Gary Speed 1969-2011

The shocking events of Sunday morning mean that all other ideas for blogs this week might seem pointless and rather trivial.

Sometimes, just sometimes Football isn’t the most important thing in the world and the tragic passing of Gary Speed aged at just 42 proves that.

The inquest into his death starts today and it would be entirely wrong of us to speculate as to what happened. But what we can say with certainty is that Gary touched lives far beyond the fans of the clubs he played for.

Everyone, from fans, players, his friends and family has been left shocked and stunned at his loss and the tributes have been both moving and fulsome.

He was a model professional for club and country and one of the greatest – perhaps the greatest -  goalscoring midfielder’s of his generation. Here was a man who lived a quiet life with his wife and two sons, who was never in the tabloids and who appeared happy. Speaking on the BBC, Mark Lawrenson said his abiding memory of Speed was how “normal he was.”

He was also a dedicated professional footballer. He embraced the new thoughts on diet and fitness a long time before they became prevalent in the game only the most dedicated and fit of players can still be playing football into their 40’s as Speed did in a career that spanned over 20 years.

And what a career it was! Playing 677 league games for Leeds – with whom he won the league in 1992 - Everton, Newcastle, Bolton and Sheffield United, he also scored 103 goals.

A boyhood Everton fan, he jumped at the chance to sign for them in 1996 after eight years at

Elland Road

, and whilst at Goodison Park he scored the winner in a Merseyside derby. It took £5.5m to get him to the North East and St James’ Park, and it was here that he enjoyed the second most prolific spell – playing over 200 games for Newcastle.

He was nearly 35 when he left there to move south to Bolton in 2004, but far from winding down he managed three and a half years more in the Premier League playing another 120 games before moving to Sheffield United as Player-Coach.

It was whilst at Brammall Lane that he took his first steps into the Management Career he had always seemed destined for, taking over in the hot seat after Kevin Blackwell was sacked in September.

He was only at the helm for a matter of months before his beloved Wales came calling. Speed had been the Captain of the National Team had played 92 times for his country. He was appointed at the Welsh National Manager on December 14^th 2010 and he was slowly turning the fortunes of the country around, declaring his “pride” at the way his team had played despite the loss to England and since then they have recorded three successive wins for the first time in three years, including a 4-1 friendly win against Norway which Speed himself declared as “sensational.”

Sadly we will never get to see just how good a manager he could have made.

His last public appearance was as a pundit on Football Focus on the BBC on Saturday, when he gave no impression that was worried about anything. Making plans to visit Alan Shearer at his home this weekend and thanking host of the show Dan Walker for having him on. Tragically he will never be on again.

Amongst the many moving and warm tributes to Gary came from his friend Robbie Savage, who was in tears on the news when he said: "I loved him as a friend, his wife is beautiful, he had a lovely family, he'd do anything for anybody.

"I idolised him, he was one of my heroes in life, he's been there for me, someone I spoke to every week…this guy had everything, a beautiful family. He had a caring, loving family and was doing great at his job. Why has this happened?

"He was a larger than life character, he's got a great family, his father Roger travelled all around the world to watch him and he's left behind two beautiful, beautiful boys. It's just so sad.”

Everyone at Football Business echoes those thoughts and our condolences and good wishes are with his family and friends.

Financial Fair Play, The £194m Loss....And Snoods

Personalised snoods.

Those two words alone tell you all you need to know about the ridiculous situation at Manchester City.

On the pitch things are going superbly, 11 wins in 12 games to start the season tells you as much.

Off the field, it’s not so good – at least on paper. First they lost Chief Exec Garry Cook thanks to some pretty stupid and offensive remarks about a player’s mother who had cancer, then last week they announced record losses.

In case you haven’t seen, Man City lost a quite staggering £194 million last year. Just to repeat that figure it is ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY FOUR MILLION POUNDS.

Then this week we see the news that they have bought all their players personalised snoods to wear in training – of course that is a miniscule outlay compared to the losses, but doesn’t it just sum things up? Doesn’t it just sum up how out of control football’s spending is? And those comments could apply to every club at top level really, not just City.

