We posted last Sunday that Arsenal were one of only two prominent Premiership teams that hadn't yet sold out to corrupt owners (see: http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2007/08/arsnes-arsenal-about-to-go-arse-over.html).
Yesterday, that situation changed in the most disturbing way imaginable. Former Arsenal vice-chairman (the word "vice" being particularly meaningful here) David Dein sold his 14.58% stake in Arsenal to Red And White Holdings (R&WH) - an investment vehicle owned by Uzbek billionaire Alisher Usmanov. Aside from the reward of pocketing £75 million ($150 million) on a stake that originally cost him just £300,000, Dein will become chairman of R&WH. Dein will head up the R&WH's attempts to increase their stake in the Gunners, but the firm insist they have no immediate plans to mount a takeover. Dein was forced off Arsenal's board in April after falling out with his fellow directors over their failure to support his plan to back a takeover by American businessman Stanley Kroenke. There are now fears that R&WH will team up with Kroenke to launch a hostile bid for Arsenal.
So far so similar to standard capitalist business practice worldwide. What sets this deal apart from the norm is Mr Alisher Usmanov.
Usmanov is 278th on the Forbes Rich List and is Russia's 18th richest man with assets totalling £2.75 billion. His prime business interests include being sole proprietor of Gallagher Holdings Ltd, owner of the Kommersant newspaper and Gazmetall steel and mining empire, he owns half of Metalloinvest and is a director of Gazprominvestholding which manages the debts of Russian monopolistic gas giant, Gazprom. The man also owns a mobile phone company, a couple of television stations and is very interested in the diamond trade.
These are the bits of his life, alongside his interest in fencing, that Mr Usmanov wishes for the world to see. Inevitably in the world of Russia's oligarchs, there is an awful lot more below the surface that Uzbek Usmanov wishes to hide from prying eyes.
Usmanov is "a typical oligarch with a very murky past" which leaves him open to pressure from the Kremlin (see: http://russophobe.blogspot.com/2006/10/editor-of-kommersant-out.html). Last year, Usmanov bought Kommersant (a leading Russian business journal that was, at the time, critical of Putin) at the Kremlin's request. The newspaper was formerly owned by Boris Berezovsky - a man who is no stranger to controversial football corruptions as we have posted previously and who has been recently implicated in the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Usmanov himself stated after the purchase: "no-one asked me to buy the publisher, although I should say that my purchase of it was not against the wishes of the authorities". In today's Russia, this is a clear indication that Usmanov enjoys Putin's approval. After taking over Kommersant, the editor-in-chief was immediately sacked while the defence correspondent, Igor Safranov, mysteriously fell to his death from a Moscow window three months later. The new editor of Kommersant is Andrei Vasilyev who is a close collaborator of Berezovsky and the word on the street in Moscow is that Usmanov is plate-spinning trying to keep well-in with both Putin and Berezovsky so that he may retain his power bases no matter which route Russia moves along in the near future. Usmanov also shares close links to Roman Abramovich via their shared links to the metals sector.
In the grey world of Russian oligarchy, there are two ways to assess an individuals past and current hidden agendas - their previous/current business and political links and the views of those who have come into close contact with the operator historically.
Described widely as "the hard man of Russia" which, when one considers the other hard men of the country, is a pretty disturbing motif, the Mail On Sunday calls Usmanov a "sinister...oligarch". Usmanov has very close links to fellow Uzbek, Gafor Rakhimov - in Uzbekistan, when people utter Rakhimov's name, they prefer to say it quietly. Rakhimov is Uzbekistan's richest self-made businessman and The Observer has labelled him "a major figure in Uzbekistan's booming heroin trade". Rakhimov is also accused of conspiracy and rampant involvement in organised crime and he is close to the Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov as, indeed, through his friendship with his daughter, is Usmanov. Rakhimov cooperates with Usmanov via Gazprom which is a channel for massive slush funds and linkages to offshore financial centres (OFCs). Gazprom's Sergei Kuprianov states: "he [Usmanov] devises vehicles for handling our most difficult and sensitive transactions". In support of this view, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, states that Usmanov "was in charge of Gazprom's bribery and slush funds" and, in his book "Murder In Samarkand" describes human rights abuses including boiling people to death. Reports have claimed that Britain's National Criminal Intelligence Service was monitoring Usmanov for alleged links to suspected mafia figures and a report by Lena Smirnova entitled "Uzbekistan: The Disappeared" suggests that cute and cuddly Mr Usmanov is linked to the abduction of Uzbek dissidents living abroad - a view that is supported by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
All in all, in the warped world of Richard Scudamore (the chief executive of the Premier League), Alisher Usmanov is evidently a fit and proper person for potential future ownership of one of the big four English football teams!
