Archive for the ‘The Story So Far’ Category

The Story So Far – June 18th Football, run by idiots, signifying something…

Posted by Richard Whittall under Newcastle, The Story So Far on Jun 18, 2013

Newcastle United v Arsenal - Premier League

The Lead

Newcastle United earned £93 million in revenue the 2011/12 Premier League season, the 7th highest in the league. The year before they’d spent a not inconsiderable £27 million on transfer fees, which, as you know, are amortized and so still on the books. Wages totalled £64 million as well. With the club posting a £1 million profit last season, the margins are quite tight. Mike Ashley has already loaned himself £129 million, and the club continues to seek ways to expand its commercial revenues under managing director Derek Llambas.

Once could easily see a need here for a director of football, but only if the person filling that role had a considerable track record of responsible spending, intelligent and cost-effective allocation of resources, and a good sense of areas of the player market that have yet to be fully explored as a source of Premier League-ready talent.

I don’t know for certain Joe Kinnear isn’t that man. But I’m pretty damn sure he’s not. In any case, his train wreck interview with talkSPORT yesterday revealed a man who may not have a grasp on things that actually happened in real life. From the Guardian:

On Monday evening Kinnear gave a shambolic interview to Talksport in which the former Wimbledon manager claimed responsibility for signing Tim Krul [a goalkeeper recruited by Graeme Souness] as well as James Perch [bought by Chris Hughton], said Derek Llambezee [Llambias] had resigned as director of football [a position he has never held] and talked about Shola Amenobee, Yohan Kebab and Hatem Ben Afre rather than Shola Ameobi, Yohan Cabaye and Hatem Ben Arfa.

It’s certainly possible that Joe Kinnear’s David Brent-like public deportment may not reflect on his abilities as a future director of football. But if a company were interviewing for a position that involved the oversight of spending tens of millions of pounds on acquisitions vital to the future well-being of the business, and that person claimed the accomplishments of other persons as their own in a public forum mere hours after hiring them, one would hope that company would see the error of their ways and restart the process, whilst at the same apologizing for failing to do due diligence on such a crucial hire.

But this is Newcastle. When I first read Louise Taylor’s thesis on how Kinnear got hired–Mike Ashley didn’t like how Alan Pardew ‘shared the blame’ for Newcastle’s struggles last season with the owner, and so hired a director of football as revenge–it struck me as journalistic speculomasturbation in the extreme. Now I’m not so sure. The Premier League, despite any claims that gobs of money somehow equal sophistication, slouches toward television to be born and reborn over and over again, in spite of itself.
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The Story So Far – June 17th The Confederations Cup and the death of football’s off-season

Posted by Richard Whittall under Confederations Cup, The Story So Far on Jun 17, 2013

Spain v Uruguay: Group B - FIFA Confederations Cup Brazil 2013

The Lead

The Confederations Cup was once a bona fide friendly tournament. How do I know this? Because, as with all the world’s leading friendly tournaments, it was first organized by a Middle East nation to provide entertainment in the off-season. Called the King Fahd Cup, it was first played in October 1992, with four representative FIFA confederation tournament winners travelling to Saudi Arabia to participate (Argentina beat Saudi Arabia in the final 3-1 with Caniggia bagging the winner).

FIFA, perhaps sensing another sure fire way of cramming the football calendar with more footballing goodness, took over the tournament in 1997. It was played every two years until 2005 when FIFA smartly decided to use it as a World Cup tune-up tourney to take place in the host nation, a lucrative way to keep everyone on schedule in their prep for the Big Show while at the same time providing the world with yet another international tournament.

Still, for a short time nobody was fooled. It was a dress rehearsal. Not one without its moments, mind you. But only the most overworked commentators would have scrutinized every kick of the ball, drawing tortured causal latices to the next year’s World Cup.

No longer. Whether because of doubts over Brazil’s readiness on and off the pitch, or the North American-friendly kick off times, or because of the insatiable 24/7 football media machine which needs more and more football fuel to keep chugging along, the Confed Cup is now a thing. It has its own stub at whoscored.com. It is the subject of a host of analyses on ESPNFC. And most telling of all, it has its own Guardian Football Weekly dedicated podcast.

