Officials and FA up their attacks on football clubs

 

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By Tony Attwood

Football is, in one very real sense, about the efforts to bring order to chaos both on and off the pitch. 

On the pitch the aim is to bring your side’s control to a situation in which the opposition is aiming to do the same thing.   Beyond the pitch, it is about buying the players you want at a price you want to pay, while other clubs seek to out-maneuver you, as journalists make up utterly untrue stories concerning players your club has no interest in, which in turn worries players in your club who think they might be the next to be kicked out.   

And such chaos spreads as, besides all this, agents are suggesting to players that a better deal is available with Club X rather than Club Y, forgetting to mention that they will make more money out of the transfer to X, but mentioning instead that they have the player’s best interests at heart.

And amid all this shuffling around the League and FA, they go around bringing charges against clubs for saying things they don’t like.   Not things that are not true, we should remember, but things they don’t like. 

So, for example, Nottingham Forest have been ordered to remove a social media post that went on line 11 months ago and have been fined three quarters of a million pounds for posting it in the first place.  (That’s according to the Telegraph).

Meanwhile referees, it seems, are still free from any interrogation – something which is absolutely not part of a democracy in any sense of the word.   But, of course, football is not a democracy because at the top we have PGMO, a secret society that can tell clubs what to do without ever being held to account.

And that is a danger because most secret societies that have such power (we might think of the dictatorships that run a large number of countries for example) never feel they have enough power.

The great crime of the Forestians was to suggest that Stuart Attwell (who was on VAR duty for a game) was a supporter of Luton Town.  Free speech in football is most definitely not allowed, and the suggestion was described by the Football Association as “an attack on the integrity of a match official on an unparalleled scale.”

Forest appealed and lost, although that is not surprising, because appeals in football go to the same body that imposed the fines in the first place.   And as we know such people are often loathe to admit they were wrong, and so don’t allow appeals to win, apart from on trivial points of detail.

But of course this is football so Nottingham F are not the only club to be upset.

Also feeling aggrieved is Sir Jim Ratcliffe at Manchester U, but here we have a slightly different case because he is using the old trick of talking about x to stop anyone noticing y.

In this case, he is proclaiming that Manchester United would have run out of money by the end of last year if he had not stepped in and made changes.

To their eternal discredit, the media of course accepts proclamations without question, even though they are palpably untrue.  There is no question that ManU would not have been able to borrow more money nor that it doesn’t have the assets to cover its debts.    But the media accept managerial twaddle because doing so removes the need to do any investigation.

But it remains highly unlikely that some of his chitchat is accurate,  such as saying that 450 job cuts can be made without it having any impact on the club.  It is inconceivable that none of the things these 450 people were doing were nothing that was important to the club.  Some might not have been, but all 450?   No, it seems awfully unlikely.

And we can also judge this by the statement from the man in charge of sacking 450 people that Ruben Amorim, the manager, is “doing a great job”     Yes it might have been a bit dopey to be paying Sir Alex Ferguson £2 million-a-year deal for something or other that wasn’t very clear.   But really, were there 450 people whose jobs were pointless to the level of being non-existent?

I would say a greater problem comes from the fact that the club had just two wins in the last eight games, one of which was against Leicester City, and one of which was against Ipswich Town, both of which being by the single goal.

And just to be clear about this we might consider the lower reaches of the League, to see where Leicester and Ipwich, the only two teams beaten by Manu of late, now reside.  And while we are at it we could, in order to picture the lower landscape, include Tottenham Hots as well.  Still saying such things probably makes the owner happy.   And quite possibly, he even believes they are true.

 

	Team	P	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts
13	Tottenham Hotspur	28	10	4	14	55	41	14	34
14	Manchester United	28	9	7	12	34	40	-6	34
18	Ipswich Town	28	3	8	17	26	58	-32	17
19	Leicester City	28	4	5	19	25	62	-37	17
20	Southampton	28	2	3	23	20	68	-48	9

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