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Teessider writer John Nicholson is up for a prestigious award.

The Stockton-born's latest book 'Can We Have Our Football Back' has been nominated for the Telegraph's Sports Book Awards in the Football Book of the Year category.

Our man Anthony Vickers was one of several high-profile journalists to contribute to the book.

Last year, in an interview with Teesside Live, John explained what the book is all about.

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Ditch the dish. Cancel your subscription. Take to the barricades and reclaim the game.

Pernicious Premier League cash has corroded the peoples’ game and it is time to rip the whole corrupt edifice down and start again.

Football revolutionary John Nicholson is urging disenchanted fans to take radical action to hit the reset button.

The Stockton-born writer has rattled a lot of solid gold cages with his latest book, ‘Can We Have Our Football Back?’

Subtitled ‘How the Premier League is ruining football and what we can do about it’ the passionate polemic proposes nothing less than the complete dismantling of the current paywall model.

After 27 years of Premier League domination, the entire game is now in the clutches of the top flight money machine.

And Boro fan Nicholson, a writer for the Football365 website and a former Gazette columnist, wants to liberate it.

“I’m calling for a revolution,” he said unapologetically as he explained his militant manifesto.

He proposes scrapping the pay TV model in favour of a government backed free-to-air channel.

He proposes individual player and club salary caps and the slashing of ticket prices.

And he wants the richer clubs to pay a percentage of revenue into a football investment fund to help nourish the game at lower levels.

Crucially, he sees football not as a commercial enterprise to be bought and sold but as a national cultural asset to be harnessed for good.

“I know those are radical proposals that will upset powerful interests,” said John, whose first match was a 1-0 Boro win over Hull at Ayresome Park in December 1970.

“And I know that it is easy to dismiss it as naive or romantic and that people will say you can’t change the system,” he went on.

“But I also know that a lot of people are very angry at the way the game has been stolen, packaged up and sold back to us.

“And I know that a lot of people think that the current system is immoral, that the astronomical wages just can’t be justified.

“A lot of people, including many inside the game, know that unless we change course, the game will implode.”

At the heart of his radical programme is the notion that the Premier League’s insatiable addiction to cash has financially and culturally corrupted the game, dragging chancers, charlatans and blood soaked despots into the boardroom and forcing fans out of the equation.

Any notion of sporting glory and competitive balance has gone out of the window. Now it is all about money.

(Image: Ian Cooper)

“That is always there, ticking away in the background,” said John. “The transfer fees. The wages. The prize money for every place in the table. Takeovers. How much the chairman is worth. The cost of tickets. Net spend. You can’t get away from it.

“Even when you are watching a great game it colours what you think. You see clubs owned by nation states crushing the cannon fodder and yes, they have brilliant players but given the money spent, you’d expect them to win. It is no contest.

“And when you think where some of that money comes from, from pillaging natural resources and cheap labour in faraway lands it make enjoying the result morally challenging. You feel tainted.

“The Sky years have seen big clubs carve up the cash and create an unbalanced league with the super-rich and willing whipping boys.

“The big clubs have raised the bar on spending. It is making it almost impossible for medium sized clubs to compete and driving smaller ones to the wall.

“And the media are complicit. The pundits obsess about price tags and wage bills, they urge clubs to spend record fees and sometimes a report of a game is like an accountancy exercise.

“And when you are an ordinary bloke from Teesside, or any area that has social deprivation and high unemployment and low wages, it does jar a bit to think about the obscene sums splashed out to these teams.

“It is immoral that some clubs pay players £200,000 or £300,000 a week but won’t pay their cleaners the living wage.

“I’ve spoken to players who are embarrassed by how much money they earn. They know it is too much.

“One player I quote in the book has earned £10m from the game so far and he knows it is crazy. He knows he’s not worth it.

“He knows that compared to a nurse or doctor that what he does is trivial and says when he retires he wants to be a PE teacher just so he can say he has done something socially worthwhile with his life.”

The clubs say they pay for the top talent and the TV cash helps them compete on a global scale.

That justifies the billion pound plus TV rights deals, the subscription price and the stinging cost of tickets.

But John insists the entire structure is based on a myth that the Premier League is a premium product.

“It isn’t a premium product at all,” he said. “It is just football with all the flaws it has always had.

“The central myth is based on a deceit. We are told this is the best league in the world but it is hard to believe that when you are bored stupid as two also-rans grind out a dull goalless draw on a ‘super Sunday’

“With every game we get the hyperbole of a spectacular star-studded clash. It is sold as if it is part of the entertainments industry, all glamour and consistent quality. But it's not.

“No one would sit through as many crap films as we’ve sat through crap Boro matches and go back for more.

“We don’t go to games because we expect a Hollywood spectacle with big names and a happy ending.

“Fans go to games to be there and to be engaged in it, to be part of a collective experience whatever the result.

“And that element, the ‘being there’ is the glue that has held clubs and football together so long and it is under threat because the Premier League is now essentially geared for the TV audience rather than the paying fan.

“TV football is marketed as super sexy entertainment but in truth it’s not. In real life football can be very dull.

"Not every game is Manchester City and Liverpool going hammer and tongs and attacking.

(Image: Getty Images)

“Most matches are average. Some are fantastic. And some are awful. And there’s no way of saying in advance which will be which.

“And that applies from the Champions League down to grassroots. That’s just the nature of the game. And real fans know that.

