Fair Play To Him? - Paul Hayward Gets His Knickers In A Twist

[Dorset]

 

“The clubs hit hardest by these arbitrary actions are those who had to spend heavily to raise underperforming clubs into the elite. City and PSG both fit this profile. It was no surprise, then, to find Roman Abramovich broadly supportive of the FFP principle. Chelsea’s owner had already torched the kind of cash City and PSG have burned in the last three years. By endorsing the move to have such extravagance cast as a crime, Abramovich was simply blocking the way to new tycoons and therefore protecting his competitive advantage.

 

…nobody wants an unregulated free for all, or illegality, or the crushing of the poor by the rich. But Uefa’s punishment of City takes no account of the direction in which the club is heading or the socially constructive investment in the Etihad Campus in a deprived part of Manchester. Shiekh Mansour and his entourage are not philanthropists, but nor does their spending fit the template of outright decadence.

 

…the seductive allure of FFP is that helps the poorer against the richer. All it might do in this case is to make Abu Dhabi resent being stigmatised and cause them to question Uefa’s motives. You can see the speech bubble now: “They take our money and then fine us for giving it to them?â€

 

…many of us would like to see regulation attack that issue before the Uefa bureaucracy drives through arbitrary penalties against a club (City) who are putting money in, rather than taking it out, however vulgar it might sometimes seem. Where is the £50 million fine for the Glazers for servicing their debts from Manchester United ’s revenues? On this evidence, FFP is mere grandstanding.â€

 

Paul Hayward - The Daily Telegraph, 7th May, 2014

 

Appearing in the newspaper under a heading of ‘Only in Platini’s mad world can generosity be a crime’ [as well as online] it is with assorted quotes like these that Paul Hayward tries to lead from the front on the question of Financial Fair Play in general, and Man City’s punishment in particular. He fails, dismally, one foot planted firmly on the protective side of his new-found, finance-friendly Mancunian club, whilst with the other he continues to kick out at Chelsea. Of course, the very fact that this ungainly stance wreaks of hypocrisy escapes his attention, but it wont stop the rest of us poking fun at a journo who has always chosen his targets to suit himself, come hell or higher standard of journalism. Lest we forget, back in 2009 Hayward wrote the following in The Guardian when we were singled-out as the only club adopting [what he called] a seek-and-lift policy for young footballers in France.

 

“Russia's oligarchs helped themselves to the vast state assets of the imploding Soviet Union, so it's no shock to find Roman Abramovich and Chelsea headhunters availing themselves of the fruits of other people's labours at smaller football clubs.

 

…to want Chelsea to be a self-renewing Harvard of cosmopolitan talent is a rational objective. The alternative is to torch £30m every time you have to go to the shops for a new Champions League-class striker. It's not the why, but the how that ignited last week's conflagration involving the Premier League’s rich and powerful and committee men who have gazed into Swiss lakes and found inside themselves a deep hatred of "child trafficking" of boys from clubs in France to opulence at Chelsea.

 

…most of us would agree that young talent should be allowed to develop at the European clubs where it was discovered without the big English clubs inducing it back to London or Manchester. But let's acknowledge the pattern of French clubs, specifically, enlisting the help of Fifa and a French Uefa president (Michel Platini) to bolster bureaucratic rigour in the face of English football's Thatcherite economics.â€

 

At the time this garbage was written Guardian bloggers had just about had their fill of Hayward’s vindictiveness towards certain clubs, never mind his relentless, repetitive ’torching’ symbolism and subsequent inability to stand up for himself when it came to online debating, so it came as no surprise when he moved on to a newspaper that was, and still is, less demanding in that combative arena. The pity of it is, however, that the ‘move on’ has seemingly dulled even further what little he had by way of logistical thought process in the first place and his current readership must now be totally bemused as to what he actually believes in regarding FFP and what, exactly, constitutes generosity if you happen to be Russian and own a football club.

