Blatter trouble

Sepp Blatter’s recent outburst on the Cristiano Ronaldo incident has brought furious obloquy on his head, not least, as one might have expected, from the Manchester United manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, writes Brian Glanville.

There’s an old apocryphal joke which had President Dwight D. Eisenhower of the USA addressing his abrasive Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, and telling him, “Don’t just say something: stand there!” Which might be useful and pertinent instructions to Sepp (51 bad new ideas a day) Blatter, who seems just now to be following one weird outburst with another. He recently incited Cristiano Ronaldo, the dazzling Portuguese attacker who, unhappy with his £120,000 a week contract and yearning to join Real Madrid, to persist in his noisy quest to leave United for Spain, even though his highly lucrative contract has still more than four years to run. And in the process, Blatter has inexplicably and contentiously used the word “slavery”. Not realising, apart from the offence it has given to a number of black English players, such as the former international Paul Parker, how bizarrely old fashioned this is.

For you have to go way, way back to the immediate post-War years in English soccer to find that term being bandied about; at a time, admittedly when there were few black players but the excellent Jamaican Lindy Delapenha, of Portsmouth and Middlesbrough, in view. It was the time when English footballers were indeed bound hand and foot to their clubs, in restrictive perpetuity and when a minuscule maximum wage prevented even the most famous of them from earning more than an average player.

The days when Jimmy Guthrie, right-half and skipper of the Portsmouth team which had so surprisingly thrashed the favourites, Wolves, in the 1939 FA Cup Final, was the combative Chairman of what was then known as the Players’ Union. And who so nearly but alas not quite, brought his players out on strike in late 1946. “Soccer slavery” was the current catchword, and when, in 1960, I became the first ever sports columnist of the Sunday Times, the maximum wage then all of £20, was still very much in vogue. And being fiercely combated by Jimmy Guthrie’s smoother successor as Union Chairman — only now it was named The Professional Footballers’ Association — the former Brentford and Fulham player, Jimmy Hill. Behind whom, to the limited best of my ability, I managed to line up the Sunday Times. Which even, to my delight, in a leader column, exhorted the players to strike.

After bitter battles, Jimmy and the PFA got their way. In 1961 the maximum wage was abolished, but only with compromises over contracts which virtually allowed the clubs to re-establish them for a second period, when they ended. It wouldn’t be till 1996 that the famous Bosman decision, in the European court, boldly and bravely obtained by an obscure Belgian footballer, at long last established true freedom of contract for European players. Now, finally, they were free to move, without transfer fees paid, as soon as their contracts ended. The inevitable result was that after generations of dominance by the clubs, the balance at last tipped sharply to the players. This, and the money pouring in from satellite television, has made millionaires in sterling out of even the mediocre foot soldiers of the English Premier League.

Moreover, it is all too plain that if and when a player, however well paid and however long his contract has to run, insists on leaving his club, he almost always, in the end, gets his own way.

Now here, in all his seeming irrelevance, irrationality and even perversity, comes Blatter. Let us look at what he says, and also try to give him some kind of rationale for the apparent irrationality. One English sports columnist having suggested that his hidden agenda is to undermine the increasingly powerful clubs by supporting and inciting their players. Clubs which were exacting increasingly costly concessions from FIFA and UEFA. Perhaps. If so, it was a peculiarly clumsy way of going about it, and brought furious obloquy on the head of Blatter, not least, as one might have expected, from the Manchester United manager, Sir Alex Ferguson.

So what did Blatter say? Broadly, in a somewhat abbreviated version, this: “If the player wants to play somewhere else, then a solution has to be found, because if he stays in a club where he does not feel comfortable to play then it’s not good for the player and for the club. I’m always in favour of protecting the player and if the player wants to leave, let him leave... I think in football there’s too much modern slavery in transferring players or buying players here and there and putting them somewhere. We are trying now to intervene in such cases. The reaction to the Bosman law is to make long lasting contracts in order to keep the players and then if he wants to leave there is only one solution, he has to pay his contract.”

Oh, no, he doesn’t unless that contract clearly stipulates the right; and the price. And perhaps it was unfortunate for Blatter that, at the very moment when he was making his strange pitch, Frank Lampard was bitterly at odds with Chelsea because they wouldn’t give him as long an extension of his current contract as he wanted.

Hardly had Blatter come out with such bizarre reflections than he was busily reiterating his demand that European clubs should be obliged to field five or six native born players. Here we have an excellent idea, but alas, typically of Blatter, it is one which, as he knows fully well, comes hard up against the laws of the European Community. In which any and every worker is allowed to work in any and every member country. Footballers, alas being designated in this respect as workers and therefore allowed no special privilege. That immensely shrewd diplomat and negotiator, the late Artemio Franchi, when President of UEFA, somehow kept the EU at bay rather like an unarmed man confronted by an armed burglar. But Franchi died and none of his successors could work such spells.

Before Teflon Blatter at FIFA — however controversially he got himself elected in 1998 there’s no getting rid of him now — there for 24 years was the ineffable Joao Havelange. Who, the other day, roused himself from what seem his senile slumbers to accuse English referees of preventing Brazil from winning the 1966 World Cup! No, Joao, I was there at Everton to see an absurdly geriatric Brazil thrashed in turn by Hungary and Portugal. Though I admit that England’s George McCabe was a wretched, inept referee of the Portugal game, when he allowed Joao Morais of Portugal to kick Pele out of the match without let or hindrance. Conspiracy theory at its most blatant, Joao.

One last thought. Could Blatter be falling apart? As recently as last February when it was known that a fine of £625,000 imposed on the Scottish international centre-back, Andy Webster, for walking out on Hearts to join Wigan, was reduced by the Court of Arbitration for Sport to £150,000, Blatter declared, “The decision which CAS took is very damaging for football and a pyrrhic victory for those players and their agents who toy with the idea of rescinding contracts before they have been fulfilled.”

Does his left hand know what his right hand is doing?