Nimeipenda hii article ya Martin Samuel, good thinking:
Fair play to Roman Abramovich, his £75m reaches the needy
Last updated at 7:46 AM on 2nd February 2011
So one again the madness of the free market and the January transfer window succeeded where UEFA and their president Michel Platini will surely fail, by redistributing wealth throughout the game.
Roman Abramovich took roughly £75m from outside football - never forget - and invested it across Europe.
The process is haphazard, granted, and is motivated by self-interest not altruism, but what is wrong with that? Base desires can be useful, too.
John Donne spent much of his young life trying to get women into bed. The result is a collection of the most beautiful metaphysical poems known to mankind.
Indeed, much of art, music and architecture are testament to one guy's attempt to impress a girl.
Maybe this Chelsea team are, too.
Platini talks a good game, but UEFA do little to reduce the gap between rich and poor.
Champions League money goes primarily to elite clubs, with a few paupers from the inferior leagues tossed a scrap.
Abramovich, by contrast, took personal funds generated by Russian energy resources and as good as threw them at Liverpool for Fernando Torres.
He did the same in Portugal, taking David Luiz from Benfica.
The second biggest European spenders in the transfer window were Manchester City, where the owner, Sheik Mansour, used Abu Dhabi's oil riches to finance the signing of Edin Dzeko from Wolfsburg.
At first glance, providing funds for Benfica, Liverpool and a Bundesliga club bankrolled by Volkswagen can hardly be compared with feeding the poor of the parish, but look at what happened next.
Using money from the Dzeko transfer, Wolfsburg bought five players in the January transfer window, and signed another on loan.
They are Tuncay Sanli (Stoke City, England), Yohandry Orozco (Zulia FC, Venezuela), Koo Ja-cheol (Jeju United, South Korea), Jan Polak (Anderlecht, Belgium) and Patrick Helmes (Bayer Leverkusen, Germany).
The loaned player is Dieumerci Mbokani (Monaco, France).
So the Sheik's oil revenue was redistributed across three continents, seven clubs and six leagues, to places like Stoke that will never see a penny of UEFA's precious Champions League money without first completing mission impossible.
That is genuine financial fair play.
Liverpool, having already agreed £23m for Luis Suarez of Ajax - and we will never know if New England Sports Ventures had the tiniest inkling of what was around the corner with Torres when they made that deal - then paid a staggering £35m for Andy Carroll of Newcastle United.
The deal was struck too late for this to be passed on, although Newcastle did attempt to give £10m of it to Wigan Athletic for Charles N'Zogbia, but were timed out.
So Abramovich's wealth trickles through the Premier League from Liverpool to Newcastle and, finally, Wigan - or whichever clubs will reap the benefit of Newcastle's largesse in the summer.
As for Benfica - a club who have struggled financially despite their famous name - they sent Liverpool's money on to another three clubs likely to be untroubled by UEFA's bounty in the coming years, buying Lionel Carole (Nantes, France), Jardel Vieira (SC Olhanense, Portugal) and Jose Luis Fernandez (Racing Avellaneda, Argentina).
Olhanense, for instance, are a mid-table team from the Algarve town of Olhao who play at a 10,000-capacity stadium.
Nantes, the club who brought through Marcel Desailly, Didier Deschamps, Christian Karembeu and Claude Makelele, are no longer in Ligue 1.
This is football's own trickle-down effect.
As an economic theory trickle-down has its flaws - tax breaks for the wealthiest do not directly result in help for the needy - but in football its merits are clearly visible.
Money comes from outside the game and flows, indirectly, to places such as Maracaibo, second city of Venezuela, Newcastle-on-Tyne and Seogwipo, on Jeju island, South Korea.
Critics see only big fish like Chelsea feeding off smaller fish such as Benfica, but if Benfica then buy from Nantes, and Nantes from Monaco (Serge Gakpe) and Monaco from Ligue 2 club Nimes (Benjamin Moukandjo Bile), what began as money in a rich man's pocket is then spread throughout the game, down the chain to even the smallest clubs.
Newcastle may go shopping with some of their £35m in the Championship next season, or another beneficiary may use the funds to develop its academy.
True, the trickle-down effect has diminished in the Football League - only roughly £12m was spent there by Premier League clubs this January - but that is because buying habits have changed.
The trickle is still there, but it is as likely to reach foreign leagues as our own. Sadly.
Some argue there should be no window at all, and it would certainly make January less frenzied.
Yet so would returning to the old way of a free market throughout the year.
Abramovich's investment stopped at Tyneside only because of an artificially imposed deadline: had business continued today, then £10m would now be on its way to Wigan, and who knows how that would be reinvested?
There is, apparently, disquiet at UEFA that Abramovich should have spent £75m, with the financial fair play restrictions looming, on the day his club announced another yearly loss of £71m.
Good. Perhaps Platini now realises the failing in his grand plan.
