”Professional football,” as the game’s finest irritant, Eamon Dunphy, so acerbically put it 14 years ago, ”was deformed at birth.
”The game was never honourable, never decent, never rational or just. Class was the root of all professional football’s evils; those who played the game for money, the heroes who drew the crowds, were working class; those who administered the game, the directors and football club shareholders, were, as the greatest player of the age, Billy Meredith, contemptuously described them, ‘little shopkeepers who governed our destiny’.”
Five years after Dunphy summed up the past, football’s future was redefined in a European courtroom. The name ”Bosman” entered the language as shorthand to describe the free movement of an army of back-street boys, protected now by law and confident of earning as much every week as the chairmen who employed them.
Unshackled, footballers coming to the end of their contracts moved from one bank to another without the encumbrance of a transfer fee, just a consideration for their agents and perhaps a sweetener for the new gaffer.
The shopkeepers became simultaneously nervous about watching their expensive stock disappear out of the back door without compensation and excited about the prospect of inflicting the same commercial wound on their rivals. Small clubs, where great players often start, were left without even scraps and quivered now in the cold new climate of law-led greed.
And it is back to the judiciary we go again over the next couple of weeks to sit in judgement on the moral mess that is football. Soon we will find something to talk about other than Chelsea and Jose Mourinho (not that he minds) but, for the time being, they remain at the centre of the most important debate in football since the start of the Premiership in 1992.
What should be central to the argument is not whether Ashley Cole and his clever agent, Jonathan Barnett, along with the untouchable out-of-town deal-maker Pini Zahavi (who acts for Chelsea) conveniently bumped into Mourinho in a London hotel, but why this should be a crime.
”Tapping up” is the masters’ term for the practice by business rivals of luring away their highly paid serfs and has always been the most anomalous of sins in a sport that lives on backroom deals. In the normal world, it is known as a job interview. Union leaders everywhere ought to be outraged that employers can punish employees for trying to better themselves — whatever the obscene scale of their wages.
There is the other matter of honour, of course, and it could be argued that Cole should not have signed his original contract with Arsenal if he was not happy with it and had no intention of seeing it through. The counter argument is that handcuffing a player long-term is unfair because it does not allow him to maximise his earnings as his reputation grows. But football is one mean jungle and, as managers and squad players know, contracts are terminated almost on a daily basis.
No, the stench from so-called Colegate is not one of skulduggery but hypocrisy.
Southampton manager Harry Redknapp is one of the few managers honest enough to admit that ”bonuses” for trading smartly in players is just another way to describe bungs. After nearly every match he teases the media with outrageous hints that he might be in for Ronaldinho or Zinedine Zidane or any other ungettable galactico, to try to tempt them to St Mary’s. It is part of his shtick, his way of underlining the absurdity of the system.
The truth is, managers are as powerful as their chairmen let them be. And chairmen, as Redknapp’s boss at Southampton, Rupert Lowe, exemplifies, are often high-profile negotiators themselves, shinning up and down the greasy pole of celebrity. They come in many accents and overcoats, from posh to street.
Ken Bates was an uncompromising headbanger at Stamford Bridge and might be again at Leeds; Doug Ellis, famously described once as ”a largely misunderstood man”, rolls on through the years at Aston Villa; Robert Maxwell, a proven fraud, tried and, mysteriously, never really cracked it as a football mogul.
Whatever their names and clubs, there are few people in football unaware of the two-faced morality that sustains it — apart from those men, supposedly, who sit on disciplinary committees and pretend that what they accuse Chelsea and Cole of doing is wrong.
Strictly it is. According to their daft regulations. These rules were not drawn up by workers, though. They are the invention of the shopkeepers.
Arsenal, of all clubs, ought to know this. Last month, at a neat suburban house in Haslemere Avenue, Hendon, where he lived in north London, Herbert Chapman was honoured with a blue plaque by English Heritage. He was a manager for whom the word respectable might have been invented. He stood for everything that was upright and austere at Highbury, where he brought discipline, inventiveness and trophies. The marble halls can hardly have a more imperious and worthy ghost.
A moderate player for Tottenham and others, it was as manager of Arsenal that he cemented his reputation with a hat-trick of titles in the 1930s.
Conveniently forgotten, of course, was Chapman’s role in illegal payments to players when he was manager at the now defunct Leeds City during World War I. The club folded and Chapman was suspended, then exonerated on appeal, pointing out that he was working in a munitions factory as part of the war effort at the time of the crime.
Others paid a price for their part in an affair that challenged the values of the day, much as Colegate is doing now.
As Dunphy wrote, as then, so it is now, and probably always will be. The regulations might be different, the scale of the allegations more staggering, but the basic humbug remains steadfastly in place. — Â