Dein has encouraged Arsène Wenger to sign a new contract and claims that the pair will work together again in the future. Wenger was known to be disappointed about the manner of Dein's departure but has remained silent, in public at least, about his views on the developing takeover battle at the Emirates although he is known to be disconcerted about the manner in which English clubs are being bought up by global inappropriates. We await Wenger's views.
Kroenke and R&WH now own 26.77% of the shares in Arsenal which, if they combine forces, would make them the largest single shareholder in the club. It also would put them close to the 29.9% benchmark that would require a takeover bid to be launched.
The battle for the soul of Arsenal is only just beginning.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Friday, 31 August 2007
Saturday, 18 August 2007
Why Insurance Is Exactly The Same As Bookmaking
At a first glance, there might not appear to be much in common between the bookmaking and insurance industries. Think again. The two sectors are virtually identical.
The basic foundation of the business models for bookmakers and insurers involves the accurate analysis of risk assessment and management. These market makers have an aversion to risk and create strategies whereby any exposure is diversified and/or hedged away from the risk profile of the company. This may be achieved in a range of ways.
All insurance companies rely on the reinsurance sub-sector. These industry giants charge the smaller operators for effectively offering an enhancement of the risk profiles of the small operators. Lloyds of London, Swiss Re, Berkshire Hathaway etc will then trade these probabilities between themselves as financial risk is shunted around the global insurance sector. The resulting structure is opaque, to say the least, as risk is converted into a tradeable asset. As the international financial markets are discovering in the current credit squeeze, in a time of crisis nobody can be sure where the real exposure to risk lies. This, as The Economist states "has shown weaknesses in some of the foundations of modern finance". Mathematical models involving algorithmic and neural network black box techniques are fine at spotting patterns in times of market calm but any new systemic infrastructures render such modelling worse than useless - Goldman Sachs were financially compromised last week via a market occurrence that their proprietary analysis told them should happen once every 100,000 years!
Bookmakers behave similarly. Whether the template is Ladbrokes returning their off-course liabilities to the rails and betting rings of British horseracing courses or Ladbrokes behaving similarly in the illegal Far East football betting markets, the prime aim of market makers is to hedge any risk that they do not wish to keep on their trading books. The European bookmakers also trade directly between themselves in private markets which serve the purposes of risk removal and informational and/or disinformational proprietary strategies. This is high stakes manipulated poker relating to the outcome of sports events.
The major infrastructural difference between these two industry sectors merely relates to the expansiveness of the area covered by their operations. The big picture to be analysed by an insurer is global whereas the bookmakers are dealing with an enclosed system. This is a major dichotomy and, yet, the two sectors move back towards equivalence by their respective responses.
Every effort is made by both the insurance and the bookmaking industries to tilt the playing field markedly in their favour. Insurers utilise such strategies as regulatory capture, abusive clause creation and arbitrary charges and loss adjustments to remove value from the consumer to the favour of the company. Such tactics are omnipresent in any insurance policy whether personal or business and, in our estimation, undermine any logic in getting insured in the first place as the market is priced significantly against a clients interests when viewed holistically.
The closed system of football is even more manipulated. Football bookmakers employ all the same tactics as the insurance sector and then some. The traditional bookies use the overround percentage to tilt the market in their favour before layering their more corrupt trading strategies on top. To the uninitiated, the degree of overround is a built-in bias in the marketplace. For example, for tomorrow's Manchester derby match, Ladbrokes are offering prices of City 7/2, United 8/11 and the Draw 21/10 which represent actual probabilities of approximately 22%, 58% and 32% which results in a book overround of 112%. Based on a 100% book, these prices should be 4/1, 10/11 and 13/5. So, if the Reds were to win, a £1000 bet would return £727 as opposed to £909 without any market tilt. But this machination is only the start of it.
The bookmakers control the outcome of football matches through the coercion of insiders. Players, referees and/or management work together with the bookies to ensure an outcome suitable to the bookmakers bottom line. When a match is under the direct control of any particular bookmaker, there is no need for the manipulating bookie to hedge or offset any liabilities as the match outcome is known prior to the event taking place. Consequently, incredibly skewed books are established for these corrupted events as the market makers happily take any amount of money on outcomes that they KNOW will not occur. The difference between this type of event and a truly competitive event is obvious as, in the latter case, a bookmaker will be seeking to merely achieve a balanced book to avoid exposure to a future reality outside of their proprietary influence. This market strategy is evident to all professional gamblers by the response of the bookies to positions traded in the marketplace. Beneficial prices are offered by the layers on positions that are guaranteed losers while price scalping occurs in all other scenarios.
