A Striker’s Winding Path Grows More Crooked

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/sports/soccer/04iht-soccer04.html

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LONDON — The January buying and selling of players among European clubs can sometimes be as clear as horse-trading in the dark.

Moments before Newcastle United was due to play Everton on Wednesday night, Newcastle Coach Alan Pardew said on television, “It’s done — he’ll go to Chelsea with our blessing.”

Pardew was answering the question of where was Demba Ba, the team’s top goal scorer of this season and last. “We prepared yesterday with Demba in the side,” the coach admitted. “I was assuming — well, I was in the dark, really, as I’ve been with most of the deal — that he was our player and would play in his normal role.”

The coach knew something was afoot.

A day earlier, Pardew had talked to the media about the “sharks” haggling to sell Ba to the highest bidder. The actual sum was not up for negotiation. Ba is a frequent mover between clubs and, with a medical condition hanging over him, had taken the precaution of having a £7 million, or $11.4 million, buyout clause written into his contract.

That was the figure that would automatically prompt a sale if a team of Ba’s choice came in to buy him.

Newcastle’s ownership of a tremendous natural predator like Ba was always tenuous. No club, in fact, has held tenure for very long over the striker, who was born in France but now is a Senegalese national team striker.

Since his youth, Ba, one of seven children, has gone where the offers took him. Soon after starting his pro career in Rouen in France, he was sold and moved to Mouscron in the Belgian league, where his scoring prowess was halted for eight months after he broke his tibia and fibula.

He recovered and became a spectacular part of Hoffenheim’s rise through the German divisions in the later part of last decade.

His scoring has never been questioned. His permanence has never been secured.

Ba quit Hoffenheim after a dispute in January 2011. The club threatened to take him to court for breach of contract, but his agent, or agents, claimed that it was Hoffenheim that had broken a promise to let him move on if an English club bid for him.

Agents are like flies around the horse’s tail in this story. On Tuesday, Pardew had said that he had no problem with his willing, 27-year-old striker-in-chief. “I feel a little bit sorry for Demba,” the coach said. “I think he’s becoming a victim of a few sharks around him.”

The sharks, according to Pardew, are agents purporting to represent Ba and trying to rake in fees for selling him on to clubs. Arsenal, Chelsea and others barely hid their admiration for the tall, instinctive player, who had, with both feet and head, scored half of Newcastle’s goals this season.

In fact, Ba has one bona fide adviser in France, Alex Gontran. But Gontran may not be the source of the confusion around the player. There are others — unregistered sharks, to use Pardew’s term — who have tried to be the go-betweens, and whose hands are out expecting to be paid upwards of £2 million for helping Chelsea get what Chelsea has desperately needed since Didier Drogba left it last summer — a striking alternative to Fernando Torres.

Complicating matters is the fact that Ba failed a medical exam when he agreed to join Stoke City two years ago, even though Stoke had never said so, because soccer is as open as the Soviet Politburo once was in issuing public information.

But the problem was a degenerative knee condition. Despite that, West Ham took a chance on Ba, paying him for each game he completed, and then Newcastle gave him the contract that has stood until now.

In return, Ba has never missed a training session and seldom missed an opportunity to be Newcastle’s match winner. He even helped the team to sign another Senegalese striker, Papiss Cissé, as the two represented the country at the 2012 African Cup of Nations.

While Cissé scored in Ba’s absence Wednesday as Newcastle fell, 2-1, Chelsea was losing, 1-0, at home against the last-place Queens Park Rangers. And after that defeat, Chelsea’s interim coach, Rafa Benítez, claimed that he knew nothing about the coming of Demba Ba.

“Whatever Alan Pardew has been saying,” Benítez told the media, “I have not been told by our people. If someone is coming, I hope it can be in time for Saturday’s F.A. Cup match against Southampton.”

The uncertainty cannot have helped Chelsea, which lost after a four-game winning streak. It certainly did nothing for Newcastle, which has suffered 9 losses in its last 11 league games and is scouring France for players to stop the nosedive.

The January transfer window is FIFA-approved. Agents also used to be regulated by the world governing body for soccer, until it abandoned responsibility for settling the interminable disputes.

Chelsea did some legitimate business Wednesday when it sold Daniel Sturridge, a striker, to Liverpool. The Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich apparently wants Radamel Falcao, the Atlético Madrid striker, but why would Atlético sell while it is still second in the Spanish league?

According to the most experienced manager in the sport, Manchester United’s Alex Ferguson, January is not the time to buy a player. He might buy to prevent someone else from acquiring a player he covets for the future, but otherwise he believes the group that you start a season with is the group of the players you trust to the end.

Ba might double his salary, but he has adjustments to make. One concerns the matter of faith. Ba is a practicing Muslim. At Newcastle, he shared that with Cissé, with Hatem Ben Arfa and with Cheick Tioté.

Prayer could be a lonely business around Chelsea.