Post by Macmoish on Sept 12, 2010 23:38:02 GMT
Martin Samuels/Daily Mail on salary cap and other matters.
(I used to read him more before he moved to the Mail. He's worth reading) Re Salary cap, makes one think it would affect QPR spending if there was one
Martin Samuels/Daily Mail
MARTIN SAMUEL: No wonder Sunderland are so keen to pull up the ladder behind them
The wage bill at Sunderland is £44.1million. It represents 70 per cent of turnover of £64.5m, and rose by £12m from the previous year. Yet Sunderland is the Premier League club pushing hardest for a salary cap. Go figure, as the American owner Ellis Short might say.
Sunderland's plan may convey the air of good housekeeping and common sense in straitened times, but it is also a very handy means of self-preservation. Short, and his chairman Niall Quinn, have blown the kitty on Premier League survival already and now need a means of ensuring that no upstarts can follow their path.
Rich pickings: £13million man Asamoah Gyan scores on his debut for Sunderland
The latest arrival at Sunderland is Asamoah Gyan, the Ghanaian striker who scored on his debut at Wigan Athletic on Saturday. Gyan cost a club record £13m from Rennes in France and, one presumes, is to be paid accordingly. How inconvenient if next season a new arrival such as Queens Park Rangers or Cardiff City could buy and reward £13m players, too?
That is what Sunderland's new owners did on their return to the Premier League, after all. They threw money at the problem of keeping the club up and succeeded. This is, however, an expensive business. Investment is needed each year and salaries continue to spiral, particularly with the new 50 per cent tax band. It is no surprise that the idea of a salary cap is floated, or that a club like Sunderland should be in the vanguard.
Any salary cap would operate in relation to turnover and Sunderland's size compared to other clubs finishing regularly in the bottom half - Sunderland's last three league positions have been 13th, 16th and 15th - would make them the big fish in the small pool. It may leave them unable to compete with Manchester United or Arsenal, but would give them a significant advantage over Blackpool or Wigan Athletic. What at first appears a socially responsible exercise could be equally inspired by a mercenary survival instinct.
Every year, a chairman in fear for the future of his club will find a way of dressing up mere self-interest as vision or philanthropy. Not so long ago Phil Gartside of Bolton Wanderers wanted to open discussions on a second Premier League, without relegation, which would have conveniently served the dual purpose of safeguarding his club against collapse.
For much the same reason, in 2002, Paul Scally of Gillingham Town was incensed by a plan to split a £90m television windfall between the entire Football League, and proposed a breakaway of the second tier. The fact that Gillingham had spent just four of its 85 years at that level was an irony lost on him. It is unlikely he maintains this view now Gillingham have returned to more familiar surroundings, near the foot of Division Four.
Yet had Scally got his way, a frozen moment in time would have excluded future Premier League fairytales such as Blackpool, Wigan Athletic, Hull City and Barnsley; just as the sudden introduction of a salary cap might exclude a generation of Premier League newcomers from becoming established as Sunderland have done.
UEFA's new financial rules will limit mobility in the Premier League as it is, but to add to this by also making clubs adhere to strict limits on salary we would as good as ensure that no club could attempt self-improvement again. It would be football's equivalent of a chair wedged against the door. Nice try, though.'
Rio Ferdinand is the England captain. That title should mean something and he has done nothing to warrant losing it beyond getting injured. If temporary unavailability is now enough reason to have the armband taken away, then the role is meaningless.
The clamour to give the job to Steven Gerrard is premature. He has worked well as captain in the recent European Championship qualifiers, but nobody was calling for this switch after a poor World Cup, in which he also captained.
If Ferdinand's circumstances have changed and he is no longer a certain starting player under Capello that is different, but until then, it must be accepted that Gerrard's status is temporary.
Why make such a drama about the job if it is then treated as a frippery?
Lampard's way backIn the aftermath of England's excellent performance in Switzerland, it seemed plain that Frank Lampard's chances of an immediate return to the England team would be slim. In a matter of days, so much has changed.
Lampard looked to have been squeezed out by the emergence of James Milner and Adam Johnson to play on the left of midfield, meaning Steven Gerrard could return to the centre, where he has been impressively disciplined for club and country this season.
Yet while England had a nice balance in the matches with Bulgaria and Switzerland, those who continue to advocate an unchanged team against Montenegro have not been paying attention.
