Saturday 2 March 2013

Retro rant: Worth it for a bag of crisps


The news this week that Crystal Palace are set to invest again in their vaunted academy to improve the facilities to achieve ‘category one’ status to protect their home grown players reignited some passionate thoughts we’ve had on the subject. Check out this trip down memory lane (originally posted July 2008) for thoughts on young players and how smaller clubs get a raw deal   




Originally posted via 411mania on 23rd July 2008
http://www.411mania.com/sports/other_sports/80896/Breaking-The-Offside-Trap-07.23.08:-Worth-It-For-A-Bag-of-Crisps?-.htm
"Insidious, insipid, egotistical, greedy, self-motivated"


These are the words used by Crystal Palace chairman Simon Jordan to describe the world of professional football that exists today. He is not to be chairman of the South London club for too much longer however as he has openly declared that this is a world that he is no longer prepared to operate in. Jordan has decided after eight years at the helm to sell up and end his involvement with the club he has always supported. The final straw for the man as he saw it was the decision last week of the English Football Association to rubber stamp 16 year old John Bostock's move from Selhurst Park to Tottenham Hotspur for a fee of around £700,000.

Around two months ago I wrote an article entitled Raiders of the Lost Talent, which looked at the continued practice in football that exists today whereby the most powerful and rich clubs are able to steal away any young talents they desire with no risk of repercussions. Within this piece I talked about the case of John Bostock, as it had just emerged that he was preparing to take the decision to reject the offer of a contract from Palace, the team that had spent years of time, effort and resources in his development in order to join Tottenham. Now I am writing following the transfers conclusion.

Football players, despite Mr Blatter's remarks are not slaves, not should they be. They are individuals, workers, employees who like everyone else should have freedoms to control their own destinies. Yet the current system that is currently being ruthlessly and mercilessly exploited by those clubs at the top of the food chain is clearly not working for the common interests of the football community as a whole. Once again the large number of ‘have not's' are being exploited by the very few ‘haves'. The Bostock case is just another classic example.

The rules of the FA state that players must be at the age of 16 before they are able to sign their first professional contract. Before then they are in effect ‘fair game' to any suitors who wish to take the player. In Bostock's case, he was offered terms on a professional deal when he turned 16, however by this point Tottenham had sounded out the player and his father and had put on the table an offer for him to join them instead.

That Bostock's head was turned is no surprise. Tottenham are a Premier League club whereas Crystal Palace currently ply their trade in England's 2nd tier, the Championship. What's more Tottenham are a club with a large fan base, a rich tradition and most importantly a seemingly bottomless pit of money when it comes to player recruitment. We can argue that the boy, as that is what he is, should have showed more loyalty or appreciation to the club that he has been training at for nine years and that has unquestionably aided his development yet that is his personal choice to make. In his mind I am sure that he believes that it is the right move. The pressing issue however is with the current rules and laws of the game that at present allows for the bigger sides to walk all over those smaller than them and allows them to pilfer their talents.

The FA's edict to try and ‘protect' clubs from having players leave after years of resources have gone into them and encourage clubs to continue to produce home grown talent is that for any player who is under the age of 24 and been developed by a team, that club will receive compensation, despite the player having come to the end of their contract or not being under one. The fee then is to be decided by a tribunal.

The tribunal's job is a hard one, one can never predict exactly how successful a player will become for certain, nor can their any be any firm guess at how a player's ability will develop. It is hard to judge potential, but how can we have a workable system whereby Tottenham's North London rivals Arsenal have just shelled out £5,000,000 for teenage winger Aaron Ramsey as opposed to the £700,000 that Spurs have been ordered to pay for Bostock? As Lawrence Donegan argued in the Guardian newspaper last week;

"Comparing the two young players is a futile exercise. Ask around and you'll find some who prefer Ramsey, others who are enthralled with Bostock. But in any such discussion there is one common theme; both are "can't miss" prospects, in as much as any teenager can be said to be such a thing. Yet Arsenal paid £5m, Tottenham less than 20% of that. Even those enamoured with Ramsey would be hard pressed to argue he is five times the player Bostock is, and if they did they would probably fail a drugs test."


