Pearce bemoans one-sided Premiership

MAN CITY boss Stuart Pearce has claimed the one-sided nature of the Premiership will only get worse as the years roll by.

After grabbing a goalless draw from their weekend encounter with Liverpool, City take on another member of England’s ‘big four’ tonight when they make their first visit to the Emirates Stadium to take on Arsenal.

Of the 36 major domestic honours on offer since 1995, all but six have been carved up between Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester United, with the entire half dozen coming in the League Cup, widely regarded as the least glamorous of the three.

This season, now that Chelsea and Manchester United have booked their places in the FA Cup final on May 19, there has not even been a runners-up place to cherish. And Pearce is not expecting any significant change over the coming years.

“The Premiership is extremely one-sided,” he said. “There is a massive gorge between the top four and the rest of the league and you have to realise, the more years that tick by, the harder it becomes for anyone else to win something.

“You look at the statistics and you can see it is the big boys who win the trophies, so the finances sloshing around in the game just now mean it is not a fair playing field.”

Long-term, Pearce feels the only way to properly compete against the biggest spenders is for City to nurture their own talent.

Even that brings its problems though, with players unwilling to remain at one club for long, as Pearce did at Nottingham Forest, when there are better alternatives on offer.

“The psyche of players has changed,” he said. “I was quite happy to spend my best days at Forest. But maybe with the advent of agents and parents who are a little bit cuter in terms of what is going on around the world, boys are not so happy to have a decent career and be reasonably well paid without getting what they perceive to be the holy grail of playing for the likes of Manchester United or Chelsea.”

As if to emphasise the point about the imbalance of Premiership life, Pearce estimates Cristiano Ronaldo’s new £31million contract at Manchester United is 12 times his own transfer budget for the season.

And, even when City unearth a gem, keeping hold of it can be impossible as they found with Shaun Wright-Phillips.

“Who is not a selling club?” he sighed.

“Michael Carrick left Tottenham last summer because the price was so good they could not turn it down, so even a club of Spurs’ clout have become a selling club. There is only Chelsea who don’t have to sell. Even United, with their backers, might have to.”

Meantime Arsene Wenger will today learn his fate following a FA charge of improper conduct for an altercation with referee Steve Bennett at half-time in the match against Portsmouth at the Emirates in December.

A date, meanwhile, has yet to be scheduled into a separate charge of improper conduct and/or bringing the game into disrepute following his media comments about one of the assistant referees in the Carling Cup final on February 23.