No surprise Leeds lost to Manchester United, just look at the wage bills

Although teams can often defy financial logic for a time, to move up a tier is incredibly difficult

Manchester United’s Fred celebrates celebrates after completing Manchester United’s 5-1 victory over Leeds. Photograph: Jon Super/AP
 

Jonathan Wilson in The Guardian

The easy thing is to blame the manager. It has become football’s default response to any crisis. A team hits a poor run or loses a big game: get rid of the manager. As Alex Ferguson said as many as 14 years ago, we live in “a mocking culture” and reality television has fostered the idea people should be voted off with great regularity (that he was trying to defend Steve McClaren’s reign as England manager should not undermine the wider point).

Managers are expendable. Rejigging squads takes time and money and huge amounts of effort in terms of research and recruitment, whereas anybody can look at who is doing well in Portugal or Greece or the Championship and spy a potential messiah. Then there are the structural factors, the underlying economic issues it is often preferable to ignore because to acknowledge them is to accept how little agency the people we shout about every week really have in football. 

That point reared its head after Manchester United’s 5-1 victory over Leeds on Saturday. There was plenty to discuss: are Leeds overreliant on Kalvin Phillips, who was absent? Why does Marcelo Bielsa’s version of pressing so often lead to heavy defeats? Can Mason Greenwood’s movement allow Ole Gunnar Solskjær to field Paul Pogba and Bruno Fernandes without sacrificing a holding midfielder and, if it does, what does that mean for Marcus Rashford?

Yet there was a weird strand of coverage that insisted Solskjær had somehow outwitted Bielsa, even in some quarters that Bielsa needed to be replaced if Leeds are to kick on. (They finished ninth last season with 59 points, the highest points total by a promoted club for two decades). A Bielsa meltdown is possible; they do happen and he has never managed a fourth season at a club. There should be some concern that, like last season, Leeds lost by four goals at Old Trafford, insufficient lessons were learned, even if Bielsa said this was a better performance. But fundamentally, Manchester United’s wage bill is five times that of Leeds. 

Everton, who finished a place below Leeds last season, had a wage bill three times bigger. Of last season’s Premier League, only West Brom and Sheffield United had wage bills lower than that of Leeds. To have finished ninth is an extraordinary achievement and nobody should think to slip back three or four places this season would be a failure. Modern football is starkly stratified and although teams can often defy financial logic for a time, to move up a tier is incredibly difficult.

There is still a tendency to talk of a Big Six in English football and while it is true six clubs last season had a weekly wage bill in excess of £2.5m, it is also true that within that grouping there are three with clear advantages: Manchester City (who had kept their wage bill relatively low, although if they do add Harry Kane to Jack Grealish that would clearly change) and Chelsea because their funding is not reliant on footballing success, and Manchester United because of the legacy that has allowed them to attach their name to a preposterous range of products across the globe.
Mikel Arteta is struggling to revive Arsenal. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian
Liverpool can perhaps challenge for the title this season, but their wage spending is 74% of that of United. That they were as good as they were in the two seasons before last was remarkable, but last season showed how vulnerable a team like Liverpool can be to a couple of injuries. Similarly, Leicester’s two fifth-place finishes with the eighth-highest wage bill are a striking achievement, their decline towards the end of the past two seasons less the result of them bottling it or any sort of psychological failure than of the limitations of their squad being exposed.

Which brings us to the other two members of the Big Six: Arsenal and Tottenham. Spurs’ last game at White Hart Lane, in 2017, brought a 2-1 win over Manchester United that guaranteed they finished second. Since when Spurs have bought Davinson Sánchez, Lucas Moura, Serge Aurier, Fernando Llorente, Juan Foyth, Tanguy Ndombele, Steven Bergwijn, Ryan Sessegnon, Giovani Lo Celso, Cristian Romero and Bryan Gil, while United have bought, among others, Alexis Sánchez, Victor Lindelöf, Nemanja Matic, Romelu Lukaku, Fred, Daniel James, Aaron Wan-Bissaka, Bruno Fernandes, Harry Maguire, Donny van de Beek, Raphaël Varane and Jadon Sancho. Money may not be everything in football, but it does help.