As Ian Herbert put it in the Independent last week, though: ”Thankfully for City, the figures will not be taken into account used as part of UEFA's Financial Fair Play regulations as they fall outside the accounting window.”

Those regulations stipulate that no club can incur loses of more than £40m in the two seasons of the FFP regulations (the monitoring period begins at the end of this season.)

But even then, of course, clubs will get round the regulations, by finding ever more novel ways to do things, in a similar way of course to that which Manchester City have in having their ground and the so-called Etihad Village that is being built across the road from the ground sponsored for a reported £350m over a ten year period.

So UEFA can make all its grand pronouncements and it can talk as tough as it likes, but until a massive club is actually punished, surely they will just pay the regulations lip service and football will spiral out of control even further.

No other business (except maybe Banking – but that is a whole different political argument ) would be allowed to carry on in such a fashion, nobody else in any walk of life other than football would be able to spend money with such impunity and have someone else picking up the tab. And crucially nobody else, faced with these figures would try and give them a positive spin, which is what the powers that be at Manchester City attempted to do last week.

What of the role of the fans in all of this?

Lets be honest the fans of “Citeh” don’t really care about this – and neither should they, when they thrashed Man United, when they won the Cup, do you really think they thought to themselves, “yeah this is great, but we can’t afford it, it just not fair,” but then the same could be said for Portsmouth fans a couple of seasons ago.

But the responsibility rests with the owners of Man City to run the club in a responsible and business-like way, consistent with the principles of running any other business and crucially it rests with the Governing bodies to enforce their own rules and not be as toothless as you suspect they might be.

Because if they don’t actually do something about the situation then big football clubs will carry on in exactly the way they choose to do with absolutely no recompense.

I stress again that those comments don’t just relate Manchester City, but all football clubs, its just that Man city are the only ones who announced £194m losses last week – and promptly bought their players personalised snoods.

Gripped By Olympic Fever?

Football Business found itself in the pub last Friday night and while talking to a mate about next years cricket season the conversation got round to the Olympics.

The Olympic Act (2006) passed by Parliament is a hefty document, weighing in at 61 pages and amongst the many things it does a law in there means there can be no other sport played in London at the time of the games and because of this England are only played South Africa for three Test Matches rather than the usual four of five.

Given that SA are the second best Test Match Team in the world the prospect of England taking them on has got cricket fans excited and my mate is a trifle vexed at the curtailing of the series.

He went a little further, claiming he was planning to “go away” during the Olympics because he wasn’t bothered by the whole thing and he was already getting annoyed by the hype.

Now, I don’t agree with that necessarily – in fact I have already gone on record on this blog to say that I am quite positive about it – but his comments did get me thinking. With the games now less than nine months away are we gripped by “Olympic Fever” like it is claimed, or are we, as a country, less than enthused at this stage?

Ticket sales went well, with many sports sold out, but this doesn’t tell the whole story, most tickets were bought by those in the south of the UK, with less and less uptake the further North you go. Which points to the whole thing being a rather Southern bias to things. It seems that despite the “UK being gripped by Olympics fever” that many swathes of it are rather underwhelmed by the whole thing.

In fairness there are some events in other areas of the country – the football primarily being taken all over (although there’s no 5 or 6 a side stuff no matter how much we lobby!!) but as we argued on here the other week Football Business thinks that Football has no business at the Olympics so that is rather hollow anyway.

Then there was the revelation last week that the Government is spending £750,000 on tickets. As The Telegraph put it: “2012 has been dubbed The Peoples Games, that must be because the people are paying for absolutely everything.” Again, in fairness, that represents just 0.1% of the total amount of tickets, but it just seems a little too much expense when the public are having to pay so much for everything else.

Then there is the anticipated traffic chaos – bizarrely the lady in charge of Transport for the games was on radio the other week and her plan to alleviate the problems appeared to be “Londoners can work from home for a fortnight.”

There are, in fairness a lot of good things about the Olympics. The stadiums are completed already, the organisation appears to be running well at this stage and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of competitors who are focussing on their training for perhaps the biggest event of their lives.

But next time someone tells you that “Britain is gripped by Olympic Fever” perhaps you should look beyond the headlines. A lot of people couldn’t care less.

