As Tottenham look set to lose Luka Modric to Real Madrid, Andre Villas-Boas is considering making a move for Malaga ace Santi Cazorla as a replacement for the Croatian playmaker, according to Talk Sport.
Cazorla is currently said to be unhappy in Malaga following a dispute over wages, and Spurs will be hoping to lure him to White Hart Lane as they look to offer double his current earnings.
Having cost Malaga £17 million from Villarreal last summer, the Spanish international could be moving away from La Rosaleda just one year on.
However, north London rivals Arsenal have also been linked to the 27 year old, as they look set to part company with Andrei Arshavin, who is looking for a permanent move to Zenit St Petersburg.
The arrival of Santi Cazorla to the Premier League would no doubt add to the wealth of talent that England’s top flight has to offer, as the Spaniard featured in both of Spain’s European Championship winning campaigns, only missing the 2010 World Cup due to injury.
Andre Villas-Boas has already stated his intent at revamping the Spurs squad this transfer window to turn them into genuine title contenders, and Santi Cazorla would mark another high profile signing this summer having already secured the services of Gylfi Sigurdsson and Emmanuel Adebayor.
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Liverpool boss Kenny Dalglish is set to further strengthen his defence in January with a bid for Ajax’s Jan Vertonghen in the pipeline, the Metro reports.
The Liverpool boss isn’t entirely satisfied with his defence, despite already strengthening it this summer with the signings of Jose Enrique from Newcastle and Uruguayan starlet Sergio Coates.
Vertonghen was linked with a move to Merseyside and Premier League rivals Arsenal during the transfer window although both failed in persuading Ajax to sell.
That could all change in January with Dalglish set to renew his interest in the 24-year-old Belgian international who has become a key figure at the Amsterdam Arena.
Fresh interest in Vertonghen comes off the back of criticism aimed at current Reds defender Jamie Carragher after the stalwart’s mistakes against Bolton and Stoke.
Dalglish spoke out in defence of the 33-year-old and insisted that his place in the side was down to his consistent displays and not based on reputation.
He said: “I don’t know what I can say to you about him because there is nothing that I would like to change about him.
“Jamie Carragher will do me just fine the way he is.”
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With Liverpool reviving their interest in Vertonghen, and with a January bid expected, it could nonetheless spell the end of Carragher’s regular first team opportunities at Anfield.
Chelsea signing Fernando Torres has trained with the Blues on Thursday, heightening speculation he will debut on Sunday against Liverpool.
The 50-million-pound acquisition went through the motions at Chelsea’s Cobham training home alongside fellow signing David Luiz, who transferred to London from Portuguese club Benfica.
It has fuelled belief the Spaniard will face his old side less than seven days after transferring from Anfield to Stamford Bridge.
While Torres could lay claims for an immediate start in Carlo Ancelotti’s side despite Chelsea packing an attack consisting of Didier Drogba and Nicolas Anelka, Luiz is more realistic about his efforts to gain a place in the back four for the English champions.
“I always knew there would be competition because Chelsea is a big club and you have to be a top player to play here,” Luiz said.
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“It is a big challenge for me, but I have a strong desire to get a space in this group and establish myself and learn from my new team-mates to become a better player and have more skills.”
Tottenham will complete the £12 million signing of Hugo Lloris, but only once Luka Modric is sold according to The Sun.
The north London club are adopting an aggressive transfer strategy this summer, with Jan Vertonghen and Gylfi Sigurdsson already having completed moves to White Hart Lane.
However, Andre Villas-Boas is eager to sign a new goalkeeper to replace ageing Brad Friedel between the sticks, with the Lyon man the Portuguese manager’s preference.
After negotiations between Spurs and the Ligue 1 club, a fee of around £12 million is thought to have been agreed, but Tottenham need to wait until they are given a cash injection from Modric’s sale.
The Croatia international is in the process of moving to Real Madrid, with negotiations ongoing.
Lloris’ father has also confessed that the goalkeeper’s move may hinge on the future of Modric and the money received from his sale.