The irony of the situation is that it was investment in the infrastructure that should allow Spurs to generate additional revenues and better develop their own talent (much cheaper than buying it) that led to the lack of investment in players largely responsible for the staleness resulting in Mauricio Pochettino’s departure. That Daniel Levy compounded the problem by appointing José Mourinho – acting like a big club as though to jolt them to the next level – should not obscure the fact that until that point he had pursued a ruthless and successful economic logic.

Arsenal had gone through a similar process the previous decade, investing heavily in a new stadium at the expense of the squad, only to discover that by the time it was ready the financial environment had changed and the petro-fuelled era had begun. It was easy after the timid performance against Brentford on Friday to blame Mikel Arteta and ask why he gets such an easy ride. For all that Arsenal have finished the past two seasons relatively well, that criticism will only increase if there are not signs the tanker is being turned round. But the gulf to the top of the table is vast and a desperation to bridge that has contributed to a bizarre transfer policy.

That does not mean managers are beyond reproach and limp displays like Arsenal’s deserve criticism. But equally we should probably remember that where a side finishes in the league has far more to do with economic strata than any of the individuals involved.

Flyer beware: why the customer isn't always right at 40,000ft

Dan Milmo in The Guardian

United Airlines planes at San Francisco international airport. Photograph: Louis Nastro/Reuters


Airline passengers beware: when you buy a ticket, you are not only subjecting yourself to the ordeals of security queues, baggage limits and turbulence. You are also signing a near-40,000-word contract with a carrier that, in the extreme case of a United Airlines passenger on 9 April, could have you hauled off an overbooked aircraft – legally – as fellow customers and a global web audience look on aghast.

United Airlines shares plummet after passenger dragged from plane



Sunday’s extraordinary scenes on a Chicago, Illinois, to Louisville, Kentucky, flight unfolded because of two regulations that are standard practice across the industry. The first says a passenger can be barred from a flight if the number of customers with tickets exceeds the number of seats. The second says the captain can have you removed from the plane if you get emotional about it.

Air travel is a thicket of regulations and acronyms that, of course, have your safety at heart. But there can be a thin line between guaranteeing your security and dragging a seemingly innocent passenger off an overbooked aircraft.

Flight overbooking is a phenomenon born of an industry that has struggled historically to make money. Indeed, airlines lost nearly $50bn (£40bn) in the past decade due to a combination of the 9/11 attacks, high oil prices and the credit crunch. The sector is making money now, but profits are slender – $9.89 per passenger per journey – so taking a risk and selling 183 tickets for a 180-seater plane is worth it if three of those passengers fail to turn up and you can pocket their fare expenditure as pure profit.

“Airlines have very large fixed costs, so if they don’t fill the plane past a certain point they will lose money. They know a certain proportion of these passengers will not show, so they need to overbook to get to break-even or better,” says Brian Pearce, the chief economist of the industry’s trade body, the International Air Transport Association.

The contract of carriage at United – the conditions to which you agree when you buy a ticket – comes in at 37,000 words and embraces a range of arcane treaties and rules, from the Montreal and Warsaw conventions to FARs, the US’s federal aviation regulations.

According to one legal expert, United was acting within its rights as the furore unfolded when it tried to find seats for four crew who needed to reach a plane they were due to operate in Louisville. But such a calamitous collision of passenger rights and airline prerogative is unlikely. “It is a very rare set of circumstances,” says Kevin Clarke, a flight-delay specialist at UK law firm Bott & Co. Pointing out that US airlines usually seek, and find, volunteers to come off full flights in exchange for compensation, he adds: “It can be a question of who backs down first.” In the case of this United flight, the passenger certainly didn’t.

United’s contract of carriage is a joyless tour of one of the world’s most over-regulated industries, where a minority of colourful terms – “acts of God”; “civil commotions” – is crowded out by tightly worded legalese that will stop you from taking any future journey for granted (at least on United). Under rule five, covering “cancellations of reservations”, the passenger is warned that all flights are “subject to overbooking”, which could result in the airline being unable to put the passenger on the flight. In that scenario – please bear with this – rule 25, on passengers denied boarding compensation, kicks in.

