Liverpool news as Gary Neville makes grand Premier League rulebook recommendation after independent regulator rant but Jamie Carragher looks elsewhere
Gary Neville has suggested a radical Premier League rule change to improve the game for fans. With the former Manchester United defender continuing to speak out on issues within football, he has swapped looking at governing issues to analysing the rulebook instead.
Having spoken strongly at a Labour event earlier this week about the current English food chain from Premier League to EFL, Neville switched tack when talking on Sky Bet’s The Overlap. Asked, alongside Ian Wright, Roy Keane, and Jamie Carragher, what he would do to make football “110% better forever,” the pundit came up with quite the proposal.
“At the end of [drawn] league games [I’d introduce] penalties for an extra point,” he said. “So you get two points [if you win the shoot-out].
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“Make it exciting for a fan that comes. If a kid goes to a game for the first time or it might be their only game this season, and sees a 0-0 or 1-1 draw, there would be a winner at least. Kids love penalties, my girls [would] love penalties at the end.”
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It is a system already in place for the EFL Trophy, which sees Premier League Under-21 sides compete against League One and League Two outfits in a group stage and knockout competition throughout the year. During the first phase of the tournament, drawn games go to a shootout with points awarded to the winner, as Neville explained.
A similar format is used during pre-season friendlies and mini-tournaments to bring added entertainment for supporters. To this, Keane said that it was ‘very Americanised’.
Carragher, meanwhile, went for something entirely different. “Players to stop kicking the ball out when somebody goes down,” he explained. ‘It f****** pisses me off! “Games stopping all the time. People bluffing injuries, it stops the game. Just get on with the f****** game.”
Neville’s more wide-ranging point on the landscape of English football remained though. “I would definitely change distribution right down from the Premier League,’ he added.
“So the steps are equal all the way down. [I want] the idea that every team can come up and every team can come down so there’s not a massive disparity between the Championship and Premier League. It’s massive and it’s getting bigger.”
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For more on that, he heavily criticised the top division in a separate interview on Monday at the Labour conference. “We have a Premier League that’s entitled, they feel entitled,” he mused. “I’m not going to use the word greedy, but I just have.
“They are selfish and I can’t understand that way of thinking. It’s almost like they’re the big brother that sit there and distribute scraps of food to the little brothers round the table.
“It’s not what you do when you’re in a family. Their mindset is such of a bully. Their mindset is such that they think they can influence the regulator once the regulator’s introduced and they can get a better deal potentially the other side of the regulator.
“And what they’re applying is their soft power and their influence to try and create scare stories and scaremongering, like we had a couple of weeks ago.”
