It's official, Thierry Henry is now a Barcelona player. After passing a medical earlier on today, he was officially unveiled at 5pm in Barcelona, with the transfer fee being about 16.1 million pounds. I don't think there's much more that can be said about this transfer, Arsenal and the Premiership are losing a great player, but I do believe that Arsenal will recover from this and still challenge for the title this season. The youngsters are going to be forced to take more responsibilty for their roles in the team and this can only be a good thing. Good luck to Thierry and I hope that Barcelona don't meet Arsenal in the Champions League knockout stages!
Plenty of other news to keep us busy, starting with an issue that hasn't gained a huge amount of press but I feel is an important issue in the modern game. It is about women's football in England. Charlton ladies team has been forced to disband because of the relegation of the mens side from the Premiership, it is all about cost-cutting. Now I appreciate the fact that Charlton do have to cut some costs but surely they could have cut the wage-bill from the mens team a little? Plus they are receiving a generous amount of money from the Premiership as part of their parachute payments after getting relegated. The Charlton ladies team was the main challenger to the Arsenal ladies team this season for domestic honours, and how will women's football grow in England if they are considered so expendable by the big teams? I know that the football quality is not close to the premiership but having watched some women's football in the past couple of seasons, I was pretty impressed by the level of play and will always watch women's football when it's on tv. This closure is sending out the wrong message to te women's game, and does not reflect well on the men's game either, I hope the players and staff quickly find new clubs to work at.
There's been a few interesting pieces of news with regards to managers, with Paul Ince becoming the new manager of MK Dons, continued uncertainty over Capello's job at Real madrid and Neil Warnock coming out and saying he'd do a better job then Sven at Man City.
Firstly Mr. Warnock's comments were just his opinion on his own abilities, which he is entitled to, but I personally believe that most people out there would rather have Sven over Neil any day. But hey, if Sven declines the Man City job then maybe Neil can expect a call from Shinawatra...or maybe he should start looking elsewhere for a job.
Good on MK Dons for taking a chance on Paul Ince, he did a good job in keeping Macclesfield in the Football League and he does seem like he has the type of personality suited for management. I don't want to get into a racism debate, but it does strike me as odd that Roy Keane and Stuart Pearce can gain top management jobs straight away but Ince starts off at Macclesfield. However, this may be just down to Ince wanting to gain experience in the lower league before joining a top club, a very good idea as the demise of Stuart Pearce showed. Whatever the reasons behind his original move, I hope that he does well at the Dons as it's always good to have young English managers in the game.
I shall finish with poor Capello at Real Madrid. I have already mentioned his situation in a previous post but to have uncertainty over your job after winning the League title is pretty harsh. They may not have played brilliantly all season but they won the title for the first time in 4 years, syrely he deserves another season to build on this success. But who knows what will happen, Real Madrid is not a normal club and so we cannot expect them to make any normal decisions!
Au Revoir football lovers, I shall be back tomorrow.
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