Newcastle carried on their impressive start to the Premier League season with a comprehensive 3-1 victory at St James’ Park.
Demba Ba was the hero with a hat-trick in what was a relatively comfortable afternoon for Alan Pardew’s men as Blackburn rarely threatened to upset the Magpies throughout.
Steve Kean went into this game confident after last week’s impressive victory at Ewood Park, however his Rovers side never got going and their defence was the victim of their own downfall. Demba Ba time after time found himself with acres of space in and around the area and the Senegal striker could have added a few more to his name this afternoon.
The first came via a run by Leon Best who centred for Ba who spun round and smashed it past Robinson. The Rovers defence was in generous mood and when they failed to clear Steven Taylor’s headed centre Ba got ahead of the flapping Rovers keeper. Hoilett gave Blackburn a lifeline against the run of play, but the result never seemed in doubt given the dominance of the home side.
The second half was played out in much the same vein and Demba Ba finally completed his hat trick after more sloppy play in the Rovers backline. Alan Pardew was disappointed that Newcastle didn’t make their dominance pay with more goals, although I am sure he is secretly delighted at the result and the performance of his Magpies side.
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Aris Thessaloniki defend a 40-year unbeaten record at home in European competition when they welcome Manchester City in Tuesday’s Europa League action.
The Greeks have gone undefeated in 24 European games at their Kleanthis Vikelidis Stadium, turning back the challenges of such clubs as Chelsea, Benfica and Atletico Madrid.
But if they are to extend that remarkable record, Aris will have to handle a City side smarting from a 2-1 league defeat to arch rivals Manchester United on Saturday, Wayne Rooney’s stunning overhead kick delivering a hammer blow to Roberto Mancini’s title hopes.
With the English Premier League dented for the Eastlands outfit, the Europa League is the biggest prize on the horizon for Mancini, and so far his troops have been impressive in the tournament.
They head into Tuesday’s round of 32 first-leg fixture with only one defeat so far in the competition – a 3-1 loss in Poland to Lech Poznan – but will be without Italian striker Mario Balotelli, who is still recovering from a knee complaint, and Dutch midfielder Nigel de Jong.
Aris, meanwhile, have been in disappointing form so far in Greece’s Super League, sitting in eighth place and 29 points behind leaders Olympiakos Piraeus.
Their Europa League form has been solid, however, with wins over champions Atletico Madrid (twice), Rosenborg and a draw with Bayer Leverkusen seeing them into the last 32.
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Despite the January departures of Spanish wingers Javito and Toni Calvo, and Tunisian international midfielder Mehdi Nafti, manager Giannis Michalitsos has succeeded in putting together a competitive squad.
Argentine striker Raul Bobadilla arrived on loan from Borussia Monchengladbach, Mexican striker Nery Castillo is a loan acquisition from Shakhtar Donetsk, while Japanese marksman Daisuke Sakata was signed from Yokohama F Marinos.
After being crowned as Premier League champions at the end of last season, Manchester City were roundly criticised, namely by supporters of their rivals Manchester United, that Roberto Mancini’s side had ‘bought the title’, but does this claim stand up to closer scrutiny? Do United really have that much of a sound footing when it comes to talk of success being directly linked to money?
Since the Premier League’s inception in 1992, Manchester United have spent upwards of £15m on 12 separate occasions on the following players – Veron, Ferdinand, Rooney, Carrick, Anderson, Hargreaves, Van Nistelrooy, Berbatov, Valencia, Young, Jones and De Gea.
Now there’s nothing scientific to this cut-off point, but I think is a fair summation of what a big transfer has been for the best part of the last 10 years at least, not huge, but out of the realms of the majority of teams in the top flight, particularly in terms of consistency. Of course, given the context of the period, the deals involving Saha, Stam, Yorke, Kagawa, Nani and Cristiano Ronaldo were all pretty sizeable too.
