COMEDIANS AT THE EFL HAVE THEIR PRIORITIES ALL WRONG
WE MAY only discover how the Football League really feel about Evangelos Marinakis the day Ben Toner is appointed to officiate at Nottingham Forest.
Last weekend, the EFL removed Toner from Blackpool’s match with Portsmouth, after Blackpool’s owners, the Oyston family, were ordered to pay £31million in the High Court. Judge Marcus Smith presided over the ruling which accused Karl and Owen Oyston of ‘illegitimately stripping’ the club of £26.77m while using it as their ‘personal cash machine’.
Much merriment followed when the name of the referee for Blackpool’s next game was spotted. Ben Toner was a punster’s dream come true — say it quickly — and, fearing ridicule, with a keen sense of priority, the League removed him. But would he be allowed to pitch up at the City Ground, now that owner Marinakis is facing match-fixing charges in his native Greece?
Indeed, would it not be the correct procedure to make sure Toner referees Forest, and soon, to show that the League are not taking sides in the case? Might Toner’s absence be read as a sign that the League thinks Marinakis has questions to answer, and is grouping him with the Oystons in its list of club custodians who are at the mercy of unfortunate word play?
The EFL are on the defensive about Marinakis since it was asked how a man answering matchfixing allegations came to sail through their fit and proper persons’ test. ‘We can only ever operate within the context of our rules and in this instance they are clear and effectively provide for the same principles as in English law, innocent until proven guilty,’ said communications director Mark Rowan.
‘As soon as there is a breach in our regulations, the EFL will act; but we cannot pre-empt any
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decisions, no matter how unpopular that may appear.’
Except nobody was asking them to pre-empt. Just hold fire, perhaps — in the way a bank might, before appointing a senior executive under suspicion of fraud. Marinakis protests his innocence, of course, and at the time of the Forest takeover, it was reported that he had been cleared of corruption allegations in Greece.
Yet it would have taken the EFL one call to the Hellenic federation to discover this was not the case. At that point the takeover could have been postponed pending the outcome. If cleared, it could happily go ahead. This hardly seems an unreasonable stance given that match-fixing is arguably the most serious crime in sport. It would have ensured the League at least took responsibility for the integrity of the game.
Fit and proper persons tests are notoriously hard to enforce. Few bad owners telegraph their incompetence at the time of buying. The Oystons did not announce their asset-stripping intentions; Francesco Becchetti did not predict he would run Leyton Orient into the ground.
Many could mount a strong and costly legal challenge if barred, anyway. Amnesty International took a dim view of Thaksin Shinawatra, former prime minister of Thailand, but as he was out of office when he bought Manchester City in 2007, and the British government had maintained trade relations with Thailand throughout his tenure, what were the Premier League to do? Make a judgement that their government had not deemed necessary? They had no chance.
The Marinakis case was different. Innocent until proven guilty might be reasonably applied to a person in office, as Marinakis is now, but not to a man buying into English football. In that situation, surely, simple innocence is required. No pending charges, no outstanding investigations. And then it does not matter if the referee is Ben Toner because his name is only a name; not a punchline, a criticism, or a commentary.