Are Things Going To Change - Dont Bet On It?!

Now the dust is settling on the betting scandal that saw three Pakistan Cricketers imprisoned, together with their manager for conspiring to bowl no-balls in a test match last year, we can perhaps think about why they did it.

The obvious answer, of course, is money, greed and thinking they could get away with it, and as has been pointed out in cricket, it would be pretty easy to do just that.

When Football Business isn’t selling franchises to run 5 and 6 a side football leagues we spend a lot of time watching County Cricket, and to be totally honest if bowler A wants to bowl a no-ball then, who in front of 200 spectators on a cold Thursday morning in April is going to remember that it happened? Let alone, to be honest, care.

Of course, it could be argued now that everyone is under suspicion – and that, probably is the worst aspect of this. Every player is effectively “tarred with the same brush.” As an example, I was at a county game a few months ago when a player on the opposition was having what is known as a “no ball problem.”

There was a self-appointed “comedian” in the crowd who, on each occasion this happened, shouted “oh, somebody call the bookies,” there was a titter in the crowd the first time, a little less on the second, but by the tenth it had become downright annoying and you felt sorry for the bowler concerned, who given the attendance levels at these things, could hear every word.

You can only speculate at the level of coercion that took place to get Messrs Butt, Asif, and Amir to cheat. Maybe they were threatened, maybe they weren’t, maybe they were wiling accomplices with no conscience, maybe they weren’t. The fact is that only they know.

What we can be certain of is that this type of betting has been going on for ages. The now deceased former South African Captain Hansie Cronje admitted his role in a match fixing scandal, he was banned for life, but two other players implicated are still playing. Another cricketer implicated in so called “Spot Fixing” is on the England Test Cricket Coaching staff.

As sport becomes ever more like a business and there is ever more money being bet on outcomes, these types of stories will become ever-more prevalent. Certainly the scourge has hit snooker and football already, with World Champion John Higgins banned from the sport for a while and soccer games in Korea, Germany and Italy falling under suspicion and resulting in suicides, convictions and recriminations in the last few years.

And before we start thinking it’s a recent phenomenon, let’s not forget that four players were banned from football for life for their role in fixing a match in December 1962 between Sheffield Wednesday and Ipswich Town, and in his autobiography Matt Le Tissier said that he had agreed to make money on a bet on the time of the first throw in: Spread betting had just started to become popular. It was a new idea which allowed punters to back anything from the final score to the first throw-in”, he said.

“There was a lot of money to be made by exploiting it. We were safe from the threat of relegation when we went to Wimbledon on April 17 and, as it was a televised match, there was a wide range of bets available.

“Obviously I’d never have done anything that might have affected the outcome of the match, but I couldn’t see a problem with making a few quid on the time of the first throw-in.


“My team-mate had some friends with spread-betting accounts who laid some big bets for us. We stood to win well into four figures but if it went wrong we could have lost a lot of money.

“The plan was for us to kick the ball straight into touch at the start of the game and then collect 56 times our stake. Easy money.

“It was set up nicely. The ball was to be rolled back to me and I would smash it into touch. It seemed to be going like clockwork. We kicked off, the ball was tapped to me and I went to hit it out towards Neil Shipperley on the left wing.

“As it was live on television I didn’t want to make it too obvious or end up looking like a prat for miscuing the ball so I tried to hit it just over his head. But with so much riding on it I was a bit nervous and didn’t give it quite enough welly.

“The problem was that Shipperley knew nothing about the bet and managed to reach it and even head it back into play.

“Suddenly it was no longer a question of winning money. We stood to lose a lot of cash if it went much longer than 75 seconds before the ball went out.

“I had visions of guys coming to kneecap me. Eventually we got the ball out on 70 seconds. The neutral time meant we had neither won nor lost. I have never tried spread betting since.”

Quite why he tired it in the first place is open to question but it was probably money, greed and thinking he could get away with it. Which brings us back to the cricketers.

In betting it seems, as in life, the more things change the more they stay the same.

We Only Beat This If Everyone Speaks Up!