“I’m sure that Hugo’s move will be accelerated if Modric joins Real,” Luc Lloris is believed to have said.
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Football chairmen are rarely liked. Whilst it may be a position that millions dream of having, it can often be a thankless task. As a chairman you are not judged on the things that you hold most dear: revenues, profit margins, net gains and all those other juicy financial buzzword goals. You are judged by the fans and on their terms, judged on the scale of your ambition and your generosity in pursuit of that ambition. This disparity between what the Chairman and the fans consider success is the fundamental reason why their relationship is so often so strained.
To a chairman, success is financial stability, maybe even making a profit, or for the less ambitious, steering a club away from administration. To fans a successful football club is one that wins games. Consider Arsenal’s current situation. As a club, their revenues are phenomenal and their business model is the envy of every club in the Premier League but their fans are despondent, desperate for Wenger to spend some of the ‘warchest’ the media refer to every year. The fans don’t care that their club is generating record profits, they’re paying hundreds of pounds for a season ticket as the quality of football declines.
Football fans will only be happy when the chairman’s ambition matches theirs, of course this is only possible at the upper echelons of the game. Your Manchester City or Crawley Town type clubs. Any attempts at consolidation and financial security are simply seen as the end of the club’s ambitions. Ken Bates has managed to find himself on Leeds fans’ hitlist this summer for investing in corporate facilities rather than players. He attempted to explain this as improving the club’s infrastructure and long-term earning capacity but he was preaching to the wrong crowd. (It didn’t help that he then called them morons). The fan wants short-term success and instant results, they have no financial stake in the club, just a permanent, incredibly hard to satisfy emotional stake.
Mike Ashley is considered a villainous chairman by many Newcastle fans following various terrible decisions at boardroom level. He is displaying all the traits that football fans despise. He sold Andy Carroll and did not reinvest the money back into the squad. He sold the Captain Kevin Nolan and is in the process of releasing Joey Barton. He couldn’t display less ambition if he wanted too.
Chairmen are of course within their rights to run their clubs however they wish, but when their decisions show a lack of ambition or generosity like Ashley’s or are judged to affect results on the pitch like Bates, they will be blamed. It’s lonely at the top and the only way to win over the fans is to start winning games.
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Birmingham City boss Alex McLeish is hoping for a little less drama after his side’s latest comeback against Coventry in the FA Cup.
Birmingham came from 1-0 down – 3-1 on aggregate – to beat West Ham United and reach the final of the Carling Cup on Wednesday.
And they were forced to repeat the trick at St Andrew’s on Saturday, fighting back from 2-0 down against Championship club Coventry to eventually win 3-2 and progress to the fifth round.
“I wouldn’t want to live through that too often with the stress levels, but I thought the team played well today,” McLeish said.
“There was a lot of really good stuff.”
“We had to show great strength of character again against Coventry and it underlined the importance of having a squad with quality. The more intense the competition the better from my point of view.”
“We shouldn’t have made it hard for ourselves because we started great,” he added.
“Coventry are obviously very dangerous up front. The big lad (Clive) Platt was a handful and of course we all know about Marlon King. But I knew there was goals in it for us.”
McLeish credited David Bentley with turning the tide – the loan signing from Tottenham struck in the 35th minute to drag Birmingham back into contention.
“Bentley’s was a cracker,” McLeish said.
“We needed that. If we’d gone in 2-0 down it would have been much tougher. The second half was again a measure of this squad’s resilience and their desire not to give up until the final whistle.”
Coventry manager Aidy Boothroyd felt his team’s ambition got the better of them as they surrendered their lead in the second half.
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“I thought it was a terrific occasion and I’m afraid we got caught up in it in the second half and wanted to try to score three and four goals rather than being sensible,” Boothroyd said.
“If somebody’s bigger than you and better than you, you don’t go toe to toe with them – and that’s what we did.”
“For some strange reason, despite what was said at half-time, we went all out to try to beat Birmingham City, a Premier League team, convincingly when really what we should have done was weathered the storm, kept calm and hit them on a sensible counter-attack.”