The school of thought is that Manchester United are able to operate on such a sphere due to their prolonged spell at the top and the success that they’ve enjoyed in the process. They’ve only really been spending that amount of money since 2001-2, preferring to utilise home-grown talent and operate within their means (which they still do, to be fair to them, but for different reasons) up until that point.
Since the Premier League began, the club have spent £501m and recouped £310m from their dealings in the transfer market, which gives them a net spend of £190m, which spread over 21 seasons comes in at £9m per season which seems a very reasonable amount given their huge success. Even when you take out the hugely distortive figure of the Cristiano Ronaldo sale of £80m, the net spend is still a respectable £270m which works out at £12.7m per season.
Let’s take a look at Manchester City now then, bearing in mind that the club haven’t competed in the Premier League anywhere near as frequently, but they’ve been regular members since 2002. In that period they’ve spent £649m, recouped £175m for a net spend of £473m a huge increase on the figures mentioned above to do with United.
Using the same loose barometer for transfer activity, Manchester City have spent upwards of £15m on 16 separate occasions on the following players – De Jong, Robinho, Jo, Lescott, Toure, Adebayor, Tevez, Santa Cruz, Dzeko, Milner, Balotelli, Kolarov, Silva, Yaya Toure, Nasri and Aguero. Sizeable fees have also been forked out on Bridge, Bellamy, Wright-Phillips, Barry and Boateng in that period.
There’s clearly a more scattergun approach at work here as best typified by the fact that the club have had three managers in five years. People often forget the gradual period of investment that the club had prior to Abu Dhabi’s takeover in September 2008. They spent £45.8m the summer before under Sven Goran Eriksson and Thaksin Shinawatra before the real bug bucks were spent under Mark Hughes.
It’s only really now that you begin to realise how poor Mark Hughes spent while he was at the club keeping in mind the resources that he had available to him at the time. He spent a staggering £127m in 2008-9, but only Vincent Kompany (£6.7m), Nigel De Jong (laughably bought for £16m with just six months left on his contract) and Pablo Zabaleta (£6.5m) played any sort of part during their title success last season, while Joe Hart was bought for a pittance two years before for £600k from Shrewsbury.
Indeed, the club have spent £141m on players since 2008-9 which weren’t at the club last season, either being loaned elsewhere or having since been sold since, so they played no part at all during their title success, which is being extremely kind to Kolo Toure at the same time. The sheer level of mis-management and wasted resoruces is astonishing. It makes the often used figure of £528.6m that the club have spent in the past five years somewhat irrelevent without the context of the managerial change and the fact that half of those signed no longer play for the club anymore.
It would seem churlish to discount this period altogether, though, because the Robinho move in particular helped to create the conditions by which they could then move for the likes of Aguero, Silva and Tevez later on. However, in terms of the impact that they had out on the pitch, it’s pretty threadbare, which is essentially what we are talking about when we talk about them having ‘bought the title’, because otherwise if you’re just lending to the wholesale purchases of every player that’s walked through the door since 2008 and it loses all perspective.
Since taking over in December 2009, Roberto Mancini has spent £237m on 16 different players, which seems a fairer figure to use to judge their title success by, because it’s only since then that they have become a genuine threat to Manchester United. The significant outlay was needed to bridge the gap, they couldn’t afford to wait, so to speak, and planning methodically over the course of a number of years in the way Manchester United had done wasn’t a realistic option. Ferguson has still spent about £120m himself in that period, hardly small change as a standalone figure.
But at the same time, football has changed since those days, long ago in fact and while Manchester United may not set market trends with concerns to the fees that they pay, rather they keep up with them, they can hardly plead poverty themselves over this period. Is what Manchester City are accused of doing really that different to what Manchester United have been doing to the rest of the league, Chelsea aside, this past decade?
You can’t have success without money, every league title since the dawn of time has been built upon the club in question being able to attract top talent at a cost, but at the same time, having money doesn’t neccessarily guarantee success. Sure, Manchester City could afford to indulge in the transfer market and speedily replace expensive flops that perhaps Manchester United couldn’t, but it’s been as much of a hindrance as a help to them as they’ve had to muddle through with players constantly trying to bed into the club and gel and a high turnover of players is never conducive to success.