It seems the public shares this interest. As Roger Pielke Jr. notes:

While I’m partial to the idea that there are several distinguishing factors that make this instance special (including the fact Brazil are the hosts), I generally think this is also a case of television’s insatiable desire for more product. Conventional TV is bleeding profit as many viewers are dispersed in a cable universe that is itself under increasing threat of “cord cutting”–dropping cable altogether in favour of live-streaming services like Netflix.

Sports however, which are played live in real time and look gorgeous in high definition of the kind only TV can provide (for now), are still TV’s safest bet. But in order to capture and keep as many viewers as possible, TV needs a lot of sports to justify the increasing cost of event rights. Hence the incredible interest in the UEFA U21 tournament this time around, and now the Confed Cup. No doubt football fans are delighted with all this intense coverage, but the reality is now there is no off-season in soccer. Football is a year-round sport, and all of it is important with a capital ‘I.’

The problem is however is that sooner or later, if all televised football is must-see, essential viewing, then none of it is. Will all this exposure dilute the product? Maybe not. The Champions League has long been accused of being bloated beyond recognition, but it’s still among the most entertaining sports events in the world. Still, one yearns for the time when the Confed Cup was a silly lark in which we could watch the USA beat Spain in a semifinal in South Africa, all the while knowing it was ultimately meaningless.

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The Story So Far – June 14th Is the Premier League failing to attract the world’s best players?

Posted by Richard Whittall under The Story So Far on Jun 14, 2013

Team GB v Brazil - International Friendly

The Lead

Hey guys. It’s the middle of June. We’ve got a Confederations Cup bearing down on us. It’s two months until the gears of the domestic season begins to grind. Why are you still reading about football? Do you have a problem? Do you need help?

The absence of football is clearly getting to some heads early this off-season. Like Jeff Powell.

Now this is pretty goddamn low-hanging fruit, I know, particularly after Powell’s somewhat embarrassing Thatcher apologia from last April. And I’m trying not to do this kind of thing any more, I’m honestly really trying.

But how any one could accept the empirical premise of this op-ed which currently sits atop the Daily Mail football section is beyond me:

Hands up all those who have heard of Razvan Rat, Ricky van Wolfswinkel, Jesus Navas, Modibo Diakite, Guillermo Varela, Aleksandar Tonev, Jose Canas and Fernandinho.

Hands on hearts, even if you have an inkling of those names now then how many of you knew who on earth they were as
recently as last month?

Thought not.

You can sort of see where he’s going with this. The Premier League isn’t attracting the stars like Neymar and Robert Lewandowski (maybe). It prefers spending on the cheap rather than break the bank on pricier English players. From here, Powell morphs this whole thing into an argument against the current loan system. It all means England won’t win the World Cup, which is what the Premier League is for, apparently.

Before we get into that, some very basic points need to be made here. As I mentioned above, it’s June 14th. That means there remains two-and-a-half months left of the transfer window in which these so-called superstars can be bought up as apparent proof that the Premier League is the best league in the world. To make this argument today completely undermines everything that follows. I could stop typing right now! And you may as well stop reading!

But a second point anyway: how many players have arrived in England as relative unknowns (and I mean relative: who in the hell doesn’t know who Jesus Navas is?) only to become major international commodities? Last season alone saw Michu and Benteke shine for mid-tablers like Swansea and Aston Villa. They would almost certainly have made Powell’s list had they arrived this season. Is the ability to spot and develop talent not a mark of an elite league?

And a third point: while major 80 million pound signings sell a ton of papers, they make for terrible business. We can have a conversation about the pros and cons of the loan system in place in Europe (it does permit for anti-competitive hoarding), but allocating enormous resources to secure the services of a single player, particularly with what we know about performance regression, and now with the introduction of Financial Fair Play, is just plain dumb. Much better to hedge bets over less expensive, and in some cases undervalued, foreign prospects.

Not once does Powell speak to the reforms being implemented by the Elite Player Performance Plan, which could help make the transition of young prospects into the Premier League easier and more affordable.

Best for now that Powell sticks to the keyboard and stay very far away from holding a position of actual power in the sport.
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The Story So Far – June 13th How much is André Schürrle actually worth to Chelsea?

Posted by Richard Whittall under The Story So Far on Jun 13, 2013

Bayer 04 Leverkusen v Valencia CF - UEFA Champions League

Welcome to the horrible hellscape of a world with Financial Fair Play:

Well exciting transfer deals haven’t exactly died yet, apparently.

