September 5, 2008
Manchester City: an accident waiting to happen
Simon Barnes
Dr Sulaiman al-Fahim should take note of Dr Simon Barnes's first law of football. It states: “Ownership of a club invariably diminishes the person who does the owning.†This can be expressed less formally — under normal circumstances, anyone who buys a football club will end up looking an idiot within a year and a bloody fool within two.
Everyone who goes into club ownership thinks that he will be the one who does it differently, the one who can do what has never been done, who can win what has never been won. But with the inevitability of the sun rising in the east, the rich and powerful men, the brilliant creative leaders of business, take a seat in a directors' box, put on the red nose and the funny hat, assume a cheery smile and step straight into the open manhole.
As the good doctor from Abu Dhabi contemplates his almost completed purchase of Manchester City, he should take a look around the Barclays Premier League at all the fine messes other owners have got themselves into and ask himself: “Why should I be different?â€
Look at Mike Ashley. For all of us who read the back pages, the Newcastle United owner is a man who has long gone beyond the “bloody fool†stage. It takes an effort of will to recall that he is also a crash-hot businessman with a fortune of £1.4 billion, No 54 in The Sunday Times Rich List.
He is not, then, an obvious candidate for the clown's make-up and fright wig. But ever since he bought Newcastle United just over a year ago he has become a laughing stock, while the club he was going to launch into the stratosphere have staggered from one crisis to the next, making everyone who lives a decent distance from the Tyne howl with laughter every time United's name comes up in conversation.
Ashley, no doubt wearying of the hostility of the business world, clearly wants to be loved. He also has romantic feelings about football, but mixing business and romance is never a good idea. Ashley has the romance thing worse than most, sitting with fans in his replica shirt, drinking lager, dismissing the unglamorous Sam Allardyce as manager and replacing him with, of all people, Kevin Keegan.
If there was a point in signing up Keegan for his second stint at Newcastle it was to be found in the manager's mad impetuosity, his all-out emotional commitment, his inspiring love for the daft bloody game. But here Ashley lost his nerve. He appointed Keegan's temperamental opposite to keep him in check. Dennis Wise as executive director (football) has consistently undermined Keegan, hence the mess the club are in. Keegan has had a week in which he apparently resigned, had apparently been sacked and has now gone at last, while Newcastle's season fell apart before the astonished and bewildered eyes of supporters.
Everyone knows that stability, consistency and the strong input of a single visible leader are what bring success in football. So in comes a new owner and he goes for turbulence, for chopping and changing, for appointing a manager and then having second thoughts and bringing in an un-manager.
It has been the same at West Ham United. They somehow finished tenth last season and had their best start to a campaign in years, so off went Alan Curbishley because he got fed up with being in control and yet not being in control as the board took decisions about buying and selling out of his hands. As a result, Björgólfur Gudmundsson, the Icelandic chairman and owner, resembles a man unable to organise a drinking session in a BrennivÃn distillery.
Liverpool more or less patented the ideas of consistency and stability in their glory years, so the new American owners thought it would be more fun to take the opposite route. What's more, they hate each other. George Gillett Jr and Tom Hicks have cooked up some fine stunts between them, such as trying to sign Jürgen Klinsmann as manager while Rafael BenÃtez was in place. It was a dodgy move to start with, but getting found out was a PR disaster. The pair look disloyal, fickle, untrustworthy. And what about that stadium? Stanley Park — remember that? They would be shifting the earth on the site within 60 days of taking over, all right? We are now 18 months on and work has been delayed again.
The club float along on borrowed money, apparently unable to go forward or back, offering jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam today. And as always it's the owners who look silly, everyone else a mere victim of their methods of management.
Malcolm Glazer is more hated than laughed at, but the American owner of Manchester United has betrayed no interest in football and has launched the club on to a turbulent sea of debt. His sons, Joel, Avram, Bryan, Kevin and Edward, and daughter, Darcie, are on the board. Glazer's purchase prompted the foundation of a rebel club, FC United of Manchester, who play in the Unibond League. Bizarre stuff.
Not even Roman Abramovich can escape the might of Dr Barnes's Law. Untold billions don't stop you looking a fool; au contraire. Abramovich found his club, Chelsea, turned into a no-go area by the posturing of José Mourinho when he was manager and Mourinho's ability to play the press like a Stradivarius.
Abramovich almost found himself in a position of dismissing a man who won the Champions League — Mourinho twice took the club to the semi-finals — which is an absurd situation to be in. The Russian then made his pal, Avram Grant (initially appointed as an un-manager, to get in the way of Mourinho), manager and sacked him less than a year later for not being quite up to the job, as a million people pointed out as soon as the appointment was made.
Football consistently makes some of the most powerful and effective men in the world look silly. It is football's nature; it is football's gift to the common man. Partly, this comes about because football is not a business like running a shoe shop. Twenty well-run shoe shops will make a few bob, but even if you have 20 well-run clubs in the Premier League, you would still have only one winner.
A further problem is that football is fun and business is not. Millions are interested in the sport and follow it with a passion. Therefore, everything is stared at, everything is discussed, everything is examined, everything is everybody's concern.
But at the last it comes down to the inescapable fact that football is based on wild, romantic notions about life that are fundamentally incompatible with business practice. To go for pure business strategies in football is as inappropriate as going for pure footballing romance in business. But try the two together and you find yourself in a world of eternal tensions, which create eternal chaos in individuals and institutions.
A brilliant business brain doesn't let you off, nor does a bottomless purse, nor does a lifetime in the game.
Source. timesonline.co.uk/
Football makes fools of men; the bigger the fortune, the bigger the fool.
.
