Transfer rights must not justify onfield wrongs
When Alan Sugar, giving evidence in his successful libel case against the Daily Mail, was asked in the high court whether the managers were to blame for Tottenham’s can you wash a canada goose jacket in the washer lack of success under his chairmanship, his reply encapsulated an attitude which has prevailed in the game for many years.
“I don’t kick the balls do I?” he said. “Who else’s fault is it?”
Since managers, unless they are buy canada goose jacket toronto player-managers, do not kick the balls either, the answer should be obvious. Yet even now football refuses to accept, or at least admit in public, that just as players are primarily responsible for a winning team then they must also be held accountable, in the main, for one that is losing.
When Argentina won the 1978 World Cup their manager, Cesar Luis Menotti, confessed that while a coach might be 60% responsible for what happens in training he had less than 10% to do with what happened in a match.
Menotti made good sense. Until the likes of Sheffield Wednesday realise that firing managers like popcorn will not improve results if a club and their team are fundamentally flawed, changing the boss’s name in the programme every so often will merely be a feeble gesture.
The strength of Charlton Athletic’s faith in Alan Curbishley’s ability quickly to restore Premiership football to the Valley, after one promotion had been swiftly followed by relegation, should be a template for others. Charlton did not change the manager, they changed the team where it needed to be changed and a successful season back in the Premiership is the result.
Nevertheless, Curbishley, in a recent interview, put Menotti’s sentiments into a modern context when he said that the role of the football manager was becoming devolved against a background of plcs, commercial departments, communications directors and so on. This is so different from a time when Bill Nicholson looked after practically everything at Tottenham from winning the Double to feeding the stadium cat.
Yet even now, in the eyes of directors and supporters, the devolvement of responsibility for a team’s performances remains much as it has always been. If anything players are less culpable for bad results than ever before.
No wonder that Arsene Wenger has threatened to walk out of club management if, as a result of the transfer system being scrapped to conform to European labour laws, footballers win the right to end their contracts at three months’ notice.
This is unlikely to happen and, while Premier League rules already allow players to break contracts with only six months’ warning, the majority of those in the lower divisions will be more concerned about retaining the relative security of employment, so long as they can command a transfer fee, than winning the right in principle, more or less, to play for whom they like when they like.
The old retain-and-transfer canada goose coat 1000 calorie diets system, which allowed clubs an unreasonable hold on footballers who wanted to play for somebody else, coined the phrase “soccer slavery”. Yet an equally iniquitous aspect of the practice was seen towards the end best canada goose jacket for women of each season when players anxiously awaited a club’s retained list to discover whether or not they would be out of a job come the summer.
Now the boot is in the process of being given a final fitting on the buy a canada goose jacket online other foot and it is difficult to criticise Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, and his colleagues at Fipro, the players’ international union, for wanting fully to exploit a situation created by the European best canada goose jacket review Commission’s insistence that football’s workforce cannot be exempted from European Union law.
Should Europe be transformed into a paradise for club-hopping footballers parka, however, the game would quickly become inviable. Since the players’ organisations realise this as much as Fifa, Uefa and, it is to be hoped, the EU, there is every chance of a compromise. But until one is reached the danger of self-defeating anarchy will be uncomfortably real.
What can never be accepted is that professional footballers, any more than pro golfers, boxers, cricketers, tennis players etc, are workers can you wash a canada goose coat in the general sense. From the moment the first young coal miner with talent in his feet emerged from a pit to be snapped up by Newcastle canada goose coat – hybridge lite United they were always men apart.
It is one thing to argue that players should have the rights of other workers. So they should, but in what industry is a factory hand mobbed, hugged and kissed when he has made an exceptionally good widget despite being hustled, tugged, kicked or elbowed in the process?
Footballers stopped being workers when clubs decided to pay average cost canada goose jacket them a wage so that instead of clocking on in pit or factory they could spend their time getting fit and practising their skills. In this all that has changed are the wages; pop star millions at the top, bus driver’s money at the bottom.
Without his talent David Beckham could now be selling football boots rather than endorsing them. What should concern everyone involved in the protracted wrangle over ending the transfer system is that the talent of future buying cheap canada goose outlet jacket online Beckhams might be overlooked in complications which are sure to ensue.
With increased player power has to go greater responsibility.
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