IT'S THE economy, stupid. You only have to look out the window. As we spread Aldi margarine on our white sliced, we see the happy Italian and Spanish cruise-ship tourists frolicking around laughing at the feeble libido of our pound.
Despite football's ongoing attempts to create a world of its own, occasionally a few shafts of cold reality break through. And at the moment, in football, the hard currency belongs to the Spanish.
Spanish fiscal supremacy is as potent as Barcelon
a's passing game, with every British high street about to come under the thrall of their canny armada, and even Bradford City and Leicester City wondering if they face becoming rebranded branches of Racing Santander. Similarly the lure of Liverpool or Manchester United is diminishing against the lustre of Barcelona and Real Madrid, and it goes beyond the relative aesthetic attractions of the Rambla or Salford Quays.
After a season in which disgruntled Premier League footballers found that their six-figure weekly pay packets could still be treated patronisingly in the exalted hangouts of the permatanned Eurotrash, 2009 threatens to be the summer where the stars head to the Continent to earn some real money.
Footballers, like grannies converting everything into shillings, like to measure their worth in a figure they understand. Over the last couple of years, footballers in the Premier League accustomed to calculating in euros saw their salaries effectively slashed by 30 per cent as sterling plummeted on the exchanges. As if that was not enough indignity, the British government is about to take an additional slice of the hard-working multi-millionaire's stipend to waste on stuff like public hospitals and schools, that no self-respecting footballer would ever dream of using.
The 50 per cent tax rate is already threatening to provoke a kind of no-brain drain. This week even Alvaro Arbeloa, that thoroughly average full-back, trying to put an airily positive spin on the news that Liverpool were buying an Englishman (the shame of it) to replace him, said the imminence of the new tax burden was a factor in his desire to go back to Spain.
At the same time, the agent of his rather less dispensable team-mate Javier Mascherano has been flirting heavily with Barcelona, who have made no secret of their desire to appoint the Argentine as the midfield minder to their crew of fragile artistes. It's an agent's job to keep an eye on his next percentage of course, and Mascherano has looked on from the sidelines while Fernando Torres, Steven Gerrard and Dirk Kuyt signed new deals at Anfield, so this may just be an early summer negotiating gambit. It was noticeable though that, shortly after the Mascherano story emerged, there were rumours that Jose Reina, the base of Liverpool's spine, was also gazing fondly towards the Nou Camp. The protracted Ronaldo move, following soon behind Barcelona's humbling of Manchester United in Rome, seems to confirm a power-shift, away from the frantic hype of the Premier League, towards the elegant elite of La Liga.
If global economics, and the weak pound, exert an influence, there are also parallels with the somewhat less volatile finances of the two massive Spanish clubs. In the same way that the traditionalist Banco Santander avoided much of the recent meltdown in the banking sector by the startlingly original practice of not lending money to people who were never going to pay them back, Real Madrid and Barcelona have the sort of established structures that allow them to finance spectacular deals, while not falling prey to international speculators with dangerous lines of credit.
TV rights are their most obvious advantage. While the big Premier League clubs are tied into the, undeniably lucrative, collective deal with broadcasters, Real and Barcelona negotiate their TV rights independently. Setanta's woes have shown Sky's ability to swat away putative competitors, and to scare away all but the biggest players from future auctions. They have also shown that there is a finite pay-TV audience for English football and it may have been reached. Future deals for English clubs will no longer splash out the largesse so indiscriminately. The system in Spain whereby the clubs are owned by the members, rather than being the speculative ventures of the likes of the Glazers or the Gillett-Hicks crew means transfer deals are unlikely to be subject to the qualms of debt-laden businessmen. "We have responsibilities as a company", Sir Bobby Charlton said on Thursday, neglecting to add that these responsibilities entail keeping the Glazers one hop ahead of their creditors. This summer's dealings will be characterised by the relative reticence of England's top two: Manchester United, reinvented as a selling club, are now committed to buying younger players who may have a resale value, while Liverpool have to balance their books by selling before strengthening. Their accountancy will have to be so stringent that Michael Owen might soon start to look like an attractive signing.
Of course Chelsea and Manchester City have deeper pockets, but even they can't do anything about the exchange rate or the taxation levels. One of the world's most coveted strikers, David Villa, snubbed the advances of English clubs in the happy belief that he was bound for Real Madrid. The team of coiffeuses, barbers and topiarists required to tend that soul-patch semi-beard could hardly be financed on mere sterling. As it is Madrid seem to be stretching the indulgence of their bankers, and Villa might yet have to take Chelsea's phone-calls, but the point has been made. Spain is the new England, and the Premier League will have to stomach a little unfamiliar humility, at least until the pound recovers.
The full article contains 965 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
