Liverpool FC Forum

by **Reg** » Wed Oct 08, 2008 12:10 am

Worth the read as it exposes Blatter and Platini as the power crazy freaks they are.
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Sepp Blatter's attack misses the target again

For a start, there is no place called Foreign. There is no Republic of Foreignia where all the foreign people live, doing foreign things, thinking foreign thoughts, hatching cunning little foreign schemes to carve up the bounty of English football and spirit it away to sit in a foreign vault, guarded by a bank manager who twiddles his moustache, smells vaguely of garlic and chuckles greedily in that funny way foreigners do.

There are, however, owners of English football clubs from several continents, from regions and cities as disparate as Saratov Oblast in Russia, on the Kazakhstan border, and Racine, Wisconsin, on the banks of Lake Michigan, via Reykjavik and the Bakos neighbourhood of eastern Alexandria in Egypt.

This will be news to Sepp Blatter, the president of Fifa, who, in attacking the lure of the Barclays Premier League to the lucre of foreign investors, appears to think of them all living in one big house, or at least across the apartment block hall, like the cast of Friends. Certainly, Blatter and his Uefa ally, Michel Platini, see a gang, to judge from the way foreign owners are invariably lumped together as a homogenous collective in their thoughts and pronouncements.

And yet when one considers Sheikh Mansour, the son of Sheikh Zayed, ruler of Abu Dhabi and President of the United Arab Emirates for more than 30 years, and Tom Hicks, the son of a Texas radio station owner from Dallas and owner of the Texas Rangers baseball franchise, one is not immediately struck by similarities. Perhaps Blatter has not seen much of the news lately, but people from those two constituencies don't see eye to eye on a whole range of issues.

So quite why the new owners of Premier League clubs are viewed as united, or on the brink of joining forces like some axis of evil to conquer the world, is a mystery. England, and the English, are frequently painted as parochial and xenophobic, yet it is those beyond these shores, most specifically Blatter and Platini, the Uefa president, who are most likely to fall into intellectual shorthand, viewing all outsiders as one, and as a threat.

As if the biggest train wreck in English football is not Newcastle United, owned by Mike Ashley, of Burnham in Buckinghamshire. As if the greatest financial catastrophe of recent years had not occurred at Leeds United under Peter Ridsdale, a native of the city and lifelong supporter. Four legs good, two legs bad, chant the sheep in Animal Farm, and what is being advanced here is its football equivalent, in which all English owners have only the interests of the game at heart and those from Foreignia conspire and plot, their minds fixed firmly on the next quick buck.

Except the divide is not between foreign owners and English owners; it is between good and bad, effective and ineffective, successful and unsuccessful. For all their avowed hatred, would Manchester United supporters swap Malcolm Glazer, of Rochester, New York State, for, say, Daniel Levy, of Tottenham Hotspur and Essex? The ability to run a club is not something that shows up on a passport. Yes, some of these new guys will be passing through, some will be looking for a swift profit or will find the air too rich for their taste, but that has always been the way.

Football clubs mess up. It is what creates movement between the divisions. The reason the hinterland is littered with names that could once be found in the Premier League is that somebody got it wrong. This can be a manager or the playing staff, but in most cases the trail leads to the board and can be pinned on poor management decisions, unfortunate executive appointments, unwise investments or flawed dealings in the transfer market.

Blatter's organisation has helped to create a football environment inspired entirely by financial issues and now he throws up his hands in alarm at the logical conclusion. The only football event to which I have been refused admission for carrying a small soft drink manufactured by a rival sponsorship brand was a Fifa World Cup game. The stewards wouldn't even let people into the area around the ground with a Pepsi. So the president can get off his high horse about the motivation of this new generation of club owners, because his lot are worse.

Platini, too. Like Blatter, he witters on about the four clubs who dominate the English game, while devising a Champions League format that may kill competition in domestic leagues across Europe by admitting one club from a smaller country and giving it a level of resource that will, in time, end sporting rivalry.

