These days, two controversies have grabbed the sports media’s attention. First being the Carlos Tevez’s ownership question and the other being the Ferrari espionage controversy. Both have questioned some issues, the solution to which isn’t easy to find out. Lets see what exactly happened:
The Carlos Tevez issue first - The Argentine striker was transferred from Corinthians to West Ham United last season, and hammers were handed a record £5.5 million fine by the Premier League for breaching the rules regarding third party ownership of Carlos Tévez and Javier Mascherano. Premier League believed that there were no official records regarding the transfer deals and West Ham had to prove that they had ripped up an agreement they had with Joorabchian, the owner of MSI (Media Sports Investments) who was behind the transfer of Tevez and Mascherano. Although there were no points deduction and Mascherano eventually moved to Liverpool, Tevez still stayed and played with West Ham. The relegation threatened clubs, Wigan, Fulham and Sheffield United, cried foul over this and asked legal action and relegation of West Ham. That all didn’t happen and eventually Tevez saved West Ham from relegation at the last day of Premiership season to win against Manchester United.
But now the situation took a new turn when Manchester United wanted to sign Carlos Tevez, and things were looking fine until the Premier League stepped in to announce that whatever transfer fee was to be paid, will be paid to West Ham United, as they have the player’s registration. Kia Joorabchian on the other hand claimed that his company MSI owned the player’s economic rights, which West Ham denied. So United knows that they have to pay the transfer fee but do not know whom to pay the transfer fee. The issue has been dragging on for days now, with even FIFA requested to step in, but FIFA said that they cannot decide on the issue as third party ownership was common in some nations but not in England, so FIFA believed that it was to take the issue to CAS (Court of Arbitration for Sport). So now the situation hangs in that place until CAS finally decides what should happen. Joorabchian is confident that the issue will be sorted out soon enough, but whatever happens one thing will need to be sorted out in order to prevent another such controversy. One possible thing being thought of is, that Manchester United pay the money to West Ham and West Ham will eventually pay some money to MSI for breaching their contract. I still need an answer to one question, if Javier Mascherano was allowed to goto Liverpool, then why to fight over Tevez? Both Mascherano and Tevez were owned by MSI and both were transferred to West Ham so both should have had similar contracts. So why was Mascherano’s transferred cleared and not Tevez’s?
Now lets see what grabbed the paddock’s attention in Formula One.
Scuderia Ferrari came to know that Mike Coughlan is in possession of 780 pages of Ferrari documentation and immediately took action. Ferrari believed that Nigel Stepney was behind the documentation acquistion by Coughlan. Ferrari and McLaren both suspended Stepney & Coughlan respectively. Ferrari took the issue to FIA and a high court suit followed. The eventual result of the court meeting was, there was “insufficent evidence” it had affected this year’s title race. McLaren still face a championship ban if in the future they are seen to have gained any advantage from the data. Ferrari didn’t like the decision, and not surprisingly as a lot of time and money is spent on the car’s development and no one would like someone to obtain that information, especially if that person is from a rival team. So Ferrari will certainly not stop here and will still try to do something about it.
So in short, both the issues highlight some issues needed to be taken care of. Football transfers are now involving huge money, and players are being transferred from different leagues to another. Either there should be a unified format related to this or there should be a rule as to how to transfer a third party owned player. And in Ferrari’s case, the matter should be closely looked upon, and see if McLaren really did use that information they got.
