Pools in Division 1 next year - what the heck?!

By Albatross
June 10 2004

No, it's not April 1st - though you can be forgiven for looking at the calender. A "Rebranding" exercise means that the divisions are to be renamed - and it means that we will be in what will claim to be "League 1" next season.

So Pools will be playing in Division 1 next season after all - though as far as the leagues themselves are concerned there's no real change. Division 1 is being renamed "The Championship", while we will play in what is being described as "League One". This is of course coupled with new sponsorship from Coca Cola.

In some ways there's a sense of Deja Vu - the season after Pools were promoted in the early 1990s, from Division 4 to Division 3, we found ourselves in what was in theory a new division the season after due to the formation of the Premier League; now it's happened again.

The Football League, and chairman Sir Brian Mawhinney, are trying to trumpet this as a big thing - but my personal reaction is that it's simply ridiculous. "The Championship" is still the second tier of football in this country, and everyone knows it; similarly, for all that our status may officially be "League One" next season we've not actually gone anywhere. There was a sort of sense to the renumbering of the divisions after the formation of the Premiership - but this new renaming doesn't make sense to me. It will sound stupid to say 'Who do you think will be relegated from "The Championship" this season?'

As far as I'm concerned, this is just rearranging the chairs and trying to say you've moved house. Or trying to pretend that things have somehow got better when they haven't. Tell you what, let's rename the Auto Windscreens Shield next - call it "The Cup" and see if it convinces people it's a major tournament! It's a classic political trick in some ways - akin to deciding that because everyone in the country wants to be millionaires, we should change our currency to Turkish Lire so we can all actually be millionaires....

If anything, all this does is raise fears that sooner or later the Division 1 clubs (or should that be "The Championship" clubs) are going to form a Premier Division 2 and try and pull the ladder up behind them. The Premier League was formed in large part so that the top clubs could keep even more TV revenue; the majority of what's left goes to the Division 1 clubs now, but you can bet your bottom dollar that they'd jump at the chance of keeping even the little that goes to the lower divisions.

Anyway, call me a refusenik if you will, but I'm still going to refer to Division 2 next season. It's an effort not to think of it as Division 3 as it is - why make things even more stupidly opaque?