Referees aren't worth suing ? if you could prove a loss, the agents and clubs with oodles of cash are the ones to target
Joey Barton. What would columnists and bloggers do without him? While not sympathising in the slightest with his argument that Norwich City's Bradley Johnson conned the referee at QPR on Monday ? if Barton doesn't wish to see opponents overreact, he shouldn't go around sticking his head in their faces, not to mention falling to earth too easily himself as he did with Gervinho on the first day of the season ? his idea that clubs could soon sue referees for making bad decisions was highly amusing.
Everyone should sue everybody, that's just what football needs. There's probably no point just picking on referees though, they haven't got enough money. The first rule of taking the litigation route to chase a loss is to make sure to hit on a mark rich enough to pay up when the judge finds in your favour. There has to be a demonstrable loss, too, ideally a financial one, or at least one that can be suitably recompensed with a sum of money. Otherwise, there's no point.
So if Barton wishes to claim that Neil Swarbrick's action cost him three weeks' wages, or damaged his chances of making it into Fabio Capello's England squad in time for the European Championship, and therefore dashed his hopes of picking up Michael Owen's sponsorship deal with Tissot, he would have a chance as long as he could prove it, though even if he could make any of that stick Swarbrick would still have to be good for the money to make it worth his while.
Referees are the wrong targets. Agents are the people to go for. Clubs, managers, players, anyone with oodles of money. But still you need to prove a loss worth recovering, and that is trickier than it seems.
I know a Manchester United supporter, for instance, who cannot afford a season ticket and only manages to get to a couple of games a season. His first visit to Old Trafford this time was the 3-2 defeat by Blackburn Rovers on New Year's Eve. He was miffed, to say the least, that half the United team were playing out of position and Wayne Rooney was nowhere to be seen, even more disappointed when David de Gea flapped at the corner that led to Blackburn's winning goal and then thoroughly disenchanted to learn afterwards that Rooney had been dropped as a punishment for being a tad worse for wear at a training session four days before the game.
Given the result Sir Alex Ferguson might be deemed guilty of poor management, either underestimating Rovers or overreacting to a fairly minor breach of discipline, though in mitigation to the charge of signing another underwhelming goalkeeper he could plead that he has been doing this for most of his career and only got lucky when Peter Schmeichel's confidence was boosted by being voted the world's best on the back of Denmark's European Championship success in 1992 and Edwin van der Sar made his own way to England to play for Fulham. A strong case, all in all. But hardly worth fighting for the price of a single ticket.
A lot of single tickets, on the other hand, may be a different story. Were all the United supporters at once to demand reimbursement from the club or the manager, the total sum involved would be at least worth winning, though only if the supporters could agree to divert it to a good cause that would teach the club a lesson ? FC United, say ? rather than shared out individually. Similarly all those present at the Wolves debacle at Old Trafford a few years ago, when Mick McCarthy rather spoiled everyone's enjoyment of the evening by changing his entire team and accepting defeat without a fight, could sue Wolves for their money back and present it to Roy Keane, or Sunderland, or anything else that would make McCarthy see the error of his ways.
Agents would probably be first against the wall come Barton's glorious day, because every single Premier League club must have at least one absurdly overpaid, overvalued player kicking his heels on the bench or in the reserves because his representatives made him out to be much better than he actually turned out. I could make a list of such players right here, though for legal reasons I think it may be better not to. But then again, what do football clubs and managers expect agents to do? Point out their players' shortcomings? The decision to buy players, especially expensive ones, should rest squarely on the judgment of the manager and his scouting team, and if short cuts have been taken with agents and selective videos there is still no one else to blame.
What is surprising, when you come to think of football purely in terms of money and recompense, is how few of the really annoying things actually translate to financial value. On the field, at least. Footballers who kiss the badge on their shirt ought to be routinely fined for insulting their audience's intelligence, but no financial loss is involved and any capable brief ought to be able to argue that football audiences haven't got much intelligence left to insult.
I absolve Gary Neville at Anfield from the above criticism, by the way. I think everybody quite enjoyed that.
Diving and cheating are two of the other great bugbears, as Barton rightly pointed out, but it is players who are at fault here, not referees, and, let's not beat about the bush, they are all at it. It would seem to make sense to support draconian fines or bans in retrospect for players who have been caught cheating by the cameras ? not that that is always easy to prove ? and that is something the game may consider. A court of law, however, seeking to establish whether Player A damaged Player B's livelihood by simulation or exaggeration, would quickly point to Exhibit C: Alan Shearer or some other pundit explaining on national television that you have to make the most of contact in the area and that the referee won't give a foul unless he can see you have been fouled.
That football has lost its Corinthian spirit is hardly news, but even Barton's tongue-in-cheek sense of affrontedness shows vestiges of it still hang on in these venal days when rivalries are measured in the size of owners' bank balances. The incredible fact about Premier League footballers these days is that for all their wealth they are still pawns in a game ? if game is what it is ? of unimaginable financial resources. Rooney's misdemeanour last weekend incurred a fine roughly equating to 10 times the national average annual wage. Nothing to him, nothing to the club. Carlos Tevez has been earning approximately the same amount, around �240,000 a week, every week since his misunderstanding in Bavaria, even though he has absented himself from club duty. That is the sort of financial heft clubs such as Arsenal and Liverpool find it impossible to compete against, and small wonder. It would hardly be an edifying spectacle to see them try. On the pitch, it was encouraging that Sunderland managed to beat Manchester City and Blackburn surprised United. Away from the pitch, the game is running out of glue to hold itself together.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2012/jan/04/paul-wilson-joey-barton
No comments:
Post a Comment