It has been a week, and I am here to tell you I still haven’t gotten over it. Imagine my surprise when, while watching Tiger Woods shoot 81 in Scotland, I came upon an even bigger story.
Rio Ferdinand is sold from Leeds United to Manchester United! It cut a hole in my soccer heart larger than the divot ousted Rep. James Traficant uses for hair. The deal was for 30 million pounds, which converts to $47.7 million, unless you’re at one of the foreign currency exchange booths at the airport, where they take half.
“Spend, Spend, Spend” was the headline in a London tabloid after the monumental transaction took place in broad daylight, if you can find any of that over there. The whole thing resembles a problem afflicting our most troubled sport, baseball. The rich get richer while the poor fire a pitching coach or give away their second baseman, whichever stalling tactic is cheaper.
After the reserve clause in America’s former pastime was declared illegal in 1975, people involved in futbol, the world’s most popular sport, braced for free agency. Sure enough Europe’s courts ruled soccer players also can change teams when their contracts expire, without restrictions, compensation or having to turn in their knee pads.
No less an authority than Gerhard Mayer-Vorfelder, vice president of the German soccer federation and an old friend whose opinion we value, labeled the decision “catastrophic . . . many clubs will be threatened with bankruptcy and I am sure salaries can now only go up.” He sounds like he’s an old friend of Bud Selig’s too.
Anyway, Ferdinand is gone after announcing he didn’t want to take corner kicks for Leeds anymore. So he was traded for cash to Sir Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United manager who was the George Steinbrenner of soccer even before Manchester United formed a marketing link with the New York Yankees.
Naturally, fans of Leeds United are united in outrage, although all involved parties are putting a nice spin on the controversy over there, just like all the mopes who are ruining baseball over here. Leeds Chairman Peter Ridsdale said he didn’t want to part with Ferdinand but had no choice and now he can use that money to buy other players, ho, ho.
Meanwhile Ferguson justified the expense by saying, “we have every right to improve ourselves, despite what some people think. We have every right to be the best of the best. There is nothing wrong with that.”
At least Ferdinand, who signed a five-year contract that will pay him in excess of $100,000 a week, didn’t say it was about respect and not about the money.
Ferdinand, not that you have to be reminded, is 23 and touted as the world’s next great center-half. His transfer is merely the sixth most outrageous in soccer history, well below the 46.5 million pounds Real Madrid paid Juventus for the one and only Zinedine Zidane. Space does not permit a complete list of others; we all know who they are anyway.
Apparently Manchester United investors are upset because stock shares in the club fell after Ferdinand’s acquisition. After all, Manchester spent a bundle on Juan Sebastian Veron last year, and he was a bust. Manchester didn’t win a thing, and they don’t even play in the American League Central.
Which raises a the question: If soccer games are all 0-0 or 1-0, how can one defender be worth so much? I mean if Manchester coughed up a lot of goals, that’s one thing. But I guess this proves that if you’re the Yankees of futbol, you can never have enough center-halves.
It sounds a lot like baseball. I think we know the score in soccer, even when there is none.
