rick james said:
Logic-is-your-friend said:
Time to introduce financial fair play in cycling.
why is that?
I won't pretend for even a second that the fact it's Sky doesn't play a part in people's negative response to this saga, but in return please don't pretend that a team with sufficient budget and clout that the team with the second biggest budget in cycling abandons its U23 development project because it can't stop its riders being stolen isn't a marketplace killer.
Cycling got by, you could argue rather archaically, for many years without football-style tapping up, contract buyouts and so on. Sky's contract wranglings and buyouts with Wiggins and Swift were one element of the end of that, GreenEdge were another with their tapping people up all the way from January. It might well be how it's done in football and not especially
wrong per se, but there are quite a few marketplace killers in football too - Paris Saint-Germain, Bayern München, Manchester City, Real Madrid for a few, and their way of going about business is plenty unpopular among large sections of the fanbase too. While it's disappointing to see a single overpowered team buying up quality young talents like Bernal, or skimming off the cream of the U23 ranks like they did with the likes of Moscon and Sivakov, the way they - and the rider's advisors and agents, who are far more culpable than Sky for this saga - have gone about this Sosa transfer is another level of problematic from a competition point of view; if the richest teams are now at the stage where they can dangle carrots and pressure riders to break contracts or play up until they're allowed to leave (Dimitri Payet ring any bells?), and can afford to simply pay off any fine that comes for breaking those contracts as collateral for the purchase, then we are reaching the point that was why football needed the financial fair play regulations in the first place.
If Sosa had signed for Sky without the Trek diversion, then there'd still have been something of a negative response, sure, but it would have been the same as with the signings of Bernal, Sivakov and so on; a frustration that Sky are stockpiling all of the best young riders when fans would rather see them fighting against the seemingly unbeatable Sky machine rather than joining it, but not the feeling that there's anything wrong per se in how it's come about. The situation here with Trek and the UCI getting involved in arbitration and then ultimately being ignored or treated as irrelevant anyway because Sky can pay away any fine on the rider's behalf, however, has justifiably generated a more negative reaction because its implications are greater, and it reinforces the image many have of Sky as the big overpowered, amoral corporate bully, the Gordon Gekko of the pro péloton.
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