 

Clearly, in Hayward’s xenophobic little world, nationality makes a difference. For instance, a French club like PSG is obviously fully entitled to spend heavily in order to raise their under-performing club to the elite level. So let’s cheer them along a virtuous path, shall we, whilst at the same time ignoring all those young pieces of talented French fruit lying abandoned in the gutter beneath, sniffing at our scented handkerchiefs as we go and trying not to give a second thought to those nasty Chels traffickers who once dared, like every over Premiership club that ever existed, to cherry pick from the ripest of European orchards. Not any more, though, not now we’ve supposedly fallen for the seductive allure of FFP, gifted to us by our archenemy Michel Platini so that we might pursue our own scurrilous plan of keeping the other bar stewards out of the Premiership garden centre. 

 

Not that we are alone in there most weekends, because Manchester United have to be ’in’ with us, otherwise why didn’t Sir Alex expose the Glazers for what they truly are [united revenue filchers par excellence] and be done with it long before retirement gave him more leisure hours in which to mulch? Then again, if this fly-boy knight knew that his employers were, as Paul so succinctly puts it, £50 million fine payers in the making, why not spill the beans in your autobiography… I’m sure your ghost-writer would have been only too pleased to put it all down in words of more than one syllable, logistical thought process allowing….especially when his name just happens to be Paul Hayward. 

 

[SHELLY]

Great post....I haven't used the word bumptious in ages, it seems to fit Hayward quite nicely, as does hypocritical, dull, pontificating and flatulent.

[Backbiter]

Great job ridiculing the @rsehole that is Hayward. To supplement your post, I'd like to share this unbelievable pile of bollox he wrote just before José fielded a weakened team up at Anfield:

 

 

Liverpool v Chelsea: A weakened team? Jose Mourinho could selfishly pull sky down on one of the great title races This was meant to be a Premier League title race for the history books, not one decided by politics and Jose Mourinho's self-interest, writes Paul Hayward

Fixture No 36 in Chelsea’s Premier League season was sent by the gods to let Jose Mourinho take revenge on all his enemies. Except Liverpool, who will be a leap closer to their first English title for 24 years if their visitors on Sunday hoist the white flag.

Mourinho can take them all down in one 90-minute payback: the league, referees, Manchester City, the television companies, even Roman Abramovich for not buying him a fancy striker. A potentially momentous clash had already been undermined by Chelsea’s extraordinary home defeat to Sunderland and Liverpool’s win at Norwich, but now the ‘Political One’ is threatening to field a shadow side at Anfield and treat the match as a rude interruption to his quest to scrape past Atlético Madrid in the Champions League semi-finals.

Attention-deflecting shields seldom come this big, and Mourinho is laughing away behind this one. First, he can claim that the Premier League’s refusal to shift the fixture to Saturday displays the warped priorities of the English game, even though the Chelsea v Sunderland game was moved to a Saturday to accommodate a Tuesday night date at Atlético.

Second, by declaring straight after the 0-0 draw at the Vicente Calderón that he would consult Abramovich on selection policy for the Liverpool game, he neatly shared any subsequent blame with the owner and made it a club issue rather than another example of his disputatiousness.

Third, Mourinho has steadily displayed the kind of persecution complex he paraded in Spain, where he set out to prove that a mystical underground power network was helping Barcelona at every turn.

Back in England, he has veered from praising our fairness and sportsmanship last summer to seeing conspiracies everywhere. His feuds with Mike Dean, Mike Riley and Chris Foy on the refereeing front indicate a need to divert the public’s gaze from bad defeats and bolster his file of excuses.

Some think Mourinho is playing possum ahead of the Anfield fixture. They think Chelsea will leap off the floor and do unto Liverpool what they did unto Manchester City at the Etihad Stadium, hounding and counter-attacking Manuel Pellegrini’s team with gusto. That night showed us Mourinho-the-master-strategist. If the mind games theory is wrong, Sunday will show the Mourinho who is willing to pull the sky down on one of the great title races out of self-interest.

There is no bluff involved in him thinking he cannot win the league. But the stalemate at Atlético and Real’s 1-0 victory over Bayern Munich in the other semi-final will have raised his hopes of winning the Champions League with a third club. The loss of Petr Cech and John Terry to injury forces him to think even more intensely about his team’s defensive strategy at Stamford Bridge on Wednesday.