Going further back, in 1987, manager Sir Alex Ferguson signed Brian McClair and Steve Bruce for £1.75m, a significant outlay. A year later, he spent roughly the same on Mark Hughes. A year after that, he made spent £2.5m on Gary Pallister, who was at the time, the most expensive defender ever. They have broke the British transfer record fee on three separate occasions over the past 20 years, spending £7 million on Andy Cole in 1995, £28.1 million on Juan Sebastian Veron in 2001 and £29.1 million on Ferdinand in 2002.
It does come across as slightly hypocritical, Manchester United fans moaning about another club spending big money, but at the same time, entirely understandable. They’ve never spent the amount that City have in such a short space of time before, but does that make their market dominance over a longer period any more palatable? For the other teams in the top flight, probably not.
Blackburn, Arsenal and Chelsea before City have all spent big at different periods while Liverpool have been consistently up there in terms of net spends for quite some time. To talk wistfully about the days before football was dominated by money is absolute folly, it’s played a huge part for the best part of the last two decades, except the wealth is now more extreme, hence the Financial Fair Play rules being instigated in an attempt to counteract the billionaire play-thing owners of the last seven or so years.
In light of the fact that Manchester United bid up to £27m on Brazilian starlet Lucas Moura, a 19 year-old international with less than two years experience, does mean that the moral high ground does start to evaporate beneath their feet. You could argue that they are merely trying to keep up with Manchester City and Chelsea now, but that’s approaching it from the perspective of the rich vs the super rich, something which the likes of Everton, Newcastle and Aston Villa, three pretty big clubs themselves, can only dream of and it’s difficult to feel sympathy for any of the parties involved, to be perfectly honest.
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For example, if you take a look at the two side that line-up in the title-defining clash at the Etihad Stadium last season, using the universally accepted fees for each player, there’s not an awful lot of difference between the two teams. Manchester City’s starting line-up cost roughly £178m, while Manchester United’s cost around £148m. Adjusting these figures for the players which came off the bench, and City again lead by £219m to £181m, and when you factor in the entire bench and starting line-up, it’s around £286m to City and £220m to United. This is hardly the prince vs the pauper, so all the holier than thou stuff really has to stop.
Cries of Manchester City’s title success as being ‘the death football’ are seriously wide of the mark. It’s been dying for a long time now. Nevertheless, credit must got to Mancini for sorting out the mess that Hughes left behind and winning the FA Cup and then the Premier League. He’s bought the right sort of players (a skill in itself) at the right time to mount a challenge and potentiall usurp Manchester United as the dominant force in the English game.
Of course, Manchester United have had to cut their cloth accordingly due to the suicidal amount of debt leveraged onto the club by the Glazer family, but seeing as football didn’t start in 2005, the same context has to be applied to the Abu Dhabi takeover in 2008 and the Premier League boost in 1992. Over a longer period, Manchester United hardly stand up to closer scrutiny when it comes to the claim of having ‘bought the title’, but at the same time you wouldn’t begrudge them of their success or say that they haven’t been deserving of it either.
They may be the biggest losers of sheer scale of the Manchester City investment in the short-term, but over the long-term, they’ve been just as guilty. For those of us with longer memories than the beginning of the Premier League, it’s worth taking a look at the wider picture, because while City have set a worrying trend of their own, Manchester United have been setting their own trend for quite some time. Without trying to come across as too self-righteous, sometimes you just have to say ‘fair enough, well played’ because mud-slinging isn’t a good look on anyone, particularly on those with already dirtied faces.
Under-fire Blackburn manager Steve Kean has stated that he was happy with the 1-1 draw his side recorded against Fulham on Sunday, and feels the performance could be a springboard to better results.
The Ewood Park outfit had lost all three opening Premier League fixtures, but a gutsy effort at Craven Cottage saw the Lancashire team get their first point of the season.
