In their official statement Arsenal state that they believe the hearings were fair, that the punishment will act as a deterrent to other clubs approaching players illegally, and they reiterated their support for Ashley Cole.
David Dein had this to say about Ashley:
“We don’t want Ashley Cole to leave. We expect him to respect the two years remaining on his current contract, and look to extend his contract and hope that he stays longer. As a Club we did not want to see him punished.
With regards to Ashley Cole’s position, it is not untenable, everyone makes mistakes.”
So, it looks like Arsenal are prepared to forgive Ashley Cole for his part in the affair, which would seem to imply that he did indeed have some hand in approaching Chelsea. Dein’s further comments take a swipe at the role that agents played in this case, and it would seem to imply that the whole thing may have been driven by one or both of the agents involved.
The fact that agents typically get some cut of the transfer fee paid for their clients naturally makes it in their own interests for players to change clubs as often as possible, and for as large a fee as possible. It is easy to understand why they would be tempted to contravene the rules, especially when the penalties involved are not likely to be serious enough to deter anyone at the top levels of football. In this case, Ashley Cole’s commitment to Arsenal has been weakened somewhat, and when the dust clears, there’s nothing to stop him going to Chelsea anyway at some point in the future, and thus the agents will get their cut sooner or later. Perhaps one outcome of this whole sorry affair will be a review of the role of agents in player transfers, and what measures can be put in place to prevent agents flouting the rules.
Of course, it must be said that the agents can only wield influence, and in the end it is the players and the clubs that also contravene the rules. In this particular case we cannot say definitively what actually happened, so perhaps the agents were not at fault. The findings of the commission seem to make no mention of the agents, and perhaps this means that it was indeed Ashley Cole and Chelsea who instigated the meeting. But I can hardly imagine their respective agents saying “No, this meeting won’t happen, it’s against the rules, and I don’t want to get a large slice of £20 million”. Can you?