The bookmakers are always on the lookout for valuable inside information which might solve a particular football match outcome. By offering preferential trading conditions to industry insiders and professional market analysts and brokers, a bookmaker is able to develop a market strategy that increases profits by the buying of information. In this manner, the betting markets are highly regressive with those least able to accommodate losses being charged the most for the trading experience. Not content with this collection of highly abusive business templates, the bookmaking sector has a further pair of aces up its collective sleeve. Firstly, gambling winnings are not enforceable under law and, consequently, all professional traders must build in to their trading strategies the unpleasant reality that the final payment from a bookmaker will not be made. Secondly, once it is apparent to the industry that you are a winning client, there are very few bookmakers who will accommodate your trading positions. In the same manner that casinos bar card-counting blackjack players, Ladbrokes and their like will inform you that "it is not in our economic interests to continue to offer you trading facilities."
As the systemic risks in the global insurance industry become more unpredictable due, in particular, to issues related to climate change, a similarly abusive infrastructural attitude is developing. The breakpoint for this new attitude in insurance was 9/11. The insurance industry haggled, bartered and battled for several years arguing that the demolition of the Twin Towers was one event rather than two separate events. This unethical posturing was profit-motivated and this strategy has now been fine-tuned and, in a direct equivalence with bookmakers, the insurers will now not take on certain types of risk. Following Hurricane Katrina, American insurance companies either refused to insure in hurricane zones or made the cost of such insurance prohibitively expensive. The parallels between insurance, bookmakers and casinos is startlingly similar.
A further intriguing area to focus on is the psychology of risk. Gambling is an addiction that incorporates a whole spectrum of personality attributes and disorders. For example, magical thinking enforces all players of the National Lottery to go to ridiculous lengths to ensure that they purchase their tickets each week as the FEAR that their numbers might come up in the very week where they choose to do something else with their money is colossal. And irrational... Similarly, the insurance industry thrives on fear. The likelihood of being burgled in England has significantly fallen over the last decade which is not a piece of good news that one finds trumpeted throughout the media. The insurers wish for us to remain terrified of burglary, mugging, theft, loss of belongings while travelling etc to an extent massively beyond the real probability of such an occurrence actually coming to fruition. Even better still, from the perspective of the insurance industry, is regulatory capture which enforces insurance on the population whether they desire such cover or not. Health insurance in America is a particularly hot potato at the moment while compulsory car insurance in England is another prime example of regulatory capture.
The marketing of insurance and gambling products show similar equivalence of strategy. William Hill's homepage is currently offering four introductory offers. These offers are very revealing as to where the bookmaker wishes you to place your bets. £50 ($100) bonuses are offered for opening sports betting or casino accounts and £20 for bingo. But, for the highly corrupt poker platforms offered online, Willie Hill's offer a $500 introductory bonus. As we have stated before, it is beyond our comprehension why any individual would trust the efficacy of an online poker game where the cards, the table, the other players and the reality of the game are so opaque and open to rampant manipulation that the format is a magnet for the criminalised businessperson. Similarly with insurance where, for example, it is almost impossible to buy any object with a plug on it or to make any travel booking without some slimy agent informing us of the risks related to the purchase.
So, how should the person on the street deal with these corrupt edifices? With gambling, the solution is simple. Unless you are a professional analyst or have access to privileged inside information, forget it. You are a patsy and you will lose your hard-earned cash. With regard to insurance, the basic strategy should be similar. Apart from areas of compulsory insurance, do the mathematics and determine the value (or, more often, the lack of it) in insuring yourself against a particular risk. If it appears that the insurance company has mispriced the risk then, by all means, seek cover but one should remember that the insurers have highly developed business models and the likelihood of mispricing is minimal.
Personally, I possess no insurance whatsoever anywhere. I minimise my risks by creative work/life balancing and have developed a type of individual amortisation account to provide a safety net against potential future occurrences that are outside my control. Similarly, I never hedge any trading positions unless I am certain that my market exposure has become incorrect due to externalities.
I refuse to pay others for the maintenance of an adequate risk profile and I would advise everybody to behave similarly. We do not need any external cover.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
The basic foundation of the business models for bookmakers and insurers involves the accurate analysis of risk assessment and management. These market makers have an aversion to risk and create strategies whereby any exposure is diversified and/or hedged away from the risk profile of the company. This may be achieved in a range of ways.