Wigan Athletic are set to launch a late bid for Mallorca defender Ivan Ramis who is reportedly available for £4m, according to The Daily Mail.
The 27-year-old has been attracting interest from both Aston Villa and Sunderland but the Latics are looking to hijack any possible deal and take him to the DW Stadium.
Roberto Martinez will be keen to add a consistent defender to his ranks and Ramis fits the bill having only missed four league games for the Balearic Island side last season.
The Spanish defender has only ever represented Mallorca at club level but he was part of the squad, alongside Samuel Eto’o, that lifted the Copa del Rey in 2003.
Ramis had previously been linked to Celtic but it appears that interest has now filtered south of the border as Martinez’s team form a trio of clubs chasing the centre-back.
Wigan have also made an enquiry as to the availability of Watford’s 25-year-old defender Adrian Mariappa.
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Following the arrival of new owners at the club and the installation of Gianfranco Zola as manager, it remains to be seen whether the Hornets will still be willing to part with the Jamaica international.
Acting Asian Football Confederation (AFC) president Zhang Jilong has pledged to help restore the game’s reputation in the region.Zhang stepped into the interim role as president after incumbent Mohamed Bin Hammam was given a life ban by FIFA following allegations of bribery and corruption.
Football administrators all over the world are under pressure to clean up the sport, and at a meeting of the AFC Executive committee on Friday, Zhang said it was their duty to restore the public’s faith.
“Today I will speak to you from the heart. Today I will address you not only as the Acting President of AFC and the Chairman of this Executive Committee but also as a very concerned fan and supporter of Asian football,” Jilong said.
“Football is the number one sport in Asia. It is followed by millions of people and today everybody is looking to us for leadership and assurance.”
“Our fans and sponsors want to be reassured that Asian football will not be affected by this great misfortune, and that the ‘Future is indeed Asia’.”
“This is the time to show the world that Asian football is united and will weather this storm. The AFC Statutes will be my guide.”
Following his opening address, Zhang was unanimously nominated to sit at Asia’s vacant seat on the FIFA Executive Committee, and will remain interim AFC president for up to 12 months before an Extraordinary Congress can elect a permanent successor.
Bin Hammam received a life ban from any football-related activity by FIFA’s ethics committee last week after being initially suspended on May 29.
It was alleged he tried to bribe Caribbean Football Union officials for their votes in the FIFA presidential election, which he was contesting against incumbent Sepp Blatter.
Spurs manager Harry Redknapp is expected to test Aston Villa’s resolve once more by making an offer for England star Ashley Young.
Redknapp, who is well known to be big admirer of Young, was frustrated to miss out on his target over the summer and will pull out all the stops to get his man in January.
It is thought that Spurs are likely to meet the £15 million asking price, as well as giving Gerard Houllier the pick of their squad players which includes the likes of Robbie Keane, Niko Kranjcar, David Bentley and Jamie O’Hara.
Young’s current contract expires in 2012 and Villa are scared of letting him leave for free in a years time. It is thought that Spurs’ cash plus players offer is tempting the midlands club who could increase their own transfer budget as well as being given a ready made replacement for Young.
Redknapp may also use the deal as a chance to give injury-plagued defender Jonathan Woodgate some first-team football. It is thought that Spurs could send Woodgate on loan to Villa as part of the Young deal, an offer which could help to sure up Houllier’s shaky defence.
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The 25 year-old midfielder joined Villa from Watford in 2007 for around £9 million and has made 11 appearances for England since that time. He has consistently been a star performer at Villa Park since his move, but the lure of Champions League football at Tottenham could prove to be too tempting for the ambitious England man.
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When UEFA’s Executive Committee approved the Club Licensing and Fair Play Regulations in May of 2010, the move was heralded as imperative for rescuing football’s financial integrity. Too long had clubs overextended in pursuit of success; too long had the financial landscape been grossly exploited by Europe’s richest. Something had to change.
