Row Z: Commentary neutrality, the Wolves packs and Ipswich complete the social set

Welcome to Row Z, The Athletic’s weekly column that shines a light on the bonkers side of the game.

From clubs to managers, players to organisations, every Friday we’ll bring you the absurdities, the greed, the contradictions, the preposterousness and the oddities of the game we all love…

Premier League cheerleaders

A couple of weeks after TNT Sports commentators “Fletch”, “Rio” and “Sav”, full names Darren Fletcher, Rio Ferdinand and Robbie Savage, cheered Manchester United to victory against Lyon (with United losing and a boy in the crowd pictured crying, Fletch said: “Let’s hope we can put a smile on that young man’s face by the time we finish”), the trio stayed nice and neutral in Bilbao on Thursday night.

A night earlier in Barcelona, Ferdinand had expressed his bias for the Premier League as an entity, not just United, when eulogising over Raphinha’s performance against Inter.

“It makes you wonder how he was ever allowed to leave the Premier League,” Ferdinand queried.

Yes, massive mistake by the Premier League to allow him to move. They should have stepped in to protect their asset when Raphinha swapped Elland Road for the Camp Nou in 2022 and given him a five-year contract at West Ham instead.

Pack lives

Wolverhampton Wanderers, a story in numbers from 2023-24.

Revenue £177million ($235m), player sale profit £64.6m, player wages £142m, fees paid to agents £14m.

Also Wolves: We are ‘One Pack’.

Also also Wolves: No we won’t pay £1.5m for our women’s team to be promoted to the Championship. Two packs?

For context, a promotion application had to be submitted by February, committing to raising the club up to Championship standards should they win promotion (which Wolves ultimately fell just short of on the final day last week).

The official line is the club were worried about the club’s finances in February should the men’s first team be relegated (parachute payments going into the tens and tens of millions notwithstanding). They also don’t like the idea of running the women’s team at a loss despite the increased investment. But hey, what football club doesn’t run at a loss?

Anyway, if they had won promotion they’d have been competing with big spenders Charlton, Bristol City, Portsmouth and Durham, which feels like a step too far for a club like Wolves with its multi-billion pound Chinese owners.

To be fair to chairman Jeff Shi, who made the call not to bother with promotion (although whose idea it was to not tell the players until the end of the season isn’t clear), he’s made his stance on Wolves Women pretty clear.

Here he is in 2022: “We still have not been pumping too much money into the women’s team, but what we’re doing is providing good conditions, or facilities to the girls. I think it’s more important to provide the local girls with a strong chance to participate in football from a younger age, so they can share the training facilities here, they can share the pitch here.

“But we still have no strategy to spend a lot of money on the squad to try to promote again for next season, no.”

There you go then.

Men’s team, have our money. Women’s team, you just have a bit of a kickabout.

Farewell Premier League Pt III

Continuing the theme of weird, PR, non-reality tweets from clubs who have been relegated from the Premier League, this week was Ipswich Town’s turn.

You may remember Southampton kicked off this nonsense by tweeting a long, long time ago when they were officially relegated: “Today’s result confirms our place in the Championship next season.”

They couldn’t bring themselves to say the word relegation and the tweet read like they had qualified for the Championship. Well done Saints.

Leicester followed suit last week with: “Today’s result means our place in the 25-26 Championship has been confirmed.” This was alongside a picture of an empty stand at the King Power, laying the groundwork for next season’s low attendances.

Anyway, Ipswich were a little bit better, at least basing their tweet in the real world by actually mentioning they had been relegated…

They still couldn’t help getting in that PR positive about back-to-back promotions though, could they?

Leicester missed a trick: “Following our incredible title success in 2016 and our FA Cup win in 2021 under the same family ownership, today’s result confirms our relegation from the Premier League.”

Social media corner

Some excellent social media content this week (yes, this still exists). Tottenham Hotspur were surprisingly competent on Thursday night in the Europa League, but that doesn’t make this pre-match tifo suggestion being any less funny.

Crystal Palace fans had the time of their lives when beating Aston Villa 3-0 in the FA Cup semi-finals at Wembley last Saturday.

This bloke wasn’t going to let something frivolous like a broken arm stop him supporting his team.

The steaks were high for these Oldham Athletic fans heading to Forest Green Rovers last weekend.

The team lost the match, but their fans won best fancy dress of the season.

Port Vale’s brilliant X account has rightly featured prominently on Row Z in recent weeks and, after securing promotion to League One last weekend, they didn’t disappoint.

And finally this week, here are Matlock Town attempting to take ‘parking the bus’ to extreme levels.

(Top photo: George Wood/Getty Images)

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