All insurance companies rely on the reinsurance sub-sector. These industry giants charge the smaller operators for effectively offering an enhancement of the risk profiles of the small operators. Lloyds of London, Swiss Re, Berkshire Hathaway etc will then trade these probabilities between themselves as financial risk is shunted around the global insurance sector. The resulting structure is opaque, to say the least, as risk is converted into a tradeable asset. As the international financial markets are discovering in the current credit squeeze, in a time of crisis nobody can be sure where the real exposure to risk lies. This, as The Economist states "has shown weaknesses in some of the foundations of modern finance". Mathematical models involving algorithmic and neural network black box techniques are fine at spotting patterns in times of market calm but any new systemic infrastructures render such modelling worse than useless - Goldman Sachs were financially compromised last week via a market occurrence that their proprietary analysis told them should happen once every 100,000 years!
Bookmakers behave similarly. Whether the template is Ladbrokes returning their off-course liabilities to the rails and betting rings of British horseracing courses or Ladbrokes behaving similarly in the illegal Far East football betting markets, the prime aim of market makers is to hedge any risk that they do not wish to keep on their trading books. The European bookmakers also trade directly between themselves in private markets which serve the purposes of risk removal and informational and/or disinformational proprietary strategies. This is high stakes manipulated poker relating to the outcome of sports events.
The major infrastructural difference between these two industry sectors merely relates to the expansiveness of the area covered by their operations. The big picture to be analysed by an insurer is global whereas the bookmakers are dealing with an enclosed system. This is a major dichotomy and, yet, the two sectors move back towards equivalence by their respective responses.
Every effort is made by both the insurance and the bookmaking industries to tilt the playing field markedly in their favour. Insurers utilise such strategies as regulatory capture, abusive clause creation and arbitrary charges and loss adjustments to remove value from the consumer to the favour of the company. Such tactics are omnipresent in any insurance policy whether personal or business and, in our estimation, undermine any logic in getting insured in the first place as the market is priced significantly against a clients interests when viewed holistically.
The closed system of football is even more manipulated. Football bookmakers employ all the same tactics as the insurance sector and then some. The traditional bookies use the overround percentage to tilt the market in their favour before layering their more corrupt trading strategies on top. To the uninitiated, the degree of overround is a built-in bias in the marketplace. For example, for tomorrow's Manchester derby match, Ladbrokes are offering prices of City 7/2, United 8/11 and the Draw 21/10 which represent actual probabilities of approximately 22%, 58% and 32% which results in a book overround of 112%. Based on a 100% book, these prices should be 4/1, 10/11 and 13/5. So, if the Reds were to win, a £1000 bet would return £727 as opposed to £909 without any market tilt. But this machination is only the start of it.
The bookmakers control the outcome of football matches through the coercion of insiders. Players, referees and/or management work together with the bookies to ensure an outcome suitable to the bookmakers bottom line. When a match is under the direct control of any particular bookmaker, there is no need for the manipulating bookie to hedge or offset any liabilities as the match outcome is known prior to the event taking place. Consequently, incredibly skewed books are established for these corrupted events as the market makers happily take any amount of money on outcomes that they KNOW will not occur. The difference between this type of event and a truly competitive event is obvious as, in the latter case, a bookmaker will be seeking to merely achieve a balanced book to avoid exposure to a future reality outside of their proprietary influence. This market strategy is evident to all professional gamblers by the response of the bookies to positions traded in the marketplace. Beneficial prices are offered by the layers on positions that are guaranteed losers while price scalping occurs in all other scenarios.
The bookmakers are always on the lookout for valuable inside information which might solve a particular football match outcome. By offering preferential trading conditions to industry insiders and professional market analysts and brokers, a bookmaker is able to develop a market strategy that increases profits by the buying of information. In this manner, the betting markets are highly regressive with those least able to accommodate losses being charged the most for the trading experience. Not content with this collection of highly abusive business templates, the bookmaking sector has a further pair of aces up its collective sleeve. Firstly, gambling winnings are not enforceable under law and, consequently, all professional traders must build in to their trading strategies the unpleasant reality that the final payment from a bookmaker will not be made. Secondly, once it is apparent to the industry that you are a winning client, there are very few bookmakers who will accommodate your trading positions. In the same manner that casinos bar card-counting blackjack players, Ladbrokes and their like will inform you that "it is not in our economic interests to continue to offer you trading facilities."