United Airlines CEO calls dragged passenger 'disruptive and belligerent'


Using language that inadvertently acknowledges the confrontation inherent in the situation, it states that, if no passengers agree voluntarily to give up their seats in exchange for compensation, “other passengers may be denied boarding involuntarily”. Admittedly, there is recompense of about $1,000 available in this scenario, but it appears that the United passenger in this case said no. This brought him head to head with the far tougher rule, enshrined under the 1963 Tokyo Convention, that says the captain’s word is law on an airliner and that he or she has “the ultimate authority” in dealing with any onboard incident.

Rule 21 of United’s contract states that removal of a passenger may be necessary if their conduct is deemed to be “disorderly, offensive, abusive or violent”. It appears that the Louisville-bound passenger refused to give up his seat voluntarily and the crew deemed his behaviour to be out of line, prompting them to call in the security team at Chicago O’Hare international airport.

Compensation for delays caused by overbooking is guaranteed by EU law. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Speaking to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity, a senior pilot at a major airline said: “The legal position is that you are not guaranteed to travel and that you must obey any ‘reasonable commands’ of the crew. So, legally, the airline is right.

“If it were me, I might have sought to promote a different solution [to allow] the crew to travel. I suspect a crew was ‘out of hours’ [about to exceed its working-hours limit] or sick or injured somewhere else on the network and the decision was therefore a little late to send them on that aircraft. I think the reputational damage from the events on Facebook will be significantly worse than a delay – even significant – elsewhere.”

Airline professionals are astonished that United’s overbooking procedures, in a market where overbooking is prevalent, resulted in a passenger being allowed to board before they were subsequently dragged off. John Strickland, an industry consultant whose career has included managing the overbooking process at a major airline, says carriers now have sophisticated computer systems that calibrate whether flights can get away with being overbooked – right down to the specific route, the time of day and whether demand will surge due to holidays or special events. However, he adds: “It is not a perfect science, which means when it goes wrong it needs to be handled sensitively.” This is where United, a so-called full-service airline that tries to offer a level of customer service superior to that of budget rivals, could suffer lasting reputational damage.

At the end of rule 25, United states: “UA shall not be liable for any punitive, consequential or special damages arising out of or in connection with UA’s failure to provide the passenger with confirmed reserved space.” Best of luck with that one, United.

An argument in favour of airline laws is what happens when they disappear. In the UK, compensation for delays caused by overbooking is covered by a regulation called EU 261/2004. According to industry lore, it came into fruition when MEPs grew exasperated with being bumped from flights to Brussels and Strasbourg. But airline passenger compensation could be one of the items of red tape that will be lobbed into the Brexit bonfire come EU independence day. One of the unintended consequences of severing links with Brussels, and abandoning EU 261/2004, is that passengers flying from the UK could be exposed when we say goodbye to the single market.

“There is the possibility that we adopt the principles of the regulation [after leaving the EU],” says Bott and Co’s Clarke. “But it is a possibility that we will be left without that protection. The obligation to put you on an alternative flight, the entitlement to compensation, that would not be there. You could be left stranded.”

Another reason for Michael Gove and his fellow Brexiters to stick to the staycation.

Uefa and Michel Platini are missing the real targets with their £50 million fine for Manchester City

Paul Hayward in The Telegraph

When Abu Dhabi’s rulers first decided to build a bonfire of hundreds of millions of pounds at Manchester City they would have laughed at the idea that blowing money was a crime punishable by Uefa sanctions. Imagine that: a sport where they throw a £50 million penalty at you for excessive generosity.

Strictly, Financial Fair Play (FFP) is an anti-subsidy initiative by a game that prostrates itself to foreign billionaires and then ticks them off for investing too much. It defiles the World Cup by awarding it to Qatar, then disapproves of Qatari spending at Paris St-Germain.