Milner (right) is suspended, Theo Walcott and Jermain Defoe will be absent through injury. Fabio Capello, the England manager, will be without three of his front four.
If Capello wishes to keep the same team shape, Johnson can replace Milner on the left - or right, where he played in Basel - but that still leaves a spare berth on the flank. Aaron Lennon appears to have exhausted his chances, while Shaun Wright-Phillips has failed to convince in his place.
This leaves moving Gerrard, once again, as the best option, starting wide and coming inside, with Lampard alongside Gareth Barry.
The only alternative is to change the system entirely and play 4-3-3 with Peter Crouch as the central striker, Wayne Rooney and Johnson either side and Gerrard, Barry and Lampard in midfield.
Either way, Lampard plays. It may be a temporary alteration and will not be a popular one with the knee-jerk detractors but, for now, needs must. The battle for midfield supremacy will have to wait.
(Oh, and I saw John Terry in action for Chelsea against West Ham United on Saturday: anyone who thinks he isn't an England international is plain nuts.)
A heart to heart over Joe The rush to anoint Joe Hart the natural heir to international goalkeepers such as Peter Shilton and David Seaman has been perhaps the most overplayed element of England's success under Fabio Capello since the World Cup.
Hart (right) is the best man for Capello right now, but he is young and far from proven, as his error for Manchester City against Blackburn Rovers at Eastlands on Saturday showed.
Under pressure against Switzerland last week, his handling went to pieces for a brief spell and he is yet to engage in the tension of a major tournament.
One only has to look at the way playing for England affected a trio of contemporaries, including Paul Robinson, Robert Green and Scott Carson, to understand the challenges ahead. Everyone is desperate to move on from South Africa, but a sense of realism is required.
It is no mean achievement to have six players in the England team, as Manchester City had in the match with Switzerland on Tuesday, but there is a significant difference between producing players for the nation, and buying talent that others have developed.
In 2001, when seven Manchester United players were on the pitch for England against Albania, five of them (Paul Scholes, Nicky Butt, David Beckham, Wes Brown and Gary Neville) had come through the ranks at the club and two, Andy Cole (Arsenal) and Teddy Sheringham (Millwall) were developed beyond.
Yet not one of Manchester City's six came from the juniors. Even Shaun Wright- Phillips signed his first professional contract with Nottingham Forest, and only joined City following his release, three months short of his 17th birthday.
Various Premier League big guns may lay claim to these players now, but England's team in Basle was variously the work of Shrewsbury Town (Joe Hart), Arsenal (Ashley Cole), Wolverhampton Wanderers (Joleon Lescott), Sheffield United (Phil Jagielka), West Ham United (Glen Johnson), Leeds United (James Milner), Brighton and Hove Albion (Gareth Barry), Liverpool (Steven Gerrard), Southampton (Theo Walcott), Middlesbrough (Adam Johnson), Everton (Wayne Rooney), Nottingham Forest (Wright-Phillips), Charlton Athletic (Jermain Defoe) and Ipswich Town (Darren Bent).
City gave Wright-Phillips his professional debut, as West Ham did Defoe and Aston Villa did Barry, but credit where it is due.
AND WHILE WE'RE AT IT... David Moyes (right), the Everton manager, was dismissive of questions concerning Wayne Rooney prior to Saturday's match with Manchester United. 'If you are a football journalist, you wouldn't ask me that,' he said, contemptuously.
Yet by making Rooney's private circumstances the reason for his absence from Manchester United's team at Goodison Park, Sir Alex Ferguson has blurred the lines between personal and professional.
John Terry is no longer England captain because of events in his private life, now Rooney is out of the Manchester United team for the same reason. In the circumstances, as unpalatable as it may seem, certain questions are going to be asked.
Russian boss in denial According to FIFA, racism will not be a factor when deciding the hosts of the 2018 World Cup. Now that all those picture opportunities with those lovely black faces in Soweto have ended, football's governing body has reverted to its default position, and stuck its head in the dirt.
Just as well, really, as Russian fans compounded some recent unsavoury incidents involving black players, by chanting fascist slogans during a European Championship qualifying game against Andorra.
Sergei Fursenko, president of the Russian federation, was initially in denial. 'Maybe they were engaged by some outside forces,' he said. 'It is unlikely these troublemakers were Russian.'
