Phillip Buckley
The air in Sepp Blatter’s office at Fifa headquarters is conducive to the dreaming up of crackpot schemes. That can be the only explanation for ideas such as making women players wear tighter outfits, doing away with draws by playing every match to a finish and making the goals bigger for men. All these so called improvements have been dreamt up by Blatter in the last few years.
His latest suggestion does not appear on the face of it to be quite as hairbrain, yet scratch beneath the surface and its drawbacks become very apparent. For those who have managed to miss Fifa’s head honcho’s idea it is the extension of transfer windows to cover coaches (Managers for the British amongst us) in order to prevent moves between teams in exactly the same way as the window does for players.
“We’ll try to extend the rule that is valid for players to coaches” Blatter told Italian daily Gazzetta dello Sport. Of course, if this arrangement were already in place we wouldn’t have had Juande Ramos’s move to Tottenham or Ronald Koeman swapping PSV for Spain with Valencia. Players are restricted with their movements, so why shouldn’t the same apply to coaches? Blatter thought.
It’s certainly the case that whenever a coach leaves a club there is disruption and for the coach involved, if he hasn’t moved on to greener pastures he’s almost always been dumped. Coaches rarely make plans to leave teams mid-season. Ramos didn’t intend to swap Sevilla for North London until next summer, but Spurs forced his hand. Henk Ten Cate moved to Chelsea from Ajax because he could hear the guards coming to take him to the guillotine. Should a coach get sacked, he flies off to join the masses of unemployed coaches, who circle like vultures, waiting for a chance to jump back on the merry-go-round.
So Blatter’s suggestion would give coaches far more job security. They’d know that no matter what happened it would be a little more likely they’d remain in situe until January at least, gaining that commodity they all crave (and most convenient of excuses), time. That is, unless a suitable replacement from the circling vultures can be found.
Blatter’s proposal is sure to affect mainly big clubs, as the men big clubs want are usually employed elsewhere and seldom come from the ranks of the unemployed. Mourinho went straight from Porto to Chelsea, Benitez Valencia to Liverpool, Schuster Getafe to Real Madrid, Mancini Lazio to Inter and the list goes on. Blatter’s proposal wouldn’t have affected those moves, but it does have the potential to affect future moves for those elite clubs.
The obvious example to look at is Spurs where Juande Ramos was recently appointed. If Blatter’s scheme was already in operation, Tottenham Chairman Daniel Levy would have been reluctant to dispense with Martin Jol as he’d have had to look beyond his favoured choice for a replacement and given his verbal agreement with Ramos and lack of suitable unemployed alternatives, would he?
So what situation would we find ourselves in? Levy would have a coach in situe he didn’t want or have faith in. He wouldn’t have been able to get Ramos until January, so Jol would have soldiered on, a dead man walking, bereft of authority in the dressing room. Over in Seville, Ramos would also be in a difficult situation. The President, board and players would get wind that in January he would be off, what effect would that have? The situation wouldn’t be fair on Jol or Ramos, yet they would be forced to soldier on regardless. Quite likely Spurs’ bad form would have continued given Jol had lost the support of key players and Ramos would walk into a real relegation dogfight on January 1st.
Lower down the foodchain we wouldn’t have seen Gary Megson swap Leicester City for Premier League Bolton and whilst Bolton fans would greet that with cries of joy, what would have been Chairman Phil Gartside’s next move? Megson was clearly in his opinion the best available candidate. Paul Jewell (ex-Wigan) and Graeme Souness (ex-Newcastle) weren’t interested in the job. Thus again at Bolton, Gartside would be forced to stick with Sammy Lee, who undoubtedly had lost the dressing room or appoint an unemployed coach he didn’t want or believe in. Caught between a rock and a hard place indeed.
Another effect of this extension of the window could be the forcing up of coaches’ salaries. If a team make a dreadful start or begin to plummet like a stone after January and feel they desperately need a change, a good quality unemployed coach will be able to hold them to ransom. Picture the scene, a club has ten games left to save its top flight status and they believe coach A can guide them out of trouble. But coach A doesn’t much fancy the job, at least, not without a huge salary. Do the club, A. hire coach A paying him an obscene amount they can ill afford? B. stick with the incumbent coach who’s looking as likely to save them as an Elvis impersonator or C. appoint another unemployed coach with a salary they can afford but who is clearly not as good as coach A?
By limiting the amount of available coaches, Fifa will surely drive up the demands of those coaches who are available. Not only that, panic appointments will be made by clubs that can’t get their first, second or third choices but feel they desperately need a change.
The likelihood that this proposal from Fifa’s President will happen is probably small. The G14 would certainly oppose it as, I’m betting, would most professional clubs in the game. Coaches would probably welcome the move, the rule forcing Chairmen and Presidents to think again before showing them the door. When the sack did come, unemployed coaches would have a greater chance of getting jobs as every employed coach would be automatically ineligible.
Yet Blatter still likes to grab the headlines. The President of Fifa is a man we just can’t take seriously, a few days before this suggestion he was again quoting the need to limit foreign players, conveniently forgetting that the EU have laws against restriction of trade. But whilst he remains in power, he will always be looking for ways to make “improvements” to the game. We will keep our eye on this latest proposal, but as I type it’s probably being locked away in the already overflowing Fifa vault in Switzerland.