It says little about rampant ticket price inflation, the huge sums extracted by agents or grotesque individual player salaries. Whichever way you turn it, Uefa’s clumsy lunge at “fairness” has ended up being about two gulf states who jumped into football as an act of future-proofing because their oil was running out.

No torch is being held here for sovereign wealth. But the distortion of the London house market by foreign speculators, for example, is a far more serious issue than City paying Sergio Agüero’s wages via a so-called sweetheart deal with Etihad Airways.

Uefa-ologists might have spotted that president Michel Platini enjoys a cosy relationship with Qatar, who chose Paris as their investment outlet, and that it might have been somewhat awkward for Europe’s governing body to punish PSG without also directing their disapproval at City. 

The clubs hit hardest by these arbitrary actions are those who had to spend heavily to raise underperforming clubs into the elite. City and PSG both fit this profile.

It was no surprise, then, to find Roman Abramovich broadly supportive of the FFP principle. Chelsea’s owner had already torched the kind of cash City and PSG have burned in the last three years. By endorsing the move to have such extravagance cast as a crime, Abramovich was simply blocking the way to new tycoons and therefore protecting his competitive advantage.

From Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi’s viewpoint, a £50 million fine doubtless leaves a kind of moral stain. It implies financial doping, or even cheating, with its suggestion that the £35 million-a-year Etihad deal was really a polite way to cook the books.

As with PSG and the Qatari tourist board (£167 million), Uefa clearly believe that the deal was inflated to allow one part of an oil-rich state to subsidise another. And they might be right.

Yet the people who struck those deals are unlikely to appreciate being singled out in an industry that is synonymous with creative accounting. If in doubt, consider the mess Barcelona got themselves into over Neymar.

Nobody wants an unregulated free for all, or illegality, or the crushing of the poor by the rich. But Uefa’s punishment of City takes no account of the direction in which the club is heading or the socially constructive investment in the Etihad Campus in a deprived part of Manchester. Shiekh Mansour and his entourage are not philanthropists, but nor does their spending fit the template of outright decadence.

So far all that expenditure has bought them one Premier League title and not much headway in Europe. There is no wholesale buying of trophies because the Premier League is too competitive to allow it. This season City have had to fight Liverpool and Chelsea for the championship. The seductive allure of FFP is that helps the poorer against the richer. All it might do in this case is to make Abu Dhabi resent being stigmatised and cause them to question Uefa’s motives. You can see the speech bubble now: “They take our money and then fine us for giving it to them?”

A much greater problem, certainly in England, is clubs being ram-raided by speculators who seek to suck money out, not put it in. Portsmouthand Birmingham City are just two examples of clubs that have been treated like lumps of meat on an “investment” menu.

Many of us would like to see regulation attack that issue before the Uefa bureaucracy drives through arbitrary penalties against a club (City) who are putting money in, rather than taking it out, however vulgar it might sometimes seem.

Where is the £50 million fine for the Glazers for servicing their debts from Manchester United’s revenues? On this evidence, FFP is mere grandstanding.

David Moyes, just like John Major, is destined to fail

Sport is no different from politics. There is a syndrome that means it's all but impossible for one star to follow another

• 
• • Jonathan Freedland 
  • theguardian.com, Tuesday 10 December 2013 11.00 GMT

Manchester United manager David Moyes is discovering how hard it is to follow a predecessor of star quality Photograph: Dave Thompson/PA

You don't have to be a football fan to understand the trouble with David Moyes. Anyone familiar with the highest reaches of politics will recognise his predicament immediately. For those who turn rarely to the back pages, Moyes is in his first season as the manager of Manchester United. He inherited a team that had just won yet another title as Premier League champions, but under him they are struggling. Now ninth in the league, they are a full 13 points off the top spot. What's more, Moyes has broken a few awkward records. Under him, the team have lost at home to Everton (his old club) for the first time in 21 years and on Saturday lost to Newcastle at Old Trafford for the first time since 1972. Tonight another unwanted feat threatens. If they lose to the Ukrainian team Shakhtar Donetsk, it will be the first time United have suffered three successive home defeats in 50 years.