Analysis of Premier League club’s accounts provide unnerving reading. Manchester City recorded the highest ever monetary loss in English footballing history in 2011, as their £197million eclipsed Chelsea’s erosion of £141million in 2005. Since the Glazer’s takeover of Manchester United was enacted, the club have hemorrhaged in advance of £500million. As a general trend, clubs in England have been expending sums far beyond their income capabilities for many years. Outside the wealthy elite, the hyper-inflation of wages and widening of the gap between top and bottom leaves mid-ranging clubs in fatal peril: Portsmouth’s financial capitulation can partially be attributed to a desire to spend money the club simply does not have in an attempt to close the increasing gulf.
The introduction of the various regulatory measures has brought a stinging sense of reality to the European game, a sobering reminder that procuring an endless string of debts is no longer a viable or sustainable option. Clubs still endure losses of course, but above all the legislation has forced many to reassess their absurdly excessive spending habits, with a more rational approach adopted. Undoubtedly, UEFA’s intervention has curbed the ludicrous debt accumulation which has afflicted the European game in recent years. Clubs are perturbed by the treat of elimination from UEFA competition and the subsequent loss of revenue this would bring. Football’s finances appear set to regain at least a smidgen of the respectability lost in the globalized era.
However, there is a potential adverse consequence of UEFA’s increased involvement in dictating finance in football, one which may becoming alarmingly apparent in the coming seasons.
Let’s look at the elite of European football, the wealthiest and most influential clubs, as a group of spoilt little brats. Also for the purposes of this analogy, let’s view UEFA as a stuck-up, haggled old disciplinarian of a headmaster wanting to take all their toys away. They have so many that they don’t know what to do with them anymore, so the headmaster restricts the little brats to just a few each. Bad move. These little brats have rich and powerful parents, who are disgusted at the treatment of their precious ones. The parents group together and form a plan. They get their little brats together, pull them out of the school with nasty old headmaster and form their own school, one where they can indulge their gluttony without an overbearing presence watching their every move.
Can you see where this is going? The further UEFA extend their domineering arm into the affairs of Europe’s biggest clubs, the greater the prospect of a breakaway league forming. A notion of a ‘European Super League’ has been whispered and speculated upon for many years now, yet has never seemed an attainable option. The authorities would never allow it, the fans would never allow it. But what does that matter nowadays?
Clubs in the modern era display abhorrent disregard for the wishes of supporters and national associations, instead seemingly doing all they can to arouse conflict. The Premier League’s idea of a 39th game has fostered the prospect of clubs becoming further disconnected from their cradle in search of profit. Real Madrid have recently signaled their intent with the construction of a club theme park in the UAE, whilst Lionel Messi being propelled to the status of world icon suggest La Liga clubs are increasingly creeping in on the Premier League’s territory. Likewise, clubs already play friendly matches abroad – what is to stop Europe’s biggest sides embarking on a year round tour of exhibition matches, extracting maximum earnings in far flung climates?
To move Manchester City from Manchester would be of little distress to the club’s owners. There would be protest, there would be uproar, but ultimately money speaks loudest. As Manchester United claim that a third of the world’s population are supporters, the Glazers must surely be wishing to take their brand into supplementary markets, the confines of Salford no longer satisfying their profiteering hunger. Impulsive aspiration is replacing common sense and clubs are looking for new avenues to enhance revenue. With their power and influence now supplanting that of the regulatory bodies, there exists feasibility in the idea that top teams may seek to slowly configure a ‘Super League’ independent of FIFA, UEFA or national associations. The inclination has always been present; now clubs have the grotesque sums necessary to initiate such a change, it moves one step closer to reality.
Above all, this leaves UEFA in a precarious position. Enact the regulations any deeper and risk the loss of their most profitable assets or take a softer approach and allow clubs to re-engage with their rampant financial frenzies once more? Michel Platini’s reign has been characterised by the insistence on the reformation of modern football’s ills, and there appears to be no let up in his desire for remedy. He is right to address football’s most disturbing developments in such a forthright manner, yet walks a delicate tightrope in doing so.
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If you want to discuss UEFA’s Fair Play regulations or any other football debate, tweet me @acherrie1