Last night during the Champions League game between Chelsea and Genk there was some pretty distasteful chants from a section of the Chelsea crowd about Anton Ferdinand.

Football Business does not intend to repeat the chants here (they are freely available elsewhere if you want to have a look what was said) but we do join Chelsea in condemning it.

A statement from The Blues said: “The chanting was wholly inappropriate and we don’t condone it.”

What I will add, though, that it could have done with Andre Villas Boas condemning it as well, he claimed, in the best traditions of Mangers to have not heard anything as he was “concentrating on the game.”

I am not having that excuse. We all know – and no doubt you have been at games yourselves – when player x or manager y has been urged to “give us a wave” by the crowd and, largely without exception they do. The crowd cheers and the game carries on.

So please, don’t insult our intelligence by claiming not to hear stuff.

That attitude, though, in a way does encapsulate what’s wrong with the attempts to fight racism in the game. It is too easy to claim you haven’t heard stuff – easier certainly than confronting things.

Of course giant strides have been made in the last couple of decades. When I first started going to football in the mid 1980s black players were subjected to some fearful abuse. George Berry – he of the giant afro – famously ate a banana he had thrown at him at Millwall. He also went to remonstrate with a fan who shouted abuse at him on another occasion. Those instances and what I am sure were countless others like them are mercifully rare these days.

The great irony in all of the John Terry/Anton Ferdinand incident that sparked all this off was that it happened in the Kick It Out fortnight of events. Much of the credit for the virtual eradication of racism in the game belongs with the Kick It Out organisation. The campaign – which we are happy and proud to support – has worked tirelessly to champion the cause.

I am sure they would agree with me, though, that the key phrase in the last paragraph was “virtual eradication”. And whilst its unlikely that racism in football – just as in society, which football has always largely reflected – will ever be ended, it certainly will not be while crowds think its ok to sing and chant in the way Chelsea did last night, when the manager “doesn’t hear anything.”

As Edmund Burke once noted: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

It is perhaps something we should remember.

Help Football Business Help Movember This Month

At Football Business not only do we want to help you run community 5 and 6 a side league to help everyone, we also like to do our bit too.

That is why we are both pleased and excited to announce a massive charity initiative for November.

Throughout November any profits we make will not be going to us. No siree.

Instead all our profits throughout November are going straight to the Movember appeal!

Movember, in case you didn’t know, is a charity campaign that seeks to raise money and awareness for Men’s Health, notably Prostate and Testicular cancer.

The way they do this is to get men (Mo Bros) to grow moustaches.

The scheme is worldwide and is backed by many top sports stars.

Everyone in the world probably has their own story of how cancer has touched their lives. In my own family we have lost many close family members and I wanted to do my bit to help. A lot of the lads in the football-business.co.uk office have signed up to be Mo Bros and the board of Directors have very generously and very kindly agreed to support us by donating all the profits we make next month to the charity.

There are no gimmicks, no catches, just charity. And moustaches.

So help us by telling everyone you know about what we are doing, and if they want to buy a 5 or 6 a side football franchise in November they can do it safe in the knowledge that they are helping the fight against cancer.

And that we look even dafter than we usually do!

Team GB: Any Place At The Games?

Something very weird happened at the Football Business Offices last week.

Something so odd, so utterly bemusing and strange that I didn’t quite understand the magnitude of what had happened until about an hour later.

Even then I tried to deny it, but it is inescapable.

And it is this:

Arsene Wenger said something and I thought: “he’s got a point.” In fact, I didn’t just think “he’s got a point” I thought, “yes, you know, what Arsene said is right.”

This isn’t a trivial matter as far as I am concerned. Agreeing with Mr Wenger isn’t something I do lightly, it isn’t something I like doing and it is something I hope I don’t do again.

But last week when the Arsenal boss said about Olympic Football: “it’s not a real tournament.” I thought to myself ‘he’s correct.’

The reason for the comments to come out last week, you suspect was that last week saw the announcement of the Coaches for the 2012 football tournament. Stuart Pearce will lead the male team, with Hope Powell at the helm of the ladies side.