As the systemic risks in the global insurance industry become more unpredictable due, in particular, to issues related to climate change, a similarly abusive infrastructural attitude is developing. The breakpoint for this new attitude in insurance was 9/11. The insurance industry haggled, bartered and battled for several years arguing that the demolition of the Twin Towers was one event rather than two separate events. This unethical posturing was profit-motivated and this strategy has now been fine-tuned and, in a direct equivalence with bookmakers, the insurers will now not take on certain types of risk. Following Hurricane Katrina, American insurance companies either refused to insure in hurricane zones or made the cost of such insurance prohibitively expensive. The parallels between insurance, bookmakers and casinos is startlingly similar.
A further intriguing area to focus on is the psychology of risk. Gambling is an addiction that incorporates a whole spectrum of personality attributes and disorders. For example, magical thinking enforces all players of the National Lottery to go to ridiculous lengths to ensure that they purchase their tickets each week as the FEAR that their numbers might come up in the very week where they choose to do something else with their money is colossal. And irrational... Similarly, the insurance industry thrives on fear. The likelihood of being burgled in England has significantly fallen over the last decade which is not a piece of good news that one finds trumpeted throughout the media. The insurers wish for us to remain terrified of burglary, mugging, theft, loss of belongings while travelling etc to an extent massively beyond the real probability of such an occurrence actually coming to fruition. Even better still, from the perspective of the insurance industry, is regulatory capture which enforces insurance on the population whether they desire such cover or not. Health insurance in America is a particularly hot potato at the moment while compulsory car insurance in England is another prime example of regulatory capture.
The marketing of insurance and gambling products show similar equivalence of strategy. William Hill's homepage is currently offering four introductory offers. These offers are very revealing as to where the bookmaker wishes you to place your bets. £50 ($100) bonuses are offered for opening sports betting or casino accounts and £20 for bingo. But, for the highly corrupt poker platforms offered online, Willie Hill's offer a $500 introductory bonus. As we have stated before, it is beyond our comprehension why any individual would trust the efficacy of an online poker game where the cards, the table, the other players and the reality of the game are so opaque and open to rampant manipulation that the format is a magnet for the criminalised businessperson. Similarly with insurance where, for example, it is almost impossible to buy any object with a plug on it or to make any travel booking without some slimy agent informing us of the risks related to the purchase.
So, how should the person on the street deal with these corrupt edifices? With gambling, the solution is simple. Unless you are a professional analyst or have access to privileged inside information, forget it. You are a patsy and you will lose your hard-earned cash. With regard to insurance, the basic strategy should be similar. Apart from areas of compulsory insurance, do the mathematics and determine the value (or, more often, the lack of it) in insuring yourself against a particular risk. If it appears that the insurance company has mispriced the risk then, by all means, seek cover but one should remember that the insurers have highly developed business models and the likelihood of mispricing is minimal.
Personally, I possess no insurance whatsoever anywhere. I minimise my risks by creative work/life balancing and have developed a type of individual amortisation account to provide a safety net against potential future occurrences that are outside my control. Similarly, I never hedge any trading positions unless I am certain that my market exposure has become incorrect due to externalities.
I refuse to pay others for the maintenance of an adequate risk profile and I would advise everybody to behave similarly. We do not need any external cover.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Saturday, 4 August 2007
When Is A 3rd Party Agreement Not A 3rd Party Agreement?
On Friday July 13th, Football Is Fixed posted that the Carlos Tevez transfer was a done deal with the only remaining obstacle being how to construct a "reality" that would accommodate the multifarious public stances taken by the protagonists. That the final resolution has taken until yesterday to complete was solely a result of further non-strategic foot dragging by the Premier League. The deceleration of this process has merely served to make both their posturing as an organisation and the incompetence of chief executive officer (CEO), Richard Scudamore, more apparent to more people, as the delay has merely produced more damning column inches that have allowed more individuals to discern the Premier League's truly Orwellian fabrication of crime and punishment.
Briefly looking at the overview of this blatant piece of spectacular society corruption, we'll take each of the key participants in turn.
We stated just a couple of days ago that Richard Scudamore has more than passed his sell-by date. His mismanagement of the English game both within the public arena and away from the prying eyes of probity has been abysmal. When one compares his decision making with the interests of the more crooked elements that are corrupting our game to its core, we find a far-too-revealing positive correlation (which obviously occurs entirely by chance). However, his psychic ability to parallel Premier League strategy with the black and grey market's agenda is one of those spooky coincidences that has to be resultant in unemployment if such individuals were accountable to watchdogs. But they're not. The Premier League's accountability axes lead to some rather unsavoury loci.