Liverpool fans would be quite happy to see Mourinho field 11 Chelsea Pensioners or a side of under-eights. After 11 consecutive league wins for Brendan Rodgers’ men, there is nothing Chelsea can do to diminish the Anfield rebirth. If Liverpool return to where they last were in 1990 it will not be because Mourinho turned Machiavellian on the run-in. Yet the thrill is gone when a team who could still theoretically win the title pass up that chance in favour of glory in another competition.

Mourinho cannot break the rules by simply selecting a B team. Clubs now avoid the kind of punishments that befell Blackpool and Wolves. The 25-man squad, they argue, ought to allow for rotation and facilitate the fielding of strong teams in any circumstances.

A greater threat than the starting line-up itself is what message it might convey to Mourinho’s players. As we have seen in domestic cup competitions, if you tell them the competition is irrelevant it tends to show on the pitch. A five per cent drop in intensity is sufficient to allow Luis Suárez through on goal.

So if Chelsea trot out beneath the “This is Anfield†sign thinking the game is an exercise in injury-avoidance, then the vagaries of the fixture list and Mourinho’s politicking will have deprived us of a gloriously tense afternoon on Merseyside.

The other flaw in Mourinho’s case is that Atlético also play on Sunday.

Wednesday night’s battlefield is already level. Chelsea were seeking an advantage, not parity, in inquiring about the possibility of a switch to Saturday. All of which diverts the eye from the squandering of points at Newcastle, Stoke, Aston Villa, Crystal Palace and at home to Sunderland last weekend.

Mourinho redirected his forces to Europe when his domestic campaign flamed out. No one can dispute his logic. But the negativity he has brought to Chelsea’s season will find its biggest outlet if he goes in at half-steam against Liverpool. This was meant to be a Premier League title race for the history books, not one decided by politics.

 

I can also recommend the comments that follow it.

[startedwithglenn]

 

 

. But Uefa’s punishment of City takes no account of the direction in which the club is heading or the socially constructive investment in the Etihad Campus in a deprived part of Manchester. Shiekh Mansour and his entourage are not philanthropists, but nor does their spending fit the template of outright decadence.

 

 

 

 

Amazing he can attempt to write with so much authority on a subject he so clearly knows little about.

 

None of the investments into structural growth count towards the FFP books.

 

Moron, a disgustingly and oh so misguidedly smug one at that.

[Englishman]

Then again, if this fly-boy knight knew that his employers were, as Paul so succinctly puts it, £50 million fine payers in the making, why not spill the beans in your autobiography… I’m sure your ghost-writer would have been only too pleased to put it all down in words of more than one syllable, logistical thought process allowing….especially when his name just happens to be Paul Hayward. 

 

It's a poorly written book as well. One of those that makes you wonder if anyone bothered to read through it before sending it to the printers. If Fergie decides to write another I hope he employs a better quality ghostwriter.

[jack_super_class]

If we were against FFP we would be in the wrong

We are for FFP yet thats in the wrong too

 

We can't win.

[carrickblue]

If we were against FFP we would be in the wrong

We are for FFP yet thats in the wrong too

 

We can't win.

 

but at least Hayward recognises that we are pro FFP because we are already one of the established elite clubs who want to protect a competitive advantage.

 

the guy's clearly a complete kn*b 

[SydneyChelsea]

I forgot about that Hayward article re: Kakuta. A penny for his thoughts on Barcelona then?

Oh and Paul welcome to the party. Any Chelsea fan could see through the FFP veneer to a protectionist cabal from day 1 of its conception, but I'd wager you were too engrossed in self-righteous delusion that evil Chelsea would be financially throttled.

[SHELLY]

Great job ridiculing the @rsehole that is Hayward. To supplement your post, I'd like to share this unbelievable pile of bollox he wrote just before José fielded a weakened team up at Anfield:

 

I can also recommend the comments that follow it.

 

Superb stuff ! What a t*t...