Manchester City sale threat triggers Salford five-a-side fire sale
The Independent Football Regulator says it could force Manchester City's owners to sell, so a Friday-night side in Salford sold itself first, for three pickled eggs.
After the Independent Football Regulator's chair said it could force Manchester City's owners to sell, a Friday-night five-a-side team in Salford sold itself for three pickled eggs. The league is now investigating whether the eggs were a sham.
Deportivo La Kettle, a Friday-night five-a-side team in Salford, sold itself to its own substitute on Friday for three pickled eggs. The deal closed at 9.40pm in a leisure centre car park, under a floodlight that had been flickering since spring.
The move came after the chair of the Independent Football Regulator, David Kogan, said the watchdog would have "absolute power" to force Manchester City's owners to sell if the case against them is upheld. Kettle's dressing room heard the words "absolute power" and did not wait for the small print.
In other news, an independent commission found Manchester City broke Premier League rules with "sham" commercial deals worth over £900m across nine seasons. City have appealed. Anyway, back to the eggs.
A deal done under fire
Gaz Prentice, captain and, until Friday, majority owner, called the sale the hardest decision of his footballing life. He made it in the time it takes a kettle to boil, which is where the team got its name.
"You hear a man on the radio say 'absolute power', you don't stand there admiring it," Prentice said, still in his shin pads. "You get your affairs in order. I've seen what happens to owners. I've seen it on the telly."
Asked which rules Kettle had broken, Prentice took a long breath. He said the team kept its accounts in a carrier bag, its fines in a jam jar, and its spare bib in the boot of a Vauxhall Corsa.
"Nobody's inflating revenues here," he said. "Our revenue is a quid each for the pitch, and Dean usually forgets his."
Dean Ashworth, the substitute and new owner, accepted the club with the steady nerve of a man who has spent three seasons on the bench. He arrived for the handover in a borrowed blazer.
"I've waited a long time for minutes. Now I own the minutes," Ashworth said. "I've started the man I trust most, which is me."
The fallout
Word spread fast through the Friday league. By 10pm two rival sides had called emergency meetings beside the vending machine. A third side had begun writing a constitution on the back of a Greggs bag.
Carol Bright, the league's only referee, said she had never seen panic like it. "I've had a lad cry over a throw-in," she said. "I've never had a lad sell his whole squad to a man in a borrowed blazer."
Neville Thorne, chief analyst at the Northern Small-Sided Games Fiscal Watch, said the Kettle sale was a defining moment for the grassroots game. His organisation has three members, and one of them is his dog.
"People will look back on this the way historians look back on great retreats," Thorne said. "Prentice saw the enemy coming and burned the bridge before the enemy had even found the car park."
Thorne pointed out that the regulator's remit covers the top tiers of English men's football, not a Friday kickabout at a leisure centre. He said this made Prentice's call even braver, because it was completely unnecessary.
"Any coward can flee a real threat," Thorne said. "It takes vision to flee an imaginary one."
Questions over the eggs
The deal ran into trouble on Saturday morning. The league's three-person disciplinary committee, which meets in the café when the café is open, opened an inquiry into the eggs.
Committee secretary Lorraine Pike said early findings suggested the pickled eggs had come from a jar Ashworth already kept in the team's kit bag. That meant, she said, the club had been bought with its own assets.
"We'd describe the arrangement as a sham," Pike said, reading from a napkin. "The eggs never left the bag. The money, so to speak, went round in a circle. We've seen this sort of thing before, on the news."
Prentice denied any wrongdoing. He said the eggs were a fair price at market value and that the jar had "barely been opened" since the Euros.
Ashworth has appealed. He has also named himself club captain, chief executive and penalty taker, and promised a nine-season plan to win the Friday league. He then asked if he could start in goal, because his knee is playing up.
Kettle kick off next Friday at 8pm. The bib is still in the Corsa.
