In his exclusive column for CaughtOffside, former Aston Villa attacker Stan Collymore discusses some of football’s biggest talking points, including why the Premier League should be ashamed of their silence since the race riots, why we’ve lost the essence of what the Charity Shield is all about, why transfer windows are anxiety inducing and much more.
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Liverpool manager, Roy Evans, flew back from his holiday in Barbados to meet me at Heathrow Airport in London for two hours, before flying straight back to his long-suffering wife, in order to sign me.
I met Joe Royle, who was the Everton manager at a hotel in Cheshire and, I’m not going to lie, I think that when you’ve got the choice of two clubs the size of Liverpool and Everton – today’s equivalent might be Liverpool and Manchester City or Manchester United – you’re immediately flattered but also worrying that “I’ve got to buy a house, I’ve got to relocate” etc., and much more besides.
At least now there are transfer windows and release clauses.. When I was two thirds through a season back in the 90s, I had a phone call when I was in my car going home from Forest training from Sir Alex Ferguson. That would now be considered tapping up and was yet another layer of worry for players of a certain age.
That’s because every transfer window is anxiety inducing for a player.
Lots of dead ends… this club are interested in you, then they’re not, then they’ve dropped out of the race altogether and somebody else has come in.
How it normally works is players basically have a meeting with the managers who are interested in them to talk about the football side, and then the agent sees what they’re prepared to do or not prepared to do, and there’s a hell of a lot of waiting involved.
There isn’t enough done for players to be able to guide them through the process beyond just being a player.
In all honesty, even with clubs nowadays, I speak to a lot of younger players and of course they’ve got agents around them and the clubs try their very best with liaison officers to help players settle in – perhaps a little bit more at a club than they used to – but it’s still not enough.
That’s because there are a lot more countries to move to, players are being bombarded with all sorts of figures and money talks.
Are they going to a club to be the best footballing version of themselves that they can be, because that should ultimately will guide everything, or are they going to the club that are going to offer them a few more zeros on their pay packet?
They must do their due diligence.
I think that all football players need a permanent home.
I’m going to give you an example of somebody… Louie Barry, a wonder kid at West Brom, goes to Barcelona and then comes back and plays for Villa. As a massive Villa fan, he still wants to play for the club.
He had a nasty period with injuries and was loaned out five times by Villa, and has now been loaned out again – but the lad desperately wanted to stay.
He’s a familiar face for the fans, but beyond that in my view he shouldn’t have signed a new contract in the hope of breaking into the Villa first team (which won’t happen) when there were better options available for his career progression.
We need to have the conversation about when a player is being signed by a club, he needs to understand where he can buy a house, school his kids and have a home base to settle into. He shouldn’t be pimped out here, there and everywhere, just to be a great example of Profit and Sustainability rules in action.
Conor Gallagher is another one. Four loans in three years before settling down at Chelsea, only to then be pushed out the door by Todd Boehly.
It kills younger players to keep going out on loan and it basically leaves them like a ship that never docks. They’re constantly out and about and never find a home.
Perhaps Gallagher will do that now at Atletico Madrid – find what it’s like to go and play for a club, anchor down and become a club legend – but he wanted to be ‘the man’ at Chelsea.
This weekend sees the return of the Community Shield, a traditional pre-season friendly that I’m a big fan of.
I do think that it absolutely shouldn’t be counted as a trophy, however.
I think we need to tell the likes of Pep Guardiola that this isn’t something that he can count as one of his trophy wins. It’s not about Pep vs Klopp or Pep vs ten Hag either, because we’ve already had that narrative on any number of previous occasions.
It was originally called the Charity Shield, and the money raised from the game was given to good causes. It still is.
So we should promote that angle way more than we do currently.
This year’s partner is MIND, and there’s a whole four or five days leading up to it where players, instead of talking about the inane rivalry of Man United against Manchester City, should be highlighting the charity and the issues they face etc.
Let’s be perfectly honest, it’s the last meaningless friendly before the big kick-off, so moving forward, let’s get back to what the Community Shield is all about.
Charity.
The problem with a salary cap for me is it’s got to come from FIFA.
I think if you have got agreement across the big leagues of England, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, that would go some way to having a salary cap implemented, but of course, all it means is you’ll get more and more players going to the Saudi Pro League and picking up their £500k per week.
So it kind of becomes self sabotaging.
If FIFA said there is going to be a global salary cap, then I think it could work, but I think that FIFA would also have a fight on their hands from from UEFA.
We need to get there in some way though I worry that just like the creative accounting of certain Premier League clubs – selling or their swapping their best young kids or assets to get around FFP – the clubs will find a way to circumvent this cap.
What I would like to see is an organisational cap, which HMRC can then can get involved in.
The organisation, for example Man City, can only spend across all of its assets – whether it be players, staff or anything else – £100m total per year, and if you go over that then you get fined.
That way you can have some common sense because then clubs have to look around at where they’re spending every penny.
I think that the Premier League have a massive responsibility as a big British brand, and as a big British brand that’s inclusive with all creeds, all flavours and all genders, to comment on the current riots from a football perspective.
After all, they can’t wait to tell you about No Room for Racism day.
I would really have liked to see Richard Masters come out after last weekend and say “any supporter involved in these in this disorder, will never set foot in an English football stadium again,” and that would have done as much as potentially the deterrent effect of a six month or a 12 month custodial sentence for some of them.
Frankly, I’m disgusted by the Premier League.
If you remember, when players were getting racist abuse a while back, the Premier League were quick to tell everyone to put a the black square on their social media profiles and not tweet or post for 24 hours.
The fact they’ve said nothing whatsoever during the current riots, I would suggest, is 1000 times worse. The fact that I genuinely feel like the only voice in the professional football sports broadcasting space that was willing to call it out, hour by hour, and to show people that there were good people in Walthamstow, in Birmingham, in Newcastle and elsewhere that weren’t going to allow this race baiting to happen… I think it’s frankly disgusting and disturbing.
Football is multicultural, and not just the fan base.
We’ve got Muslims, we’ve got Jews, we’ve got blacks, we’ve got whites, we’ve got French, we’ve got Germans, we’ve got Italians, we’ve got Egyptians… all playing in the Premier League.
I get that a lot of players and clubs will be very reluctant to speak up because they don’t understand the politics, but for me, football needs to do much, much more.
The post Collymore’s column: Premier League should be ashamed, clubs need to stop pimping out players for FFP, time to remember the true meaning of the Community Shield and more appeared first on CaughtOffside.
