I'll Give You Security

How things can get distorted. The title of 5 August was "only to distort". It happens. In Puerto Pollensa a new system of security has been introduced in the Club Náutico: security cameras and access barriers to the jetties; cards are due to be introduced at some time in the future. This is all part of a system of security that the Balearics ports authority, responding to improvement demands from the association concerned with moorings, is implementing not only in Puerto Pollensa but elsewhere.

In light of Palmanova (and now Palma), this development is being interpreted through speculation as some sort of response to the terrorist attack. It may be opportune that the system has been implemented now, but it is not and was not a system with terrorism in mind. There is an issue with general security in the ports and marinas; of course there is. This is why Puerto Alcúdia has, for some time now, had a barrier control for vehicles at the entrance and swipe-card entrance to the jetties. There is, at the nautical clubs, a great deal of floating expensiveness that might be tempting to some. Security is necessary and frankly overdue.


Real Mallorca under new ownership
It has been a while now. About a year ago, everywhere you read (including this blog) was full of the story of the Real Mallorca football club takeover. The eventual collapse of that takeover by Paul Davidson left many not with just egg on their faces but a full English breakfast with double helpings of toast. Initially Davidson was meant to have offered just short of 50 million euros for the club. It always seemed way too much for a club that doesn't even own the ground and cannot be guaranteed to fill a 25,000 capacity stadium. Now there is a new owner - Javier Martí Mingarro, a Madrid businessman. He has paid four and a quarter million euros in return for the same 93 odd per cent of shares that Davidson was due to purchase - less than 10 per cent of what was on offer when Davidson first approached the club's then owner. The payment now may not exactly be nominal - four and a quarter million can hardly be described as that - but it is paltry by comparison and will strike many as being so for a club in La Liga. But is almost certainly more realistic than Davidson's absurdly grandiose offer and pronouncements. When Freddy Shepherd, following the collapse of the Davidson deal (the amount for which had by then fallen by some ten million euros), came and had a look, he said that the club was "unviable". Certainly for the amount he was contemplating, which was reported variously as between ten and twenty million euros.

As with pretty much everything else, Spanish football has not been left unaffected by the economic climate, unless the club happens to be Real Madrid. But it was in a mess before the crisis. Real Mallorca was and is heavily in debt, and unlike counterparts in the Premier League, clubs in La Liga, such as Real Mallorca, do not benefit in quite the same way from television money. They do benefit, but there is not the same collective bargaining that the Premier League undertakes; individual clubs, for which read Real Madrid, Barça and one or two others, get the cream of the TV money through their own separate negotiations. Four million or so euros for Real Mallorca? It may not sound much in football terms, but it is probably realistic.


Palma bombs
Little bombs, little bits of very little, save for the odd bits of hysteria. Nothing. Forget it.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - The Beach Boys, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hYIlH4nOEo. Today's title - from a cheesy disco song from the late '70s.

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