This bank holiday weekend saw the return of Rugby League's 'Magic Weekend', where all 14 Super League teams play a round of league games over two days, at the same venue.
In recent years, since this concept was thought up, all the matches have been played at the Millennium Stadium, with the weekend originally being coined as 'Millennium Magic', but this year the titans of Super League moved to Murryfield to compete over the two days.
The question that I am posing here though, is would something like this work for the Premier League?
In the last year or so Richard Scudamore has been babbling on about taking the Premier League abroad and adding an extra round of matches in the process, taking the Premier League to new lands and expending their ever increasing selling power.
But with discontent amongst the majority in the game, regarding this idea, why not have something that’s a little bit closer to home, and wouldn’t require having to add another game onto the calendar.
Wembley would be the obvious choice and I'm sure the FA would instantly see the pound signs lighting up in front of them if such an idea was posed. Just imagine if 30,000 fans from each Premiership club came down for the weekend, each buying a ticket at, say, £20 for the game and neutral day tickets for £50, that would be, £600,000 a game from fan's (£12million in total) and another £1.5million a day for the neutral tickets. Naturally some of that would have to go to the clubs themselves, but that’s still a lot of money.
We have mentioned before on this blog that Wembley would be a great day out, and there will be some clubs in the Premier League who may have never been to Wembley, old or new, or at least not for a long time.
People would ask the question about travel but football fans travel the length and breadth of the country for league games anyway so there is no reason to assume that fans of teams like Newcastle, Sunderland, Middlesbrough, and the like, will not want to travel down to Wembley.
The sponsorship possibilities will also be pretty endless but there would be some logistical questions that would need answering. Where would 600,000 fans stay, with games having to kick off early there will be some fans that will need to stay over the night before for games?
Would there be enough personnel to police the event and to keep rival fans Liverpool/Everton, Newcastle/Sunderland, Arsenal/Tottenham etc apart?
Those are just two of the questions that would need to be answered before something like this could possibly happen. This however is just an idea, an idea of mine, and the likelihood that anyone within the game will think of such an idea and try and implement it is unlikely, but it could work and it has the potential to make for one brilliant, money spinning, magic weekend of football.
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