Watch Moyes attempt to explain these results, or defend his performance, in a post-match interview or press conference and, if you're a political anorak, you instantly think of one man: John Major. Or, if you're an American, perhaps the first George Bush. For what you are witnessing is a classic case of a syndrome that recurs in politics: the pale successor fated to follow a charismatic leader and forever doomed by the comparison.

Major may be earning some late kudos and revision of his reputation now, but while prime minister he was in the permanent shadow of his predecessor, Margaret Thatcher. Bush the elder was always going to be dull after the man who went before him, Ronald Reagan. So it is with Moyes, who was given the hardest possible act to follow – inheriting from one of the footballing greats, Sir Alex Ferguson.

It's a pattern that recurs with near-universal regularity. Tony Blair was prime minister for 10 years; Gordon Brown never hit the same heights and only managed three. Same with Jean Chrétien of Canada and his luckless successor Paul Martin. Or, fitting for this day, consider the case of Thabo Mbeki whose destiny was to be the man who took over from Nelson Mandela and so was all but preordained to be a disappointment.

It's as if an almost Newtonian law applies: the charisma of a leader exists in inverse proportion to the charisma of his or her predecessor. Moyes is only the latest proof.

What could explain the syndrome? Does nature abhor one star following another in immediate succession?

One theory suggests itself, though it draws more from psychology than physics. Note the role, direct or indirect, many of these great leaders had in choosing their successors. Could it be that some part of them actually wanted a lacklustre heir, all the better to enhance their own reputation? United could have had any one of the biggest, most glamorous names in football at the helm, yet Ferguson handpicked Moyes. Did Sir Alex do that to ensure he would look even better?

For this is how it works. Once the great man or woman has gone, and everything falls apart, their apparent indispensability becomes all the harder to deny. Manchester United fans look at the same players who were champions a few months ago, now faring so badly, and conclude: Ferguson was the reason we won.

If that was his unconscious purpose in picking the former Everton boss, then Sir Alex chose very wisely. And Moyes can comfort himself that, in this regard at least – like Major, Bush, Brown and so many others before him – he's doing his job perfectly.

In the Premier League the endgame of rampant capitalism is being played out

An unsustainable system where the rich win and the poor go to the wall. We see it in English football – and beyond

• 
• • Jonathan Freedland
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 18 October 2011 21.30 BST
  • larger | smaller

