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Bobby McMahon on the EPL, match-fixing and the modern game
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Bobby McMahon is the analyst for the Fox Soccer Report, a nightly soccer news show on Fox Soccer Channel. For many of us here in North America (and around the world), McMahon is an authority when it comes to what's going on in the world of footie. With a lifetime of experience playing, organizing and studying the game, he's a valuable voice in the coverage of world soccer. He can be seen on the Fox Soccer Report on Mondays and Fridays at 10 pm EST, and regularly updates his blog on Fox Soccer's website.
One of the biggest misconceptions you mentioned previously is that because the Premier League generates so much money that it is a well-run league. What aspects of the EPL, in terms of how it's run, would you like to see improvement in?
One of the initial intentions of the Premier League was to get down to a 16-team league, to reduce the number of games, which I think would be a better league. If they were to cut it down to a 16-team league, they may actually begin to give greater incentive to the teams to pay more attention to the knockout tournaments, like the FA and Carling Cups. These competitions have become undervalued, but at the heart of the game, to a greater extent than league action, is the number of upsets that can occur in them.
The number one piece about the misconception that the EPL’s a well-run league is ownership. You’ve only got to look at ownership and their fit-and-proper test and how many people have managed to get through that test to use the club as a vehicle to make capital gains. I don’t think there’s too many people that really feel badly about people making money if they’ve invested money into something and worked hard to realize the potential of a business, whether it be a club or anything else, but you see situations like Gillett and Hicks at Liverpool, where they’re putting very little of their own money into it and are using the club as a vehicle to make a capital killing. It’s pure speculation and a little bit of a bubble. It’s jumping on a market segment that is viewed as something that’s going to continue to appreciate in value, so why not try to make that capital killing while that bubble continues to expand? Unfortunately, for Hicks and Gillett, as an example, are going to be caught short-changed on this one and that’s the problem with being a speculator.
How does a guy like Kia Joorabchian, who was partly responsible for West Ham's current legal issues, get on their payroll as a consultant and advisor? Talk about a conflict of interest. Is this what you refer to as one of the poorer ways the EPL is run?
Historically, soccer has never been a well-run full-stop, and using concepts of “conflict of interest”, I’m not sure really means very much in this business. Joorabchian is one example, but what can be a bigger conflict of interest than agents, that for many years, were allowed to operate on both sides of the deal, without anybody seeming to have a problem with it?
It sounds like something say, a boxing promoter would do.
There’s another example of that, and we wouldn’t exactly hold boxing up as an example of a business or a sport operating to the highest ethical standards. You can certainly see the parallel between boxing and football, as football tolerated (and probably still do to a certain extent, under the table) agents playing two sides of the same deal.
You've just finished Declan Hill's book, The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime. What did you think of it?
It made me think. I would suggest that if even half of what he suggests is true, then the football authorities are very much underestimating, and to some extent ignoring the potential damage that this (match-fixing) could be doing to the game. The view that it might only be one or two games is a problem, because the effect of that has when it’s discovered, could be ultimately destroying. It could put the game back 20-30 years.
Where there’s money, there’s going to corruption, and gambling is just part of that. If there’s money to be made, somebody will find a way of doing it legally and illegally. It behooves FIFA, UEFA and all the other associations, to be much more proactive and having more checks and balances. It’d be lovely to see it stopped, but I don’t think you can eliminate it.
There’s an example Hill describes in his book, with Canada’s World Cup team in 1986 or 1987 in Malaysia. That was a big deal here (in Canada), and the thing I could never work out at the time, what never made sense to me, was why in the hell would you bother giving Canadian players that kind of money?
(Bobby discusses the book in this December 7th post on his blog)
How does Joey Barton seem to get chance after chance, even after proving there's no limit to his delinquency?
Well, rather like so many coaches that get chance after chance, there’s always somebody out there that thinks they’re smarter and they can sort him out and they can discipline him, and turn him into the player that people thought he could become. Look at Paul Gascoigne, from club to club. George Best had his problems, as well. Look how many clubs he’s played for in his career. There’s always somebody that thinks they’re smarter than everyone else, and can turn him around.
At one point it seemed he was the future of England’s midfield. Does that have to do with the number of chances he keeps getting?
It may sound like I’m picking on England, but I’m not. I can think of other examples, but it’s just the nature of the media that they jump on players that emerge and they become “the future”.
I was just thinking this morning about Bojan Krkic at Barcelona, and his very badly taken penalty against Sporting Lisbon, and he’s having an absolutely horrible season. He may be one of those youngsters that look to be close to breaking down. Well, how many times have you heard that Bojan is the next great thing in the world, just like Giovanni dos Santos was the next big thing.
Very few that are fingered as being the next great player turn out to be. If you look at Thierry Henry, he had an immense amount of pressure on him when he was a kid, but it was Arsene Wenger that pretty much saved his career because he looked like he was going to be a bust at Juventus.
