Wolverhampton Wanderers have been given a £25,000 suspended fine for fielding a below-strength side in their match against Manchester United at Old Trafford in December.

The manager Mick McCarthy made 10 changes from the side that had won 1-0 at Tottenham Hotspur three days earlier. Wolves then responded by recalling nine of the players that had been in action at White Hart Lane for the next league game, at home to fellow strugglers Burnley – and won 2-0. The under-strength Wolves side lost at Old Trafford, on 15 December, 3-0. John Curtis, The Guardian.

I’m no fan of Mick McCarthy or Wolves – I’m a Chelsea fan – but surely a manger is entitled to select any of the players he has on his books – unlike Manchester United who are out to win the premiership – Wolves aim is to avoid relegation – so I can see why he wanted to avoid injury to his best players for the game against Bolton – which he won – who’s next to be fined? What a ridiculous attitude taken by the Premier League. What happens if my team have won the Premiership with three games to go and the only game we’ve left is the Champions league final will we be fined for fielding a weakened team, our last three games are Stoke, Liverpool and Wigan – two of these games could be important for the relegation and the other for qualification in next year’s European competitions.

Back in May 2005 the Glazer family brought Manchester United for £810m, paying £270m themselves and borrowing the remainder since then the dept they’ve loaded on to United has increased to £700m.

Now imagine how United might look without the Glazer debt. True, as a plc – the Stock Market listing which football executives now agree was a failed experiment, despite defending it zealously at the time – United paid dividends to shareholders. Yet even allowing for the increase in turnover, from £171m to the most recent £278m, the 2004 dividend was £7m, nothing like the mountain of interest, £42m to banks, £25m to hedge funds, with which the Glazers have burdened United.

Had the takeover never happened, how fearsomely United could now be swaggering. Three times Premier League champions and European champions in 2008, with a record income of £278m (although it would probably be lower, because without the Glazers, ticket prices would not be so high), with a £91m operating profit, not plundered to meet the interest. On top of that, £81m from selling Ronaldo.

Would the manager, in those debt-free circumstances, really spend the autumn years of his brilliant career grumbling about the price of players? Can he be pictured allowing Ronaldo and Carlos Tevez to depart, leaving him to admit that United’s thinner strike force is seriously reliant on one player, Wayne Rooney?

For those who still believe that United are untouched by the financial chicanery the Glazers have visited on them, the fullest answer so far is contained in an unlikely place – United’s bond prospectus itself. That piece of work, arguably the most dispiriting document ever produced containing the word football, seeks to persuade investors to buy a piece of the Glazers’ latest debt restructuring. David Conn, The Guardian.

We really have to thank our lucky stars that the Glazier’s are in charge at Man United, if it wasn’t for Alex Ferguson the crisis would have already happened, he’s a brilliant manager and this season without key players there’s every chance of United winning their fourth straight Premiership title.

Your wife has just become pregnant for the third time so how do you celebrate? If your Marlon King the answer is – out on the town sexually assaulting women and when one of them has the temerity to protests you punch her in the face so hard you break her nose – nice. For once a premiership player’s lawyers didn’t get him off – every time I see the video below of Liverpool midfielder Steven Gerrard I wonder how a not guilty verdict was returned

The governing bodies of some of the UK’s most popular sports, including cricket, rugby union and Premier League football, have criticised plans to force BSkyB to wholesale its sports channels to pay-TV competitors more cheaply.

Sports bodies have responded furiously to Ofcom’s consultation on its plan to ensure Sky makes its premium sport and movie channels available to rivals including Virgin Media, BT and Top-Up TV at lower prices, claiming it will reduce the amount of money they receive from selling media rights. The Rugby Football Union said that forcing this move on Sky would reduce the value of its exclusive live, terrestrial TV and mobile rights by 60%. James Robinson, The Guardian.

The rich and obscenely rich have taken over our sport long ago – now a Premier League game is little more than a money making event in which as much money as possible is taken from the poor deluded fans – and yes we are deluded – I haven’t been to match in 10-years I can’t afford the cost of a day out – adding up the cost of tickets, travel and food you’d be looking at over £200 – instead I fork out around £60 a month to Sky and ESPN.

It’s should be no surprise that The Premier League backs Sky against Ofcom – Sky is a very lucrative source of income for the Premiership – I guess that’s why rugby and cricket are also backing Sky – they can see the riches football already enjoys.

