Telegraph today:-
Grounds for sharing on Merseyside
By Patrick Barclay
(Filed: 17/09/2006)
In listing last Sunday the massive and, to my mind, scandalous debts with which our leading clubs and now even the FA casually labour, I omitted to mention Liverpool alongside Manchester United, Arsenal, Newcastle and (for all we know) Chelsea — not because I had forgotten Liverpool but because I had temporarily forgotten their resolve to try to keep pace with Chelsea and the rest by building a new stadium with a capacity of 60,000.
David Moores
David Moores: against the idea of a joint stadium
Nine days ago, the council said they could use land in Stanley Park, the patch of green that traditionally separates the red and blue homes of Merseyside football, if they could furnish evidence of £180 million worth of funding by the end of September — two weeks from now. In fact Liverpool might have to be a bit quicker to be sure of the public money from the UK and Europe — at least £15 million — that will pay for infrastructural improvements intended to "regenerate" an especially poor part of Liverpool.
It sounds fine until you remember that chopping bits off parks is seldom a good idea. And I wonder where the casting of yet another club into hundreds of millions of pounds of debt is going to lead us, given that they are all likely to be competing against each other for the foreseeable future: conditions hardly conducive to the accumulation of profits necessary to pay off interest. And what of Everton? They cannot stand still. They are going to have to build a new home too. Maybe it will regenerate another poor part of Liverpool. Maybe one without a park in it.
What profligate nonsense it is. Liverpool and Everton could and should halve their costs by sharing a stadium. There are no two clubs more suited to the arrangement and it would have the additional benefit of providing an opportunity to draw closer again. In the none too distant past, there were few manifestations of local culture that induced in the outsider more respect for Merseyside than the derby-day sight of a red scarf trailing from one side of a car and a blue from the other; there were jokes about mixed marriages and so on and the impression came over that here was a place comfortable with its passion for the game.
Then came the horror of Heysel and the tragedy of Hillsborough and the gradual draining of a reservoir of humour. The Liverpool-Everton rivalry became just like any other. Accordingly, the chairmen of the clubs, David Moores and Bill Kenwright, being authentic fans of Liverpool and Everton respectively, are against the idea of a joint stadium, even though it might endow the community with a state-of-the-art and naturally universal asset embodying the city's unique place in the English game.
The council have erred. Part of the problem with football is its popularity, which induces politicians to make weak decisions or, as in the case of the Government's shyness from addressing the corruption which runs through the game, no decision at all. Liverpool should have been told, and quite bluntly, that neither they nor Everton can afford petty pride. In a sensible world, they would not be allowed the private money for which their future is to be mortgaged, let alone the public purse they now await.
Throughout football the sums have ceased to add up and it is just one more reason why our sports minister, Richard Caborn, should launch a public inquiry into the game. Dodgy deals? The Panorama expose is due to go out on BBC Television on Tuesday and Alex Millar, the reporter who made the film, estimates that £100 million has been corruptly siphoned from the game since the Premier League's inception 14 years ago.
Managers have been prominent in that, but they could not do it without help. So corrupt agents? There is no point in asking the game, which is largely governed by club chairmen, to police itself because the corruption is institutional and bad practice rife. Jake Duncan, the FIFA-approved agent calling for reform, draws attention to the big fees earned for work ''behind the scenes" which might contravene regulations or even the law. For, when an agent is paid by a club to keep other clubs away from his client, it is bribery. Yet football blithely allows it.
What about bizarre transfers such as that which brought Javier Mascherano and Carlos Tevez to West Ham? And shadowy takeovers? The FA say everything is hunky dory and UEFA (to do the European body justice, only they seem even to recognise that there is a serious problem which the FA cannot or will not handle) declare it is a matter for the UK government because football is an industry under its jurisdiction. So perhaps it might be easier if Caborn just told us how many reasons he needs before ordering an investigation.
An illustration of why football cannot be trusted comes with FIFA's unveiling of Seb Coe as chairman of an independent ethics committee. This is just a PR stunt, the sort of thing football comes up with every time it senses a little more wool needs to be pulled over our eyes. Coe is quoted in today's Sunday Telegraph as saying: "My gut view is that we might be meeting six times a year." He says he does not even intend to try to clean up football and adds: ''The issues that are to be raised in Panorama are exactly what this committee is not going to be about…I don't have any doubt at all that the FA are strong enough to deal with those issues." He then opines that ticket prices are rather high, as if unaware that they would be lower if so many people were not plundering the game's economy. My guts, like Coe's, have a view of this appointment.