“We played a lot of good stuff and dealt with the Fulham threat. We’ve got confidence in abundance, we have spirit and togetherness,” he told Sky Sports.
“The speculation doesn’t affect me, honestly. I have the dressing room and the backing of the owners. If the fans stay with us, we’ll see many away performances like that where we win more than one point.
“I’m sure if the fans stay with us we’ll finish in the top half,” he concluded.
Fulham boss Martin Jol was not happy with the draw however, and felt his side should have won the game.
“I felt we deserved more today. We are playing at home and we didn’t succeed. We know we have to win our home games and we didn’t today,” he admitted.
The Dutch coach felt that his side lacked a killer instinct in front of goal to finish off Blackburn, and has stated his team have work to do to eradicate this.
“In the second half we put a lot of pressure on them and we had a lot of opportunities, but we were not efficient enough. We got plenty of crosses in, but they defended well.
“We lack some creativity. What you would say in England is the cutting edge and that’s a nice phrase,” he stated.
Despite the point Blackburn are still bottom of the pile, whilst a slow start for Fulham sees them in the relegation places also, as they sit in 18th position.
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Fulham’s penchant for drawing games they ought to win has left them in the relegation dog-fight. The late equaliser against Wigan last weekend was absolutely crucial in keeping the Cottagers out of the drop zone, and the players will know that home fixtures like this will decide whether they remain a top-flight outfit next season.
Stoke have been excellent in recent weeks. An away defeat to Manchester United aside, they have taken their chances, and are now properly settled in the top-flight. I was surprised to see Tony Pulis allow Ricardo Fuller to leave the Britannia this week, the former Southampton striker has been instrumental for the Potters during their three-year stay in the Premier League. It is an indication of the strength in depth at Stoke that previously unused Champions League winner, Eidur Gudjohnsen can come in and do a job.
Fulham’s resources are a little more stretched, and a return to goal scoring form for Andy Johnson will be a major boost for Mark Hughes as he looks to turn solid performances into much needed wins.
Prediction: 1-1
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Not all of us in life make for such good travellers. For every seasoned flyer that ooze both air miles and smugness in equal measure, there are those who struggle to keep their lunch down on a short coach trip. And for as long as the mind can remember, Tottenham Hotspur seem to have forgotten to pack the Kwells and succumbed to a pretty bad dose of travel sickness on the road.
Is away-day flakiness a habitual requirement of playing for Spurs? It certainly shouldn’t be, but life on the road for the Lilywhite’s in recent Premier League times, has been a real mirth of inconsistency.
At fear of stating the obvious, football is something of a results based business. The dust is now settling on Harry Redknapp’s reign as Tottenham manager, but for all the hope and future emphasis that chairman Daniel Levy has applied by appointing Andre Villas Boas, he will be judged upon where Spurs finish. The task has to be to at least match, if not improve, on the work Redknapp has done.
Of course, Spurs fans will be more than optimistic that Villas Boas can go one up on Redknapp – after all, despite the reasons for sacking Redknapp being seemingly unrelated to events on pitch, the premise is that the Portuguese can succeed where Redknapp had failed.
And if we look at the away results of last year, one of the most glaringly obvious issues was Spurs’ failure to pick up points at any of the teams around them in the table. Spurs took only three points against the other teams in the eventual top eight away from home. For a team that was supposedly dubbed title challengers at one point in the season, that is a pretty miserable turn out to say the least. And it is something they must rectify next season.
Still, as poor as that record is, it can be more easily forgiven if the team are picking the points up that they are expected to away from home. Yet of course, in typical Tottenham fashion, that task in particular seemed to evade them once more. A failure to pick up wins in games they dominated, such as Sunderland and Aston Villa were compounded by defeats at the hands of QPR and Stoke. Even if we take away the controversy at the Britannia, you can’t ignore the away day blues.
