10th October 2003: Football in
crisis? You would think so if you took notice of the media this week.
I don't very often read newspapers and now I know why - the opinions
expressed in the London Evening Standard (sister paper of the Daily
Mail) yesterday were, to put it politely, extreme and suggested that
football was full of low-lifes of the worst character. Obviously,
it has been a bad week for football, but talk of a crisis is, in my
opinion, a huge overstatement.
Take the whole Rio Ferdinand incident. The whole thing was emminently
preventable had the FA got their act together. Ferdinand failed to
attend a drugs test on 23rd September - he was stupid. I agree with
the FA in that his excuse about moving house is just not acceptable;
drugs testing is one of the most important things in sport today,
and Rio should have given it the attention it deserves. He took the
test the following day and was found to be clean.
It then took eight days before a letter was sent to Ferdinand explaining
the problem - eight days!! Whether this was down to Sport England,
who carry out the testing, or the FA is unclear, but surely it should
not take eight days to write a letter about a matter that was evidently
clear cut. Once the England squad announcement was imminent, the FA
obviously took the view that if Rio played against Turkey and it emerged
that he was guilty of a "doping offence", all hell could break loose
in the international football community - this is understandable.
However, if the personal interview had been held before the England
squad announcement, which should have been possible, Ferdinand would
have probably been fined and his name would not have been released.
In fact, it has emerged that an unnamed Manchester City player went
through the same procedure last season having missed a test due to
being "caught in traffic" - his name was never released.
This, I believe, is why the England players got upset. The FA have
effectively punished Ferdinand without going throught the due process
that their own rules dictate. His name need not have been released
had the FA/Sport England acted in a timely manner, and the England
squad would've been unaffected. Having said that, I think a strike
threat, if there ever was one (I wonder how real the threat really
was), was ill-advised, although the criticism the England squad has
received in the media has been a little over-zealous - but that's
the English tabloid press for you. It remains to be seen what effect
this will have on the match, but I think it will, if anything, have
a positive impact - England sides often produce their best in adversity.
I saw a comment in the Standard praising the Turkish squad for allowing
the TV and print media to attend an informal barbecue with their families
and lamenting the fact that the England squad were always kept at
arms length from the media - are they that blind to realise that while
the Turkish media used the event to get a few quotes to use in their
stories to get behind their side, the English media would only use
such events to look for some sort of scandal to ruin the reputation
of a successful sportsman or two.
Obviously, the sex scandals involving Jody Morris in Leeds and other
players in a London hotel are serious issues and will obviously reflect
badly on football. But surely this is more a problem with society.
Anyone found guilty of such offences should be treated in accordance
to the law, but the fact that they are footballers doesn't mean it's
a football problem or that football is in crisis. I accept that clubs
could do more to prevent their young well-paid stars from going off
the rails, but they're all adults responsible for their own actions.
Football is not in crisis. The last crisis was in the mid-eighties
when English clubs were out of Europe, there was no money in the game
and attendances were in a slump (under 10,000 was common at the Hawthorns).
Sky saved the day and football boomed through the nineties and is
still booming today. Yes, the money has changed the game and perhaps
not always for the better, but talk of a crisis is surely ridiculous?
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