“But TV tells you that every game is brilliant, every game is a spectacular, every game will be enthralling and exciting.

“They have to do that to justify the price of the product. And more and more people are not buying that.

“More and more people are cancelling their subscriptions. And for me that’s a good thing.”

Calling for the cancelling of subscriptions is the really revolutionary content to Nicholson’s radical platform.

Premier League and TV chiefs are used to shrugging off shapeless howls of protest and have seen a lot of supporters’ campaigns over pricing and changing kick-off times fizzle out .

But if enough angry individuals tear up their direct debit it would hit them in the pocket and threaten the integrity of their model.

“A lot of people are cancelling,” said John. “For some it just a question of cost, especially now the split between Sky and BT means two subscriptions now.

“For some it is about quantity because there is just too much football. It is relentless and it wears them down.

“For some it is about quality because so much of the football on screen is garbage, two teams terrified of relegation fighting for 17th place and the privilege of being cannon fodder again next year.

(Image: Getty Images)

“Some people are cancelling at home so they can watch it in the pub.

“There is a whole generation of net savvy fans who would never dream of paying for something that can watch free on illegal streams.

“And there are some, a growing number, who, like me, are turning away on principle.

“They believe, as I believe, that the current model is pernicious and is damaging to the structure and culture of the game.

“Cancelling the subscription is a symbolic act, a rejection of the whole idea that football is a product to be sold to us.”

Widespread cancellations could cause what he says is a fragile model to crumble and fall - and that offers a golden opportunity for a massive beneficial shake-up, he believes.

“The current subscription model is moving towards the end game,” he said. “The numbers don’t stack up.

“TV has paid a ridiculous figure for the rights package while viewing figures are flat-lining. They have paid £9m a game under the current deal and the media machine makes out everyone and his dog is watching but a game like Burnley against Huddersfield might only get an audience of 200,000.

“Technology is changing fast and the big clubs with a global audience might soon be in a position to it alone on their own platforms and if the collective approach ends it could leave a lot of clubs right up the creek.

(Image: Getty Images)

“The current structure is flimsy and the game has no vision or leadership. The clubs are resistant to change and you can see why. Right now they get a cheque for £150m a year for accepting the status quo. There’s no incentive to change.

“They will just wait until it all implodes. They have no Plan B.”

John does. His Plan B would see top flight football being brought in from behind the paywall.

He believes the cultural value of the game is such that it should be ‘listed’ by the government.

In fact, he thinks there is a compelling argument the state should buy the TV rights and show them on a dedicated free channel.

“Football should be free to air,” he said. “It has huge social and cultural benefits and should be open to everybody.

“The game has been coralled in a digital ghetto for 27 years and denied to the wider public. That’s just wrong.

“If it was free to air then big games would be a shared national experience, a collective water cooler moment.

“That would be good for the game in terms of marketing and profile and good for social cohesion.

”When games are on free TV they get massive audiences. People engage. They talk about it. New generations of fans are born.

(Image: Ian Vogler / Daily Mirror)

“We saw this summer how cricket got a boost from switching the World Cup from paid to free TV. People were buzzing over it.

“The Womens’ World Cup too. Far more people watched that than even the biggest games on Sky. It was huge.”

Smashing the paywall will led to a massive reduction in the income of clubs but Nicholson doesn’t see that as a problem.

In fact, he would encourage a levelling of the financial landscape with vastly reduced wages - and ticket prices.

And it would allow the game to cleanse itself of some of the problems the Premier League has ushered in.

“The Premier League has changed football culture for the worse,” he said. “It has created a divide between fans and players.

“The wage explosion has encouraged anger and abuse in stadiums and on-line and that is not healthy.

“If you pay players 10 times more they don’t get 10 times better but some fans seem to not only expect they will but also that it gives them the right to heap 10 times the dog’s abuse on them.

“Football has a massive gambling problem. Football has been financially colonised by a destructive industry that ruins lives.

“It has a massive problem with dodgy owners who want to get their hands in the till or sportswash their human rights record.

“And that has all stemmed from the money. If that was out of the equation a lot of the other problems would ease.

“So take the money out of it. Why not have a wage cap? I’ve suggested £220,000 a year. That is still a lot of money.

“And clubs should have their total wage spend capped too. That will make the game more competitive

“With costs cut the prices of tickets could be slashed too. A tenner. Why not?

Nicholson is an accomplished and passionate writer with a string of Teesside flavoured Nick Guymer crime novels behind him.

He also wrote the William Hill Prize nominated ‘We Ate All The Pies’ tracking the social transformation of the game through terrace catering and hospitality.

This book not only features a forensic dissection of the games financial and cultural tensions and draws up a manifesto for radical change but also includes an extensive range of observations from ‘industry’ insiders, players and media commentators including Mark Chapman, Clive Tyldesley, John Murray, Pat Nevin, Guisborough’s Steve Crossman, Chris Sutton and myself.

John has often raged against the machine in his rock and roll flavoured on-line columns but over the past few years his position has become more coherent - and more popular.

“There are a lot of diehard long time fans out there who are really disenchanted with the game,” he said. “I don’t think the powers that be realise they are sat on a powder keg.

“Whenever I touch on these areas the response is always overwhelming supportive. There is a lot of anger out there.

The first print run sold out in four days. More will be available later this week.

They cost a tenner. You can order on-line at https:// www.johnnicholsonwriter.co.uk