Newcastle United received a massive boost for their plan to claim ?20m compensation from the Football Association for Michael Owen’s injury sustained at the World Cup when the powerful G14 syndicate pledged their support to the fight. It’s no coincidence that newly elected G14 chairman David Dein is also the main powerbroker at Arsenal who also are considering a similar bid for compensation from the Swiss FA over Phillipe Senderos’ injury which has kept him out of an Arsenal jersey so far this season.

The G14 have an ulterior motive in supporting Newcastle of course, their concern doesn’t really lie in the difficulties the North East club are having with their expensive signing from Real Madrid, instead they want to make sure they get a test case against the football associations which shows that they are due compensation for allowing their players to play in international matches, fixtures which the G14 clubs view as completely unimportant and inconvenient.

David Dein’s statement included this telling sentence:

In what other industry would you allow your employees to go to someone else and then be off for a length of time because effectively they were on secondment to someone else?”

Football, we are told, is an industry quite unlike any other as the transfer system and the international football release rules show. If the G14 clubs get their way and force the football associations to pay for the release of players for international duty then the international side of the sport could disappear altogether. Not all national associations have the financial clout of the English FA and many smaller ones simply couldn’t afford to compensate clubs for playing their players or in the case of a serious injury on their time such as that suffered by Michael Owen.

Newcastle United’s claim for ?20m compensation may seem steep but when broken down I actually agree with what they are claiming for. The FA insurers will only pay half of Owen’s reputed ?100,000 a week wages while he is on the treatment table, Newcastle also want compensation for the depreciation in value suffered by their ?16m asset as a result of his ligament trouble and subsequent surgery and they are also looking for compensation for the money they have had to spend to replace Michael Owen directly caused by his injury. When you consider that his replacement is ?10m Obafemi Martins then the figure being bandied about suddenly crystallises around the ?20m mark.

I’m not a supporter of the closed shop, “rich get richer” G14 on most issues, I think they are a blight on the game and their continual greed for more power and money will eventually ruin the game. However, I do think that clubs should be due adequate compensation for injuries sustained by their employees when on international duty, the Michael Owen case is a big money one because of the high profile both the player and his club enjoy, it could yet prove to be a bigger case than we’ve seen before as Newcastle United and their backers at the G14 have pledged to take it to the High Court if they have to in order to regain some of the money they have lost.

The FA had better watch out, the sharks are circling.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 6th, 2006 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Newcastle United. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.