European football in crisis: Strike and fall

 

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By Binoy Kampmark, 28 Aug 2011 Binoy Kampmark is a Roar Rookie

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 European football, football, La Liga, Serie A

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How theatrical, how dramatic. Serie A, Italy’s premier football league, continues to hibernate, albeit forcibly.

This month, all 20 of Serie A’s captains signed a document threatening strike action if no collective contract was in place before the start of the season.

The bone of contention? Money. Everyone wants to keep money and not part with it – it is the axiom of football, one might even say life, but given that the sport in Italy is a bloodline, it means far more.

The government’s austerity package places a five percent additional tax on income over 90,000 Euros; and a 10 percent additional tax on income above 150,000 Euros. The league clubs have tried to factor this in, a situation that the players find unacceptable.

The other is a clause that will allow clubs to make unwanted players train away from the first team for, in the wording of the section, a club has the right ‘through its technical staff, to organise the preparation, also through different training techniques for temporary reasons’.

The characters of this drama are all strong willed, featuring a stubborn Lega, and a player front more united than ever. “As far as our side goes,” claims the players’ association president Damiano Tommasi, “we don’t have anything to be ashamed about. It’s the league that sought the rupture.”

Tommasi is also defensive on the subject of the solidarity tax that is to be hoisted on the players. “As ordinary taxpayers, as footballers we will pay the solidarity tax, if there is to be one and its gets approved.”

The Lega was merely making a ‘manipulative fuss’ over the mater (La Gazetta dello Sport, Aug 23). Maurizio Zamparini, Palermo club’s president and Serie A supremo, is furious with everybody, accusing all parties of pigheadedness.

The result of this dispute is that none of the parties will get the remuneration they want. A player like AC Milan’s striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic stands to loose 304,600 euros each week he doesn’t play (Times of India, August 27).

The latest round of bitterness in the Serie A has been replicated in Spain, arguably Europe’s finest league. This has been resolved just in time for the season to start, though the wounds are still being licked.

UEFA President Michel Platini is stunned. “I am worried. There are strikes in Italy and Spain over players not getting paid. These are my personal reservations, not UEFA’s. Maybe this is the future of football” (Guardian, August 26).

The future, and perhaps even the nature, of the game if one is to take the grim summation by Platini of a sport at risk to “match-fixing, corruption, illegal betting, violence on the pitch, racism and hooliganism.”

As European football’s self-appointed moral guardian, Platini fears that the game is retrograding. His own moral panacea includes the introduction of financial fair play rules that will force clubs to keep a balanced sheet this season.

The worst offenders remains the clubs of Spain’s La Liga. “Of the five major championships [England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France] the clubs have a combined debt of 1,200 million Euros,” he explained to the paper Le Parisien. “The worse case is Spain.” Such financial restructuring so soon might be unrealistic.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com.

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