"If you want some accessible but informative insight into football then I suggest you couldn't do better than the Political Economy of Football website, which is not only intelligible but comes with the added bonus of being written by Addicks fan Wyn Grant."
Ben Hayes - Charlton Athletic programme
Spanish league president Javier Tebas is keeping up the heat on Manchester City. He has threatened to complain to the European Commission if Uefa do not take action against Manchester City as well as Paris Saint-Germain for an alleged breach of state aid rules. If that complaint does not succeed, they will resort to the courts.
However, he has also opened a new front over five players loaned to Girona, which is part-owned by City. For their part, City have described some of Tebas’s comments as ‘pure fiction’ and they are taking legal advice.
When I was on a visit to Chile, I switched on the television and Universidad Católica were playing. Eventually they scored and the successful player ripped off his shirt to reveal a huge tatoo on his back of Jesus on the cross.
The Economist (it likes to call itself a newspaper not a magazine) runs the occasional article on football. It ticks a number of boxes: globalisation; popular culture; big money; unusual markets. It also shows that the magazine is not too stuffy and can get down with the masses.
Manchester City are not to be the subject of a special investigation under Uefa financial fair play rules unlike Paris Saint-Germain. In an unusual intervention, Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga complained that City were ‘irreparably damaging the football industry’ by creating an inflationary spiral. His intervention had the backing of Barcelona and Real Madrid.
From the age of nine until I went to university I lived in Billericay. Billericay Town played on the Archer Hall field and had an annual dinner-dance in the Archer Hall. One player from the 1950s remembered playing a German team, Emmerich Rhine, there. ‘Billericay’ almost sounds like an Irish place name, but I think it is a corruption of the Norman-French ‘Ville de Cray’. Other explanations are available.
I am always suspicious of articles which claim that the bubble has burst or is about to burst in relation to the Premier League. If I was given a pound for each time I had read such a story, I could afford a good meal out on the proceeds,
James Montague has brought out a new book called The Billionaires Club which is about ‘the unstoppable rise of football’s super-rich owners.’ I have only dipped into it to so far but he is a journalist and can tell a story well.
It starts with a chapter about Crewe Alexandria and finishes with one about Portsmouth. The main body of the book is about owners from Eastern Europe, America, Asia and the Middle East.
Uefa has launched a formal investigation into whether Paris Saint-Germain has breached financial fair play rules following ‘recent transfer activity’. There has been concern that the effectively state-owned super club has taken financial competition in European football on to a new level.
There are indications that Uefra president Aleksander Ceferin is inclined to take a harder line on such matters than his predecessor Michel Platini.
The fact that transfer window records have been broken once again is hardly a surprise. Spending by Premiership clubs on the closing day was £210m compared with £155m last year as they scrambled to close last minute deals. Overall spending was a record £1.4bn.
Some widely predicted transfers did not go ahead and some players are stuck in clubs where they are clearly unhappy, leading one commentator to describe the final day as ‘anti-climatic’.
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When I was on a visit to Chile, I switched on the television and Universidad Católica were playing. Eventually they scored and the successful player ripped off his shirt to reveal a huge tatoo on his back of Jesus on the cross.