It’s a job that – for Pearce – appears fraught with problems. The Scottish, Irish and Welsh FA’s don’t want their players selected for any “Team GB” for fear that any moves to do that could see their autonomy within FIFA eroded, so it might be that Team GB is effectively Team England – although Gareth Bale and Aaron Ramsey have declared their hope to play.

And it is the latter that has vexed Arsene. He doesn’t want his players burnt out in what he considers a pointless competition. And, although I do not share the cynicism of a lot of the country for the event and am tremendously looking forward to it, I agree with the Arsenal boss: football has no place there.

In fact, I don’t recall ever watching an Olympic Football match if I am honest, and I am sure I am not the only one.

Football – or for that matter tennis – have no business being in the games (tennis is different matter – it shouldn’t exist full stop). I remember seeing the eminent cultural Professor Ellis Cashmore say that “any sport for which the Olympics wasn’t the pinnacle” shouldn’t be at the competed for at the Games, and its something that makes sense. Are we to believe that Gareth Bale grew up dreaming of the chance to play for Team GB when he was a boy in Cardiff, or did he want to win the Premier League, Champions League or the World Cup for Wales?

Therein, surely is the difference. Usain Bolt would have dreamed of winning Olympic Gold, so do amateur boxers, cyclists, rowers, swimmers and countless other sports men and women. That’s why those sports belong to the gold medallists and football doesn’t.

Team GB must complete of course. Hopefully it will have players from all four Home Nations in as it should, but whether the sport in general should be there is an entirely different matter.

The rest of what Wenger said was:  “For me, the Olympics is for track and field, basically.”

And, as someone who loves the idea of watching the Olympic boxing tournament, or minority sports like Weightlifting I profoundly disagree with that premise.

Disagreeing with Arsene Wenger. My world makes sense again.

The Stupidest Idea Ever?

There have been two big Football Business stories this week.

One has been bubbling for a while and it is something we have talked about before on the Blog. Namely Overseas TV rights.

Last week saw Ian Ayre, Managing Director of Liverpool saying that he wanted an end to clubs all receiving the same money for games overseas no matter how many times they were on. He was pretty blunt (one of the comments reported was: “who tunes in from Kuala Lumpur to watch Bolton?”)

There has been debate about how the comments symbolised Liverpool’s move from Bill Shankley’s socialist roots to the modern, capitalist new world that football now inhabits – further distancing itself from his working class routes. And while, in fairness to Ayre, there is some merit in what he says: Liverpool are on the TV more than Bolton so it can be argued they should be getting more remuneration for this, it is a premise that we at Football Business wholly disagree with.

One of the strengths, surely of English Football (as opposed to other countries) is that we – just about – sustain over 100 professional clubs, and one of the ways we do that is by collective bargaining. In fact, the overseas TV deal is surely the only thing that is equitable about the Premier League and it must stay that way.

The other is even more stupid. In fact, it must rank as perhaps the single most stupid suggestion that has ever been uttered. A story emerged on Monday from the League Managers Association that some of the Premier Leagues foreign owners wanted to abolish relegation. The LMA’s Chief Exec Richard Bevan explained that these people wanted to move to an American Franchise type system of a closed shop.

Encouragingly this idea looks already dead in the water. A host of football people have lined up to ridicule it. Sir Alex calling it “suicide,” Dave Whelan, the Wigan Chairman, saying in today’s Guardian that he would “resign from the Premier League” if it happened and Venky’s Group – the owners of Blackburn Rovers – releasing a statement yesterday explaining: “We believe that the EPL's success is, in large parts, down to its ability to create such excitement for all who follow it, fans, players and staff and of course we the owners.

"We see no reason why anybody would feel it necessary to change the current format of the competition and are proud and privileged to be a part of such a great League.”

Without core support any plot – if there even was one– to ruin (and that’s not too strong a word for it) our great game will never get off the ground.

We all know what promotion and relegation brings to a league. We know how it has improved the competitiveness of Cricket and Rugby – indeed we always encourage our Franchisees to start more than one division because even in 5 and 6 a side football people want to go up and they want teams who deserve to go down to do just that.

Football is, was and must always be meritocracy. And, actually despite all the hot air this week, I am sure it always will be.