But this was well and truly one of Harry Redknapp’s most uncomfortable truths. It is naïve to dub the 65-year-old as tactically inept as such. He certainly managed to get Tottenham Hotspur playing a wonderfully entertaining brand of football. Yet strip away the England speculation, strip away the court case and strip away the health issues – on purely footballing terms, there is no way Spurs should have finished a point below Arsenal. And that is in a large part down to their fallibility under Redknapp away from home.
Redknapp has often talked with more than a hint of disdain for what he liked to call, ‘the numbers game.’ In one his more famous nuggets of wisdom, the now ex-Spurs boss quipped: “You can argue about formations, tactics and systems forever, but to me football is fundamentally about players.” Indeed, Rafael van der Vaart gave an interesting look into the pre match routine at White Hart Lane, stating: “There is a clipboard in our dressing room, but Harry doesn’t write anything on it. It’s not that we do nothing – but it’s close to that.”
Redknapp’s approach worked superbly at home. Go out and get great players playing great football. Unfortunately, against some of the best-organised teams in the Premier League, the same tactic didn’t work too well away.
Going with a 4-4-2 at the Emirates, against a side as good in possession as Arsenal, was a really quite poor decision and Tottenham were bulldozed as a result. The same formation worked better against, with all respect, a lesser team in Everton. But David Moyes was no mug and after nullifying Spurs centrally, Redknapp had no answer. Games against the two Manchester clubs away may have come under completely different circumstances. But tactically, Spurs were left far too open against two of the best teams in the league and paid for it as a result.
If you switch the emphasis from tactical preparation to trying to change the game mid way through proceedings, Redknapp’s lack of reactivity seemed even more apparent. The token gesture of whacking on Jermain Defoe for Rafael van der Vaart was always taken in the dying embers of matches and in some cases (a la the now infamous Villa away fixture) it didn’t come at all.
And this is what Villas Boas is going to be expected to rectify. It’s easy to sit here and put a magnifying glass over every away fixture that Spurs failed to get three points under Harry Redknapp. Of course they’re not going to win every game on their travels and we can’t forget the resolute performances that came away against teams like Fulham and West Brom.
But it’s against the so called ‘bus-parkers’ that Spurs need to pick the points up. AVB won’t have a magic wand during his half time team talk, but he’ll be expected to do more than tell the boys to ‘f****** run about a bit’. And if Spurs are to progress, they simply have to start taking points off the bigger teams away from home. Hopefully, between Villas Boas and new chief opposition scout Daniel Sousa, they can prove more reactive in their preparations than Redknapp.
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Tottenham bestow an array of extremely talented footballers who, when they play to their core attacking strengths and fluid best, are a match for anyone. But teams will, as what happened last year, find a way to counter that and some will simply be better suited to play against it. Harry Redknapp’s inability to evolve his team when needed, played a bigger part than any in their inability to finish third.
Andre Villas Boas will have to be seen to make the big calls away from home and develop the sacred ‘Plan B’ that evaded Spurs under Redknapp. Daniel Levy said that Villas Boas has an “outstanding reputation for his technical knowledge of the game.” Supporters will expect to see that next season.
Can Villas Boas develop a Plan B at Spurs? Or do you fear that Tottenham are still going to remain so infamously flaky away from White Hart Lane? Tell me what you think and what you’d do on Twitter, follow @samuel_antrobus
Bolton face Manchester City in the Premier League this weekend and you have the opportunity to see the Trotters in action! We have teamed up with 188BET to give away five pairs of tickets to the match at the Reebok Stadium on Sunday. You can see Owen Coyle’s men in action against the riches of Man City in what is a top of the table clash.
Both clubs go into the match in good form and it should turn out to be a cracker. On the opening weekend Bolton travelled to newly promoted QPR and trounced them 4-0; the same score line achieved by Man City against fellow Premier League new boys Swansea. Gary Cahill, Kevin Davies, David Silva and Sergio Aguero are just some of big names in action, and to see them you’re going to have to be quick off the mark!
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The competition closes at 11am on Friday 19th August, so as long as you sign up and make your bet before then you’ll be in with a shout of winning. So, what are you waiting for? Sign up, make your bet and enjoy watching Bolton v Man City at the Reebok!
