Early Doors - Your morning briefing blog

World of confusion

Thu Oct 09 08:59AM

Early Doors doesn't understand the world any more. Is there money in football or not?

On the one hand, West Ham are in grave danger of getting credit crunched so comprehensively they will soon be nothing more than one of those small metal cubes that used to be a Ford Sierra.

English clubs are £3 billion in debt - and nearly two-thirds of that belongs to the big four.

The FA and UEFA are urging the introduction of a salary cap to prevent the imminent implosion of every club in the universe.

Yet, at the same time, foreign consortia plough billions into English clubs with no real prospect of seeing any of their investment back.

Clubs continue to spend, players continue to get paid astronomic sums, and punters continue to flood through the turnstiles to see a drab 0-0 draw at home to Middlesbrough.

So ED doesn't know what to think. In fact, it rather resents the fact that it is being made to think at all, since football is not a game renowned for its self-awareness.

What has brought on all this angst, soul-searching and blind panic? It can only be a midweek with nothing to keep people occupied except the Johnstone's Paint Trophy.

Given the opportunity to step off the Saturday-Wednesday-Saturday treadmill, football has come to the sudden realisation that it is morally and financially bankrupt.

Oh, and the global economic meltdown can't have helped, either.

While their mammoth pay packets might be under threat from a salary cap, ED sees no sign of players swapping their Rolex watches for Casio models any time soon.

Early Doors would love a return to the days when players had to take a summer job just to make ends meet during the close-season.

Who wouldn't get a kick out of seeing John Terry manning a supermarket checkout or Shaun Wright-Phillips sweeping chimneys?

Unfortunately for the authorities, they cannot bring wages down because of the something they never miss an opportunity to boast about: football is a global game.

Salary caps work in American sports for two reasons. Firstly, because players still get paid eye-watering sums of money - £10m a year is not uncommon for top stars. Secondly, foreign rivals to the NFL, NBA and MLB are uncompetitive and poor.

Football is not like that. There are loads of decent leagues, and unless you can get everyone in the world to agree to the same salary cap - and you can't - players will simply follow the money.

And as for debt, well, just listen to jug-eared Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore (pictured), a man paid to play the role of a man with his head inserted comically into a large sand dune.

As well looking like the FA Cup, Scudamore represents the big, bad, evil, commercial side of the game, and as such has to keep a straight face while saying things like: "I don't agree that debt is bad," and "Debt is a product of income."

So there is no willingness among the clubs to bring down the massive levels of borrowing.

UEFA general secretary David Taylor yesterday urged caution among debt-ridden football clubs yesterday, warning that there would be nobody to pick up the pieces when it all went wrong - no £500 billion rescue package.

"Governments might bail out banks but they are not going to bail out a football club," he said.

He was wrong. As any non-white-wearing Spanish fan will tell you, Real Madrid sold their training ground to the Spanish government in 2001 in what can only be described as a favourable deal.

It allowed them to write off over £100m of debts and go on the most outrageously bloated spending spree imaginable, building a team of Galacticos but more importantly cementing their position as the biggest, brashest team in the world.

They set the tone for a decade of conspicuous expenditure when it seemed to matter less who they were buying than how much they spent on them.

Florentino Perez's successive purchases of Luis Figo, Zinedine Zidane, Ronaldo and David Beckham brought diminishing returns, but such was the fans' delight in seeing four global stars (plus Raul, Roberto Carlos and Iker Casillas) in the same team they hardly cared - until Barcelona got their act together and started winning things.

Like Led Zeppelin sending a private jet across the United States to pick up a mislaid groupie, Real were not looking for value for money - the glorious recklessness of the spending provided as much of a thrill as the players themselves.

When Real Betis bought Denilson (the ridiculous show pony, not the Arsenal player) in 1998, it is claimed that they deliberately pushed the price up from £18m to £21m so they could set a new transfer record.

The statement of intent was as important to Betis as whether Denilson was any good or not. Which is just as well, really, because he was awful. Greedy, lazy and self-indulgent - he alone set the cause of stepovers back 10 years. But Betis made their point anyway. They were a big club.

It is the same with Manchester City, funded by a bottomless pit of oil money. Robinho has been good in patches but the fact that he was signed in such spectacular style - for £32m from under Chelsea's noses - will always count for far more than anything he does on the pitch.

Weighty (and unfunny) stuff indeed, and it is far beyond the mental capacity of Early Doors to understand the situation, let alone find a solution.

ED just wants to get back to the good old days when we spent the week before a World Cup qualifier wondering whether Kazakhstan were going to pack five across midfield or go with a 4-4-2.

- - -

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Do you want in Liverpool an Arab sheikh as president with one Brazilian coach and nine or eleven African players? Where is Liverpool in that? We have to make some rules." Michel Platini; born in Joeuf, North-East France. Played much of his career for Juventus. Where's the Joeuf in that?

QUOTE OF THE DAY 2: Has Noel Gallagher been taking elocution lessons from Joe Kinnear? "England isn't that f****** great. To live here is a f****** s***hole, to be honest. People have this romantic image of England. London is a f****** dump."

"Which one is Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories? You're a ****," he didn't add.

FOREIGN VIEW: Cristiano Ronaldo's ex Nereida Gallardo: "In the time we were together, I looked at his mobile.  And I got a surprise - in Spanish. The other woman was Spanish. Either that or she was from Miami! It always seemed that he was playing around with girls by text message so I said to him: 'If you want to play these games then tell me and I can turn on my old phone and I can go back to having my pick!'" She's going to get that tattoo with his initials removed..

TALKING POINT: You want a talking point? Fix football. Well, go on then..

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