The Greatest Football Pay Per View of ALL TIME

Now that official word has been handed down and we know exactly what is going to happen regarding the nefarious Serie A teams, it makes sense to run this column. For those of you who are link-phobic, allow me to just tell you that Italian giants Juventus, Lazio, and Fiorentina have all been relegated to Serie B, with various points docked for previous seasons AND next season, while AC Milan were allowed to stay in Serie A, but docked 44 points from last season, and will start 2006 with a 15 point deficit. Should the verdict stand, none of these teams will be allowed to play in Europe this season either.

With the punishments final, it should set off a run on transfers the likes of which haven't been seen since Leeds United called time on David O'Leary's madness.

What's that? Okay, fine - it will be much greater than that. In fact, the news is SO interesting that I think it has the potential to be turned into the greatest football pay-per-view event of all time. What sort of idea could possibly meet the hype?

The 2006 Serie A Auction of the Stars

Harry could make a real splash here.

Here's the plan: Any and all players on the relegated teams who are interested in transferring should submit their requests and they will be publicly posted as available for bid. Then next Saturday, July 22nd, every single team interested in bidding on these players will show up at some predetermined place where an auctioneer will then run an auction for each player's transfer rights, with the winners earning the right to negotiate personal terms with the players.

The entire process would be covered by television cameras and commentators from every major league in Europe, and after each set of bids, interviews commence with the manager of the team that won the bid and they'd get a chance to interview the players for their reaction. Then, said commentators could, you know, commentate on whether they thought the player was a good buy for the team, whether a particular player went for too much money, etc. Tell me you wouldn't pay 50 bucks/30 quid/1 million lira to see Harry Redknapp show up with a 70M pound transfer kitty and make some noise. I am convinced that this is one of the greatest television ideas of all time. Just take a look at the list of players that might be involved:

Juventus
Gianluigi Buffon - G
Lilian Thuram - D
Fabio Cannavarro -D
Gianluca Zambrotta -D
Robert Kovac -D

Emerson - M
Pavel Nedved - M
Patrick Viera - M
Mauro Camoranesi - M

Zlatan Ibrahimovic - F
Adrian Mutu - F
Alessandro Del Peiro - F
David Trezeguet - F

Fiorentina
Sebastian Frey - G
Tomas Ujfalusi - D
Valeria Bojinov - F
Gianpaolo Pazzini - F
Luca Toni -F

Lazio (No wonder they were fixing matches)
Simone Inzaghi - F

All I can say is: wow. And this is assuming that none of the Milan players want to move post-scandal, though they could certainly be included if they wanted to opt-in.

Now there's obviously a major problem with this plan in that players still have to agree to personal terms in order make the transfer complete, so they could obviously stall for whatever team they wanted to move to. However, I can see working around this by setting up some rules ahead of time.

Rule #0: Players will privately publish their personal terms ahead of time to the auctioneer so that teams will know whether they have a chance of meeting them. This is a long shot, but whatever - this entire idea is a long shot.

Rule #1: Players get 10% of the transfer fee as long as they sign with the team that bid the most for them. Otherwise they get zero.

Rule #2: Trailing bids matter, since they will determine who gets second and third chances, etc to negotiate with the player.

Rule #3: If you can't agree to terms with one of your Top 5 bidders, you have to stay with the relegated team for the rest of the season. You will sign a contract to this effect ahead of time.

Rule #4: Chelski are not invited.

Could this work? I think it could. Obviously there are ways to game the system, but that's part of the fun. The revenues from this could go to charity as the teams use it for good PR, or better yet, founding a refereeing program that doesn't suck. Additionally, you could get some betting company to sponsor this with Live Bet odds on infinite things, including which player will command the highest transfer fee, who will sign with what team, and whether one of the managers/players will have an aneurysm during the course of the event.

What's to stop Real Madrid from coming in and winning the bid for every one of these players? I don't know, actually. It doesn't mean they'd sign all of them and it would kind of ruin the suspense, but maybe the gaming going on for second and third place bids on a lot of players would be the interesting part. Obviously Real are freaking crazy, so they could ruin the whole show, but I don't think they would. If they did, it would be a very expensive day for them.

Do I think this could ever happen? No, of course not. But would it be the single most fascinating day of the football offseason if it did? Hell yes.