Scudamore has been the media face that has projected his and his organisation's incompetence onto the footballing public in the Carlos Tevez affair. They dug themselves into a hole and just kept digging when strategic oversight would have preferenced a negotiated settlement. In financial markets, a key behavioural factor is testosterone. The male-dominated marketplace repeatedly throws up instances of testosterone-driven individuals undertaking strategies that are to their own and their associates disadvantage rather than selecting alternative options that might produce a small gain for all. The Premier League have behaved similarly. One of the problems for the likes of Scudamore is when the spin gets out of control. The conjunction of a variety of separate media realities results in people getting cornered in nightmares of their own chaotic creation. So it is with Scudamore. Quest and bungs, the influence of Zahavi and Berezovsky, the takeovers by Shinawatra and Yeung, the Carlos Tevez transfer and the West Ham non-relegation, mismanagement or what? And this are only the tip of the iceberg that is available to public eyes. Insiders also are able to detect the other machinations that are totally undermining and destabilising the game to the financial advantage of a smallish number of very corrupt entities.
Specifically with regard to Tevez and West Ham. By clearing and, indeed, financially rewarding the Hammers for their corrupt practices related to third party agreements, the Premier League set in motion the very public decline of their executive authority. The crisis was spun from Day One as the Premier League sought to achieve their aims with an abusive template. The other parallel stories conspired to establish a typical damage limitation infrastructure where each of the options open to Scudamore's brigade was a losing position. The scenario whereby the third party contracts never existed legally would have been overturned in the High Court to the accompaniment of excessive public awareness of the Premier League's murkier activities = LOSE. Or the scenario where the third party agreements did exist and were legal calls into serious question how the Premier League could possibly not relegate West Ham = LOSE. Keeping the various plates spinning in a spectacular creation of endless contortions until the media loses interest = LOSE. Or, the choice that the Premier League eventually arrived at, reach an out-of-court settlement with all the parties. Despite the fact that this settlement is conclusive proof of the corruption undertaken by the Premier League on a range of different levels as they repeatedly break (and allow others to break) the rules that they are supposed to oversee, pretend that you are still in control of the process while avoiding any cross-referencing between the final solution and any of the executive decisions preceding it = LOSE.
In non-sophisticated sectors like football, the tone of the press releases following these type of tiffs are always revealing. The Premier League's entirely desperate attempt to paper over the chasms states: "The decision of the board, having received leading counsel's opinion, is that the agreement reached is compliant with the rules of the Premier League and consistent with the undertakings given by West Ham United to the Premier League board at various times since 27th April 2007".
No, the agreement is not compliant with the Premier League rules and what about undertakings given by West Ham United PRIOR to April 27th?
Sack the bastard...
When there is a very very big loser, there is usually more than one big winner. In this particular little scam, everybody wins big except the Premier League (who could not have played their hand less expertly) and Sheffield United. Disturbingly, two of the winners should, with judicial equivalence, actually be losers.
In the last two years, it is difficult to find any aspect of the business realities of West Ham United that have even approached the area of ethical behaviour. The illegal transfers of Tevez and Mascherano; the cosy ties with Brooking at the FA; the "interesting" choice of sector links - ask any market analyst; the takeover battle between MSI and Iceland's dodgiest businessman; the undermining of Pardew; the crowning of mr nice guy, Alan Curbishley; the £30 million payment as punishment; having the cheek to spend that money on transfers; accepting the £2 million pay-off from Manchester United that proves the illegality of their historical operations. And, yet, Magnusson's men march into the 2007/08 season in a very strong position with, approximately, £26.5 million worth of assets illegally gained. This is quite a weight advantage in the Premiership Handicap Chase 07/08.
As this tawdry affair has developed, there has been an ever-increasing amount of media flak thrown at the real winners of this confrontation, the really dodgy people - Joorabchian, Zahavi, Berezovsky, MSI Group Limited and Just Sport Inc (JSI). The Quest inquiry, the match fixing scandal at Corinthians and the money laundering charges in Brazil against Joorabchian and Berezovsky are all indicative of the sectors in which these people choose to operate. It is common practice in South America and Africa for slave-like contractual conditions to be the norm as players are tied to criminal operations. The fact that this particular operation has come to light is just another tip of just another iceberg. The football authorities, on the whole, accept this illegal trafficking in legally non-represented human beings - the contracts are heavily tilted in favour of the owners of the player's registrations. Looking at another iceberg - the one representing the financial gains to MSI and JSI - shows exactly how much these dodgy operators have profited from Tevez and Mascherano. Manchester United will pay £10 million to these people for loan playing rights for the next two seasons and then United will have an option to buy. MSI have consequently gained financially from these players at every step of their career entirely illegally and totally without internal policing within the game. And we won't even venture anywhere near the influence that these crooks have on the global football betting markets...
