What Price Justice?

When Harry Redknapp walked free from court last week not only did it set a chain of events in motion that saw the England Manager lose his job, it led to reports in the press that the trial itself had cost £8m.

Football Business tweeted on Friday: So an £8m 5-year investigation to find that someone who was accused of fiddling tax on less than 200 grand was innocent #moneywellspent and we were far from the only ones to share those views.

In fact so fierce was the outcry that the HMRC released a statement last week denying that the court case had cost anywhere near that much and instead insisting that the actual cost was somewhere in the region of £1.3m, indeed it further suggested that the £1.3m figure also included the trial of former Pompey Chief Exec Peter Storrie, who it emerged had been acquitted of similar charges last year.

A spokesman was unequivocal: “There's been a lot of nonsense talked about the cost of this investigation to HMRC.” They told press, with their figures coming in at around £300,000 apparently. The other million comes from barristers fees, which in Dec 2011 stood at just over £944,000.

So the question begs itself: What price justice? And does it actually matter how much it costs to see justice done?

You can see why people got vexed by this. The investigation into Redknapp has gone on for five years and was all to do with the sort of sums that Carlos Tevez takes home per week.

But, is that the point? Surely you don’t want to get into a situation where you are looking for value for money in justice and cases don’t go to court because you can’t afford to see it through?

However, on the other side of that you do have to wonder if, in these times of fiscal hardship and cutbacks and budget deficits whether it should have taken five years to investigate something and bring it to trial – especially when you consider the fact that Storrie had already been cleared (that detail wasn’t reported – and rightly so, for fear of prejudicing the court case).

Personally I am inclined to think that, when all things are considered, the cost of things isn’t important when it comes to the law. You can’t get in a situation where people think to themselves “I can get away with this because they can’t afford to investigate.” And the actual cost of the crime – as we have pointed out already, in this case it was considerably less that what some Premier League players earn in a week – shouldn’t really be a consideration.

Of course, in this particular Messrs Mandaric, Redknapp and Storrie have been vindicated in their belief of their innocence and are free to carry on their lives. That being the case, it easy to point fingers and suggest that money has been wasted. But I wonder if that had been said if the Spurs boss and the Sheffield Wednesday owner were in prison this week?

If the HMRC are to be believed, rather than the more lurid reports, then the £1.3 million is a tiny, miniscule drop in the ocean compared the bank bailouts, or MP’s expenses. Or indeed just over a sixth of what the outgoing England Manager was paid – and probably just about what he received as a pay-off.

Points of Principle

On Monday night, it probably would have been beneficial for all concerned if Luis Suarez had slipped quietly back into action after his eight game ban was completed.

But it didn’t happen, did it?

And it didn’t happen for two reasons. First he was booked – and in the view of many in the Football Business office he was lucky not to get sent off – for kicking Scott Parker, and second, because Kenny Dalglish decided that a matter that should have had a line drawn under it was not, in fact, closed. Instead he decided that everyone – yet again – needed to hear his opinions on what did or didn’t happen between his player and Patrice Evra that day at Anfield.

The Liverpool boss has been widely quoted as saying in his post match interview: "It's fantastic to have him back. He should never have been out in the first place.”

Leaving aside whether the Uruguayan should or shouldn’t have been suspended for his comments that day (and lest we forget the words he used to Evra are not in dispute, merely whether they were intended in a racist way) surely Dalglish is a clever enough individual to know that what he was saying was potentially inflammatory given that the two sides meet this weekend, for the first time at Old Trafford since it happened in October.

When the giants clashed the other week in the FA Cup The FA (in, it must be said, a rare attack of good sense) wrote to both clubs and asked them to refrain from talking about the incident, but unfortunately no one seems to issued such an edict this time around.

And yet, this is no ordinary rivalry. Liverpool v Manchester Utd is perhaps the bitterest antipathy in English football, it is a game that can always have the potential for trouble, even before Suarez and Evra is added into proceedings and certainly it didn’t need the rather unfortunate input of the Liverpool boss.

But should we be surprised? Everything that Liverpool FC have done recently has made a bad situation worse. The stupid t-shirts the squad (including Suarez) and the Manager wore at Wigan before Christmas outraged anti-racism campaigners and according to reports even insiders at Anfield think they were a mistake.

Then there was the bluster about their appeal against the ban – one which they backed down on, when, lets be honest, it became expedient for them to do so. This was topped off with a rather daft statement they made on their website which insinuated Evra was guilty of all manner of things. The whole unedifying escapade shows the club in a bad light.

It is tempting to suggest that they should have showed some humility, but the time for that has passed. What they should have now done was nothing at all, but unfortunately no one told their manager.

Someone who was famously shy and distrustful of the Media when he was a player and reticent to speak to them in his first spell as boss, now can’t stop making statements – and football is all the poorer for it.

Managing To Make Money From The Players

It is not for us –for all sorts of reasons – to speculate as to the guilt or otherwise of Messrs Mandaric and Redknapp.

But there is one thing we can speak about, which has become common knowledge as part of the evidence is the issue of managers receiving part of the fees for selling players to other clubs.

Redknapp, it emerged, received in the region of £200,000 for selling Peter Crouch to Aston Villa in 2002, and these payments are common place.

They were written into his contract, so just be clear, I am not suggesting in any way that anyone to do with the transfer acted improperly and the payments were perfectly legal and above board – but were they right?

Is it not a conflict of interests, or more accurately, can a conflict of interests not be suggested? For example, to take Peter Crouch since he is the named player in the deals, if Crouch was scoring goals and Portsmouth were going for Promotion and a club comes in with a big bid, does the manager – in this case Redknapp - keep him in order to further those promotion prospects, or does he recommend the player be sold for personal gain?

As James Lawton put it in The Independent last week: “The practice in general opens up the issue.”
“At what point,” argues Lawton. “Might a manager, conscious of the uncertainties of a results-oriented business where pressure on the jobs of even the most distinguished operators has never been so great, be tempted to put his own interests before those of his club, and by extension, the fans who supply its lifeblood?”

And isn’t that the crux of the thing? Is it right that this is allowed to happen?
Redknapp isn’t the only manager to benefit in this way, of course. It appears that Dario Gradi’s fabled Crew Alex production line also produced plenty of cash for him as he personally benefitted from the transfers of the likes of David Platt, Robbie Savage and Dean Ashton. Gradi’s presence on the board at the Alexandra Stadium on Gresty Road further exacerbates the situation.

Although the Italian is no longer the Manager of the now League Two side he still retains his right to a percentage of player transfers out of the club – and with the likes of Nick Powell and Max Clayton currently starring for the England U-19 side he may well be getting to top up his ISA again soon.
There are, I am sure many within football who cannot see what the fuss regarding these payments is about. In his aforementioned piece in The Independent last week, Lawton quotes “an experienced football administrator” as saying: “The system can be justified... a manager, who has no kind of job security, does a good job, makes the club a huge profit on an individual player, so why shouldn't he have his share? Like the bankers do when they improve the figures.”

Although even here this person agrees that there is a potential for wrong-doing to at least appear to be done. "The potential problem lies in the possibility of some managers and players maybe being tempted to collude over their short-term interests rather than the long-term ones of the club.” Which is an interesting way of putting it.
The issue at hand here is not whether these payments are legal and above board – they clearly are – the issue at hand is rather they are right.

And if that is hard to quantify, then what might be harder to do is to decide whether to allow the practice to continue. At this point, now these payments are in the public domain, do the authorities need to have a look at what is going on here and perhaps act accordingly, before this rather murky aspect of football business really get too far out of hand?