The question I have is how – or is it even possible to reverse the crass commercialisation of football?

The government has demanded immediate reform of the Football Association, insisting it implements recommendations made by Lord Burns four years ago in full or face a £25m cut in grassroots funding and the withdrawal of political support. Owen Gibson, The Guardian.

Why on earth are we giving the FA £25million – I don’t care what it’s for – there is so much money in football, £25million is only just over a quarter of the fee Man United received for selling Cristiano Ronaldo to Real Madrid – if the FA wants to develop grass roots football I suggest it passes the hat round it’s wealthy clubs and leaves the tax payer alone.

Now I’d better state I’m a Chelsea fan – however the saga of a 12 month transfer ban seems to be missing the point. The player involved Gaël Kakuta has been banned for four months for doing nothing more than realising a contract he signed at 14 was illegal and that he could earn more money playing for Chelsea.

Lens had been training Kakuta since the age of nine, and he signed a pre-contract agreement with the club when he was 14 and a half years old that stated he would sign professional terms with Lens at 17, the first opportunity under French employment law. Chelsea’s legal advice appears to have been that the pre-contract was unenforceable, an interpretation that François Collado, general manager of Lens at the time, disputed from the outset. Matt Scott, The Guardian.

So as I understand it Lens effectively illegally signed a 14-year-old player and for that they are rewarded by FIFA with just over a million Euros, Chelsea are banned from signing players for 12 months and Kakuta is banned for four months.

Now if both teams weren’t so greedy – Chelsea for wanting to pay less – Lens for wanting more – we’d be none the wiser. You can be sure that Lens isn’t the only football team signing under-age players.

Now greed and football – that’s a venomous combination that’s playing havoc with our national game.

Details of ESPN’s plans for the 46 Premier League matches they’ve the rights to show have been revealed.

The US broadcaster ESPN has announced plans to launch a new UK sports channel, called ESPN, on 3 August.

The channel will show 46 live Barclays Premier League football games, which were to have been shown by Setanta until its recent financial problems.

Sky’s residential customers will have to pay a premium of £9 a month for the new channel if they already pay for Sky Sports or £12 a month if they do not. BBC.

I haven’t written about Chelsea recently, I know it’s a specialist interest, however the latest news that the club has lost £66m for the year to the end of June 2008 and that Russian owner Roman Abramovich has now invested £710m. Of that £66m loss £23m was down to compensation paid to former coaches and managers, but doesn’t include Scolari.

I don’t see exactly why we saw fit to sack Grant and Scolari, When Grant took over we’d had a poor start and finished second in the Premiership taking it to the last game and lost out on penalties in the Champions League – a pretty good record, but still sacked. Then Scolari after 36 games is fired, mainly over poor results for the last month – you can’t judge a manager in just 6 months; it takes years. If you look at the top clubs in England they don’t change managers often – even Benitez is approaching 5 years at Liverpool – the short term appointment of Hiddink isn’t management stability.

If that’s not bad enough for Chelsea fans then the news that in an attempt to scale back its debt, the club is aiming to pay for any purchases this summer by selling players – doesn’t look good for next season; then again how many players will want to sign for a manager-less club? Then again it doesn’t look particularly good for this season.

The management at Chelsea seem to be clueless about how to achieve success, constantly changing managers and financing player purchases out of player sales won’t achieve success.

Source: BBC.

I never had any idea why the European Commission forced the Premier League to split its matches between two broadcasters – something to do with consumer choice, which has been a complete farce it left many football fans having to fork out another thirteen pounds a month to Setanta, which I duly did. I won’t go into the reasons why I no longer subscribe other than to say when I signed up the deal was supposedly a monthly contract; however you try cancelling a Setanta contract, almost impossible. So I’m very happy that Sky has won five out of six of the available packages leaving Setanta with just 23 Saturday evening matches. Source: The Guardian.

In scenes reminiscent of Sunday League half-time’s Hull City’s manager, Phil Brown, kept his players on the pitch for a frozen half-time team talk.

“It was nice and cold out there and I thought it might keep the boys alive,” Brown said. “I felt they looked half dead in the first half. I also felt three or four thousand Hull supporters deserved an apology, some sort of explanation as to why we had been so bad in the first half, and it’s difficult to do that in the confines of a dressing room.” Source: Paul Wilson – The Guardian.