Friday, June 10th, 2011 « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade

By Tony Attwood

For a while it looked like Man IOU and Liverpool (previously known as the Insolvents) were going to come a cropper over the Uefa financial rules which aimed originally to make clubs playing in European championships be financially solvent.  But with those two, and Chelsea and Man City spending like they had money to burn (which is the case with the latter two, but not necessarily the former) I begin to wonder what is going on.

Because Man U and Liverpool are not just spending – they are spending on English players.

Now part of that could be because they are worried about the English 25 rule, through which only 25 over 21 year olds can be registered to play with the club, and with 7 of those having to be home grown.

This rule came in, as I understand it, because it doesn’t break the EU employment regulations, in that “home grown” simply means trained and nurtured by an English or Welsh club over a three year period.

Phil Jones is 19 and Jordan Henderson is 20.  Between them they cost £36m.  OK they won’t affect the 25s this season – so the clubs can continue to load up their list of players with older folk.  But as these two grow up a bit they can fit in as home grown players.

OK so far, but still it seems a rather heavy price rise, especially among clubs that don’t really have the money.

So here’s one possible reason.  Fifa – that most corrupt of organisations – is about to introduce a system in which squads are reduced to 18 and half the  squad must be “homegrown”.

Fifa and their chums in Uefa have long been annoyed with the way bigger clubs get bigger and bigger squads, keeping (as they see it) talented young players sitting around not getting games.  Indeed I had a Uefa official tell me that Arsenal were prime examples of this bad behaviour.  “Just look at their goal keeper situation.  Four highly talented keepers.  One plays, one is on the bench, and two never get a game apart from for their country.”    (Whether Uefa recognise what happened to us with keepers this year is unlikely – they probably didn’t even know we signed a German).

The new rule would be in keeping with the new Fifa youth development programme that was voted through recently.  It didn’t actually get covered in the UK press, but they are still arguing about who should have got the world cup.

There is however a thing called the Player Status Committee which has ex-Football Association toady, Geoff Thompson as its top dog, and they are supposedly talking to the European Clubs Association about the new rule.  This new approach is a variation on the doomed 6+5 rule which said that six out of the starting 11 in any team would be homegrown – although the definition of that word is not quite set in stone.  As we have seen with the 25 rule, people like Clichy, Fabregas and the like can be homegrown if you sign them early enough.

The old 6+5 idea was clearly against EU employment law (although that didn’t stop Fifa pushing it through on the grounds that no government can interfere with football matters.  The EU thought otherwise, and the rule went).  The 25 rule that we now have came out of that failure, and there is a general consensus that it’s impact has been minimal.

So Fifa wants to go further, and if Fifa really can do a deal with the EU to bring in an 18 rule in which nine players have to be “home grown” the cost of English players will rise because most top teams in England don’t have nine “home grown” players.

But (and this is the twist in reality) I don’t think that Fifa is considering England.  After all Fifa hate England.  No, they are trying very hard to help out their old pals, Barcelona.

Last summer Barca went bust, and was unable to pay its players.  The story didn’t get huge coverage because it was so out of keeping with the official line in Uefa, and indeed in much of the UK media, that Barca is a god-like system and can do nothing wrong.

But as we kept on saying on this site, when you can’t pay your staff, you are only one step from the grave – and Barca were in that position.  Not even the nationalist Catalan banks would help for a while.

So those of us interested in such things have been waiting for a while to see what happens this year, and almost a year to the day after Barca hit the buffers they have come out with a deflecting statement, saying that they are going to reduce the club’s debt.

Javier Faus, the vice-president (finance) said that Guardiola would have “€45m for new signings, plus money that may be obtained from sales”.

That might not sound like a money saving scheme – but in Barca’s bizarre terms of reality it is.  (It also incidentally suggests that unless some of the sales are big names Barca could not possibly afford Fábregas – which really ought to be Arsenal’s reply to their annual rubbish.  “You might want Cesc but you are quite unable to afford him”).

The admissions from Faus are extraordinary from a club that has treated money in the same imperious fashion as it treats everything and everyone else.  He went on to say, “The gross debt has been reduced from €532m to €483m, and the net debt from €431m to €364m. We want to decide our future and to do so we must reduce the debt to acceptable levels.

“There has been a great effort, which will continue over the next two years, to reduce this debt … a millstone that is essential and indispensable. This will make Barcelona the most financially solvent club in the world in two or three years.”

This is of course tripe – and when your financial director says that with tiny reductions in a debt of €431m the club can become “the most financially solvent club in the world in two or three years” you know he has gone to another planet and there is no hope for the club.  It is, in short,  just plain gibberish.

Barca’s problem is that it has sold everything it can sell.  It can’t fill its ground, except for very big games, it can’t readily put up prices any further, it has sold the sacred front of the shirt, and its membership department and marketing team is work at full stretch.  It is as big as it can get (unlike for example Arsenal, who, as we saw the other day, has hardly started on the marketing road).  For Barca the knowledge is clear: if it can’t make money now, it will never make money.

But Barca could be helped enormously by the 9+9 rule because of their tendency to go for young players and bring them up through their academy, while other clubs have brought in players from overseas at a later stage in their career.

Barca would not be hindered by the 9+9 rule at all, but many English clubs would – and that’s why it is coming along.  The 9+9 won’t help Barca’s insane finances but it won’t hurt their academy.  On the other hand it will hurt the finances of some English clubs – and I think that is not a coincidence.  If Fifa really has got its thinking hat on, it might well have set up a plan that will boost Barca while reducing the power of some English clubs.   To survive the 9+9 rule the clubs have to have more English players.  But the price goes up, so they fail the Uefa financial tests.  A rather clever ploy.

So, maybe, just maybe, 9+9 here we come, and expect the price of young English and Welsh players to rocket.

I am now going away for a little while – Walter will be editing the site ably backed up by Dogface.  I won’t be answering any emails or even seeing the site since where I am going is so remote they don’t even have broadband!  But I hope to rejoin the fray in around 10 days time.  Tony.

A call to arms; let us sort out this refereeing issue once and for all

On the history site…

How every book and article gets the name of Arsenal’s second manager wrong.