Moneyball: Barcelona ups the ante

By: Isaiah | October 17th, 2007

This week has been pretty solid for me in terms of sports. I’m a big Kansas Jayhawks fan and the football team is ranked 13th in the BCS standings, while my other beloved college team, the OU Sooners, is ranked 5th. The Cleveland Indians beat the New York Yankees and are now mowing down the Boston Red Sox in the baseball playoffs and the hated Dallas Cowboys finally lost in the NFL. The only issues are coming from Spain, oddly enough. Barcelona has been playing so well that their actual on-the-field endeavors have been nothing but a fantastic ride lately, but now Joan Laporta is mixing things up and making headlines when he should be shutting his mouth and hoping everyone comes back from international duty healthy.

The obvious reason behind my somewhat bitter statement about Laporta is that he’s come out in the media in the last few days (or, really, Friday and Saturday), to press UEFA and FIFA on the issue of compensation to club teams for “allowing” their players to serve on international duty. I’ve already written about this, but apparently Laporta didn’t get my memo about shutting the hell up and getting on with running a club with a conscience. Platini and Blatter should smack Laporta on the back of the head and tell him where to go. Back to Barcelona, of course, because he should be there doing whatever it is club presidents are supposed to do, which is certainly not destroying the fabric of the game.

But, of course, I’ve got another gripe. Laporta spouting off at the mouth is hardly worth mentioning except that it comes in tandem with this little gem, pointed out by a buddy of mine. The original telegraph article is here, in case you’d like to read it more thoroughly.

The gist of the article is that Barcelona won a court ruling in Spain against Fran Merida for leaving the club. Another article about the ruling says that Merida was charged with failure to honor a pre-contract agreement. I have been under the impression for some time that pre-contract agreements are not legally binding in any sense because they are, by definition, pre-contract. If they were binding, wouldn’t they just be called contracts?

Beyond that is the question of what this means for other players. If the general understanding of the “pre-contract agreement” was that you weren’t breeching any contract by leaving, what does that mean for players like Cesc or Daniel Pacheco, the latter of whom is apparently the next target for FCB’s legal department? I assume they won’t go after Cesc because they might want him back (not that this is a good idea, but you know, that’s not how the club’s thinking would ever go), but little fish like Merida and Pacheco? Sure.

Skip Sauer of the Sports Economist might be correct in saying that Barca is only going after a change in the law to protect future investments, but this seems a rather ridiculous way to go about that, if that is indeed the master plan. As one of the commenters on the Telegraph, a John A. Blair, article wrote, “Surely the Spanish court decision has no weight in the UK, where the contract would not be illegal. In addition EU rulings on interference with trade would also negate the court ruling.” I’m not particularly familiar with EU rulings on interference with trade, especially not when concerning sports, but it seems to be a valid point in that there can’t be the lack of a law here. And why has it taken until now for this to surface?

Regardless, it’s a asinine and ridiculous move on the part of Barceonla to attempt to recover money from someone that they don’t even want anyway. The nature of the business is that the youth ranks aren’t for making money, they’re for training kids, for teaching them, and for getting players out of them at a later stage. I think there needs to be a FIFA ruling on this, if that’s legal as it might infringe upon individual countries’ rights to self-govern, creating a standard age at which a contract can be made. Whether that’s 16 or 18 or 55, I don’t know, but until then I’m just going to be ashamed at the way in which Barcelona has been conducting itself recently in terms of basking in the glow of its money while demanding even more in return. We’re not Real Madrid, for chrissake, so let’s get down to the real business of winning the league and making the world a better place.p