Omars moving finger writes.....

The big news this week is that former Glentoran and Cliftonville player, Tim McCann (or should I say the injured Tim McCann), has parted company with United. The club and McCann, we are told, have come to an amicable arrangement. With 6 months of his contract to run, we are left to wonder how much money United had to ‘cough up’ in order to get Tim off the books. Let’s say for arguments sake that he’s earning £200 per week, with 6 months left he’d stand to lose £5,000, so I’m sure United had to give him at least £3,000, in order to pay him off. That’s a lot of money for a club like our own to find, who, although well run, are still ‘balancing on a tightrope’, financially. Wouldn’t it be much more prudent to have a clause in player’s contracts which states that after a player is out injured for 3 months, he goes onto half pay and after 6 months, the money stops completely? I know this sounds a bit harsh, but at the end of the day this is how it is done in the real world, the ‘world’ of business and we are after all trying to run football as a business. In fact we probably wouldn’t have to put it in as a clause in contracts, just make it a club policy and therefore it would be part of any future contracts automatically. In the 15 months that Tim McCann has been at the Showgrounds he’s made 15 first team starts and one as sub, total (16). To the best of my knowledge, our players are only paid during the playing season, so Tim’s 16 matches cost our club somewhere in the region of £10,000, which works out at an average fee per game of £625, not a bad wee wage is it? Tim of course isn’t United’s only long term injury victim, Darren Fitzgerald is at present out injured and United are not hopeful of his return this season. Darren has been on our books for almost a year, he has only played 11 games for us, which works out at approximately £700 per game. I realise that any new legislation would not save us the money for these players, but it would safeguard our club in the future, if not there may not be any future for us at all!