Roberto Jimnez is far from a household name but the goalkeeper's transfer from Benfica to Real Zaragoza last week could have consequences as far reaching as Jean-Marc Bosman's challenge to football's transfer system.
Jimnez's move raised eyebrows since his new club had applied to the courts for voluntary administration in an effort to deal with a 110m (96.5m) net debt. How could they afford to buy a 8.6m goalkeeper?
As a publicly traded company, Benfica were obliged to declare to shareholders how the insolvent purchaser would pay for the player. It turned out that Zaragoza paid 86,000 with the balance of more than 8.5m paid for by an unnamed investment fund that will retain the player's economic rights.
The Spanish daily El Pas has claimed that fund is Quality Sports Investment, and that according to "several sources" it is being controlled by the Portuguese agent Jorge Mendes and the former Manchester United and Chelsea chief executive Peter Kenyon. Kenyon has confirmed to Digger that he and Mendes are acting as advisers to the fund.
There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by QSI: third-party player ownership is legal in the Portuguese and Spanish leagues. But the nature of the QSI investment raises a number of potentially serious regulatory challenges. It is based in the offshore jurisdiction of Jersey, meaning the identity of its investors are unknown. Digger was unable to contact QSI since it has no internet presence and its contact details have not been released. It operates from a smart, five-storey building of serviced offices without so much as a brass plate on the door to say which companies work from there.
The owners' and directors' test for football clubs is in part an effort to guarantee the integrity of the sport. QSI's intentions are no doubt honest but if players as important as goalkeepers can be owned by anonymous third parties in impenetrable offshore companies the potential for match fixing is clear. Fortunately, with its ban on third-party ownership the English game is protecting itself. But though could be an existential threat to football, Fifa appears to have taken little regulatory interest.
Like several other Championship clubs, Ipswich Town are cashflow insolvent. "We only survive because Marcus Evans can afford to put in 4m or 5m of his own money every year to keep the club afloat," said the chief executive, Simon Clegg. "That is testing on anyone's pockets, however deep they are."
Evans's pockets certainly are deep: the secondary-market ticket seller is worth 625m according to the Sunday Times Rich List, making him one of the 125 richest people in the country. But Ipswich fans should be forgiven for not tripping over themselves with gratitude to Evans. After all, the football-club company's debt stood at about 7.6m in June 2007, six months before Evans's takeover " about 73% of the club's turnover. Now, according to the most recent accounts, it has swelled to 40.9m " even when taking off the 11.6m owed to subsidiary companies the debt to turnover ratio of the club is a punishing 187.8%. Added to that are the 30.9m of loan notes that "following the acquisition of the company ... were assigned to Marcus Evans International Finance KFT. The interest rate on these loan notes is 7.29% per annum." That meant 1.9m of loan-note interest due to Evans was added to the total debt of Ipswich's group companies in the year to June 2010, taking it to 64m. Lucky those pockets are deep.
Betfair are doing a new marketing push around the new football season wherein Lee Dixon is the betting exchange's lead football pundit. Maybe Andy Gray was unavailable. Gray had been retained by Betfair even as he was sacked by Sky after the sexism row in January but his contract was not renewed upon expiry at the end of last season. Betfair says Dixon is one of a new set of "ambassadors" including rugby's Will Greenwood, racing's Paul Nicholls and cricket's Michael Vaughan. So Gray was deemed not to be sufficiently ambassadorial then? "Different people become available and they might be a better fit for what we do," an insider said.
JMW Solicitors is staging its inaugural corporate recovery and insolvency conference on 15 September, to be held at a plush hotel in Manchester. It will "focus upon both the practical and legal issues which have arisen in corporate recovery and personal insolvency over the course of the year". These kind of conferences are nothing without their speakers. So who are JMW going to use? Well, there is a man in football who knows a bit about corporate recovery.
He has even suffered a legal claim from HM Revenue Customs over the winding-up of a consultancy company which owed the taxman the best part of half a million pounds at the time, so you could say he has personal insolvency too. That man is Peter Ridsdale, whose proposed takeover of Plymouth Argyle failed to gain Football League board approval on Thursday as it seeks "further clarifications about certain aspects of the proposed deal", just at the time the money is running out at Home Park. JMW Solicitors know enough about corporate recovery and insolvency to have booked him as the expert keynote speaker at the conference.
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