Anyway, what will follow in all of football’s dark corners in this summer transfer window is speculation over whether Chelsea overpaid or overpaid for the Bayer Leverkusen winger, whether Schürrle will end up another Marko Marin or a regular in Chelsea’s now-famed three-pronged attack in midfield under Jose Mourinho.

Luckily, the International Centre for Sports Studies has released one of those newfangled list of players ranked according to an as-yet unknown set of metrics. Before we get into that, a short preamble.

Yesterday I got in a spot of hot water for expressing indifference to a similar list from Bloomberg (I may have used the expression “cocktease”) because it was based on a means of evaluation we were not privy to beyond a standard non-specific explanation of methodology:

Now I completely understand the notion of proprietary walls. Without them, the entire financial edifice of sports research would slide off into an impoverished sea. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s very difficult to judge a result without a specific idea of the process.

Consider this my caveat with regard to the CIES’ list of players ranked according to their “true” transfer value based on a host of factors (see section 4 of the linked extract). They mean business with this list, claiming it could be used by “club officials, agents, journalists, bankers, investors, courts etc.”

It’s from this list that we learn that André Schürrle’s “true value” on the transfer market is 27.8 to 32.3 million EUR. Now personally I’m a free market fanatic, which means I believe “true” market value is essentially whatever anyone decides to pay. “Bubbles” form when there is a lag between extraneous factors that should lower market price and the actual lowering part, but the bubbles themselves aren’t “wrong,” just late. Conflating “use value” with price brings us dangerously close to subversive Marxist economic theory, he wrote entirely facetiously.

Still, it’s a novel approach. One I’ll hopefully be able to read a little more about in the coming weeks.

Links

The CSA reasserts is suspension of the Quebec Soccer Federation after the latter upholds turban ban [CSN].

Michael Laudrup insists he will stay at Swansea in light of PSG rumours [the Guardian].

Head Coach Martin Samuel says England will win if they put as much effort in football as they do in their tattoos? I think that’s the gist of this anyway [Daily Mail].

Grantland’s take on the death of the Dribbling Man [Grantland].

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The Story So Far – June 12th Quebec Soccer Federation to take 10 days to make decision on turbans

Posted by Richard Whittall under Canada, The Story So Far on Jun 12, 2013

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The Lead

Ten days to say yes or no to turbans on the soccer fields of Quebec? Is there some sort of middle ground they’re trying to discover here? Is the QSF drawing up blueprints on acceptable dimensions for turbans? Furiously working behind the scenes on any possible legal angles to take against the CSA?

Or maybe this is just a last gasp at retaining dignity in the face of defeat. Kind of like how Canada waited a week to declare war after Great Britain in World War II in order to express its independence.

The story has gone international. The NY Times opened its story on the ban with this rather provocative sentence: “The newest intersection of soccer and cultural controversy has an unusual address — Canada.” Cultural controversy! Sovereignty! Pauline Marois wading into soccer governance rules she knows absolutely nothing about! Awooga! Defcon 5!

Let’s put aside the political hay-making for a moment (the less said on Joey Saputo’s pathetic excuse for a statement on the matter, the better) and look at the particulars. The Montreal Gazette has some interesting background on how we came to this point:

A member of the Quebec Soccer Federation suggested Tuesday that the decision taken almost two weeks ago to ban turbans from the game was rushed.

“I think it was poorly evaluated, and the way it was presented, and the speed with which it was presented — it was, I think, the last point on the agenda of the meeting of the board of directors — there are things in the way it was handled … that must be looked at again,” said Richard Gravel, director-general of the Association régionale de soccer de l’Outaouais.

The turban file was presented to the board of directors of the QFS by a member of the executive committee on the weekend of June 1-2. According to the QFS’s bylaws, the member of the executive committee did not have the right to make a recommendation — pro or con — about the turban ban. She was only allowed to present the file in a neutral manner, Gravel said.

So, in other words, a stupid bureaucratic quirk may have prevented the QSF board from weighing through all the possible consequences of the turban ban. They may have voted on it without being aware of FIFA’s specific stance on the issue. They may have voted on it without even being specifically aware of the CSA’s mandate on turbans, or that the CSA’s recent governance reforms required compliance from the provinces on the CSA’s national directives.

