Funny game

After the recent fiasco at Manchester City, the chief executive of the Premier League, Richard Scudamore, came up with some answers.

Football, we are often informed, is a funny game. To which one might add the old question, funny ha-ha or funny peculiar? It can be both as evidenced by the present travails of Manchester City. You can find them peculiar which they unquestionably are, or you can succumb to the temptation to laugh at them. When the alarming Thaksin Shinawatra, ex-Prime Minister of Thailand, took over Manchester City, I was very much among those who deplored the move. There was simply too mu ch sinister baggage that came with him.

In the first instance, the military coup which had displaced him were bringing charges of massive corruption. In the second, Amnesty International had levelled fearful charges of the abuse of human rights. These varied from the alleged slaughter of thousands of minor drug dealers to the systematic torture and even murder of political opponents, not to mention the persecution of a Muslim minority. By what possible stretch of the imagination could he be called, in the terminology of what I early on christened The Greed is Good League, alias the Premier League, “a fit and proper person”?

Well, after the recent fiasco at City, we have had some kind of an answer from the chief executive of that League, the ineffable Richard Scudamore, who tells us that “Our rules are clear.” Some might say clear as mud. “Somebody has to be convicted of some thing before they fall under the remit of the fit and proper person act. Until such a time as he is convicted, he falls within the rules. But we have always said that the test is meaningful and has to be applied.” Eh?

Scudamore proceeded: “We need to make sure that if he is guilty of anything, we will deal with it.” Questions begged while you wait, you might well say. But the recent developments in the Shinawatra case have been such as to make him anything but a fit and proper person even in financial terms to control a major English club. For when the Thai government put his wife on trial on corruption charges, she was found guilty and sentenced to over three years in prison. Thus well and truly put the wind up her husband who, with cries of conspiracy, decamped from Beijing where he had been attending the Olympics, for England, where he has taken refuge, insisting that he would not get a fair trial in Bangkok.

Doing this has meant that he leaves behind the bagatelle of £800 million which he cannot now touch. And it even emerges that he has, of late, borrowed £2 million at least from the decent and long suffering former top-man at City, John Wardle, who this summer, having retained a seat on the City board, resigned in what looked like desperation and despair.

All of which has left the manager, Mark Hughes, in a most unenviable position though he insists against all logic — for where is the money to come from? — that he himself is in charge of all transfer dealings: as evidence of which he refused to allow the team’s Croatian international right-back, Vedran Corluka, to move to Spurs for a huge £7.5 million fee, money which, you would have thought, the club will now desperately need. £19 million had already been paid, or at least promised, for the Brazilian striker Jo, who arriving from Moscow, was promptly whisked away to play for his country in the Beijing Olympics. Meanwhile Hughes was making offers for the Paraguayan striker, the prolific Roque Santa Cruz, of Blackburn Rovers, the club he had so hazardously left for City in the close season. It amazes me that Hughes could not see the warning signs, but instead appears to have been lured by a much improved salary and what might have seemed, without closer examination, the prospects of a much wealthier club. As it is, and I speak as one who greatly admired Hughes as a fine centre-forward for Wales, Manchester United and Chelsea, he reminds one of Freud’s devastating image of the clown who pretends to be running the circus, when everyone sees it’s a game. Meanwhile, City are still asserting that there is plenty of money to be spent. But where, given the frozen fortune in Thailand, is it coming from?

To make matters still worse, City made a horrific failure in their UEFA Cup second round home tie against obscure Danish opposition, in the shape of Midtjylland. Who, scoring after 15 minutes against a City team admittedly lacking several strikers, held that lead till the embarrassing end. Scudamore now tells us that, “We have to establish the status of his (Shinawatra’s) return to England and where that leaves him as regards to the legal process in Thailand.” One supposes that the Thai government could well seek to extradite the man to face trial; though till that happened, and he was actually convicted, he would presumably, under the dotty rules of the Greed Is Good League, still be, in their eyes a fit and proper person! The mind boggles.

But to be fair, no easy task in this instance, you have to ask why City’s previous regime sold the club to Shinawatra in the first place. True, the word is that they were financially desperate, but is that a sufficient excuse?

And then, there is the curious case of Queens Park Rangers. Hardly analogous, since QPR, the West London club, have been taken over by three very rich men indeed. Among them Lakshmi Mittal, who is one of the richest men in the world. The other two being the millionaire Bernie Ecclestone and the Italian Flavio Briatore, both of them connected with Formula One motor racing. But what, in this new season of the so-called Championship, which not so long ago was known as the Second Division, have they done so far? In the first place, the appointment of the likeable Iain Dowie as new manager in place of the competent Italian, Luigi Di Canio, seemed unadventurous. Last season, Dowie left South East London’s Crystal Palace, saying that his wife wanted to go back north: only to sign for nearby Charlton Athletic. To the fury of the bellicose Palace Chairman, Simon Jordan, who took him to court and won £1 million. But Charlton eventually sacked Dowie, who was then appointed and sacked by Coventry City. What now? By the time you read this, he may not even be at QPR, since he has already fallen out with the combative Briatore.

And while QPR, who missed the real Championship title by a last ditch goalkeeping error and a single point in 1996, can hardly hope to discover the equivalent of those glorious maverick attackers, Rodney Marsh and Stan Bowles, when is the real spending going to start? Dowie pays tribute to Briatore for helping him to find excellent young players on loan such as right-winger Emmanuel Ledesma, an Argentine from Genoa, and Real Madrid’s striker, Daniel Parejo. But actual firm transfers have been of modestly accomplished players.