It’s a bizarre story. First, in May, before the World Cup kicked off, Fabio Capello along with a man named Chicco Merighi launched the Capello Index, an objective system that measures and evaluates the performances of players. But after the news broke of the ratings system, many people thought it would be in poor taste to have the rankings system running during the World Cup. That included the Football Association (FA) who prevented Capello from running the index during the tournament.

But now that the tournament is over, the people behind the Capello Index launched the site this morning which reveals how poor the England footballers were rated.

However, “A spokesman from the FA said that the index ratings had not been seen or approved by Mr Capello, were published without his knowledge and that his representatives have taken immediate steps to have the material taken down.”

It’s a bit ridiculous, really. Why can’t Capello have an opinion about how the players in the 2010 World Cup were rated even if it includes his England team? Isn’t relatively objective data what it is, a reflection on how a player performed at the top level? Does it look bad that Capello is associated with the index? Perhaps it seems unbefitting of an England manager, perhaps.

Now supposedly Capello is trying to get the index removed from the Internet for fear of embarrassment (too late). So in case it gets wiped away, here’s more information about how the index works and how the England players were rated during the 2010 World Cup:

According to the Capello Index website, the Capello Index uses “a scoring system which takes account of every key event that occurs during the course of a match. The Capello Index has a unique formula that measures a player’s contribution from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The score a player’s action generates is weighted depending on a number of factors, such as the area of the pitch in which they are completed, their impact on the match and the importance of game.”

The England players were rated as follows (out of a score of 100):

Robert Green 51.67
David James 59.28
Glen Johnson 57.18
John Terry 60.48
Ledley King 57.50
Jamie Carragher 59.04
Matthew Upson 60.21
Ashley Cole 59.58
Aaron Lennon 57.64
Frank Lampard 58.58
Steven Gerrard 60.98
James Milner 59.40
Gareth Barry 57.50
Shaun Wright-Phillips 61.09
Joe Cole 55.45
Wayne Rooney 58.87
Emile Heskey 60.15
Jermain Defoe 62.47
Peter Crouch did not play enough minutes to generate a mark.

In comparison, Diego Forlan achieved the highest score in the 2010 World Cup with a rating of 65.77.

Jermain Defoe scored the highest rating of the tournament for England with a 62.47. Not surprisingly, Robert Green scored a 51.67 after playing just one game and making a fatal mistake although, in fairness, he did earn back some credibility when he saved Jozy Altidore’s shot in the same game against the United States.

In the meantime, you may want to surf the Capello Index website as much as possible this weekend before it’s removed. It’s a bit of a fuss about nothing, in my opinion. What do you think?

You may as well kiss England’s chances of winning the 2018 World Cup bid goodbye. England’s 2018 World Cup bid lay in tatters this weekend after The Mail On Sunday newspaper revealed that FA Chief Lord Triesman accused Spain and Russia of trying to bribe World Cup referees.

And today, it was announced that Triesman has quit as chairman of the 2018 World Cup bid.

In addition to that, The Mail revealed that Triesman was cheating on his wife and was involved in an intimate affair with a girl who was formerly his private secretary. This coming from a man who was supposed to be rebuilding the scandal-clad reputation that the FA has had and the disastrous 2018 World Cup bid thus far.

Lord Triesman’s intimate relationship with his former private secretary became so cozy that Triesman confided inside information about the 2018 World Cup bid process. Namely that Triesman believed that Spain may withdraw its bid to stage the 2018 finals if Russia, which also wants to host the event, helps it to bribe referees in next month’s World Cup tournament in South Africa.

Whether Triesman’s allegations are factual or not, it’s a damaging blow to England’s chances of winning the 2018 World Cup bid. The latest scandal certainly helps Russia’s chances of winning the race for 2018.

For the Football Association, it’s another dark day in their history. Mistake after mistake. Scandal after scandal. When will they learn?

If you are the CEO of a company, you expect to have most if not all the power to make decisions. It’s down to you to drive the business, to solve problems and delegate where necessary. You’re in charge and you have the power to hire and fire.

