I haven’t chimed in on the Chelsea transfer ban because, well, I’m pretty sure some money will change hands and the punishment will be reduced. If you’re looking for a quality take on this brouhaha, though, I highly recommend this post on The Run of Play.
The big-club-vs.-small-club narrative is so ingrained in football that we reflexively see anything that benefits a smaller club at the expense of a bigger club as “fair.” But this isn’t fair. We’ve gotten so used to seeing Premier League clubs as wicked developers strip-mining the talents of poorer continental clubs that we’ve started thinking the latter have some kind of moral right to control the futures of their very young trainees. But players that age ought to control their own futures. In any other field, we’d look at this story and see Lens standing in the way of the right of a child and his parents to decide what’s best for him. In football we see the kid as a strategic weapon in a quasi-declared class war in which his preferences don’t really count.
Good stuff. Make with the clicky.
