Source: Daily_Mail
Still no Spanish inquisition then, Mr President?
Manchester City[LNB]may well buy David Villa in the summer, but do not worry. There are still at least three months of the season left during which you could, too.[LNB]Villa, like the rest of the squad at Valencia, is soon to be available for weddings, christenings and, for all we know, bar mitzvahs, according to reports in Spain.[LNB] [LNB]Skewed vision: UEFA presidentMichel Platini is ignoring thefinancial problems in Spainyet continues to criticise thePremier League[LNB]The financial plight of his club is such that it has recently been proposed that, from the end of this season, the pitch at the mighty Mestalla stadium will be up for rent. Betrothals, baptisms, first communions and business meetings will be entertained and the really big spenders might get the players thrown in. And yet, no word from UEFA president Michel Platini.[LNB] More from Martin Samuel... MARTIN SAMUEL: What about a Comic Relief for the Olympics?[LNB]12/03/09 MARTIN SAMUEL: We could do with another dose of Jose[LNB]10/03/09 Martin Samuel: Conspiracies and denial, protect us from Pakistan[LNB]09/03/09 MARTIN SAMUEL: Dying does not make you a saint. But living can...[LNB]05/03/09 Butt out Blatter - our recipe has best ingredients[LNB]03/03/09 MARTIN SAMUEL: Chambers may be a cheat but he does expose the hypocrisy[LNB]02/03/09 MARTIN SAMUEL: UEFA President Platini highlights the danger of showing your true colours[LNB]24/02/09 MARTIN SAMUEL: Lampard scrubbed up nicely for Chelsea after Jose showered him with praise[LNB]22/02/09 VIEW FULL ARCHIVE[LNB] Last November, it was revealed that Valencia's debt stood at £462million, including £222m owed to local bank, Bancaja. At one stage the players were also owed £13m, which could explain Valencia's plummet to mid-table from second position. At the end of last month, work was halted on the new 75,000-seat stadium at Paterna because the money simply ran out.[LNB]The project was about to enter a costly stage using metal materials and, with the builders light by £21m, workers downed tools.[LNB]And yet, absolutely no mention of this from Platini. At the risk of being one of those types his cheerleaders have labelled paranoid, don't you think there is ever so slightly a chance that if Valencia had been a Premier League club Platini would have found a way of working their circumstances into one of his high-minded pronouncements on the state of the game?[LNB]Maybe Sepp Blatter, president of FIFA, would have referenced them in passing, too Indeed, don't you think that if it had been an English club which, in the space of five years, had more than trebled its debt while employing five presidents, five sporting directors, three director generals and three chief medical officers, there would have been just a hint of condemnation from the men who campaign so vigorously for corporate responsibility in the game?[LNB]And yet, not a dicky-bird from either of them.[LNB]Not a mention of the £556m Spanish clubs are said to owe in tax or of the study carried out by Universitat de Barcelona that conservatively estimated the accumulated debt of clubs in La Liga at £2.5billion, equivalent to 92 per cent of their assets.[LNB]Throughout Spain, there are six clubs, including the recently relegated trio of Real Sociedad, Celta Vigo and Levante, in bankruptcy protection.[LNB]The Universitat report used the most recent figures available, from the 2006-07 season, so these were happier times for Valencia and their debt was estimated as only £265m, which did not even win them a place in Spain's top three. Real Madrid were top with £488m, then Atletico Madrid with £399m and, in third place, Barcelona with £360m.[LNB]And yet, if you remember, Platini had absolutely no problem with Real Madrid's attempt to seize Cristiano Ronaldo from Manchester United for a small fortune last summer, despite his love of the level financial playing field.[LNB]It must only be the indebted English clubs that are destroying fair competition in the transfer market.[LNB] Villa for sale: City's first inquiry was met with a demand for £90million[LNB]The revelation that in 2006-07, La Liga clubs earned £1.18bn and spent £1.28bn is another one of those little details that seems to fly from his memory under the pressure of public speaking.[LNB]So how did Valencia get in this much trouble? Well, it turns out that just because your owner is Spanish it does not mean he is any better for your club than these Arabs and Americans who Platini wishes would just go back to their own country and stop taking jobs from hard-working English billionaires.[LNB]In Valencia's case, a property developer called Juan Bautista Soler took a successful, functioning club and turned it into a freewheeling catastrophe.[LNB]Long story short, his major mistake was attempting to finance the building of the new stadium through continued success in the Champions League, a concept he may have borrowed from Peter Ridsdale's Big Book of Football Economics (also known as Whoosh! There Goes Another Ten Million or Why Not Set Fire To it?).[LNB]By the time Soler's football policies had blown any chance of Valencia's continuance as a force, the Spanish property market had collapsed and it was too late to be saved by his alternate strategy, selling the Mestalla.[LNB]Soler resigned and there followed a succession of inadequate figureheads, including Juan Villalonga, who lasted two weeks and somehow picked up £9.2m for it, until the major creditors, Bancaja, lost patience and installed Javier Gomez as executive director.[LNB]It is Gomez who is talking about selling Villa and David Silva for top money, even though it will no longer make a dent in Valencia's debt.[LNB]This could explain why City's first inquiry about Villa was met with a desperate demand for £90m. And yet, still no comment from Blatter or Platini. As wedding bells fade to a funeral march at the Mestalla, a cynic might even suspect these gentlemen had another agenda.