I’m willing to give the QSF board the benefit of the doubt here, even with Gravel’s admission that the vote carried “political and social aspects” specifically related to the notion of cultural integration (incredibly odd, since banning people from playing the global game simply based on their province of residence and their religious faith doesn’t seem to achieve that aim very well).

It might be best if we put the political overtones aside for the time being, until the QSF puts aside the “safety” excuse and comes clean on the vote. Otherwise the same politicians that haven’t done anything meaningful for the advance of soccer in this country will use our game as a means to divide us.
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The Story So Far – June 11th Canadian Soccer Association suspends the Quebec Soccer Federation over turban ban

Posted by Richard Whittall under The Story So Far on Jun 11, 2013

An Indian sadhu (Hindu holy man) poses w

The Lead

Friends of Soccer has the update:

On Monday afternoon, the Canadian Soccer Association suspended the Quebec Soccer Federation for failing to comply with its rules approving the the use of turbans, patkas and keski for soccer players. This is one of the most severe sanctions that can be levied by a FIFA national association.

This suspension affects every amateur team, player, referee, coach and administrator in Quebec. They cannot play teams from outside their province. QSF Referees are not able to officiate matches involving CSA or FIFA teams. CSA Referees may not officiate within Quebec. The amateur matches played within Quebec are no longer recognized by the CSA and FIFA.

The CSA underlined that this will not affect the Montreal Impact as they receive sanction from the CSA. Steve Sandor has more details on what the suspension will mean for Quebec teams if it is not resolved.

The QSF’s ban on turbans doesn’t match best practices in other national associations, and is in direct violation of the national association directive.

All that’s left is a strong, unequivocal public statement from FIFA upholding the CSA’s interpretation of FIFA’s Law 4, one that implores the QSF to comply with their national association. Without recourse to the ‘safety’ argument, the QSF will have nowhere to left to hide. There will be no justification for the ban left, except for the QSF’s use of Sikh footballers as a pawn for their stance on religious rights.

This needs to be dealt with sooner than later, for the ugly political ramifications alone. It’s also a strong reminder of why the provincial associations should not hold political sway over the national association any longer. The QSF playing politics with football is a nauseating reminder of the squabbling that has long characterized Canadian soccer governance. Enough. Canadian players deserve better.
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The Story So Far — June 10th Here comes the Happy One

Posted by Richard Whittall under Chelsea, Jose Mourinho, The Story So Far on Jun 10, 2013

Michael Ballack - Farewell Match

I’ve written all I can on Jose Mourinho’s record at Real Madrid, but it’s already been a bit of a challenge not to use epithets like “slobbering idiots” as I read unchecked comments on the Guardian live blog of his first official Chelsea presser like this one: “He was a complete failure in Madrid and treated everyone inside and outside the dressing room like dirt. Going back to Chelsea is cowardly. On paper he is the most successful manager probably in the last 10 years and yet the biggest institution in world football said no. That says it all.”

Mou treated “everyone like dirt”? Who? A few journalists he took issue with? A few players that were content to make their grievances known to the Spanish tabloids? The Real Madrid fans he took to the precipice of the CL final, and a league title to boot, in the same era as Pep’s Barcelona? Unfortunately, aided perhaps by a few journalists who had been personally burned by the Portuguese manager during his time there, the idea that Mourinho’s ‘failure’ at Real Madrid lingers on.

Jose Mourinho achieved a win percentage at Chelsea of 67% over 185 games. There is no one at the club who managed a similar achievement in so many matches. Ranieri’s over 200 games was 54%. Many managers with far fewer games played couldn’t come near to that achievement.

But the media (and many club presidents) measure their success in whether a manager behaves the way they like, or how many trophies they manage to win over a set number of seasons as a function of how much money they were paid. If you don’t believe me, read the pseudo-psychology passed off as commentary among those watching today’s show and tell. Mourinho seems bored, contrite, humble, his behaviour doesn’t reflect his words.

Is he an insufferable jerk whose words once hounded a referee out of a career? Absolutely. Does this make him a poor manager? Perhaps if your idea of what makes a manager good transcends the actual winning part. Maybe it does. If that’s the case, I’ve got a hundred inspiring, pitch-perfect opening press conferences for you to watch from a hundred actual failures.

The press conference means nothing. Nothing matters until the season is well underway.

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