Your reading a pre 2010-11 archived article
Sometimes I quite despair about the state of the simple game of football. Lots of idiocies abound: wage levels, transfer fee levels, the curse of the agent, cheating and various levels of incompetence. However none of them are my beef at this juncture. Fairness or rather its complete absence (along with its brother common sense) sometimes from the world of administrators and rule makers is what drives me mad!
The situation presently evolving at Southampton Football Club set me thinking just how pompous and arrogant the game, via its representatives in authority, can be. Setting aside for a minute that the Football League seems not to see itself having a role in ensuring a decent sized city doesn’t lose its football club and accompanying history, ignore the idea that the said FL might have learnt something from the string of PR disasters of the last 3 years around point deductions (Leeds, Luton, Bournemouth, Rotherham, Stockport, Wrexham etc) and don’t even concern yourself with peripheral issues like the integrity of the 3 leagues they run, these are but pale irritants to the issues Mawhinney and company think is really important: preventing clubs showing in the courts that they got it wrong!!!
At this juncture it might be helpful to put in a disclaimer, I personally don’t see that Southampton have a leg to stand on with regard to the 10 point deduction. The claim that the holding company and the club are not fully related entities is quite frankly pathetic (nearly as pathetic as the case Bates bodged over Leeds -15 points). But more pathetic is the tools used to prevent Southampton exercising a basic principle of our society, the right to appeal to law. By insisting that the new owners make a written pledge not to challenge the penalty, with the clear implication “no waving no licence to compete”, not only do the FL play with Southampton’s future, not only do they threaten to leave 23 other L1 clubs wondering what is happening they also place themselves, a bunch of pencil-pushing suits above the law!! The Prime Minister of this country isn’t above the law, why should the FL be? It is manifest nonsense.
Again to be clear, I don’t want titles and promotions and relegations to be decided by judges (and I equally don’t want points deductions to become an accepted part of the landscape) but in the end that can only happen if the administrators get things wrong. Some will say that the FL should have better things to do than worry about court cases, and there is some truth in that, but in reality the insistence on waving is self defeating. If the FL is clear the case for deduction is made it will win the case, perhaps enhance its reputation for integrity (something it might consider it should do anyway) and reclaim its costs. If the price for Southampton is not to buy a couple of decent defenders (or not the ones useful on a pitch) then that is for them, their fans will discover just how gutting all that false hope was, how it probably affects the players and how the only winner is the expensive lawyers bank balance. But the decision to challenge the -10 points should be for Matt Le Tissier and his Pinnacle Group only.
To be fair to the FL they are only really following the precedent set by FIFA. The world governing body is the ultimate arrogant entity when it comes to the rule of law. Operating under a Voltare/Blatter principle “I may know you’re a corrupt, incompetent and down right foreign jolly focused national association but I will defend to the death your right to be self-governing within your own country”, FIFA exercises a blanket ban on the use of the courts. In fact its goes much further, you may be a democratically elected government but when it comes to the make up for the football authorities, your irrelevant, Blatter and co will suspend the countries membership simply to save some corrupt autocratic position on the gravy train. The Jack Warner syndrome creates a cancer so deadly at the core of FIFA that the idea they are above democracy and law is to be considered a sickening insult to us all in my humble opinion. The irony in all this, the English FA will spend up to £50m trying to persuade this corrupt arrogance to give us the 2018 World Cup, we will either be denied by the despots of Trinidad and Tobago football or we will get a tainted success, lovely.
FIFA is an organisation it would take decades to put right, closer to home we first have to deal with our own house. Without deviating off the subject the running of football in England has never recovered from the wholly artificial separation of the top division from the rest of the clubs. The Premier League created a power vacuum between those who should run the game, a organisation with a nice office block in Soho Square called the Football Association, and those who do, the PL with its cash, the FL with the clubs, even the Blue Square gets to make an unholy mess without being rained in by authority. A call into the wilderness it may be but the sooner the FA grasps the nettle and reasserts its over-arching authority the better for the game in the long run.
Part of my frustration with all this is thus: wouldn’t it have been a better use of time, resources and abilities to come up with effective mechanisms that allow a fair game, where football not money rules, where futures can be planned long term and supporters an integral part of the mix instead of energies been used to ensure players get paid before the taxman, clubs deprived of points and legal rights and discussions held about playing PL matches in Beijing? The game has no divine right to be the most popular sport on the planet, the reputation of football has to be worked on constantly, not by cleaver public relations or celebrity focused communications strategies but by the central core values that made it what it is today, simple, accessible, enjoyable, but most of all, fair! If Southampton Football Club want to spend some of their post administration resources on expensive lawyers in a futile attempt to turn over the 10 point penalty, the Football League should let them and do so proud of their commitment to that fairness.
June 09.
