• Frank Lampard signs MLS deal to join New York City in July
Then again, has any club been set up without encountering some kind of difficulties in their early years? Not in Manchester, certainly. St Mark’s, the club that eventually spawned Manchester City, won one game in their first season and, wading through the history books, it became apparent that was largely because the opposition, Stalybridge Clarence, had eight players and made up the numbers with three volunteers from the crowd.
The club accrued so much debt when they were known as Ardwick FC the director who bailed them out had to put back his wedding by three years. It was hardly straightforward either for Manchester United’s predecessors at Newton Heath bearing in mind they finished bottom in their first two seasons and, in a move Sir Alex Ferguson would undoubtedly approve of, took one newspaper to court for complaining their style was “not football but simple brutality”. TheBirmingham Daily Gazette had concluded that the tactics in one game would “perhaps create an extra run of business for undertakers”. The libel case was won and the newspaper was ordered to pay one farthing in damages.
It must be slightly weird supporting a team nobody has seen play but the club have more than 13,000 season-ticket holders, four weeks before the new MLS season, and a series of events has been organised by the “Third Rail” fans’ group, named after the method of running New York’s subway system and promising “to be the electricity that powers NYCFC”.
Looking at the work that has been undertaken in Manchester, and knowing the expertise of some of the people involved in the two projects, I would probably back them to get it right. Take away the Frank Lampard farrago and there is plenty to admire. Their data states they are in the top three clubs in MLS for season-ticket sales and, again, when it comes to the interest generated by their Twitter and Facebook accounts. Momentum is gathering even without, lest it be forgotten, a ball being kicked.
Yet it certainly requires some modern thinking and an open mind to feel immediately at ease with the new “franchise” (never a word that fits snugly into the football lexicon), the back-scratching agreement that exists between Manhattan and Manchester and the lingering sense of awkwardness surrounding what happened with Lampard, a long story involving what the MLS commissioner described as the truth being “mischaracterised” and eventually coming down to one key fact: City’s owner, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, kept Lampard in Manchester after some delicate negotiations with – well, fancy this – NYCFC’s owner, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan.
Almost 300 people asked for refunds on their season tickets because they felt misled about his contract situation and he might also be aware of what happened at the MLS super-draft in the Pennsylvania Convention Center. The event had barely started when the first chant of “Where’s Frank Lampard?” echoed through the grand ballroom.
NYCFC’s only other run-out was a practice ground match against Jacksonville Armada and the supporters who have spent from $306 to $2,975 on season tickets have largely had to make do with snippets from the club’s social-media feeds. One cross from David Villa drew acclaim because of the way he “puts it on a platter”. Another player scored with a “snap shot bar and down finish”.
The match was played in four quarters of 24 minutes and, if that sounds slightly odd, it’s nothing compared with the story about the Phoenix Fire’s first game in 1979 and the sudden panic, 10 minutes before kick-off, when the kit turned up and the president, Len Lesser, bounded into the dressing room to announce why there was no goalkeeper’s jersey. “We’re going to be the smartest team in the league. None of this bullshit with players wearing different uniforms. I want us all to have the same uniform.”
Lampard should ask his uncle, Harry Redknapp, about that one. Redknapp was in the team and had persuaded the goalkeeper, Kieron Baker, he should leave Ipswich Town to join him in Arizona.
NYCFC, one imagines, will be able to rustle up a goalkeeper’s shirt. As you can imagine, it has not been easy locating somewhere for a stadium in New York and they had to give up on the site MLS proposed on Queens parkland because of the kind of problems David Beckham ran into when he suggested putting a 20,000-seat arena in Miami’s Museum Park – to which the local residents’ association posed the question, quite reasonably, in the Miami Herald whether he would “go to the mayor of London and ask to put a soccer stadium in Hyde Park”. The New York Times made it clear what it felt about “inserting a soccer stadium into the green lungs of Queens County”.
The search will continue but Yankee Stadium is not a bad temporary home, leased for the next three years, and when you analyse the sheer scale of work is it realistic that so many people take the view it is all a cunning plan driven by financial fair play manoeuvring on behalf of the Manchester side of the operation? For some, that appears to be the default setting every time the club’s owners are rich enough, or clever enough, to do something that is beyond their rivals.
But just think about it for a second: would they really go through years of political pain, moving heaven and earth to try to squeeze a stadium on to the New York skyline, creating a new club at immense cost with 25 players and more than 100 full-time staff, simply because City found it difficult to get beneath the break-even line in their last FFP accounts?
Arsène Wenger might be suspicious about the number of players who will be loaned from one City to the other but maybe Arsenal should be doing something similar bearing in mind their majority shareholder, Stan Kroenke, is the owner of the MLS team Colorado Rapids. Chelsea have an agreement in place whereby they load players on to Vitesse Arnhem. Manchester United have made all sorts of tie-ups over the years and it strikes me, overall, as smart business from the CFG (City Football Group) empire. Not hugely sensational, I know, but maybe the relevant people have just seen an opportunity for MLS to flourish with New York and, indirectly, Abu Dhabi at the forefront of it. CFG has other ventures with Melbourne City FC and Yokohama Marinos. It does feel like their ultimate aim is some form of global domination.
That is going to be a long process. On Friday, someone in City’s ticket office told me there were 100 tickets left for Tuesday’s game. It sounded like wishful thinking and, as it turns out, the 7,000-capacity ground will be a small fraction full, as you might expect for a midweek game in February against the team third from bottom of the Scottish Premier League. But there is momentum. The people behind this operation are here for the long haul, and they generally get what they want.
Leeds United were entitled to be pleased about the FA disciplinary panel’s decision not to rule against Giuseppe Bellusci after the allegations that he had racially abused Cameron Jerome.
Yet the verdict was that the case was “not proven”and, without wishing to be too pedantic, that may not absolutely tally with the follow-up line from Leeds that Bellusci had always made it clear he did not use racist language “and the FA commission has found that to be the case”.
We will know more when the full written reasons are published, possibly on Monday, but it is likely the case came down to one man’s word against another’s.
Jerome thought he heard Bellusci call him a “negro”. Bellusci, according to his lawyer, had been talking in Italian and said nero (black) in the context of wanting to give the Norwich City player a black eye. With nobody else hearing it, what was the realistic likelihood of the allegation being proven?
What will be interesting is the FA’s explanation for going through with the case, no matter how credible they considered Jerome, when they knew in advance Bellusci’s argument, that there were no other witnesses and nothing conclusive from the lip-readers.
Almost certainly, it is because the authority did not feel it could drop a case of this nature without going to a formal hearing. Yet even with the FA’s high rate of proven verdicts it was probably obvious, no matter who you might believe, how this one would eventually pan out.
No wonder Van Gaal and José get on
Louis van Gaal’s spot of bother with the Football Association, for his take on the referee’s performance at Cambridge, reminds me of a story they still tell in Holland about the only red card of the Manchester United manager’s playing career.
Van Gaal was playing for Sparta Rotterdam when he took exception to a decision from a mustachioed referee and was given a warning for raising his voice. Van Gaal responded by saying: “If you want to make it into tomorrow’s papers, moustache-man, you should give me a yellow card.” The referee obliged so Van Gaal followed it up with: “If you want to make it to the front pages, you should give me another one!” The referee obliged again.
All of Van Gaal’s five bookings that season were for dissent. These days he rarely mentions referees and his comments at Cambridge were so vague he is not alone in being surprised by the misconduct charge. Yet there are glimpses sometimes to make it clear why he and José Mourinho get on so well.
