Newsgroup: it.sport.calcio
Titolo: Crisi di trasferimenti oggi sul Guardian

Transfer crash puts Europe's elite on critical list
Summer market closes down as top clubs spiral into debt, reports Graham
Hunter
Saturday July 13, 2002
The Guardian
Finally, it has happened. After years of excess inflation, the football
bubble has burst in spectacular fashion. And the ramifications are being
felt throughout Europe.
Across the continent, managing directors, chairmen and coaches are sitting
nervously in empty counting houses, surrounded by "for sale" signs that
pepper their expensive squads. But no one wants to buy. The transfer market,
if not dead, is in a critical state, and some of Europe's most famous clubs
are struggling to offload the debts they have recklessly amassed over recent
seasons. Arsène Wenger, whose club Arsenal is on a sounder footing than
most, this week compared the situation to a head-on road crash - "and the
car has already hit the wall".
In Italy there are even growing fears that the new Serie A season may have
to be delayed to give teams time to get their finances in order. Before
kick-off clubs must prove that they will be able to complete the campaign -
and few, at present, can. "I don't think it is possible to sort out
everything for September 1," said the Roma president, Franco Sensi. "The
championship could be postponed by one month."
Closer to home, debt-ridden Leeds yesterday agreed a £9m fee with Liverpool
for the controversial midfielder Lee Bowyer, but such multi-million
transfers are the exception among the Premiership's leading clubs this
summer. Manchester United, Chelsea and Leeds have spent almost nothing,
while Arsenal's investment has been limited to this week's £2.1m signing of
French defender Pascal Cygan.
Chelsea, like Leeds, are struggling to rein in massive debts and their
Italian manager, Claudio Ranieri, may yet have to start the new season
without his star striker Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink - if the Chelsea board can
find anyone willing to pay upwards of £15m for the Dutchman.
"The need for future austerity is why the chairman renewed my contract for
five years," Ranieri explained. "The board wants me to work on the
youngsters at Chelsea - they don't want to keep spending money like we have
been until recently. We have reduced our costs and now we will have a
reduced bench. I won't be bringing more than five players to the bench.
"In England, the crisis is all still about the flop of the [ITV Digital]
television system," Ranieri added. "However, in Italy, my feeling is that it
is much worse. Some clubs have spent the money they are due to be earning in
something like 2010..."
In his native country, the spectre of Fiorentina looms large: the club that
in recent seasons beat Manchester United and Arsenal in the Champions League
now languishes in Serie B on the point of bankruptcy. As a result, even the
likes of Internazionale have tightened their belts significantly - resulting
in their recent, slightly surreal securing of an option on the
out-of-contract Coventry defender Gary Breen. While that has since run out,
six players have arrived at the San Siro this summer and not one has been
paid for.
"We have a clear strategy which includes investing serious money in proven
superstars," confided one Inter board member. "But beyond that, we will
invest lesser sums in serious professionals who are cheap, or better still
free.
"We saw Breen during the World Cup, investigated his background and found
him to be an impressive man with a professional attitude. Just what we were
looking for."
Such humility from the Italian giants is an indicator of the searing nature
of the recession afflicting European football. The cost of salaries - driven
up by a series of record-breaking transfers during the fool's-goldrush years
of paid-for television viewing - is crippling the game's elite clubs.
"The current problems are the result of the stupid fees which were paid out
over a two-or three-year period," said Chelsea's former managing director
Colin Hutchinson, now a consultant for the Proactive Management agency. "The
incredible hot spot when £35m became a common fee has, in the end, helped to
force prices and wages down as clubs run out of TV money and need to cut
costs. That, and the impending arrival of transfer windows, is forcing clubs
to do their housekeeping and use Bosman transfers as they were meant to be
used.
"Particularly in Italy, we have seen the rise of the exchange deal, which
helps clubs improve the asset value of their players, cut the wages bill and
save on transfer fees. We will see a spate of such swap deals in Europe in
the short term."
Not even the biggest possible shop window, the recent World Cup in Japan and
Korea, has tempted the majority of clubs in England, Spain, Italy, Germany
and France to shell out on players. Instead they loan them, swap them, even
give them away like bubblegum cards in a playground. Above all they will try
to renegotiate their wages - downwards.
Frank de Boer, for example, has re-signed at Barcelona for much less money,
and so has Jose Chamot at Milan. Yet as Fabio Cannavaro, who earns £2.8m per
season at Parma, pointed out this week: "It's difficult to go back when you
are already earning a certain amount." He may no longer have a choice: the
Italian players' union yesterday agreed to flexible, performance-related
contracts including automatic salary cuts after relegation.
The Chelsea chairman Ken Bates said yesterday: "I won't reveal names but
when a player was offered to us not so long ago, we were told that he was
earning £6m per year. We said no wonder you want to swap him, keep him. It's
ridiculous.
"Most of the large Italian clubs would like to swap every one of the players
they have got for English players on lower wages, but their problem is the
English clubs don't want to pay those wages.
"The market is usually led by Spanish and Italian clubs but they haven't got
any money. So they haven't spent any money in England buying players and
that means there isn't any money floating around in the system. Apart from
Newcastle, who are busy spending their Champions League money before they
get it, there is no movement at all. Everybody has to sell as well as buy."
Clubs' potential to do business depends on the domino theory of someone else
spending money first. But Tottenham Hotspur are unlikely to shift Sergei
Rebrov while, for example, Lazio are struggling to reduce the astonishing
wage bill from Claudio Lopez, Gaizka Mendieta, Hernan Crespo, Jaap Stam and
a host of other lesser names.
Lazio are working double time simply to make the payments on a number of
recent transfers. If they got a good offer for the club mascot or Sergio
Cragnotti's furniture at his training-ground office, they would give it
serious thought. The cupboard is bare and they are not alone.
Milan, Parma, Deportivo La Coruna and Celta Vigo have all become selling
clubs, while Valencia's president Jaime Orti has warned: "If we don't sell
anyone, we won't be signing anyone." That after two consecutive Champions
League finals in 2000 and 2001 and the Spanish championship last year.
Their counterparts at Real Madrid count themselves with perhaps only Bayern
Munich, Inter, Liverpool and to a lesser extent Manchester United as clubs
who can spend with comparative impunity. Yet even the Butch Cassidy and
Sundance Kid of the European transfer market, Madrid's president Florentino
Perez and sporting director Jorge Valdano - who broke the world-record fee
for Luis Figo and Zinedine Zidane in consecutive years - have not yet spent
a cent this summer, and are instead desperate to offload Steve McManaman
among numerous others.
There is, too, little hope for any change in the near future. In Spain,
Germany and Italy, just as in England, the pay-per-view television
negotiations for the next couple of years herald drastic cuts. Both in Spain
and Italy, the competing digital companies (Via Digital and Canal Satelite,
and Telepiu and Stream), whose auctions for television rights forced the
cost up in the past, are merging to stamp prices back down. In Italy,
television revenue is expected to drop by 50% when the new deal comes into
force in 2003, while Germany's clubs have signed with KirchMedia for £160m
less than their previous £600m deal.
As Wenger highlighted this week, faced with such bleak figures clubs are
taking desperate measures. "Recently I have been offered players that
haven't been paid for five, six, seven months," said the Arsenal manager.
"Not in England, but from foreign countries. And once you stop paying the
players any more, there is a deep problem."
--
Cosa penso del caso Scajola? Penso che rispondere con un insulto a una
domanda sensata ("Perché gli hanno ritirato la scorta?") fosse troppo.
Perfino in un Paese come l'Italia.

 Transfer crash puts Europe's elite on critical list
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