A Football League tribunal has settled the dispute between Tottenham Hotspur and Crystal Palace over the transfer fee of sixteen-year-old John Bostock. The dispute began when Tottenham announced the signing of Bostock on the club's official website. Crystal Palace quickly issued a statement denying that any deal had been reached. Palace valued Bostock at around £2 million with the fee rising a further £2.5 million based on appearances for Tottenham. Basically, Crystal Palace were looking for £4.5 million for the player. Tottenham obviously disagreed with the Palace's valuation and the matter was brought before a Football League Tribunal.

Well, the matter has been resolved and Crystal Palace's chairman, Simon Jordan, is rightfully upset. The tribunal has set the fee for Bostock at just £700,000 which could rise to £1.25 million based on appearances. Simon Jordan has described the decision as 'scandalous' and who could blame him? I mean, Chelsea offered Crystal Palace £900,000 for Bostock when the player was 14 and the offer was turned down. Bostock went on to captain England's U-17 team and become the youngest player ever to appear for Crystal Palace. After these accomplishments his value somehow went down? What? That's absolute lunacy.

The most important aspect of this decision, though, is the dangerous precedent it sets for English football as a whole. England currently has a team that failed to qualify for the European Championships and the English Premier League is only made up of something like 35% English players. The teams in the lower leagues develop players like Bostock from scratch only to see them picked off by Premiership sides for bargain basement fees. The players are then put in Premiership reserve sides or loaned out if they're lucky while they could be seeing first-team minutes for their former club. Eventually, English teams are just going to say, "Why bother?" and stop investing in academy systems. I'd be absolutely livid if I were in Simon Jordan's shoes. He and Crystal Palace have been totally hard done by. The English Football Association is always talking about how it's such a problem that the Premier League is so dominated by foreign talent, suggesting ludicrous 'solutions' like English quotas, and then they turn around and make a decision like this. How about they do something productive and make it more difficult for Premiership sides like Tottenham to cherry-pick young, talented players like Bostock only to have them waste away on the reserve side before selling them back to a Championship side a couple years later for a marginal profit.