[LNB] Magnificent: Liverpool's Fernando Torres[LNB]Just focus on Europe, LiverpoolWhat a magnificent performance by Liverpool at Old Trafford on Saturday. The League is wide open now. The Champions League, that is. The Premier League, forget. To claw it back now, four points, one game and five goals behind, Liverpool would have to win every game and Manchester United lose three between now and the end of the season. [LNB]That is not going to happen. Liverpool may have hit scintillating form, but where are United's trio of defeats to come from in a fixture list comprising Aston Villa, Portsmouth, Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester City and Arsenal at home and Fulham, Sunderland, Middlesbrough, Hull City and Wigan Athletic away? Liverpool's problem is that it took a team operating at the peak of its powers to topple United and there is simply no equivalent out there. [LNB]Aston Villa, Manchester City and Arsenal have the potential, but all three will not win at Old Trafford. And this still assumes that an infuriatingly inconsistent Liverpool side do not slip up between now and May 24. [LNB]No, the arena in which Saturday's result could have greatest effect is Europe, because that is where Liverpool and Manchester United may go head to head again, at which point Liverpool would have a significant psychological advantage. Friday's UEFA draw should be interesting. No prizes for guessing which team Manchester United will be looking to avoid, although that could be said for the rest of the clubs in the hat, too. [LNB] In Di-nialRoberto Di Matteo (pictured right) and Eddie Newton, the managerial team at MK Dons, are livid after being notified that they have failed their UEFA A licence coaching badges. Never mind, they could always follow the example of their employers and nick somebody else's qualification instead.[LNB]Alan Wiley, the referee, got every major decision right at Old Trafford on Saturday, including a penalty and a red card against Manchester United. Tough calls, made without drama. Well done, that man.[LNB]Arsene Wenger, the Arsenal manager, says he does not care if his central defenders William Gallas and Kolo Toure get on with each other socially, as long as they have a professional relationship. Even so, the word is they will not be together as Arsenal players next season and it will be Toure, not the outspoken Gallas, who makes way.[LNB]And while we're at it ...Despite the close finish to the Test series with West Indies, there is something very odd in the swing towards giving England's vacant team director role to Andy Flower (below), the current acting head coach. This was, after all, a tour in which every expert tipped England to win that, instead, turned into a succession of missed opportunities against ordinary opponents. [LNB]Always chasing the series after a humiliating second-innings collapse in Jamaica, England came within a whisker of winning the Tests in Antigua and Trinidad but on both occasions were undone by caution. The insertion of a nightwatchman at a crucial stage in Antigua proved costly, as did a late declaration in Trinidad; both were decisions on which a team director should have a say. [LNB]Somehow, regardless of this, Flower's stock has risen because he has developed a good relationship with the players, in particular the captain, Andrew Strauss. Such things are important, but if the West Indies tour was an audition, it was far from a convincing one.[LNB]Provoked: Jose Mourinho[LNB] I'd understand if Jose hit outAccording to eye- witnesses, the song that provoked Jose Mourinho, the Inter Milan manager, allegedly to strike a fan after Wednesday's defeat at Manchester United was: 'Go home, Mourinho.' [LNB]It was chanted repeatedly by a large group while he was trying to conduct a television interview. (The fan was from Cambridge, so no Mancunians were hurt in the making of this story.) Isn't that wonderful, though? 'Go home, Mourinho.' [LNB]A good job these cherubs were not employing a phrase that is a little, shall we say, stronger. A compound verb beginning with the letter F, perhaps. No, perish the thought. Fans never sing songs like that. They always tell unpopular personalities simply to go home. [LNB]Like that other song they sing: 'The referee's a rascal.' 'We thought he was going to sign autographs,' said witness Steven Mace, unemployed, from Doncaster, when Mourinho marched over to the crowd with a face like thunder. What an astute observer of human behaviour. After all, who wouldn't be filled with love for his fellow man at that moment? [LNB]You're the manager of Inter Milan, your team has just been knocked out of the tournament you were employed to win, you have done 15 rounds with the Italian press who all want you sacked and then you have conducted a live television interview with a mob in the background telling you to f*** off (sorry, to go home). [LNB]Who wouldn't then be bounding over with a cry of: 'Good evening to you all gentlemen, now form an orderly line, who should I make the first one out to?' And I abhor violence, too. So I am not saying that, whatever the circumstances, Mourinho should have slapped anybody. I'm just saying I'd understand if he has.[LNB]IT DOES not matter whether the final settlement is £10million or £25m, at the moment the emphasis in the Carlos Tevez dispute shifted beyond the reinstatement of Sheffield United to the Premier League, it became a row over money between two groups of very rich men and since then the ethical issues have been increasingly lost. The lasting significance is in the precedents that have been set by misguided arbiters such as Lord Griffiths who, in finding against West Ham United in a compensation case, established that a game can be played hypothetically, individual contributions surmised and presented as fact and also that a club is not responsible for its league position. Many will feel justice has been done over Tevez but Sheffield United's victory may prove hollow if the rumours circulating about the direction the Iain Hume case is about to take are correct. Hume is the Barnsley striker and record signing left fighting for his life after a challenge by Chris Morgan, the Sheffield United defender. Barnsley were 17th when Hume got injured but this weekend fell into the bottom three. It might be advisable not to spend all of that compensation money at once. [LNB] [LNB] [LNB] [LNB]
