Avoiding the Drop

When the Swiss Super League comes up around these parts, it’s usually to discuss my second club: Grasshopper-Club Zürich, the most succesful team in Swiss soccer history. Today, though, we’re going to glance southwest from Zürich to Sion, where a couple of interesting things have been happening.

First of all, it should be noted that FC Sion is not exactly a model of consistency; they’ve gone through twenty managers in four years, a pace which makes the Real Madrid managerial post look stable. Still, they managed to win their eleventh Swiss Cup this year, beating Young Boys Bern (possibly one of the best double entendres in sports) 3-2. That victory makes them perfect in Swiss Cup finals; every time they’ve gotten to the final game they’ve won.

Even though they finished in seventh place, the start of their season was filled with promise. On July 12th Everton came into the Swiss capital for a friendly and walked out on the wrong end of a 1-0 match; even though it was a friendly, the fact that Egyptian keeper Essam El-Hadary was able to keep a clean sheet was supposed to portend a good year.

Almost eleven months after that game, though, El-Hadary is right in the middle of a major problem for FC Sion. You see, that “transfer” was a little less than above board. El-Hadary decided in February of 2008 that he wanted out of Al Ahly, so he invoked the Webster ruling and tried to buy out his contract for $400,000.

Obviously, though, this caused issues. See, you can’t just buy your contract out at any point in time; specifically, according to Article 16 of FIFA’s  “Regulations for the Status and Transfer of Players”, you can’t buy it out in the middle of a season. So even though El-Hadary THOUGHT he was going to Switzerland, ultimately he ended up back home. Only thing is, once he got there he found that both the local fans and the fans of the Egyptian national team really didn’t want him anymore; he was booed and hissed at from match to match in March of 2008 until he decided he’d had enough…and moved to Sion on his own, where he’s been their starting keeper ever since (“The Offside” had two good breakdowns of this story last year; you can read them here and here.).

A year and a quarter later, FIFA’s finally weighed in on their opinion of this transfer. Surprising nobody, they’re pretty much saying that Al Ahly got screwed. The punishments?

1. El-Hadary’s going to be banned from all competition for four months; since El-Hadary’s 36, and appeals can take 2-3 years to go through, chances are his career will be over by the time this goes into effect.
2. FC Sion will have to pay Al Ahly $1.3 million in compensation. Fair enough.
3. FC Sion is banned from dealing in two transfer windows. That’s right: they (presumably) can’t buy OR sell anyone for one whole year.

I’m not an expert, but I have a feeling that the effect of not being able to rebuild or supplement your team for an entire year is a major, major problem. You can’t replace guys who left, you can’t build up depth, and you can’t make money unloading players who’ve outgrown your team. So in the upcoming 2009-10 Swiss season, it’ll be very interesting to see if and how FC Sion can compete.