Originally Posted by
the other bob wilson
I agree with you - if Mackay and Moody are guilty of these charges then I'm fairly sure that there are plenty in the game who'll be thinking "there but for the grace of God go I".
I'm still not completely clear about this though. City paid what was reported as Spurs' asking price for Caulker and were largely reckoned to have got most, if not all, of their money back when they sold him a year later. Also, I can clearly remember it being reported that Odemwingie would could us £2.5 million when the rumours about him coming here first broke and, then, when he left a few months later it was in a swap deal where it was reported that there had been no cash adjustment between us and Stoke or vice versa - effectively we got a player valued at £2.5 million for nothing when Odemwingie left.
So, how were City defrauded to the tune of £10 million when we got a year from Caulker (he may not have been perfect, but we would have stayed up if all of our players had performed to the same level as Caulker did that season) and Odemwingie and then Kenwyne Jones for a total of three seasons? Surely, the club were only conned to the tune of the fees paid to those agents the City claim were not involved in the transfers?
I find the fees allegedly paid to those agents disgusting, but, although I'm no expert on this, they are around what I would expect from a pair of transfers that amounted to something like £11 million - by the look of it, the issue is not how much they were paid, but more what did they do to earn it?
One other thing, if I were on a jury trying this case, I would certainly not be convinced by an argument that "The club’s concern was heightened by the fact Manasseh was in Spain overseeing Bale’s move to Real Madrid on the day the Odemwingie transfer was completed" - I feel uneasy about sounding like I'm on a football agent's side, but I would have thought there are plenty of them for whom it would be physically impossible to be there on the scene of every deal they were involved in on any given transfer deadline day.
If it is found eventually that the five men charged are guilty then I'll say that Vincent Tan and the club have done football a favour and they should be praised, not vilified, but, for now, it doesn't look good that these stories by the same writer on the same paper keep on popping up whenever Malky Mackay is on the brink of getting a job.
Providing the story is accurate, there's a revealing sentence right at the end of it where it says that the club hold "Mackay and Moody responsible as two principal officers of the club overseeing transfer business.". This would appear to prove what seemed obvious anyway, Mackay and Moody were given carte blanche when it came to transfer dealings that summer.
By appointing a CEO who was not involved in the transfers in the way that others doing the same job at other clubs would be in Simon Lim and then letting the situation develop to the stage it did (don't forget that these two deals went through some time after the Cornelius transfer, with it's exorbitant fees and wages, was completed), I still feel Vincent Tan brought a lot of this on himself.