allblues09
Well-Known Member
Wow, I can't believe it, but a good article about Blatter and Platinis anti-English agenda. Even mentions their hate for our beloved owners.
Well done Daily Mail. (how often am I able to say something like that!)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/fo...1/Still-Spanish-inquisition-Mr-President.html
Well done Daily Mail. (how often am I able to say something like that!)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/fo...1/Still-Spanish-inquisition-Mr-President.html
Still no Spanish inquisition then, Mr President?
Martin Samuel
Manchester City may well buy David Villa in the summer, but do not worry. There are still at least three months of the season left during which you could, too.
Villa, like the rest of the squad at Valencia, is soon to be available for weddings, christenings and, for all we know, bar mitzvahs, according to reports in Spain.
The financial plight of his club is such that it has recently been proposed that, from the end of this season, the pitch at the mighty Mestalla stadium will be up for rent. Betrothals, baptisms, first communions and business meetings will be entertained and the really big spenders might get the players thrown in. And yet, no word from UEFA president Michel Platini.
Last November, it was revealed that Valencia's debt stood at £462million, including £222m owed to local bank, Bancaja. At one stage the players were also owed £13m, which could explain Valencia's plummet to mid-table from second position. At the end of last month, work was halted on the new 75,000-seat stadium at Paterna because the money simply ran out.
The project was about to enter a costly stage using metal materials and, with the builders light by £21m, workers downed tools.
And yet, absolutely no mention of this from Platini. At the risk of being one of those types his cheerleaders have labelled paranoid, don't you think there is ever so slightly a chance that if Valencia had been a Premier League club Platini would have found a way of working their circumstances into one of his high-minded pronouncements on the state of the game?
Maybe Sepp Blatter, president of FIFA, would have referenced them in passing, too Indeed, don't you think that if it had been an English club which, in the space of five years, had more than trebled its debt while employing five presidents, five sporting directors, three director generals and three chief medical officers, there would have been just a hint of condemnation from the men who campaign so vigorously for corporate responsibility in the game?
And yet, not a dicky-bird from either of them.
Not a mention of the £556m Spanish clubs are said to owe in tax or of the study carried out by Universitat de Barcelona that conservatively estimated the accumulated debt of clubs in La Liga at £2.5billion, equivalent to 92 per cent of their assets.
Throughout Spain, there are six clubs, including the recently relegated trio of Real Sociedad, Celta Vigo and Levante, in bankruptcy protection.
The Universitat report used the most recent figures available, from the 2006-07 season, so these were happier times for Valencia and their debt was estimated as only £265m, which did not even win them a place in Spain's top three. Real Madrid were top with £488m, then Atletico Madrid with £399m and, in third place, Barcelona with £360m.
And yet, if you remember, Platini had absolutely no problem with Real Madrid's attempt to seize Cristiano Ronaldo from Manchester United for a small fortune last summer, despite his love of the level financial playing field.
It must only be the indebted English clubs that are destroying fair competition in the transfer market.
The revelation that in 2006-07, La Liga clubs earned £1.18bn and spent £1.28bn is another one of those little details that seems to fly from his memory under the pressure of public speaking.
So how did Valencia get in this much trouble? Well, it turns out that just because your owner is Spanish it does not mean he is any better for your club than these Arabs and Americans who Platini wishes would just go back to their own country and stop taking jobs from hard-working English billionaires.
In Valencia's case, a property developer called Juan Bautista Soler took a successful, functioning club and turned it into a freewheeling catastrophe.
Long story short, his major mistake was attempting to finance the building of the new stadium through continued success in the Champions League, a concept he may have borrowed from Peter Ridsdale's Big Book of Football Economics (also known as Whoosh! There Goes Another Ten Million or Why Not Set Fire To it?).
By the time Soler's football policies had blown any chance of Valencia's continuance as a force, the Spanish property market had collapsed and it was too late to be saved by his alternate strategy, selling the Mestalla.
Soler resigned and there followed a succession of inadequate figureheads, including Juan Villalonga, who lasted two weeks and somehow picked up £9.2m for it, until the major creditors, Bancaja, lost patience and installed Javier Gomez as executive director.
It is Gomez who is talking about selling Villa and David Silva for top money, even though it will no longer make a dent in Valencia's debt.
This could explain why City's first inquiry about Villa was met with a desperate demand for £90m. And yet, still no comment from Blatter or Platini. As wedding bells fade to a funeral march at the Mestalla, a cynic might even suspect these gentlemen had another agenda.