Of course not. No doubt rival bid teams have been hard at work training their own knuckle-dragging Neanderthals to be fluent in Russian, before infiltrating bands of travelling Muscovites and causing maximum embarrassment with flawlessly enunciated fascist chants.
It is a common ruse, not least in the world of cricket, in which everything that is bent about the Pakistan team turns out to be a plot hatched by India to make them look bad. By the time Fursenko returned home, however, his delirium had worn off.
'I can only condemn those people,' he added. 'At first I did not even believe our fans could do such things.'
Fursenko should not worry further. We confuse FIFA with people who care.
What never ceases to amaze about football is how sensible men arrive from the world of business and are instantly bewitched into behaving in a manner utterly inconsistent with their professional lives.
Take Andrew Andronikou (right), the administrator at Portsmouth. One presumes he performs this role because he has a reputation for cool-headed pragmatism. So how to explain his decision to pay new signings Dave Kitson and Liam Lawrence salaries of £19,000 and £20,000 per week, having pledged a wage limit of £10,000?
'We have pushed the boat out, but we are comfortable with it,' said Andronikou, whose club are bottom of the Championship. Isn't that the sentiment that put Portsmouth in administration in the first place?
Pakistan's cricketers will not be invited back to these shores next year. The reserves of sympathy and goodwill on the part of the ECB and the public have been exhausted. Nobody trusts them, nobody wants to watch them and it is hard to imagine any country or county with the appetite to play them.
The only mystery is why Giles Clarke, chairman of the ECB, ever extended the hand of friendship to Pakistan cricket in the first place. The events of the summer have been shocking, but nobody who has followed the game through recent times can seriously claim they have been much of a surprise.
Twitter was supposed to be a spontaneous, largely meaningless and fun form of communication, yet increasingly it has become a medium for inarticulate people to express inarticulate, often offensive, thoughts, while the world judges these expressions of an instant as if they were tablets of stone.
Stephanie Rice, the Australian swimmer accused of homophobia for an ill-advised comment in the wake of a Tri-Nations win over South Africa, needs to grow up, as do the cricketers Kevin Pietersen and Dimi Mascarenhas; but so do we if we are taking this twaddle seriously.
www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-1311395/MARTIN-SAMUEL-No-wonder-Sunderland-keen-pull-ladder-them.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
(I used to read him more before he moved to the Mail. He's worth reading) Re Salary cap, makes one think it would affect QPR spending if there was one
Martin Samuels/Daily Mail
MARTIN SAMUEL: No wonder Sunderland are so keen to pull up the ladder behind them
The wage bill at Sunderland is £44.1million. It represents 70 per cent of turnover of £64.5m, and rose by £12m from the previous year. Yet Sunderland is the Premier League club pushing hardest for a salary cap. Go figure, as the American owner Ellis Short might say.
Sunderland's plan may convey the air of good housekeeping and common sense in straitened times, but it is also a very handy means of self-preservation. Short, and his chairman Niall Quinn, have blown the kitty on Premier League survival already and now need a means of ensuring that no upstarts can follow their path.
Rich pickings: £13million man Asamoah Gyan scores on his debut for Sunderland
The latest arrival at Sunderland is Asamoah Gyan, the Ghanaian striker who scored on his debut at Wigan Athletic on Saturday. Gyan cost a club record £13m from Rennes in France and, one presumes, is to be paid accordingly. How inconvenient if next season a new arrival such as Queens Park Rangers or Cardiff City could buy and reward £13m players, too?
That is what Sunderland's new owners did on their return to the Premier League, after all. They threw money at the problem of keeping the club up and succeeded. This is, however, an expensive business. Investment is needed each year and salaries continue to spiral, particularly with the new 50 per cent tax band. It is no surprise that the idea of a salary cap is floated, or that a club like Sunderland should be in the vanguard.
Any salary cap would operate in relation to turnover and Sunderland's size compared to other clubs finishing regularly in the bottom half - Sunderland's last three league positions have been 13th, 16th and 15th - would make them the big fish in the small pool. It may leave them unable to compete with Manchester United or Arsenal, but would give them a significant advantage over Blackpool or Wigan Athletic. What at first appears a socially responsible exercise could be equally inspired by a mercenary survival instinct.
Every year, a chairman in fear for the future of his club will find a way of dressing up mere self-interest as vision or philanthropy. Not so long ago Phil Gartside of Bolton Wanderers wanted to open discussions on a second Premier League, without relegation, which would have conveniently served the dual purpose of safeguarding his club against collapse.