Ramsey made eleven first team appearances in the Championship last season for his club Cardiff City. Bostock made four for Palace. The cost of seven appearances? £4.3 million apparently. The real reason for the discrepancy concerns the players ages. At 18 Ramsey was under a senior contract. Therefore Cardiff could afford to get what they deemed to be an acceptable figure for a young talent they had nurtured. As he was 18 and under a senior, full time contract with years to run Arsenal could not offer a contract to the player without negotiating a fee with his club first. If they had heard about the player before his 16th birthday then it is safe to assume that Cardiff would not be getting much of a reward for their hard work. Just ask Barcelona how much they got for Cesc Fabregas. The crucial issue of age then means that any player under 17 who has any modicum of talent needs to be hidden from the world by his club as the vultures come for their prey. That or they might just want to stop putting any time and effort into the development of players given that it seemingly wont get them anywhere. Not the best environment to be breeding the ‘future of the game'.

In the Bostock case it was decided that a fee of £700,000 would have to paid which was deemed to cover the training expenses that Crystal Palace have had to outlay in order to develop the player to the standard that he is today. Given the hype surrounding the 16 year old midfield player, the fact that he has already represented England at several levels, that a big Premier League club believe he has the talent and given the often astronomical fees that are often bounded about, the popular consensus seems to be then that Palace have been well and truly ripped off.

Certainly that is very much the view of Simon Jordan, who has been quoted as saying that the player had been sold "for a packet of crisps". Increasingly we are seeing dangerous precedents being set, with the incentives for spending the time and effort to produce young players being virtually none. There is nothing to stop the larger clubs hoovering up all the young talent they can find, with those less fortunate being forced to feed on scraps. Many clubs competitiveness will fall away, talent will be hoarded by the few, and clubs will no longer be able to cover their overheads. What's more there will never be a way for the hegemony at the top of the game to be overthrown, what we have now will be the status quo forever, short of finding a Russian billionaire or two. There is no other way for other teams to take on those at the top. Or maybe that's the point.

Maybe this is when I should note that I am a Crystal Palace fan, so maybe all that I have written above is a biased, blinkered and unobjective rant at the fact the club I support has lost a player for not much money and that I am not very happy about. Perhaps, but then I would like to think that fans of all clubs would appreciate that the current system of operating is very wrong and harmful to the development of the game. I firmly believe this. What's more the whole issue has just left me continually over the last week with a feeling of ‘what's the point? Why even bother?'

It would seem that Mr Jordan agrees, and he is no longer prepared to be a part of a game which allows so many to be dictated to by so few, which allows those at the top to trample all over the rest, which allows years of time and hard work to go to waste unrewarded and above all a game which protects a rigid status quo and hegemony at the top. As a Crystal Palace fan I know deep down that I am not going to be involved in cup finals and Champion's Leagues but it's still good to be able to dream that maybe one day you could get there. Dare to dream that you could get there by employing good people, with excellent skills who can coach young players and develop the stars of the future. Not dream about success achieved on the back of the tainted millions of former despots with human rights abuses on their CV.

Ajax Amsterdam were able to win the European Cup in 1995 by producing a fantastic side, overwhelmingly made up of a prodigious crop of young players that the club had trained and nurtured from a young age. Unsurprisingly that side was ripped apart by the huge pots of money swilling round the top of the game. Last season I was genuinely enthused about supporting my club because of the emergence of a young and vibrant team, excited at the prospect of young players produced by the club and hard work, many from the local area that would give the club an identity and had the potential for some great success. Now though that feeling has given way to the cold reality of the modern game, whereby players have gone or a going for measly sums due to the reluctance of a backbone of those ruling the game to stand up to those clubs who say ‘fuck the rest'. What is the point anymore?

It only seems fitting to leave this issue with a man who I may not have always agreed with and who undoubtedly has made a lot of enemies but who still always seems to hit the mark spot on. Mr Jordan, I couldn't have said it any better myself;

"I kept my sanity by pumping millions of pounds into my academy, feeling the saving grace of my club was finding players who would be chomping at the bit and honoured to play in the first team.

"But that's been taken away from me as well. Bostock was one of the best players my academy has produced in the last 10 years - and he has been sold for a packet of crisps."

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