Ordinary Gweilo

When Carlos Tevez & Javier Mascherano were unexpectedly signed by West Ham just before last summer’s transfer deadline the whole thing looked decidedly odd, and sure enough it has turned into a hugely entertaining saga for anyone not directly affected. 

First West Ham pretended they owned the players.  Then they claimed to have torn up the agreement whereby Tevez was owned by somebody else.  Now they appear to be expecting a transfer fee from Manchester United for a player they don’t own.  Somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Earlier, the club were found guilty of acting improperly and withholding vital documentation over the ownership of the two players and fined £5.5m by the Premier League even though the standard punishment for similar (and less serious) offences has always been a points deduction – which would have caused West Ham to be relegated.  Then an arbitration panel ruled that the club should have been deducted points, but refused to over-turn the decision.  No, I don’t understand that logic either.

Yesterday, Sheffield United failed in their bid to get the High Court to force the Premier League to do what they should have done in the first place and deduct points, but say that they are still going to pursue other options. 

The irony here is that West Ham were presumably chosen in the expectation that the two players they would play regularly in a team that was reasonably successful. The team would benefit and the players would be sold on for higher fees.  Instead West Ham spent almost the whole season struggling to avoid relegation, and Mascherano hardly played at all during his brief time at the club – and was loaned to Liverpool during the January transfer window (but only after the rules were bent to allow him to play for 3 clubs in one season).

Tevez didn’t start his time at West Ham very well either, but he almost single-handedly saved West Ham with his performances at the end of the season, which is one reason why Sheffield United felt so aggrieved.

It’s interesting to speculate on what might have happened to West Ham if these two players had not arrived.  It certainly appears that Alan Pardew didn’t know much about the players before they were signed, and didn’t have much idea what to do with them.   After doing surprisingly well in the previous (2005/6) season, they were 6th in the table at the time of the deal, but they didn’t win a game in September, and by December they were in the bottom three and Pardew was duly sacked (though he was snapped up by Charlton and got them relegated).

It seems clear that the only reason the players were at West Ham was to put them “in the shop window” in the hope that one of the big clubs would be tempted to buy them. It was in effect a loan.  The highly unusual thing about this deal was it was not a loan from another club, but rather the player was controlled by a company (owned by Kia Joorabchian who was at the time negotiating to buy West Ham).  The company had the right to sell the player at any time, and West Ham would receive a fixed sum for their trouble (£2m for Tevez if he had been sold in the January 2007 transfer window, but only £100,000 if he had been sold later).

Had Joorabchian gone ahead and purchased West Ham then presumably this could all have been resolved very simply.  He did not, and the new owner was therefore left with a big problem because league rules do not allow third-parties to control players. 

You might have expected that West Ham would have re-negotiated the contracts to deal with the problem, but instead they appear to have hoped that no-one would notice.  Of course they did notice, and the club were fined £5.5m by the Premier League for breaching two rules: 

Rule B13 “in all matters and transactions relating to the league, each club shall behave towards each other club and the league with the utmost good faith”.

Rule U18 (which is to be found in a section headed “Miscellaneous”): “No club shall enter into a contract which enables any other party to that contract to acquire the ability materially to influence its policies or the performance of its teams in league matches or in any (other) competitions.”

It’s hard to imagine a more serious breach of the rules, and yet West Ham were not deducted points.  In other cases, AFC Wimbledon were deducted 18 points for a much more minor infringement (though this was eventually reduced to 3 points), and Bury were thrown out of the FA Cup for another breach of regulations.  It’s funny how the rules seem to be different for the bigger clubs.