Search: ' Kia Joorabchian'

Ian Farrell bids a grateful but unemotional farewell to Carlos Tevez as he looks for another move

If you filter out any stories containing the words “romp” or “affray” and only count the football-related, few Premier League players have generated as much news over the last five years as Carlos Tévez. Not that there haven’t been sleazier revelations along the way, but it’s at work that he is truly a leading headline-maker, with the success and salvation his goals have delivered accounting for only a fraction of the coverage.

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Mark Brophy looks at the emerging trend of former player agents becoming directors of football at Premier League clubs

If a Blackburn or Newcastle fan were to feel dismay towards recent personnel changes at the heart of their club, it might not be the sackings of Sam Allardyce or Chris Hughton that were exercising them. Supporters might find the growing influence of men who previously were in the business of promoting players infinitely more worrying. Jerome Anderson, a prominent agent, has been advising Blackburn’s new owners (see WSC 288) and Kia Joorabchian, best known here for his role in Carlos Tevez’s career, has reportedly also begun to act as an advisor to Mike Ashley at Newcastle. Chelsea fans needn’t be smug either: super-agent Pini Zahavi is a member of Roman Abramovich’s inner circle.

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Who stands to gain from the brouhaha at West Ham?

The summer sales at West Ham that triggered the departure of Alan Curbishley were explained in a splurge of back-page headlines in late September. Hammered! said the Daily Mail, who were a day ahead of the pack in reporting that the club had anticipated a huge fine for their illegal dealings with Kia Joorabchian of the MSI agency, suppliers of Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano. The tribunal that examined Sheffield United’s claim for damages for having been relegated while West Ham stayed up won’t decide on compensation for several months. But United’s claim for over £30 million, made up principally of the TV and merchandising income they lost after relegation, is likely to be met. Indeed, unless West Ham are relegated this season and Sheffield United come up, £30m seems like light punishment. Most of the coverage sympathised with the claimants, with Neil Warnock telling the Times that he’d still be at Bramall Lane if the club had stayed up. “It knocked us back no end. Relegation is on my CV, which it shouldn’t be.”

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The Premier League feels once again the need for change. "Game 39" is the radical new idea

A new phrase entered football last month, one that we will be hearing a lot more of. The Premier League’s “Game 39” plan, involving an extra round of matches being played at five venues in other countries, met with almost universal derision when it was announced by chief executive Richard Scudamore in early February. The media and supporters’ groups condemned it straight away, and were soon followed by football officials from around the world. Even the FA, not known for taking an adversarial line with the Premier League, chanced some mild criticism of the plan once FIFA’s Sepp Blatter had dismissed it out of hand.

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A Search for the Truth
by Brian Belton

Pennant Books, £16.99
Reviewed by Darron Kirkby
From WSC 254 April 2008 

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In Len Shackleton’s autobiography, a chapter entitled “What the average director knows about football” famously comprised a blank page. Brian Belton, on the other hand, manages to eke more than 270 pages out of Terence Brown’s 15-year tenure as chairman of West Ham United.

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