[Me] Feature: Sky Sports' Great Hoax

A couple of days ago Sly Sports (that was a typo but I'm keeping it as I like it) put up a story about Chelsea's Tal Ben Haim [Picture]. He moaned about a lack of first team football or something, I have a built in anti-retard filter that blocked out most of what he said.

Something caught my eye though. Midway through the article he was quoted as having said this:

"It was Jose who brought me here and no one except he and I know the conversation we had when he tried to sign me the first time a year ago last January."

To people who don't follow football, this means nothing. This is also the reason why Sly Sports were happy to post the article up. To those of us who are educated in footballing matters, this is an extremely important. Allow me to explain.

In football, a player must sign a contract with a team to become their playing staff. Simple thus far. When a player's contract is over he is allowed to move clubs for free; if another club wants him while he is contracted to his club, the interested party must offer the player's club a 'transfer fee' which must be accepted before they can open contract negotiations with said player. The except to this rule is a ruling called the 'Bosman Ruling'. In short, the Bosman ruling states that a player who has 6 months left on his contract is allowed to negotiate a contract with another club, which they will join at the end of their current contract. They can simply sign a pre-contract at the time. To the best of my knowledge, this only actually affects cases from one EU country to another. In a domestic case, or at least in England, this pre-contract time is only 6 weeks.

Tal Ben Haim was actually moving from Bolton (an English Premier League side) to Chelsea (another Premier League side) which (once again only to the best of my knowledge) makes this illegal. I few of my footballing friends also noticed this and agreed with me when I pointed this out to them. If we are all correct, this is proof of Chelsea 'tapping up' a player, an illegal practice they had been guilty of at least once before.

Sly Sports have a comments section at the bottom of each article. I filled in the comments and highlighted exactly what I've highlighted here, but in much fewer words. Obviously, comments aren't posted straight away as the comments section would be spammed; instead they are moderated before being published. Unsurprisingly, Sly Sports haven't published the comment. If I am wrong, shouldn't they have e-mailed me saying as much? To the best of my knowledge Chelsea have made another illegal move.

Sly Sports, you are a disgrace. The original article (without my comment, as you can check) can be found here.

~ AVARiCE