Didn’t Anyone Tell Chelsea? Don’t Mess With Karma.

It’s a witch hunt I tell you!

Wait…wrong one. A @#$%ing disgrace! Chelsea Football Club have been banned by FIFA – not UEFA, it’s important to note – from the registration of new players for one year for once again illegaly tapping up a player (remember Cashley?) and inducing him to break his contract. That player is Gael Kakuta, one most probably don’t know, who has become the most infamous transfer of the Roman Abramovich era overnight.

This effectively means the Chelsea squad you’re looking at right now is the Chelsea squad you’ll see until at least the winter of 2011, barring any promotions from the youth team. That’s quite a blow to a club which spent the summer looking to make that one big move – Pato looks safe in Milan for another summer – as they slowly transition what is a not-quite-spring-chicken squad. Not yet over the hill, but some of the Blues won’t age gracefully.

The story reads out like so:

Chelsea have been banned from signing any new players until 2011, after Fifa accused them of illegally inducing a French youth-team player to join the club in 2007.

Fifa’s dispute resolution chamber today released a statement fining Gaël Kakuta €780,000 following a complaint from FC Lens and finding Chelsea “jointly and severely liable”.

“Furthermore, the club, FC Chelsea, has to pay to RC Lens training compensation in the amount of €130,000.”

What’s perhaps a bit ironic in all this is that Carlo Ancelotti left a club, Milan, which so often failed to bring him the right players in the transfer market. Now he’s at a club which can’t bring him any at all. Tough luck for Carletto.

Now, is this what Europe’s been waiting for? What Michel Platini has been waiting for? The much needed attack on player poaching by English clubs? The details are a bit scarce right now, but it would appear not. Kakuta was 17 at the time, which means he was eligible for a professional contract and thus that is the likely breach.

But even if so, are we naive to think the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other players poached by English clubs in this manner were all done so squeaky clean? That none of them were like this? Hardly, and you can be sure every single English club is on the phone with its legal team right now.

* – According to Lens/L’Equipe, he was under a youth contract. This sets a very, very dangerous precedent for youth poaching. Michel Platini must be beaming.

“The decision was expected. The boy was under contract and they came to steal him from us … Chelsea behaved in an unacceptable way in contacting the player before he was even 16 years old and while he was still being nurtured by us as he had been since the age of eight and a half. He had the standard French-style training contract with us.”

And the €130k fine just seems to fall a bit short. Perhaps for a club which has taken such high moral ground in the courtrooms recently – the same one which has flown helicopters into opposing training grounds to steal players – it should be a bit higher; let’s say €17m, payable directly to Adrian Mutu.

Karma will kill you every time. (Illegal activities, too.)

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Category: English Premier League