However, the Chief Executive of the FA, while technically at the pinnacle of the FA’s structure, appears to have almost no power at all. All the power gets diffused through the various board members, council members and all of their vested interests. This is why Chief Exec Ian Watmore quit this week. This was a man who had worked in government so not unused to the machinations of big political machines but he’d had a gut full of it after 9 months.

It’s hard to actually know what the FA does. If you asked most fans they wouldn’t be able to tell you. Apart form dishing out fines for squabbling managers and players, what do they do?

In reality, the FA is supposed to be the governing body of English football, overseeing the game from top to bottom. However, at a professional level, the FA is all but powerless. It is the Premier League’s bitch; unable to stand up to the biggest, most monied organisation. Below that the Football League fights its own corner so well that clubs dropping out of the Premier League it will be receiving even more money and for four years instead of the current two.

So what is the FA doing? Well they wasted a ton of money on the whole Wembley fiasco – a money pit if there ever was one. They are making a ham-fisted job of the 2018 bid. They are ridden from top to bottom with vested interests all fighting their own corners – often merely hanging on to a morsel of perceived power for its own sake. Meanwhile football continues without them.

No one epitomizes this bloated redundancy more than Dave Richards. Richards – a knight of the realm for what it’s worth – is a walking, talking conflict of interest. Somehow – and we must assume it is simply through some form of old boys act, is chairman of the FA Premier League, member of the Football Association Board, chairman of the FA’s international committee, president of the European Professional Football Leagues organization, chairman of UEFA’s Professional Football Committee. Blimey.

Now that looks like a man who is keen to acquire titles. Those jobs either require very little effort or he is not committed to doing them comprehensively. Or possibly both. When Ian Watmore resigned this week, the rumours were all about his inability to work with Richards who, again it is rumoured, simply blocks any moves to change the organization which provides him with an infinite gravy train. But whether that’s true or not, Richards should not be on both the board of the FA and chairmen of the Premier League. It compromises both positions. Who does he side with in a dispute between those sides?

The FA should be fighting for football for us, the fans. It should not be craven to money. It should be protecting the English game for England fans and for every person in this country who loves football and wants to watch and play it. But it doesn’t do that. The Premier League and Football League and all the other minor league organizations do that for themselves. The Premier League likes an ineffective FA so it can do what it wants when it wants without protest. But the lower leagues and the non-professional part of the game needs a strong FA to help them, especially financially. But as the chairman of The Northern League, the second oldest league in the world, said this week – they are simply negligent and have done little to help the money in the top flights cascade down to the lower levels

Football will kick off this weekend and thousands of games will be played regardless of whether the FA have a Chief Executive or not and on one will care. That’s because the FA is an irrelevancy; merely an old boys club to tour the world on a permanent freebie, feeling important and doing exactly nothing. It’s a disgrace.

FA chairman David Treisman mentioned introducing a salary cap, to combat the “very tangible dangers” of the current financial climate.  Premier League clubs have a combined £3 billion of debt.  But, is wage expenditure really the most prominent issue?

Yes, players make an absurd amount of money for wearing short pants and playing a kid’s game.  However, wages are not driving debt.

In the 2007-8 season, Kaka was the highest paid player in the world, earning just over £7m in salary per year.  John Terry, the highest paid player in England that season, earned roughly £6.5m.  It’s not a small sum, but, in an environment where a middling player, such as David Bentley, commands a £17m transfer fee, it’s not a particularly significant one.

Moreover, if compared to American sports, football salaries are, if anything, undervalued compared to the revenue earned by Premier League clubs.
There are far more significant debt factors.

American purchases of Manchester United and Liverpool, funded by credit, saddled those clubs with hundreds of millions of debt.  Arsenal assumed hundreds of millions of debt with the construction of the Emirates stadium.  Chelsea spend profligately, funded by an oil-rich sugar daddy.

A salary cap might earn the FA brownie points with embittered fans (and owners), but it’s not a sensible mechanism to combat debt.