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The mid-70s were a simpler, care free, less responsible time. Much so for me as I’d failed to be born yet, an excuse for irresponsibility which unfortunately doesn’t work nearly as well now. For those that had been however the joy of moustaches, the Nolan Sisters and football hooliganism awaited. Manchester United had been relegated, Brian Clough had spent 44 days at Leeds, Liverpool’s relentless era of dominance was about to begin and George Best had left English football to play for the Jewish Guild in apartheid South Africa for reasons absolutely no one understands even now. If you lived in America however, the glitz and glamour of swinging sixties football was coming to your shores in the form of the North American Soccer League.
The USA’s first attempt to lure the great and the good of World football to a succession of preposterously monikered clubs was in part a bizarre failure, but in part a surreal success, most notably in the caliber of stars it attracted. Johan Cruyff, Gerd Muller, George Best, Eusebio, Gordon Banks, Johan Neeskens, Alan Ball, Peter Beardsley, Geoff Hurst and many others graced the league during it’s 16 year tenure, and none more notably than at the New York Cosmos, where the likes of Carlos Alberto, Franz Beckenbauer and most famously Pele, spurred them on to five “Soccer Bowl” titles (though not all with that prestigious line up.)
Mostly due to Pele’s involvement, the Cosmos became a relatively famous name in football, playing to a regular crowd of over 45,000 at their peak in a strip designed by Ralph Lauren. However the success of the NASL never quite matched that of its flagship side. Whilst the Cosmos sold out Giants stadium’s 73,000 capacity for their 1978 championship victory, the league itself never averaged over 15,000. When the League collapsed in 1983, the Cosmos moved to the Indoor Leagues, but soon disbanded completely.
However general manager G.Peppe Pinton – who sounds like the kind of man that runs a malt liquor business and never takes his cowboy hat off – continued to run the club’s youth camps (which they’d begun in ‘77 as an attempt to move the side – and the league – away from it’s reliance on ageing foreign stars) and operated them under the Cosmos name. Despite several post MLS attempts by clubs in the New York area to resurrect the name – specifically by the MetroStars and Red Bulls, who are actually the same club, which is admittedly confusing, but the nature of American sports franchises – Pinton held fast and refused, believing they simply wouldn’t respect the legacy of the name. Or perhaps change it to something else at the behest of a soft drink peddler a season later.
In 2009 however, a ragtag group of English businessmen, which included Tottenham’s former vice Chairman, Liverpool’s former CEO and David Beckham’s personal manager and a former England masseuse, managed to secure the rights from Pinton with a view to resurrecting the club wholesale. In August 2010 Pele was announced as the club’s honorary president and the reboot was made official. To further strengthen the historical link his 70s Cosmos strike partner and NASL all time top scorer Giorgio Chinaglia was named as International ambassador, a role that might prove problematic for Chinaglia, considering he’s currently hiding out in the States from an Italian arrest warrant for fiddling Lazio shares.
Fast-forward six months and nothing much had emerged from camp Cosmos. Until Wednesday that is, when in the true spirit of their original galactico incarnation, they appointed Eric Cantona as Director of Soccer in a blaze of slightly ironic publicity, and announced their goal to enter the MLS in 2013 (the earliest a new franchise – which would be the 20th – could potentially join under MLS rules.)
King Eric’s return to football has long been heralded by the kind of idiotic fans who think the playing traits of their former heroes are in any way indicative of their managerial skills, but the man himself has always been rather aloof on the subject. Cantona retired in 1997 to spend more time pondering existential matters with a beard and occasionally popping up in films but said recently that it’d need something “extraordinary” to rekindle his love for the game. Putting aside all my deeply cynical instincts, it’s possible that this could be it. In his statement on the club website – aside a gloriously regal picture of him posing gallicaly on a throne – he’s claimed the opportunity presents itself as a “kind of mix between football and art” and a “wonderful project…beautifully made.” He continues by saying that “In addition to my artistic engagements, I will do everything that I can to help us find our way to regain the number 1 position in the United States, and then for us to become one of the best clubs in the world over the coming years.”
