Thanks London :D
Rob Hughes/New York Times
In Premier League, Widening Gap Between Rich and Poor www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/sports/soccer/16iht-SOCCER.html?_r=1&ref=sportsThe English Premier League is back in business, and so England’s failure at the World Cup has become a rapidly fading memory.
But sometimes the word English is a misnomer. Manchester City, owned by the ruling family of Abu Dhabi, paid Inter Milan about $35 million for Mario Balotelli last Friday. Balotelli, a gifted but temperamental 20-year-old Ghanaian-Italian, watched as City opened its season with a 0-0 tie at Tottenham on Saturday.
Later Saturday, Chelsea, the defending champion owned by the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, barely touched top gear in trouncing West Bromwich Albion, 6-0. Chelsea also had a newly acquired player in the stands. Ramires, Brazil’s energetic midfielder, was signed from the Portuguese club Benfica on Friday for $26 million to $30 million.
He is a quality player and should adapt to the high intensity of the Premier League. Back in Brazil, Ramires was known as the Queniano Azul, or Blue Kenyan, a nickname earned because of his prodigious stamina in the blue jersey of Cruzeiro.
Yet Ramires belonged to Cruzeiro for barely two seasons before he went to Benfica, and a percentage of his rights fee still rested with his original Brazilian club, Joinville.
Settling that, and gaining a work permit for him to play in England, was a lesson in how complicated player transfers to the Premier League, the world’s richest league, have become. “Any player in the world would want to play for Chelsea,” Ramires said on his arrival.
He repeated the mantra that the Premier League was the best and the most competitive on earth. Spain, with the style and power of Barcelona and Real Madrid, may have something to say about that.
But the premise that England’s is truly a competitive league is being shot to pieces by Chelsea. Its six-goal trouncing of newly promoted West Bromwich followed a 7-0 beating of Stoke City and an 8-0 obliteration of Wigan Athletic in Chelsea’s final two home games last season.
The gap between the wealthy clubs — and the playing strength their riches can buy — and the rest of the league is widening. There are new rules this season designed to try to protect English players from being crowded out of their own league. When those rules take effect Sept. 1, clubs like Manchester City will have to trim back from rosters of 40 or more to a maximum of 25, at least eight of whom must be “home produced.” The pain and the ruthlessness of that process is about to dawn on players who blindly signed up with England’s most acquisitive clubs.
Meanwhile, though, there is a touch of real romance to the English season. It happened a few years ago when Wigan rose from the lowest professional echelon to the Premier League. Hull City and Burnley soon followed. Small clubs, operating on minuscule budgets but high-powered team spirit, made it to the promised land.
Wigan, alone among those three, is still up with the big boys. But it was Wigan that was humbled Saturday by the latest newcomer to crash the elite. Forget Chelsea’s routine hammering of a team not in its league; the 4-0 win by Blackpool at Wigan was the story of the day.
Blackpool was once the team of the England national team players Stanley Matthews, Jimmy Armfield and Alan Ball. But its famed tangerine colors last appeared in England’s top soccer division 39 years ago. And its sudden rise this summer was so unexpected that its tiny 99-year-old stadium, Bloomfield Road, was unfit for play. While the builders worked around the clock on renovations, 4,200 fans traveled to Wigan for Saturday’s league opener.
Blackpool’s team has been rebuilt, too. Its promotion last season was achieved with players borrowed from other clubs, and when they were recalled, the team’s manager, Ian Holloway, had to hastily find new ones.
Last Wednesday, he signed five players in one day. Three of them went straight into the first team, and one of them, Marlon Harewood, set up the first goal and scored two others Saturday.
“The summer has been hideous,” Holloway said. “I’m shocked at the salaries everybody in this league is paying. We are completely out of our depth.”
A joker with a seriously competitive inner streak, Holloway said before kickoff Saturday that he was having to fight his own club chairman, Karl Oyston. “I have total optimism; my chairman has total pessimism,” he said.
“The chairman’s grip on the money is more impressive than a top gymnast doing a high-bar routine,” he said, “and I’m trying to pry those fingers open to deals he’s probably not comfortable with.”
The manager and the town are a match for each other. Both are in the business of putting on a front that disguises the business of surviving.
One British newspaper on Sunday published a list from top to bottom of the value of the 11 players each team started as the new season kicked off.
Manchester City and Chelsea, each with teams that cost more than $235 million in transfer fees, were at the top of the list. West Bromwich, which spent $21 million, was second to last. Blackpool was rock bottom.
And when Holloway was asked whether he dared to dream of a four-game winning streak to start the season, he replied: “I had quite the opposite dream. In fact, I still have it — we have to go to Arsenal next week.”
