The Footie - World Soccer News

Money Can’t Buy Chelsea Love

by Alan on March 27th, 2006

Can money truly make you happy? Taking the occasional glance at Roman Abramovich, one would have to answer in the negative although it does allow you to buy certain things that other mere mortals can only dream of. Who wouldn’t dream of owning a Premiership football team, the world’s biggest yacht, bankrolling a “Special” manager for your team or being able to completely overturn the very rules, regulations and ethics of the entire game of football if it took your fancy?

One of those list entries may seem a tad obscure but I can assure you that Roman does in fact own the largest yacht in the world. He wines and dines opposing clubs sporting directors on it and then tells the world that they have never met socially. He then pays over ten million pounds plus concessions for the aforementioned sporting director’s contract and shows that money can buy you other men’s values as well as the right to pay their National Insurance contributions. The list of things that Roman’s money can buy you goes on.

It buys you players for your “Special” manager’s squad that even he doesn’t want but you feel you should stop other clubs from benefitting from them so you distort the transfer and wages market to such a degree that no right-minded club or individual can turn the money down regardless of the impact on their careers. Is there anyone who thinks that the careers of players such as Shaun Wright Phillips and Scott Parker, amongst others, wouldn’t have been better served at other clubs than Chelsea reserves?

Obviously even Scott Parker decided that a highway to nothing in the North East was preferable to an exercise in bench warming in West London. Roman’s money, therefore, buys you players’ careers. Remember folks, the value of footballers’ careers can go down as well as up, everyone else remember that lesson, Roman doesn’t need to care, there are plenty more where they came from.

Arguably, the best thing that Roman’s money can buy is immunity from the proper rules and regulations of football in 2006. John Terry’s repeated handball/basketball routine in his own box? Countless referees just haven’t seen it. Shaun Wright Phillips/Joe Cole/Didier Drogba/Hernan Crespo diving to the ground when barely challenged? Obviously heinous attacks on the nation’s favourite players by other clubs jealous of their success rather than disgusting acts of gamesmanship by the very epitome of all that is wrong with our game. Michael Essien/Claude Makelele kneecapping opponents indiscriminately? Youthful enthusiasm or cynical fouling and spoiling as per the rest of their careers? You decide. Didier Drogba admitting to the BBC that he both liked a dive and believed that illegally handling the ball and then scoring was “part of the game”? Maybe if the game is rugby or Gaelic Games but not football, never football Didier, not now and not ever.

I will not be quiet on these issues, there is a tear in the moral fabric of our game and Chelsea are ripping it further asunder every week they send their players out onto the pitch, every game their coach sits in his dugout and every time their owner uses the money that could be helping Russian people to survive and raise them from below the poverty line to fund the wages and purchase of con men and cheats that think that they are above the laws of the game. Money can buy a lot of things Roman but it will never buy you our love.

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