The only parties to have behaved with moral rectitude are Manchester United and Carlos Tevez, himself.
Throughout the process, Man Utd have remained as inside the legal boundaries as was feasible when one is dealing with a rotten edifice. Like Liverpool with Javier Mascherano in January, United have skillfully taken advantage of a slimy corruption to gain competitive advantage. The two year loan deal with an option on outright purchase is a gem of a deal. But, just a point, aren't Manchester United entering into an illegal third party agreement in establishing this loan deal? Just a point... We expect to see the hyper owners hovering around the corruptions, even those corruptions not directly under their influence, as a frequent backdrop to the future English Premiership.
Tevez is a bit of a hero. His life story from day one has entertained Maradona-esque escapades with his existence being anchored by his immense football talent. It is absolutely not only the financial terms of this deal which makes it so massive - Tevez is the business. He has already shown that he can hack it at speed in Argentina, at Corinthians (it is incredibly difficult for any Argentinian footballer to make an impact in Brazil both due to the difference in playing styles and their treatment from opponents, officials and, even, team-mates), for his country in the 2006 World Cup, for a relegation threatened bunch of scallies and, soon, no doubt on the premier footballing stages of Europe. This speedy adaptation to new and alien environments at great rapidity is the very hallmark of a top player. And, to achieve all this against a backdrop of corruption, uproar and criminality = astonishing... Tevez or Torres. Get a grip...
Unless the Premier League determines that another spectacular cataclysmic implosion might best serve their interests, the final word on this corruption should go to one of the biggest losers out of this affair, Neil Warnock. Following the High Court's decision to back the relegation of Sheffield United while acknowledging the efficacy of their legal position, Warnock stated: "so much for the integrity of the Premier League. So much for fairness and justice in English football". Fair dinkum...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Briefly looking at the overview of this blatant piece of spectacular society corruption, we'll take each of the key participants in turn.
We stated just a couple of days ago that Richard Scudamore has more than passed his sell-by date. His mismanagement of the English game both within the public arena and away from the prying eyes of probity has been abysmal. When one compares his decision making with the interests of the more crooked elements that are corrupting our game to its core, we find a far-too-revealing positive correlation (which obviously occurs entirely by chance). However, his psychic ability to parallel Premier League strategy with the black and grey market's agenda is one of those spooky coincidences that has to be resultant in unemployment if such individuals were accountable to watchdogs. But they're not. The Premier League's accountability axes lead to some rather unsavoury loci.
Scudamore has been the media face that has projected his and his organisation's incompetence onto the footballing public in the Carlos Tevez affair. They dug themselves into a hole and just kept digging when strategic oversight would have preferenced a negotiated settlement. In financial markets, a key behavioural factor is testosterone. The male-dominated marketplace repeatedly throws up instances of testosterone-driven individuals undertaking strategies that are to their own and their associates disadvantage rather than selecting alternative options that might produce a small gain for all. The Premier League have behaved similarly. One of the problems for the likes of Scudamore is when the spin gets out of control. The conjunction of a variety of separate media realities results in people getting cornered in nightmares of their own chaotic creation. So it is with Scudamore. Quest and bungs, the influence of Zahavi and Berezovsky, the takeovers by Shinawatra and Yeung, the Carlos Tevez transfer and the West Ham non-relegation, mismanagement or what? And this are only the tip of the iceberg that is available to public eyes. Insiders also are able to detect the other machinations that are totally undermining and destabilising the game to the financial advantage of a smallish number of very corrupt entities.
Specifically with regard to Tevez and West Ham. By clearing and, indeed, financially rewarding the Hammers for their corrupt practices related to third party agreements, the Premier League set in motion the very public decline of their executive authority. The crisis was spun from Day One as the Premier League sought to achieve their aims with an abusive template. The other parallel stories conspired to establish a typical damage limitation infrastructure where each of the options open to Scudamore's brigade was a losing position. The scenario whereby the third party contracts never existed legally would have been overturned in the High Court to the accompaniment of excessive public awareness of the Premier League's murkier activities = LOSE. Or the scenario where the third party agreements did exist and were legal calls into serious question how the Premier League could possibly not relegate West Ham = LOSE. Keeping the various plates spinning in a spectacular creation of endless contortions until the media loses interest = LOSE. Or, the choice that the Premier League eventually arrived at, reach an out-of-court settlement with all the parties. Despite the fact that this settlement is conclusive proof of the corruption undertaken by the Premier League on a range of different levels as they repeatedly break (and allow others to break) the rules that they are supposed to oversee, pretend that you are still in control of the process while avoiding any cross-referencing between the final solution and any of the executive decisions preceding it = LOSE.
