When is fair play unfair?

Empty seats at the Reebok

There has been a lot of talk over the last few years about the growing predictability of the premier league. A pattern that began in the mid-late 90s seems to have accelerated in recent years, with the gap between the top teams and the rest of the premier league becoming wider and wider.


The forthcoming UEFA fairplay regulations are intended to redress some of the imbalance, limiting clubs spending to a proportion of their turnover. Theoretically, this would prevent rich owners coming into smaller clubs and spending hundreds of millions on new players without a sustainable business to fund it. However, it's a plan with flaws. Clubs will find loopholes, such as signing massive sponsorship deals to increase turnover. This is supposedly limited as part of the plan but as yet Manchester City do not seem to have been called to account for their incredibly fishy sounding stadium naming deal with Etihad. With the regulations pegged to turnover, it also means they essentially protect the status quo even more so than currently. The rules benefit huge clubs like Manchester United and Bayern Munich who have already invested in massive stadia and set up huge merchandising operations around the world. Smaller/medium-sized clubs who have challenged at the top of European football after investment from rich owners such as Villareal would be less likely to repeat their feats.

My favourite players (in no particular order): 2. Dejan Savicevic

Before I start, apologies for letting this blog slip over the last few months. Winter's coming....more effort will be made!

To get things moving again here's the second in the 'my favourite players' series.

Up 2nd is another Eastern European who played in Italy - Dejan Savicevic. Savicevic was a Milan and Red Star legend, a classic enigmatic number 10, inconsistent but at times sublime.

For the sublime see Savicevic's performance in Milan's demolition of Johan Cruyff's Barcelona in the 1994 UEFA Champions League final. I remember watching this game as a 16 year old - the way Milan beat Barca this night was jaw dropping. Capello's Milan handed out a trouncing of the most emphatic kind on the biggest of stages. Savicevic created the first goal for Daniele Massaro with a typical surging dribble and then put the tie to bed by scoring Milan's third with an outrageous lob from distance. It was an absolute peach, a brilliant combination of quick thinking and technique. He then clattered the post before Marcel Dessaily put the cherry on top of the cake with a fantastic fourth.

No words could illustrate Savicevic's talent better than the video below. It's quite long but worth watching to the end i think as it shows footage i'd never seen before from his international games for Yugoslavia and from his time at Red Star. His dribbling skills are awesome, somewhere up there with Maradona and Messi i'd say. Bloody brilliant!

And to cap things off I found this whilst researching his youtube catalogue.