If a single club from Bulgaria makes it into the Champions League two or three times in succession, gaining upwards of £10million on each occasion, what will happen to the domestic league? The same as happened in Greece (Olympiacos have been champions in 11 of 12 seasons), the Netherlands (PSV Eindhoven champions in seven of nine seasons) and Platini's country, France. In the seven seasons before 2001-02, Ligue 1 had five different winners; in the seven seasons since, it has had one: Lyons. Perhaps the Uefa president's battle for equality should begin closer to home.

What is the difference, therefore, between a domestic league that is made less competitive by Uefa money and one that is changed by investment? The financial clout of Arpad Paszkany propelled CFR Cluj to the top of the Romanian league last season and broke the domination of the Bucharest clubs that had existed since 1990-91, when Universitatea Craiova became the last team from outside the capital to be crowned champions. This is a good thing, surely. And while Paszkany may hail from Sfantu Gheorghe in Transylvania, the kernel of his fortune was made in Germany, so who is to say where foreign ownership begins and ends?

Phil Gartside, of Bolton Wanderers, was born and schooled in Ireland and came to England only because of a woman he met at Trinity College, Dublin. Steve Gibson, of Middlesbrough, made his fortune from the global transportation of bulk liquids, powders and gases. Got that? Global transportation. Not up and down the A19, or in a ten-mile radius of Stockton-on-Tees with a van.

Business is global and as clubs are businesses they are global, too. They market globally and are owned globally. Some will be professionally managed and successful, others less so. To wrap up all investors in one parcel, with a single motive and ambition, as Blatter does, is superficial. Randy Lerner, the owner of Aston Villa, was born in Brooklyn, New York, but has been an English resident and keeps a house in Chelsea. It is possible that he spends more time over here, in fact, than Ken Bates, the owner of Leeds United, who also has a house in Chelsea, but resides permanently in Monaco. Both get to matches when they can and are achieving limited success with their clubs. So who is the foreign owner, and why should only one set of motives be questioned, when the circumstances of both are so similar once birth certificates are discounted?

Events around West Ham United are a prime example of the baseless nature of Blatter's suspicions. The previous administration, all English, brokered the deals for Carlos Tévez and Javier Mascherano that caused so much trouble and could yet work out as the most expensive loans in football history. Subsequently, Terence Brown, the former chairman, and most of his allies have left, to be replaced by Björgólfur Gudmundsson, the former chairman of Landsbanki, who was sacked yesterday after the Icelandic bank entered receivership.

Some might argue that neither administration has served the club well, but it would be preposterous to rank one as preferable to the other, simply on the grounds of nationality. All that is protecting West Ham now is Gudmundsson's personal investment, so financially at least he is a bigger friend to the club than Brown ever was. And if outside pressures force him to review this relationship, or it has a negative impact on West Ham's fortunes, these are the breaks. Something must have gone very wrong when Swansea City slipped through four divisions, too; and Huddersfield Town.

Indeed, there was no golden age of club ownership in which pure and generous benefactors with unimpeachable business ethics and a world view taken straight from the films of Frank Capra moved through the marketplace dispensing joy and a generous bounty. All that has changed is that as the economic power of the Premier League has spread worldwide, so the identity of those who are interested in harnessing that power as a means to an end has spread, too. Some will be better for their clubs than others; it was ever thus.

Blatter described English football as the phenomenon of the era, but he was not talking about the sport, only the business. In sporting terms, English football is a little above average, at best. Its national team are recovering from spectacular failure in the Euro 2008 qualifiers and its club sides are no more prominent in Europe than they were between 1977 and 1984, when seven out of eight European Cup winners were English.

So, having defined the success of the English game in purely financial terms, Blatter expresses concern when others do the same. Ownership in England is out of control, he says. Yes it is. And that is what makes it healthy, because with so many vested interests pulling in different directions, the Republic of Foreignia will never have things all its own way; unlike life as lived in Blatter and Platini's own little fiefdoms.

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Sepp blatter's attack misses the target again - Blatter gets tough on foreign owners

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