In non-sophisticated sectors like football, the tone of the press releases following these type of tiffs are always revealing. The Premier League's entirely desperate attempt to paper over the chasms states: "The decision of the board, having received leading counsel's opinion, is that the agreement reached is compliant with the rules of the Premier League and consistent with the undertakings given by West Ham United to the Premier League board at various times since 27th April 2007".
No, the agreement is not compliant with the Premier League rules and what about undertakings given by West Ham United PRIOR to April 27th?
Sack the bastard...
When there is a very very big loser, there is usually more than one big winner. In this particular little scam, everybody wins big except the Premier League (who could not have played their hand less expertly) and Sheffield United. Disturbingly, two of the winners should, with judicial equivalence, actually be losers.
In the last two years, it is difficult to find any aspect of the business realities of West Ham United that have even approached the area of ethical behaviour. The illegal transfers of Tevez and Mascherano; the cosy ties with Brooking at the FA; the "interesting" choice of sector links - ask any market analyst; the takeover battle between MSI and Iceland's dodgiest businessman; the undermining of Pardew; the crowning of mr nice guy, Alan Curbishley; the £30 million payment as punishment; having the cheek to spend that money on transfers; accepting the £2 million pay-off from Manchester United that proves the illegality of their historical operations. And, yet, Magnusson's men march into the 2007/08 season in a very strong position with, approximately, £26.5 million worth of assets illegally gained. This is quite a weight advantage in the Premiership Handicap Chase 07/08.
As this tawdry affair has developed, there has been an ever-increasing amount of media flak thrown at the real winners of this confrontation, the really dodgy people - Joorabchian, Zahavi, Berezovsky, MSI Group Limited and Just Sport Inc (JSI). The Quest inquiry, the match fixing scandal at Corinthians and the money laundering charges in Brazil against Joorabchian and Berezovsky are all indicative of the sectors in which these people choose to operate. It is common practice in South America and Africa for slave-like contractual conditions to be the norm as players are tied to criminal operations. The fact that this particular operation has come to light is just another tip of just another iceberg. The football authorities, on the whole, accept this illegal trafficking in legally non-represented human beings - the contracts are heavily tilted in favour of the owners of the player's registrations. Looking at another iceberg - the one representing the financial gains to MSI and JSI - shows exactly how much these dodgy operators have profited from Tevez and Mascherano. Manchester United will pay £10 million to these people for loan playing rights for the next two seasons and then United will have an option to buy. MSI have consequently gained financially from these players at every step of their career entirely illegally and totally without internal policing within the game. And we won't even venture anywhere near the influence that these crooks have on the global football betting markets...
The only parties to have behaved with moral rectitude are Manchester United and Carlos Tevez, himself.
Throughout the process, Man Utd have remained as inside the legal boundaries as was feasible when one is dealing with a rotten edifice. Like Liverpool with Javier Mascherano in January, United have skillfully taken advantage of a slimy corruption to gain competitive advantage. The two year loan deal with an option on outright purchase is a gem of a deal. But, just a point, aren't Manchester United entering into an illegal third party agreement in establishing this loan deal? Just a point... We expect to see the hyper owners hovering around the corruptions, even those corruptions not directly under their influence, as a frequent backdrop to the future English Premiership.
Tevez is a bit of a hero. His life story from day one has entertained Maradona-esque escapades with his existence being anchored by his immense football talent. It is absolutely not only the financial terms of this deal which makes it so massive - Tevez is the business. He has already shown that he can hack it at speed in Argentina, at Corinthians (it is incredibly difficult for any Argentinian footballer to make an impact in Brazil both due to the difference in playing styles and their treatment from opponents, officials and, even, team-mates), for his country in the 2006 World Cup, for a relegation threatened bunch of scallies and, soon, no doubt on the premier footballing stages of Europe. This speedy adaptation to new and alien environments at great rapidity is the very hallmark of a top player. And, to achieve all this against a backdrop of corruption, uproar and criminality = astonishing... Tevez or Torres. Get a grip...
Unless the Premier League determines that another spectacular cataclysmic implosion might best serve their interests, the final word on this corruption should go to one of the biggest losers out of this affair, Neil Warnock. Following the High Court's decision to back the relegation of Sheffield United while acknowledging the efficacy of their legal position, Warnock stated: "so much for the integrity of the Premier League. So much for fairness and justice in English football". Fair dinkum...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
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