearer would probably buy the whole of the Third Division with a bit of the Second thrown in. The gap between the rich few and those struggling to keep up has never been so wide and will grow wider still.

With the new Sky TV deal guaranteeing each of its 20 members £9 million a season between 1997 and 2001, by which time pay per view will be well under way, the English Premier League is now the richest of its kind in the world.

As it is, with Sky due to give the Premier League a £50 million bonus, clubs already stand to be significantly better off during the coming season. Until now no club was receiving more than £3 million from television," said Alex Fynn, formerly deputy chairman of Saatchi and Saatchi and now adviser on commercial matters to a number of clubs. "But West Ham, who earned £2 million by finishing 10th last season will get £4 million if they do the same this time.

To the imminent windfall has to be added ever more lucrative sponsorships and huge kit deals. Big business continues to move into a game it would not have touched with a barge pole in the wake of Heysel and Hillsborough.

To some, the game's big spenders would seem to have more money than sense. The only guarantee offered by a gold rush, they will argue, is that sooner or later the gold runs out, leaving ghost towns and tumbleweed in its wake.

Fynn agrees that the fee paid for Shearer will increase the stakes everywhere else, in some cases to dangerous levels. "In terms of achieving success, Newcastle have raised the entry price," he argues. "A year ago Alan Sugar was saying that he couldn't see Tottenham ever spending £7 million on a player. But now even £7 million won't buy you a top class footballer.

"Sir John Hall wants to build a dynasty at Newcastle. Four years ago the club's annual turn over was £4 million, now it is £40 million. Only very wealthy people, or, very short sighted people, can play in this game.

Fynn feels that only Liverpool, Everton, Arsenal and Tottenham, if they chose, could risk going into debt to buy success in the short term in order to reap greater rewards in the long. Heavy spenders such as Middlesbrough and Coventry, he believes, are taking a bigger gamble, mortgaging future income so that they will have a better chance of remaining in the Premier League to collect it.

For Newcastle, staying up should not be a problem in the foreseeable future. And if Shearer can attract a crowd of around 20,000 to stand outside St James' Park while he gives a press conference inside then it seems reasonable to assume that they enjoy a swift return on their £15 million outlay. Tuesday's scenes bore echoes of Maradona's arrival at Naples.

Now even the Italians are coming here, attracted by wage levels which are all the more affordable if, post Bosman, European Union players are out of contract and not tied to a fee. Chelsea's acquisition of Gianluca Vialli does not represent a Bosman's holiday, given his prospective earnings, but he would have been beyond their reach before.

Provided the latest influx of foreigners does not become a flood, the English game can only benefit from having players of this stature and experience in its midst. Klinsmann, Gullit Schmeichel, Bergkamp and, last season, Cantona have set playing standards without which the Premier League would not now have the most marketable product in English football history.

It used to be said that English football did not know how to sell itself. Now the game needs to guard against selling itself too dearly on the assumption that the fans will always be there to pay increased admission prices and buy replica shirts. "When the commercial activities reach a ceiling then a number of clubs will be in trouble," Fynn warns.

Pay TV, only two years off at the most, is football's Pandora's box. Pay as you view, for those wanting to follow their teams on multi channel television, will earn even more millions for the big clubs, but Fynn senses trouble when the Premier League and Sky get down to details.

"The clubs see pay per view as a partnership," he says. "They think they have got it all tied up. They haven't."

In a sense the gold rush has not really started. What we are seeing now is a trial gallop. And the struggle to avoid missing the bonanza through relegation threatens to be the bitterest yet.

So wide is the gap between the Premier League and the rest that teams no longer merely go down, they fall off the north face of the Eiger. The Endsleigh League has become the Nationwide League but the further a club plunges the more it will feel like the Halifax League.