Today comes the news that Chelsea are being charged by the FA with failing to control their groundsman….
You remember those odd days in the summer when everyone at Arsenal was leaving to go to Barca or Real Mad or WC Milan or something. No one wanted to play for us, and anyway we knew we were bust because the Daily Mail and the News of the World said so.
Turned out nothing much was up – we swapped a fairly good winger who couldn’t score for a good one who could, and let a good young midfielder go, but had four guys waiting behind him for a place.
It was all nothing – a teacup in a storm – and it turned out that the real farce and chaos is elsewhere. A couple of posts back I covered the insanity of Liverpool players. Six of them were burgled when playing out of the country – so you’d expect them to be taking special precautions. But nope – and so inevitably another one was done while playing for Ireland.
Then today comes the news that Chelsea are being charged by the FA with failing to control their groundsman.
What is interesting is that this charge has come up because when the authorities investigated the punch up after one match, Chelsea said in their defence that their contract with their groundsman didn’t include any mention of the FA – which apparently is an offence under FA rules. So now they are being done again, for a “crime” they have already admitted. And in the Chelsea press hand out they are saying, “we are very surprised and disappointed to have this charge against us.”
Meanwhile there is farce and chaos of a different type back at Liverpool Insolvency where one of the players – a certain Jamie Carragher – has written an autobiography in which he says, “For richer or poorer, we’d sold Liverpool to two ruthless businessmen who saw us as a moneymaking opportunity. They didn’t buy Liverpool as an act of charity; they weren’t intent on throwing away all the millions they’d earned over 50 years … They wanted to buy us because the planned stadium offered a chance to generate tons of cash and increase the value of the club…. Breaking this vow [not to load the club with debt] set the first alarm bells ringing, the embarrassing continual changing of the stadium plans was irritating too…”
OK so rich player attacks rich owner. But that’s not all – for he then says of Benitez, his manager, “I understood why the owners were unhappy with him too… They’d been undermined by Rafa and now they were undermining him.”
And you thought we had problems with Adebayor over the summer!!!!! If it were possible to be worse than A Cole (who I thought was dreadful in the Theo-wonder-match) then this would be worse than A Cole. When you are a player for a club YOU DON’T ATTACK YOUR OWN MANAGER. Not very hard to understand is it?
Of course where there is turmoil the state steps in it – and football is no exception. Andy Burnham, the government’s spokesperson on debt laden football teams said at a political meeting today…
“If football follows the same path in the next 10 years as it has in the last, there is a real risk that the game will lose touch with its core support. We need to ask urgently what we want for the future of our game, before something precious is lost.”
He then rather spoilt it all by saying he wasn’t talking about foreign ownership as such, more about what he told the Guardian was “quality of ownership”. He also said he was worried about debt – which is rather nice of him, since we’ve repeated so many times that the combined debt of the Euro Final teams was £1.5 billion.
But despite the backtracking there is the possibility that they might manage to get the issue of foreign type people buying a club and then giving it impossible levels of debt (as Manchester Bankrupt and Liverpool Insolvency have done) – debts so great that the clubs struggle to pay even the interest on the debt.
Still, the government is not going to act. They are going to leave it to the FA.
Unfortunately the FA feel they can’t act either. “We can’t possibly take any more work on at the moment,” said Sir Hardly Anyone, chairman of the FA. “We have to erect the statue to Theo, we’ve got to go and collect the World Cup, we’re playing Uranus next week, and we’ve got this vital case against Chelsea and the way they failed to control their groundsman. With an agenda like that I am afraid this little matter of two EPL clubs owing £1.5 billion between them is just, well, far too trivial for the likes of us.”
Hey ho. Football resumes Saturday.