Illustration by Belle Mellor
It's a newspaper convention that the front and back pages are a world apart, as if news and sport inhabit two different spheres with little to say to each other. Indeed, it used to be an article of faith that "sport and politics don't mix", with the former no more than a form of escapism from the latter. And yet the Occupy Wall Street and London Stock Exchange protests that led the weekend news bulletins might not be entirely unrelated to the Premier League results that closed them. For the current state of our football sheds a rather revealing light on the current state of both our politics and our economy. Or, as one sage of the sport puts it: "As ever, the national game reflects the nation's times."
What that reflection says is that Britain, or England, has become the home of a turbo-capitalism that leaves even the land of the let-it-rip free market – the United States – for dust. If capitalism is often described metaphorically as a race in which the richest always win, football has turned that metaphor into an all too literal reality.
Let's take as our text a series of reports written by the sage just quoted, namely the Guardian's David Conn, who has carved a unique niche investigating the politics and commercialisation of football. Conn elicited a candid admission from the new American owners of Liverpool Football Club, who confessed that part of the lure of buying a stake in what they called the "EPL" – the English Premier League – was that they get to keep all the money they make, rather than having to share it as they would have to under the – their phrase – "very socialistic" rules that operate in US sport. In other words, England has become a magnet for those drawn to behave in a way they couldn't get away with at home.
Start with first principles. Of course, inequality is built into sport: some people are simply stronger or faster than others. What makes sport compelling is watching closely matched individuals or teams compete to come out on top.
But a different kind of inequality matters too: money. A rich club can buy up all the best players and win every time. That's the story of today's Premier League, as super-flush Manchester United sweep all before them, challenged only by local rivals Manchester City – now endowed by an oil billionaire – and Chelsea, funded to the hilt by a Russian oligarch. This, then, becomes a different kind of competition, a battle not of skill, pace and temperament but of pounds, shillings and pence. The clearest manifestation of that came at the close of the transfer window, when the biggest teams splashed out millions to buy the top talent. It means the half-dozen top sides, already at a different level from the rest, soared even higher towards the stratosphere and out of reach – in just the same way that the super-rich float ever further away from everyone else, the 1% in a different league from the 99%, as the Occupy protesters would put it.
Nothing you can do about that, says dogmatic capitalism. You can no more stop the richest teams dominating football than you can prevent the fastest sprinter winning gold. That's the force of the market, all but a law of nature.
Except along comes American sport to show us another way. First, there are those rules on revenue-sharing that so frustrated Liverpool's new owners. All the money that, say, a baseball team makes – from tickets, TV rights and merchandise – is taxed by the major league that runs the sport and spread around the other clubs, so that the richest cannot dwarf the rest. That isn't because the titans of Major League Baseball have read too much Marx. It's because they understand that their sport is worth nothing if it stops being a real competition, if only a handful of the wealthiest teams ever have a chance of winning. Redistributing the wealth around the league ensures their sport doesn't become boring. It does not level the playing field, but it comes very close.
The proof is in the stats so beloved of sporting obsessives. Over the past 19 seasons, 12 different teams have won baseball's biggest prize. In the 19 seasons since the Premier League was created, only four teams have won; Manchester United alone have won the title 12 of those 19 times.
It's not just revenue-sharing that ensures true competition. In American football and basketball a salary cap applies, limiting how much each club can pay in wages and thereby preventing the richest teams making their domination permanent by snapping up all the best players. (A "luxury tax" performs a similar function in baseball.) In the same spirit, teams in all major US sports submit to a "draft", in which they take turns picking from a pool of newly eligible players, so that the equivalent of Chelsea or Manchester City can't gobble up all the fresh talent, but instead have to let the Blackburns or Wigans have a go.
Put like that, it seems fantastical. Who can imagine Old Trafford voluntarily snaffling less of the pie, so that clubs in smaller cities with smaller grounds, and therefore weaker gate receipts, get a look in? And yet English football used to work just like that. When the founders of the Football League gathered in a Manchester hotel in 1888, they fretted over how they might ensure that a fixture between, say, Derby County and Everton remained a real contest. They agreed the home side should give a proportion of its takings to the visitors, a system that held firm till 1983.
Clubs shared the TV money when it came too, spreading it around all 92 league clubs. But the big teams always resented subsidising the minnows; indeed, the Premier League was formed out of the biggest 20 clubs' express desire to keep Rupert Murdoch's millions for themselves. That TV money is at least partly spread throughout the Premier League, but now there are noises about ending even that small nod towards wealth-sharing, so that the biggest half-dozen teams can keep every penny for themselves.
Not for the first time, it's fallen to Europe to act. Upcoming Uefa "financial fair play" rules will require teams to live within their earnings, which should put an end to the sugar daddy handouts of Man City and Chelsea. But that 2014 change will push clubs to maximise their revenue, which is bound, in turn, to mean even less sharing. Football will still be a game determined by who has most money.
There are three consequences of this strange gulf between our rules and those across the Atlantic. First, football's most storied clubs have become attractive to foreign tycoons who sniff a licence to print money, unrestricted. Second, we've established a model that is inherently unsustainable, involving colossal debts that cripple all those without a billionaire to bail them out. Since 1992, league clubs and one Premier League team – Portsmouth – have fallen insolvent 55 times. Third, we risk killing the golden goose, turning an activity that should be thrilling into a non-contest whose outcome is all but preordained.
Hmm, a system that sees our biggest names falling to leveraged takeovers – think Kraft's buy-up of Cadbury – thereby selling off the crown jewels of our collective culture in the name of a rampant capitalism that is both unsustainable and ultimately joyless. That doesn't just sound like the state of the national game, that sounds like the state of the nation.