Wolves have ambition and wit. Why is it such a crime?
LEEDS have won a single game since Boxing day and owner Andrea Radrizzani knows exactly who is to blame: Wolves.
Having lost 3-0 at home to the Championship leaders on Wednesday, Radrizzani broke ranks as one of the men putting pressure on the Football League to place further curbs on ambition and enterprise by investigating Wolves’ links to the agent Jorge Mendes.
‘We have our own problems but we should play in a fair competition,’ he tweeted. ‘Not legal and fair to let one team be owned by a fund that has shares in the biggest players’ agency with evident benefits — top European clubs giving players with options to buy. Why the other 23 clubs can’t have the same?’
Isn’t it obvious? They didn’t have the wit or ambition to do it. Fosun, the owners of Wolves, have previously been investors in Mendes’s projects, and he was an adviser on their entry to English football. It is said he is acting as a de facto director of football, helping steer transfer policy, but as long as he is not interfering in selection, what is wrong with that?
Wolves’ manager is Nuno Espirito Santo, Mendes’s oldest client, but if Fosun are simply using their contacts to build a better, successful team, why is this illegal? Manchester United seem very well in with Mino Raiola, agent to Paul Pogba, Romelu Lukaku, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Henrikh Mkhitaryan. Employing Avram Grant and Leonid Slutsky, both friends of Roman Abramovich, was once considered helpful in attracting loan players from Chelsea.
Connections have always furthered football’s business. Sir Alex Ferguson would send Manchester United’s young reserves to management allies in the lower divisions. To ask why 24 Championship clubs can’t all have a share of Mendes or his equivalent is, frankly, stupid. It certainly does not explain why Leeds currently sit lower than those financial powerhouses Brentford, Millwall and Ipswich, all run on very different budgets, and to very different models.
The Football League have now been bounced into saying they will revisit Wolves to remind them of the regulations — despite previously insisting no rules had been broken. They have been cowed by loud voices behind closed doors, the foolish outrage of club owners who would love nothing more than to break free of the Championship, but aren’t smart enough to do it. At the whiff of Premier League II, they would pull up the drawbridge on the rest without a second thought.
Wolves lost £23.2million last season, but made £5.8m the year before. The cost of taking the team towards promotion this season, therefore, puts them in danger of breaching the Financial Fair Play rules of the Football League, which permit only a £39m loss over three seasons, minus exemptions. This is when their rivals will hope to have their day, pushing for a block on promotion or a points deduction.
Yet as long as Fosun can afford their expenditure, as long as it is invested not loaned, what is wrong? When Wolves were plummeting through the second tier in 2012-13, when they had five managers in 16 months, when Fosun first arrived and appointed the hideously unsuited Walter Zenga, this was all fine. The Football League doesn’t care if you run your club into the ground; running it with ambition and enterprise, that is the crime these days.
So Leeds are a perfect Football League entity. Big crowds, but going nowhere. They will bloat the coffers while drifting mid-table, perfectly docile. When Wolves were getting it as wrong as Leeds, they were left alone to fail, too.
Let’s face it, Leeds didn’t lose 3-0 on Wednesday because Wolves had an unfair advantage. They had lost 3-0 to Middlesbrough the previous Friday, as well and 4-1 at home to Cardiff in February, and 4-3 to Millwall in January — and 2-1 to Newport County in the FA Cup.
Leeds are in the cart because Radrizzani appointed Thomas Christiansen, who had no experience of English football, as manager, then sacked him and appointed Paul Heckingbottom, formerly of Barnsley, because he ‘knows the territory’.
THERE is no consistency of thought, no coherent strategy and faced with the reality of another year in the Championship, Radrizzani’s brightest idea is to make bogus complaints against owners smarter than he is. He will find support because the Championship is full of mediocre clubs, run by mediocre minds who believe they have the right to be in the league above without devising any grand plan to achieve this — but wider backing does not mean Radrizzani is right.
He wants to handicap the ambition of his rivals, until they are reduced to his level. Wolves look to have found a way out and, with this scheme, might even survive or thrive in the Premier League. Those left behind need to raise their game and their standards, not spurious questions about fairness.