For much the same reason, in 2002, Paul Scally of Gillingham Town was incensed by a plan to split a £90m television windfall between the entire Football League, and proposed a breakaway of the second tier. The fact that Gillingham had spent just four of its 85 years at that level was an irony lost on him. It is unlikely he maintains this view now Gillingham have returned to more familiar surroundings, near the foot of Division Four.
Yet had Scally got his way, a frozen moment in time would have excluded future Premier League fairytales such as Blackpool, Wigan Athletic, Hull City and Barnsley; just as the sudden introduction of a salary cap might exclude a generation of Premier League newcomers from becoming established as Sunderland have done.
UEFA's new financial rules will limit mobility in the Premier League as it is, but to add to this by also making clubs adhere to strict limits on salary we would as good as ensure that no club could attempt self-improvement again. It would be football's equivalent of a chair wedged against the door. Nice try, though.'
Rio Ferdinand is the England captain. That title should mean something and he has done nothing to warrant losing it beyond getting injured. If temporary unavailability is now enough reason to have the armband taken away, then the role is meaningless.
The clamour to give the job to Steven Gerrard is premature. He has worked well as captain in the recent European Championship qualifiers, but nobody was calling for this switch after a poor World Cup, in which he also captained.
If Ferdinand's circumstances have changed and he is no longer a certain starting player under Capello that is different, but until then, it must be accepted that Gerrard's status is temporary.
Why make such a drama about the job if it is then treated as a frippery?
Lampard's way backIn the aftermath of England's excellent performance in Switzerland, it seemed plain that Frank Lampard's chances of an immediate return to the England team would be slim. In a matter of days, so much has changed.
Lampard looked to have been squeezed out by the emergence of James Milner and Adam Johnson to play on the left of midfield, meaning Steven Gerrard could return to the centre, where he has been impressively disciplined for club and country this season.
Yet while England had a nice balance in the matches with Bulgaria and Switzerland, those who continue to advocate an unchanged team against Montenegro have not been paying attention.
Milner (right) is suspended, Theo Walcott and Jermain Defoe will be absent through injury. Fabio Capello, the England manager, will be without three of his front four.
If Capello wishes to keep the same team shape, Johnson can replace Milner on the left - or right, where he played in Basel - but that still leaves a spare berth on the flank. Aaron Lennon appears to have exhausted his chances, while Shaun Wright-Phillips has failed to convince in his place.
This leaves moving Gerrard, once again, as the best option, starting wide and coming inside, with Lampard alongside Gareth Barry.
The only alternative is to change the system entirely and play 4-3-3 with Peter Crouch as the central striker, Wayne Rooney and Johnson either side and Gerrard, Barry and Lampard in midfield.
Either way, Lampard plays. It may be a temporary alteration and will not be a popular one with the knee-jerk detractors but, for now, needs must. The battle for midfield supremacy will have to wait.
(Oh, and I saw John Terry in action for Chelsea against West Ham United on Saturday: anyone who thinks he isn't an England international is plain nuts.)
A heart to heart over Joe The rush to anoint Joe Hart the natural heir to international goalkeepers such as Peter Shilton and David Seaman has been perhaps the most overplayed element of England's success under Fabio Capello since the World Cup.
Hart (right) is the best man for Capello right now, but he is young and far from proven, as his error for Manchester City against Blackburn Rovers at Eastlands on Saturday showed.
Under pressure against Switzerland last week, his handling went to pieces for a brief spell and he is yet to engage in the tension of a major tournament.
One only has to look at the way playing for England affected a trio of contemporaries, including Paul Robinson, Robert Green and Scott Carson, to understand the challenges ahead. Everyone is desperate to move on from South Africa, but a sense of realism is required.
It is no mean achievement to have six players in the England team, as Manchester City had in the match with Switzerland on Tuesday, but there is a significant difference between producing players for the nation, and buying talent that others have developed.
In 2001, when seven Manchester United players were on the pitch for England against Albania, five of them (Paul Scholes, Nicky Butt, David Beckham, Wes Brown and Gary Neville) had come through the ranks at the club and two, Andy Cole (Arsenal) and Teddy Sheringham (Millwall) were developed beyond.
