Premier League 
/ Ralph Ellis / 27 June 2011 / Leave a Comment 
Fabio Cannavaro is a World Cup winning captain and a class act but can his 37 year-old legs still handle the pace of the Premier League?
"The story from Italy has leaked this morning that Italy’s World Cup winning captain Fabio Cannavaro could be recruited at Loftus Road. The stylish centre back, the most capped player in Italy’s history, is available on a free after turning down a lucrative coaching role at Qatar club Al Ahli, where he’s been since leaving Juventus."
Gone are the days when it was solely the Manager who decided which players his club should sign. Ralph Ellis looks at which Premier League Chairmen and Board Members like to meddle when it comes to raiding the transfer market.
We all think we know about football. We've all got an opinion. And that's fine when it's you and me discussing what to have a bet on, or what went wrong with England's Under 21s. It doesn't really do that much harm either when it's random punters ringing in to the local radio station to air their daft views, however much that might add to the pressure on the guy who's running the team.
When it really causes problems is when football club directors start thinking they can spot a player. All the more so, when they reckon they know more than their manager. Then you've got a recipe for disaster.
The trend in football for chairmen and chief executives to get involved in transfers began when they took responsibility from managers for the task of negotiating fees and contracts. What happened next, in many clubs, was that they tried to take over choosing the players to buy as well. Agents saw the signs, and cosied up to the blokes who signed the cheques.
It's ended up with the ridiculous situation that Birmingham's acting chairman put out a statement over the weekend insisting he didn't meddle in the transfer decisions of former boss Alex McLeish; and he justified the claim by giving a list of players he'd wanted to sign that McLeish wouldn't have. It struck me it actually proved the board did interfere - otherwise why were they spending time finding players in the first place?
There's a similar row brewing, you sense, at Queen's Park Rangers. The story from Italy has leaked this morning that Italy's World Cup winning captain Fabio Cannavaro could be recruited at Loftus Road. The stylish centre back, the most capped player in Italy's history, is available on a free after turning down a lucrative coaching role at Qatar club Al Ahli, where he's been since leaving Juventus.
Now I know that Hoops boss Neil Warnock seemed to have changed his lifetime of pragmatic football philosophy last season by finding a role for maverick Moroccan Adel Taarabt. But I somehow can't see that his idea of how to shore up a defence ready for the Premier League is to sign a 37-year-old, whose legs have gone. The man behind the move is clearly co-owner Flavio Briatore, whose passion to interfere in the running of the team caused so many problems for the ten managers and 47 players who came and went in four years of his control previously.
Ominously, in the last few weeks QPR have also been linked with 37-year-old Marco Matterazzi (who has been freed by Inter Milan) as well as Nicola Legrottaglie, who is 34 and just been let go by AC Milan.
Warnock has hitherto been adept at handling the politics of the QPR boardroom, but the higher profile of a place in the Premier League will re-open the whole can of worms. Briatore is now back in charge of football operations, backed by Bernie Ecclestone's money, since Amit Bhatia and Ishan Saksena, the men behind the recruitment of Warnock, stood aside.
QPR are [1.96] to be the top promoted team in a new Betfair market, and I'm tempted to lay that. Warnock has been telling his local papers how he's "hoping the board will clarify that I can sign" players he's been looking at. It's fair to assume that none of them are ageing Italian World Cup legends.
The toughest task for any newly promoted manager is strengthening his squad. Players are reluctant to sign up to a club that promises them little more than a struggle against relegation, and want to wait to see if they can do better.
Swansea, not surprisingly, are the [4.8] outsiders to be best of the new boys. The play-off winners always start at a disadvantage with less time to prepare, and that was reduced even more as Brendan Rodgers took himself off to climb Mount Kilimanjaro for charity and then took a holiday after Wembley was over.
Of the three that went up it seems Norwich, priced at [3.3], have best got the ball rolling so far, with James Vaughan from Everton, Welsh international striker Steve Morison from Millwall, and Brighton's promising Elliott Bennett all putting pen to paper for Paul Lambert. I'm betting that Delia Smith never said a word about any of them. Well possibly except "Let's be 'avin you". But only after Lambert told her who he wanted.
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