04/26/24
September 19, 2006
Allardyce At Center Of BBC Expose.: Another scandal in soccer as serious in nature as Serie A experienced. This time managers directly invoved. Will this play out or will the FA sweep it under the rug?
posted by urall cloolis to soccer at 08:04 PM - 10 comments
actually i believe the Serie A scandal was because the teams involved were assigning refs to their own games- match fixing was never proven or the biggest issue. The refs were never actually accused of fixing the games, just the teams involved getting refs that they thought were highest quality or most favorable. A manager that adjusts their roster to pad their own pockets seems equally wrong. Maybe they sell a player that should still be with the squad for personal monetary gain. Maybe they buy an inferior player to make a little side cash. Since all the facts arent in I will reserve some judgment for later. Just trying to open up discussions on the (possible) scandal. I may have been unsuccessful by comparing the two scandals as equal, yet both definitely tarnish the image of the game. Imagine if Joe Gibbs or Pat Riley (or any coach) made money from agents for selling or buying a player. Pete Rose was banned for life for betting on his OWN team. Would love to hear more opinions.
posted by urall cloolis at 09:26 PM on September 19, 2006
If the managers pick players for the payoffs instead of ability they'll quickly be out of a job as the team suffers correspondingly--or at least I think so. Allardyce's squad hasn't shown this to be the case, heck Bolton have outperformed expectations several seasons in a row. So I'm not sure what to think.
posted by billsaysthis at 12:38 AM on September 20, 2006
Cannot equate this with the Serie A match-fixing. This will blow over. If Sam goes down, then a whole bunch of other teams and managers are in trouble. I think Ferguson and son were once under the gun for this sort of thing (don't quote me!). Sam and son are not the first and they won't be the last.
posted by worldcup2002 at 01:23 AM on September 20, 2006
Yeah, I'd agree with worldcup2002,. I started to watch Panorama last night, but after just a few minutes figured it was more of a storm in a tea-cup than anything else
posted by Fence at 02:53 AM on September 20, 2006
This doesn't seem even close to as bad as the Serie A scandal. This seems more like a warning to managers and agents to keep things above board than an institutional league-wide top-down-mandated match fixing/doctoring scheme. My first thought was that Allardyce might lose his job over this, but I don't even see that happening, and no one's getting relegated over this, at least as it stands. I could be wrong, but in my mind I'm filing this under "Rules were meant to be bent, but watch yourselves."
posted by chicobangs at 08:26 AM on September 20, 2006
This looks to me like a case of the BBC desperately trying to make the news, rather than report it. Never trust a man called cnut!
posted by Fat Buddha at 02:00 PM on September 20, 2006
Especially if he works at fcuk!
posted by chicobangs at 04:26 PM on September 20, 2006
The 'bung' has a history that goes back to the amateur origins of football, where the notion of players being paid was considered scandalous to the public-school types who established the FA. Clubs would get around the ban on wages, and then on the maximum wage, by stuffing money into players' boots. The Graham/Clough bung investigations came at a time when clubs ceased to be the fiefdoms of chairmen and became publically-traded companies. Now that the reverse is happening, and many once-traded clubs return to private ownership, it's time for yet another look at the world of brown envelopes and tapping-up.
posted by etagloh at 04:59 AM on September 22, 2006
Bung is such an England English word--I can't imagine something like it every becoming mainstream in American English. Like all those extra 'u's.
posted by billsaysthis at 01:01 AM on September 24, 2006
I'm not really a soccer expert, by any stretch, but is player contract/movement tampering really as serious as in-game ref tampering?