Not to pick on Joey Barton, but there’s an awful lot of things that can go wrong along the way from being a potentially great talent to becoming a great talent.
Speaking of great talents, Titus Bramble is still cashing paychecks in the Prem. Curtis Davies was valued at 10M GBP in the off-season, and Ledley King remained relevant despite his chronic injuries. Is there a rarity of good center-halfs in the modern game? You touched on how the holding midfielder role has diminished the overall defending ability of that position, and it seems difficult to find a big, athletic center-half that can read the game.
I think so. There’s bit of a misnomer when it comes to players we refer to as holding midfielders. Anybody that plays a defensive role is called a holding midfield player. I remember the days when a holding midfield player had the responsibility to think about the back four, but also went forward. Now I think we have different levels of holding midfielders.
We have somebody like a Roy Keane, Patrick Vieira and Michael Essien, who can play that holding role, but can charge up and down. They’re an all-around midfield player who could play a holding role, but could also charge up the attack and drive the team forward from deep positions.
Then you’ve got the Claude Makeleles of the world, and I think it’s a complete injustice calling him a holding midfield player when all he is a fifth defender, and all he ever was is a fifth defender, essentially a sweeper who plays in front of defense. And I think the advent of this kind of player, who really has no attacking responsibilities whatsoever (leads to the decline of competent center-halfs).
Owen Hargreaves is another one that is exactly the same. He’s a destroyer; he’s there to defend and that’s it. His has an inability to do anything (offensively) apart from his party piece which is free kicks, but to be regarded as a midfield player is really an injustice. So I think a lot of defenders have become used to having these players covering for them in front, and have actually lost the ability to defend. And we’re kind of deceived when we see these players going forward, and we think “what a good defender”, when in reality they’re not showing they’re good defenders, all they’re showing is that they’ve got the ability to go forward.
When it comes to Titus Bramble . . . I always make fun of Bramble, but he just seems to be one of those unfortunate players, that when he makes a mistake it’s a real howler.
The list is short, though, of athletic, competent center-halfs, at least when the transfer window rolls around.
There is a shortage of quality center-halfs. Maybe we should be looking more to Eastern Europe, because Nemanja Vidic can be that kind of player. That’s why I think Manchester United have been so effective over the last couple of years, because of what United have got in the middle of defense. They’ve got Rio Ferdinand, who’s obviously a very skilled player, who can defend as well, but they’ve got this rough-an- tumble center half next to him who knows his job is to go and win the ball whenever it’s in the air. He’s the one that puts his body on the line and Ferdinand sits behind him and just tidies everything up.
You go back to the great German teams of the 70’s, the Bayern Munich team to begin with, with Franz Beckenbauer playing in that sweeper position. There was a guy, Hans-Georg Schwarzenbeck, who played with him around that time, and that was his job, to win the ball. He sacrificed his body, and reminded the opposing center forwards that there was a center- half that was going to make them pay the price. And Beckenbauer just stood there and was his imperial self, but it was because Schwarzenbeck gave him the time to do it. Another partnership similar to Ferdinand and Vidic.
Another one you think of is Ricardo Carvalho. He’s not so big and rough-and-tumble, but for me, he’s the kind of prototype center-half for today’s game. He’s got a bit of everything. He’s willing to sacrifice his body, he’s a good tackler, and he’s pretty quick. But he also has got enough skill that he can go forward and cause some problems in attack. He reads the game well also; I think he’s a terrific player.
The majority of foreign players (around 40%) in the EPL seem to be coming from France. Is this a direct result of Clairefontaine, France's ties with Africa, or just a coincidence? I recall someone hypothesizing that the reason for this was that France was known for creating fundamentally-sound, technical players, and that is why so many ply their trade in England and most of all, Scotland.
You can say the same thing about Spain and Italy, as well. I probably watch more Serie A games than people think, and the thing that always amazes me is that even the poorest teams in Serie A can do what’s required of them. They might not be as quick, and they might play with as much heart as the English teams would at the bottom, but even in the worst teams in Italy, you’ve got very technically-sound players.
I think it might be more to do with the economy than anything else. The reality is that there’s just more money elsewhere rather than in France. They’ve very much become an exporting nation because the overall strength of the league just isn’t there. They did a massive rights deal a couple of years ago, but that didn’t seem to have made too much of a difference. They still continue to export players and I think it’s because you’ve got the top clubs in England, plus everybody else that has money, including the Italian clubs, and they’re willing to fork out. Even Franck Ribery, going to Bayern Munich as an example, so I think it’s the economy that has more to do with it than anything else.
Another example is the number of Spanish players going over to Liverpool. I think the other thing you shouldn’t underestimate is the influence of Arsene Wenger on that. Wenger, you’d have to say, was the first manager that started looking to France to build teams, and throughout the history of the game, there are certainly significant trends, and clubs are wont to copy that when there’s success.
For more on the EPL and how Bobby McMahon became a soccer analyst, click here, and check out his thoughts on English managers here.
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