Yet not one of Manchester City's six came from the juniors. Even Shaun Wright- Phillips signed his first professional contract with Nottingham Forest, and only joined City following his release, three months short of his 17th birthday.
Various Premier League big guns may lay claim to these players now, but England's team in Basle was variously the work of Shrewsbury Town (Joe Hart), Arsenal (Ashley Cole), Wolverhampton Wanderers (Joleon Lescott), Sheffield United (Phil Jagielka), West Ham United (Glen Johnson), Leeds United (James Milner), Brighton and Hove Albion (Gareth Barry), Liverpool (Steven Gerrard), Southampton (Theo Walcott), Middlesbrough (Adam Johnson), Everton (Wayne Rooney), Nottingham Forest (Wright-Phillips), Charlton Athletic (Jermain Defoe) and Ipswich Town (Darren Bent).
City gave Wright-Phillips his professional debut, as West Ham did Defoe and Aston Villa did Barry, but credit where it is due.
AND WHILE WE'RE AT IT... David Moyes (right), the Everton manager, was dismissive of questions concerning Wayne Rooney prior to Saturday's match with Manchester United. 'If you are a football journalist, you wouldn't ask me that,' he said, contemptuously.
Yet by making Rooney's private circumstances the reason for his absence from Manchester United's team at Goodison Park, Sir Alex Ferguson has blurred the lines between personal and professional.
John Terry is no longer England captain because of events in his private life, now Rooney is out of the Manchester United team for the same reason. In the circumstances, as unpalatable as it may seem, certain questions are going to be asked.
Russian boss in denial According to FIFA, racism will not be a factor when deciding the hosts of the 2018 World Cup. Now that all those picture opportunities with those lovely black faces in Soweto have ended, football's governing body has reverted to its default position, and stuck its head in the dirt.
Just as well, really, as Russian fans compounded some recent unsavoury incidents involving black players, by chanting fascist slogans during a European Championship qualifying game against Andorra.
Sergei Fursenko, president of the Russian federation, was initially in denial. 'Maybe they were engaged by some outside forces,' he said. 'It is unlikely these troublemakers were Russian.'
Of course not. No doubt rival bid teams have been hard at work training their own knuckle-dragging Neanderthals to be fluent in Russian, before infiltrating bands of travelling Muscovites and causing maximum embarrassment with flawlessly enunciated fascist chants.
It is a common ruse, not least in the world of cricket, in which everything that is bent about the Pakistan team turns out to be a plot hatched by India to make them look bad. By the time Fursenko returned home, however, his delirium had worn off.
'I can only condemn those people,' he added. 'At first I did not even believe our fans could do such things.'
Fursenko should not worry further. We confuse FIFA with people who care.
What never ceases to amaze about football is how sensible men arrive from the world of business and are instantly bewitched into behaving in a manner utterly inconsistent with their professional lives.
Take Andrew Andronikou (right), the administrator at Portsmouth. One presumes he performs this role because he has a reputation for cool-headed pragmatism. So how to explain his decision to pay new signings Dave Kitson and Liam Lawrence salaries of £19,000 and £20,000 per week, having pledged a wage limit of £10,000?
'We have pushed the boat out, but we are comfortable with it,' said Andronikou, whose club are bottom of the Championship. Isn't that the sentiment that put Portsmouth in administration in the first place?
Pakistan's cricketers will not be invited back to these shores next year. The reserves of sympathy and goodwill on the part of the ECB and the public have been exhausted. Nobody trusts them, nobody wants to watch them and it is hard to imagine any country or county with the appetite to play them.
The only mystery is why Giles Clarke, chairman of the ECB, ever extended the hand of friendship to Pakistan cricket in the first place. The events of the summer have been shocking, but nobody who has followed the game through recent times can seriously claim they have been much of a surprise.
Twitter was supposed to be a spontaneous, largely meaningless and fun form of communication, yet increasingly it has become a medium for inarticulate people to express inarticulate, often offensive, thoughts, while the world judges these expressions of an instant as if they were tablets of stone.
Stephanie Rice, the Australian swimmer accused of homophobia for an ill-advised comment in the wake of a Tri-Nations win over South Africa, needs to grow up, as do the cricketers Kevin Pietersen and Dimi Mascarenhas; but so do we if we are taking this twaddle seriously.
www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-1311395/MARTIN-SAMUEL-No-wonder-Sunderland-keen-pull-ladder-them.html?ito=feeds-newsxml