Despite the rather obvious comic potential of his closing argument, one does tend to wonder what these “artistic engagements” may be. Have they promised to let him re-design the club logo? Will he be painting player portraits? Is he going to be making some kind of surrealist avant garde documentary film on the nature of resurrection to be played in an as yet to be built cubist club museum? Who knows, but part of his remit does include player recruitment, so this grande projet d’art most likely consists of his assembly of the world’s most beautiful football team, which knowing Cantona may well extend to a few ballerinas, circus gymnasts and experimental performance artists to boot.
So this is how the Cosmos have re-introduced themselves to the 21st century, as a galactico team with a legacy. There are even rumblings that Beckham himself, free from his Galaxy contract by 2012, will join the circus that already includes his personal manager and boyhood mentor. Florentino Perez would be proud. But would G. Peppe Pinton? Ironically the one thing the Cosmos were trying to distance themselves from at the time of their extinction is the one thing that’s brought them back.
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If King Eric can learn anything from his time at Manchester United, it’s how well the kids who grew up around him looked after the house after he’d gone, and how well they continue to – in the form of Giggs and Scholes – two decades later. He, and they, and we should hope, for the sake of the Cosmos themselves, and any hope they have of standing the test of time as a lasting brand, let alone one of the “biggest clubs in the world”, that there’s more Pinton than Perez in the resurrection of this once iconic club.
You can follow Oscar on Twitter here http://twitter.com/oscarpyejeary where you can claim to have known him before he becomes rich and famous ….and then claim to have known him when he was rich and famous before he becomes bloated, big headed, drug addled and washed up….And then you can throw stuff at him and say “you’ve changed man”
BBC Sportthis morning reported of the outrage for UEFA met by both Rio Ferdinand and Vincent Kompany following their £64,561 charge for Croatia for their fans racist abuse towards Mario Balotelli, whilst Nicklas Bendtner was charged £80,000 for showing his sponsored underpants.
The decision has baffled many, and Ferdinand and Kompany were united in their disgust at UEFA’s judgement. Ferdinand used Twitter to voice his disdain; ‘Uefa are you for real?’ he tweeted, whilst Kompany also used the social networking site, urging the governing body to ‘review their priorities’.
Prior to the tournament, much was made of the threat of racism in Poland and Ukraine, but UEFA head Platini insisted it would not mar the championships.
With other occurrences of racism at the tournament also being investigated, UEFA will need to toughen up their punishments for the guilty parties, as the issue of racism in the game is far more severe than that of commercial opportunism, something voiced by Vincent Kompany.
Well known for promoting equality in the game, as well as whole heartedly objecting to racism, UEFA have proved very contradictory and demonstrated their inability to take the real problems seriously as their sanctions baffle many, including Rio Ferdinand and Vincent Kompany.
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The Daily Telegraph are reporting that Chelsea are set to make a £17.5 million bid for Porto wing back.
New boss Andre Villas-Boas is interested in bringing the 25-year-old Uruguayan to Stamford Bridge as he looks to stamp his mark on the team.
The Portuguese coach was Pereira’s boss at Porto last season and the pair could be reunited in West London.
However the Primeira Liga champions value the Uruguay international at around £26 million after his star performances in the Copa America.
They have already signed a replacement in the form of £8.3 million Alex Sandro from Santos but aren’t willing to let one of their key players leave on the cheap.
Villas-Boas is keen to fill the gap left by the recently departed Yuri Zhirkov and held talks last month only to back away when hearing of Porto’s demands.
The Chelsea boss keen to bring a player in from his former club as they understand the way he works.
It will certainly leave question marks hanging over the head of some players in the current squad.
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The 33-year-old coach could sacrifice the like of Alex, Joe Boswinga and John Obi Mikel to raise the funds capable of bringing Pereira to the club.