The attacks on Wolves are a vendetta fuelled by jealousy
FINANCIAL Fai r Play, as we all know, was introduced to stop football’s owners living beyond their means. Now it may be used to make one club spend more, in order to deliberately break the rules. That is how desperate and confused the opponents of Wolves have become.
Not content with pressuring the Football League to look at the connection with the Gestifute agency run by Jorge Mendes, they now allege that Mendes’s clients are not paid enough and that Wolves keep the salaries of players such as Ruben Neves and Diogo Jota artificially low as a way of complying with FFP. And so what if they are? Let’s say for a moment that the allegations of rivals, including Aston Villa, Derby and Leeds, are true and Wolves are paying some of their leading performers £20,000 a week, at most. Isn’t that just more smart business? Neves is a 21-year- old Portuguese international, signed from Porto in the summer. Jota is also 21 and currently on loan from Atletico Madrid. he, too, was playing for Porto a year ago. And, yes, as Champions League players, with 28 appearances in europe between them, Wolves have got a good deal if their salaries are low.
Yet that is unlikely to be the whole story. One imagines there are caveats, clauses, promises, and that playing for Wolves in the Championship is a career loss leader, with a longer, more sophisticated game plan, orchestrated by Mendes.
By doing a year here, Neves and Jota get used to the english game. They learn the language, become familiar with england’s idiosyncrasies. The Christmas fixture list, the marathon league and cup programme, the physicality, will no longer be a surprise. And they are in the shop window for bigger clubs to see. If a move to the Premier League presents itself in the summer, no doubt Wolves, to preserve their fruitful relationship with Mendes, would be amenable.
equally, the players could help Wolves win promotion, as seems likely. Now Mendes can renegotiate their contracts as Premier League talent with Wolves, free of the Football League’s FFP restrictions, with boosted television revenue to cover any rises, and the permanent acquisition of Jota.
If they impress in the Premier League and a richer, bigger suitor appears, Wolves bank the money, the player moves on and Mendes brings in his next batch of clients. What is wrong with this? Why should Wolves match Porto’s wages, knowing that would place them in contravention of Football League rules. Why not come to an arrangement that suits all parties?
There was no guarantee that Neves and Jota would be successful anyway. If they were not, there would be no sale and no promotion — so £20,000 a week wouldn’t break the bank. It would be ludicrous to set wages at a level that gambled too heavily on going up. how many Championship clubs have come close to ruin that way?
Maybe that is the real issue. Championship clubs paying individuals £ 60,000 in weekly wages, playing inferior football to Wolves, with no guarantee of promotion, resent a club with good ideas. It pains them to think they are not smart enough, so they have to believe Wolves are cheating instead.
The demand is for a forensic examination of every Wolves transfer. Only if the Football League can forensically examine the rest of it. every transfer at every complaining club. Otherwise it is little more than a vendetta, fuelled by jealousy.
Neil Warnock had it right. The one manager pushing Wolves for the title this season was asked about the Mendes link after the first complaint went in. No doubt, an outburst was expected. Something about how unfair it all was and how Warnock’s Cardiff should rightfully lead the table.
‘My first game in the Football League with Scarborough was at Wolves and I remember a guy falling through the roof of the stand,’ said Warnock. ‘ Wolves have had to put up with so much. Let them get who they want. It wouldn’t
bother me if they signed Neymar. I don’t see anything illegal in an agent helping a club. I wish we all had contacts like they have now.’
He has been around, Warnock. His first managerial job was with Gainsborough Trinity in 1981. Meaning, he has got 30 years on the owners of Villa, Derby and Leeds combined. Mel Morris bought into Derby in May 2014, Tony Xia into Villa in June 2016 and Andrea Radrizzani has been at Leeds for a mighty 14 months. Yet these are the men leading the bid to have the Championship turned on its head — and all because their new money did not come with many new ideas.
Villa had a wage bill for 2016-17 of £61.5million, for instance — they came a mighty 13th — against Wolves’ expenditure of £28.2m. Did they complain then? No, because Wolves finished 15th and Mendes’s influence was widely disdained. It is only now it has started working that it has been deemed unfair and forensic examinations demanded.
The Football League are so soft they might even comply, yet these latest rounds of accusations are close to ludicrous. The idea that FFP, supposedly introduced to control and limit reckless expenditure, could be cited to make Wolves pay more, exposes these regulations for what they have always been. A tax on ambition — a means for the powerful or those feeling falsely entitled to manipulate the market to their own advantage.
How did it end up costing Villa twice Wolves’ money to finish two places higher last season? Maybe Xia should get a forensic team on that.