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The Football League – being the 72 clubs outside the Premier League and above the Blue Square Conference structure – have agreed to a new way of paying so called Parachute payments to clubs falling out of the top flight which – some critics say – create a Premier League Second Division in all but name.

The short story is that clubs like Hull City and Burnley who are relegated from the top flight will be paid and increased slice of Premier League pie with the aim of ensuring that they do not hit the financial problems that have best the likes of Charlton Athletic, Norwich City, Southampton and other side who have fallen from grace including – although it is some time ago now – Bradford City.

The aim is noble – perhaps – but the feared outcome is that the clubs relegated from the top flight will be so financially doped that they will ruin competition in the division below reducing the chase for the top flight to clubs who have been relegated and those who have owners with massive funds to invest. Blackpool – taking a 2-1 lead into the second leg of the playoff semi-finals – would represent a model of the type of team who are expected to be penalised by this and – one assumes – QPR the sort who would benefit.

The separation between the haves of the game and have-nots will increase to a point where investing at a Doncaster Rovers or a Scunthorpe United will see you hit a glass ceiling at a much lower level than that said to be half way up the Premier League reducing competition. One wonders – if this is true – how the voting went for the chairmen of those clubs who have taken teams like that pair up from the lower reaches into the second tier of the game. They are offered riches in exchange for rowing the boat of prosperity away from the drowning men that make up much of the rest of the league. It seems that given the choice between self-interest and solidarity they elected for the former and League One and League Two fell into line for fear of a permanent break away of those clubs into an actual – rather than a de facto – Premiership Two.

In practice though – and even with huge chunks of money flying around as they always seem to – the game of football makes more a meritocracy of the business of the game than the critics of today’s news would like to admit and perhaps we need only look over to those celebrating a promotion to the Championship at the third attempt at Elland Road to be reminded how the size of the club matters little when eleven players choke in the play-offs. Chairman and managers of clubs like Burnley will be able to fritter away resource no matter how large they are and at Turf Moor they have an expert at doing just that. Before joining the Clarets Brian Laws had been frittering away the resources of Sheffield Wednesday for years and the size of that club matters little in the harshness of Championship relegation.

Nevertheless today’s decision in which The Football League practically admitted its inability to do anything other than acquiesce to the demands of the top flight is a rotten one. Whatever the gulf between clubs and wherever it occurs rather than trying to – almost literally – throw money at teams who fall into that chasm but being relegated from the top flight would it not have been a better situation to encourage – no – enforce good governance on the teams who may get into trouble rather than bail them out afterwards.

Portsmouth are playing in the FA Cup final next week and in a very serious and very real way it could be the final game in the club’s history the reason for this being the ludicrous contracts and players signed to take the club to another day out at Wembley two years ago. Portsmouth have not had a bail out of Greek proportions but they will be paid after they are relegated for the Premier League (the money, perhaps, being diverted to pay contracts they have defaulted on) and one cannot help but wonder if the best interests of all would not have been served by ensuring that the club could not be dragged into the state it is currently in in what in retrospect seems to be the service of one man’s Ahab style quest for personal glory.

Glory, glory, Tottenham Hotspur – as the song goes – beware. The quest of Harry Redknapp that has bankrupted Portsmouth has catapulted Spurs into the Champions League – such a misnomer – but one has to wonder about the cost as Spurs spend money like the water in the infamous Elland Road fish tank which provides a cautionary tale for the future at White Hart Lane, and for clubs who would borrow against success without a thought of good governance.

Indeed the Football League – agreeing this deal – agrees to take such tainted vessels in. One wonders what purpose the world’s oldest football league now has and if all 72 members or perhaps just those who were powerless to stop today’s decision would not be better resigning to join the Football Association as a giant Premier League non-league rather than this current system in which the clubs at the top of the second tier make decisions with the threat of breaking away as a stick.

Rather than making sure that Hull City do not end up spending hundreds of thousands a week on strikers who could hardly be said to have put Ryan Kendall to shame the Premier League will throw money at them to plug the holes they have after relegation. The clubs that exit the Premier League, the bounce back and forth from Premier League to Championship, will do so in luxury liners. The financial boat has set sail today with Bradford City on the shore watching and perhaps noticing that the boats themselves are letting in water.