In an ideal world all football teams would be like West Ham United. Not the
West Ham that defied gravity and, some would argue, justice last season,
with their rented Argentinians performing an open audition on the parameters
of legality. The claret-and-blue lineup to which all should aspire is that
which won the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1964-65: Jim Standen, Joe Kirkup,
Jack Burkett, Bobby Moore, Martin Peters, Ken Brown, Alan Sealey, Ronnie
Boyce, Geoff Hurst, Brian Dear and John Sissons. The only truly English team
to win a European trophy.
Not only did that XI to a man hail from England, the majority came from
London. Only Kirkup, born in Northumberland, and Hurst, from Lancashire,
originated beyond the capital or its suburbs. Both were on West Ham’s books
as junior players, though, leaving Standen, the goalkeeper who began his
career at Arsenal before moving to Luton Town, as the only player not to
come through the West Ham ranks under Ron Greenwood.
This unique fraternity (five of the starting lineup were born within walking
distance of Upton Park) prompted Moore to choose the 2-0 victory in the
final over TSV 1860 Munich as his favourite match, more personally
meaningful even than the 1966 World Cup final. “It felt as if we won the cup
with our school team,” he said.
West Ham used 16 players in nine European matches that season and even the
squad members were English. There will never be another triumph like it.
Liverpool had two Englishmen among the 14 players who won Champions League
against AC Milan in 2005. Manchester United put five Englishmen on the pitch
for a short while at the Nou Camp in 1999, but only two – Gary Neville and
Nicky Butt – were locals. This is the modern world. The tale of Greenwood’s
academy is from another age.
Was it a gentler, more innocent, time when footballers were picked from park
pitches by wily scouts, men who could spot a player by the way he controlled
a ball in the road outside a row of terraced houses? Yes. Will we see its
like again? Not a chance. So we learn to deal with our new reality, or we
tear the sport to pieces in courtrooms and houses of arbitration. And if
that means embracing a game as far removed from that known to Bobby and his
schoolboy chums as King of the Road (No 1 on May 20, 1965) would be to
anyone who saw CSS at Glastonbury, then so be it.
Just as in an ideal world, all teams would be made up of 11 players who caught
the bus to their first training session and then went home to mum, so
preferably all transfers would be conducted for the full amount, paid up
front, deal done and no grey areas. Not going to happen, is it? The Premier
League chairmen will not allow it. When they convened this summer, Richard
Scudamore, the league’s chief executive, proposed an end to the loan system
and, to judge by the reaction in the room, he might as well have suggested
giving next year’s television profits to charity. The vote went against him,
by some distance.
Scudamore believes all forms of third-party ownership whether by agents, by
borrowing a player from a rival or by entering into cosy little gentlemen’s
agreements are potentially problematic and open to corruption and he is
right.
Yet, as it stands, the Premier League has the worst of both worlds. It has a
rulebook that claims to police the game, but does not, and it has clubs who
claim to be playing by the rules when in fact driving a truck through what
is fair and proper. Sheffield United hopped up and down in fury over West
Ham’s Carlos Tévez, while Neil Warnock, their manager, talked quite openly
of an agreement with Watford that stopped a former player, Steve Kabba,
turning out against his former club. He saw nothing wrong with that, no
double standard.
Indeed, Sheffield United launched a campaign for fairness as if there were a
difference between a written agreement in which an illegal arrangement is
kept secret, and a gentlemen’s agreement in which an illegal arrangement is
not put in writing. For all the clout it carries right now, the rulebook
might as well state: don’t get caught. And with no mood among Premier League
chairmen to make the correct changes, ones that would clean up the transfer
business, the debate should move from what should not be allowed to what
should be.
The Premier League took the first step in this direction with the ruling
provoked by Tim Howard’s move from Manchester United to Everton. From
August, when a loan deal converts to a permanent transfer midway through the
season, the restrictions on playing against a former club will apply. In
other words, instead of mounting an investigation into why Howard did not
play against United in April, instead of interviewing the player, the
managers, club officials and trying to get to the bottom of what appeared to
be a squalid carve-up against the ethos of the game, the Premier League will
now join United in insisting Howard take the day off. It is a pragmatic
solution, rather than a wholesome one, but at least we know where we stand.
No more dubious private accords.
Well, almost. The Kabba arrangement between Sheffield United and Watford,
which was publicly discussed by Warnock and recorded openly on official club
information services, did not apply to a converted loan deal but to a
straightforward £500,000 transfer. In this case, the Premier League is
looking at an additional rule outlawing gentlemen’s agreements to deselect
players for certain matches. This would be hard to enforce as clearly clubs
could enter into a secret arrangement, then lie about a player’s fitness and
withdraw him from the game anyway. The solution would be to make a ten-point
deduction from both teams the standard punishment if investigated and
caught. The offence would, therefore, not be worth the risk: problem solved.
And we would know where we stand.
This leaves our old favourite: third-party ownership. As it is, there is
nothing illegal in an outside group having an interest in a player,
providing the club holds the registration and decides selection and transfer
issues. West Ham entered into a side agreement with the representatives of
Tévez, which was not disclosed and, potentially, meant the player could be
sold at any time. This was wrong and was punished, some would say weakly,
although the subsequent revelation of various gentlemen’s agreements
involving other clubs and players has greatly weakened those camped on the
moral high ground.
However, in addition to the shenanigans around Howard and Kabba, there was an
even stranger occurrence. It appears that when Collins Mbesuma signed for
Portsmouth from Kaizer Chiefs of South Africa in August 2005, his £808,171
transfer fee plus a payment of £202,080 to Mike Makaab, his agent, was met
by Pini Zahavi, the agent, not the club.
The money was loaned to Portsmouth by GOL International, Zahavi’s company, in
return for shared ownership, the repayment of the loan on the occasion of
the player’s transfer, plus a 50 per cent share in any future profit. This
seems a remarkably good deal for Portsmouth, which pays no money, yet
receives half of any transfer windfall.
And while there is no suggestion of the club withholding any documentation
concerning the deal, are we to believe that Zahavi advanced such a huge sum
with no say in the career path of the player? This would make him a bit of a
soft touch; although people capable of pulling up more than £1 million to
spend on Zambian footballers do not tend to be.
So what do we surmise from this? Either that Zahavi is football’s Father
Christmas (unlikely, for all sorts of reasons) or that third-party ownership
is now so manifest in the global transfer market that the agents can outbid
the clubs. In which case, the only way to regulate it is to make it legal,
with clear boundaries governing when an agent can exercise his right to sell
his player (the two transfer windows would be most logical). In this way,
the Premier League would acknowledge that football’s financial world is
changing and, more importantly, change with it, rather than becoming bogged
down in protracted legal arguments over rule infringements that do not exist
elsewhere in Europe and South America. And we would know where we stand.
In the end, if a club such as Portsmouth are given the capacity to compete for
players that would otherwise be beyond their financial capability, providing
the same rules apply for all, what would be the problem? This would make the
league more competitive and ultimately, as all major clubs have a limit to
their squad numbers, some of the GOL or MSI stable would have to stay where
they are.
There would be a potential impact on youth development, but that is also true
of the loan system and EU employment regulations. And no club could risk
turning out a majority of agent-owned mercenaries for fear of their
first-team being sold piecemeal in the transfer window. It is the fact that
the rules allow a club to pretend they own a player through registration,
when in reality they do not, that provides this false security. Being honest
about who really controls some of the talent at a modern football club might
not be ideal, but it would be preferable to the present system, because we
would know where we stand; even if the view was far nicer in 1965.
