Dodgy Business

I'm going to have to phone Max Mosley soon for a bit of advice: how to successfully impose a budget cap on my other half's new kitchen! Sorry, our kitchen. It might be an easier task than stopping F1 teams spending money, but I'm not convinced...

As we sat having dinner a while ago, she was staring at the ceiling a lot. At first I figured it was just better to look at than me, which is sad considering it's a load of nasty stained tongue-and-groove wooden boards. Very seventies.

"It's got to come down," she said. And so, there I was, last Wednesday, armed with a crowbar, heaving down wooden planks, working out how many days before the plane left for Oz...

If you ever find yourself in this predicament, a pair of swimming goggles keeps the dust out of your peepers but gets a bit hot and steamy after a while. I took them off and took to looking down as I ripped down each board. Which was why I didn't spot the half brick that made a bid for freedom and rudely reminded me I don't have much hair.

I don't know whether I was more stunned by that or the radio telling me, two minutes later, that King Kev was back to manage The Toon! (Translation: British soccer legend Kevin Keegan is back to manage Newcastle United). There was certainly a feel-good factor about that, which helped with the headache. Keegan seems to understand defensive strategy about as well as Lewis Hamilton.

Fernando Alonso returns to Renault © Reuters

Radio phone-ins are not usually my bag but predictably, the subject of one, vis a vis Keegan, was whether it is ever right to go back. The presenter wanted personal experiences and opinions.

"I mean, it's never right, is it, mate?" said Dave from Bootle. "My mate went back to his first missus. What a nightmare! It's like... well, you only do it when things have gone pear-shaped, don't you, mate.

"Like that Spanish bloke, the racing driver, who's got blown off by Lewis Hamilton and has gone back to his old team. I mean, he's got no chance..." So there you have it, Fernando.

More seriously, I got to thinking about the future of F1 and Mosley's recent assertion that budget caps are both enforceable and policeable. The details are likely to emerge following discussions over the next months, and I will be interested to see if it's something that has legs or gets quietly swept under the carpet.

The aims are laudable enough. You don't want a sport where success is merely a spending contest. And you don't want the independent teams, like Williams, driven out. Mosley has said that ideally, the budget figures will be set at a level whereby a mid-grid team turns a profit. For a manufacturer team, that is not a prerequisite, but for an independent, it is.

The situation is a bit like football, where salary caps have been suggested but not imposed. F1 is similar in some respects but very different in terms of the complexity of the business.

There is also the legality issue of trying to impose budget caps in a free market. Two years ago, for instance, Bayern Munich president Karl-Heinz Rummenigge was called as an expert to address the European parliament and speak about imposing a Europe-wide salary cap.

Rummenigge suggested that a club's salary bill should not exceed 70 percent of its budget. At the time, it should be said, Chelsea had just poached Bayern's Michael Ballack on the back of £120,000 (GBP) a week wages. Chelsea had just recorded an unprecedented £140 million loss at a time when Bayern was £25 million in the black.

Small change to Chelsea owner Roman Abramovitch but, said Rummennigge, the catalyst of unequal competition, which was unacceptable considering they would be playing each other in the Champions League.

Bayern Munchen Chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge and Lars-Christer Olsson of UEFA address the European Parliament in Brussels © Reuters

Arsenal's Arsene Wenger, at the time, said that he did not necessarily agree with salary caps but, rather, clubs should show good husbandry and respect their budgets, with relegation the penalty for those that did not.

The whole debate centred around stopping soccer becoming simply a quest to find the richest owner because the game, unlike F1, is fairly simple. A good manager will always be a good manager but he will never compete with a good manager with an open cheque book.

Chelsea, of course, rubbished Rummennige's arguments, saying they were merely making up for investment that had not been made before and aimed to be turning a profit by 2010. You can see that argument too, because if you weren't allowed to invest, how would you ever change the status quo, in whatever line of business you happen to be? Which, of course, is what 'the haves' want to avoid at any given time.

Why should the European parliament care about the internal workings of the game of football, or motor racing? Well, apparently when Rummenigge made his presentation, the parliamentarians welcomed fiscal openness as a means of closing down opportunities for corruption and tax evasion in the game. So Max, no doubt, would have full approval in helping to ensure that nothing as unthinkable was going on in the F1 world.

With football though, still we wait. The governing body, UEFA, seemed very doubtful of its powers to do anything, which is why it will be interesting to see what Mosley has to say in the coming weeks.

With football, the recruitment of the actual players is the key issue. Stop a guy earning 150 grand a week in one country and he will go to another. And, if a Europe-wide policy stopped that, if a market emerges elsewhere in the world, which, in time, it will, he will simply go there.

With motor racing it's slightly different. The top drivers are important, yes, but not as important as the cars. Which is no doubt why Max has not included drivers in his budget cap ideas. Engines are already being taken care of and so if - if - you can peg the expenditure on the actual cars, maybe a Prodrive can compete with a Toyota.

Allowing new teams to buy customer cars was one answer but, I have to say, I'm glad to see that it seems to have gone away. The idea of a couple more McLarens or Ferraris at the sharp end is immediately attractive but the repercussions for the sport, as it stands, were not really workable. I had a lot of sympathy for Frank Williams' viewpoint on that.

So, we watch with interest. In the meantime, if someone knows Karl-Heinz Rumenigge's phone number, perhaps they can give me a bell. If he can get my wife to restrict her kitchen budget to 70 percent of my turnover, I'd probably run with that...