Financial fair play was introduced to check the power of owners like Abramovich, except the oligarch strangely became its biggest fan.
At that point any smart person would have deduced there must be a flaw in the regulation.
And there is: financial fair play, in essence spending only what the club generates, cements the elite in place by outlawing outside investment.
Clubs like Manchester United and Bayern Munich will always have more money than their rivals and therefore the best chance of winning the league.
Abramovich saw Chelsea as part of that established elite, too, and realised the new limits would hinder interlopers such as Manchester City or Tottenham Hotspur.
A man less arrogant than Platini or a chorus less dim than his supporters - some of whom regard trite Little Englander taunts as a replacement for reasoning - would have revised their thinking.
Instead, Platini ploughed ahead, until Abramovich showed him what he really thought of financial fair play, the moment Chelsea's place in the top four was in jeopardy.
UEFA are threatening the ultimate sanction - Champions League expulsion for clubs that do not comply - but it will be interesting to see what unfolds.
Remove the likes of Barcelona, Real Madrid, Inter Milan and Chelsea from the competition, insert Bolton Wanderers or Sunderland instead, and see how long its popularity endures with supporters, sponsors and television companies.
After all, who doesn't love the Europa League? Thursday night, Channel Five.
Yet what if this winter window had been conducted under the auspices of financial fair play? Would football be better for it? Hardly.
We moan about the madness when it visits our club - so Newcastle supporters will be hurting this morning, and Liverpool's would have been, had their board not acted so decisively - but we love watching it play out elsewhere.
On Sunday, Torres will make his debut for Chelsea, against Liverpool, who should have at least one of their new strikers in action. That is box office. That is theatre. That is the entertainment football is almost duty-bound to provide in times of austerity.
Who wants to see a stand-off between 20 accountants?
Every supporter I meet asks the same question: who are we buying? Not just in January, or the summer, but all year round.
Nobody, sadly, seems much concerned with the prospects of the youth team. Nobody quizzes the press box on revenue streams. They want new, they want fresh, they want different, they want hope.
It is part of what makes the sport compelling.
In Platini's world of budget-balancing mediocrity, Abramovich would bank his fortune, Chelsea could never spend big in a daring attempt to draw level with Manchester United, and no small clubs would benefit from the trickle down.
Yet, as long as the transfer money is not set against the club as a loan, what is the problem?
Everyone cites Leeds United and Portsmouth, but those clubs spent money they did not have and could not pay it back. If Abramovich chooses to give his football club £75m to buy players, how is that wrong?
It increases competition, it improves standards, it promotes interest in football.
There would be no issue with Platini's financial fair play laws if they simply made enough room for an owner to give his money away. The by-product of this desire for austerity is the death of logic.
'City's £27m outlay on Dzeko was spent in the week Manchester City Council announced 2,000 redundancies,' it was reported yesterday, as if the two events were related.
So, had Dzeko stayed in Germany, would those 2,000 jobs have been saved? And what redundancy level is acceptable for clubs wishing to spend money? If only 1,000 were losing their jobs, could City have gone for just a squad player, or is all loss of employment reason enough to place an embargo on spending?
Now look at it another way.
Suppose you are one of the Manchester council workers losing a job, but also a Manchester City supporter. This will be a thoroughly miserable time for you, with perhaps one small pleasure: the hope your team could win the league.
When the city of Liverpool was in the doldrums it was often said civic pride came solely from its claim to have the best football team in the world.
You may find this pitiful, but it is true.
There is a reason the plinth beneath the Bill Shankly statue at Anfield reads: 'He made the people happy.'
Unemployment ran at around six per cent when Kenny Dalglish joined Liverpool in 1977, doubling in the next six years.
Would refusing to break the British transfer record for Dalglish have made any difference to unemployment? No. Would Merseyside have been a happier place had he remained in Glasgow? No.
Might success for City be about the only positive for some of those ex-council workers this year? Yes.
Juxtaposed with the threat of rising unemployment in the North East was the news that Carroll will now be paid £80,000 a week at Liverpool, having earned £28,000 a week at Newcastle.
Or to put it another way: Carroll will now be paying almost £2m annually in tax, instead of just under £700,000.
And that is worse for the country how?
When Manchester City first tried to prise Kaka from AC Milan in a deal worth £100m two years ago, a familiar cry was to think of the hospitals that could be built with this money; and then Kaka didn't come, but we are still waiting for the hospitals.
Why? Because the events were unrelated.
The choice was never Kaka or hospitals, no more than it is full council employment or Dzeko.
All that has happened in this transfer window is that some very rich men have pledged to keep us entertained for another year or more.
Make the most of it, for when Platini and his legions of dullards get their way you will be expected to find amusement in a spread sheet, as the accountants take over the asylum.
Read more:
Martin Samuel: Fair play to Roman, his £75m reaches the needy | Mail Online
