August 9 – Carbone Joins The Bantams
WHEN Bradford City went into administration in the summer of 2002 many blamed the fact that they were still paying some players Premiership wages, despite having been relegated to what was then the First Division.
The chief culprit was seen to be Italian striker Benito Carbone, who was earning a reported £40,000 a week at the Yorkshire club.
It was on this day in 2000 that the Bantams signed Carbone in a deal that was to become symbolic of smaller clubs trying to live beyond their means by signing big-name players that they could ill afford.
Carbone was regarded as something of a journeyman in Italy where he notched up six different clubs before Sheffield Wednesday paid £3m to take him to Hillsborough in 1996.
He would become very popular with the Wednesday faithful over the three years he spent there, but as his contract ran down, he refused to sign an extension and moved on to Aston Villa on a free transfer in 1999.
After one season at Villa Park, he was signed for Premiership strugglers Bradford by new manager Chris Hutchings, who had just taken over from his old boss Paul Jewell.
Although Carbone was popular with Bantams fans, and is still regarded as one of the best players ever at Valley Parade, he couldn’t prevent the team’s relegation – the key factor in their subsequent financial problems.
Carbone eventually signed for Italian club Como in 2002 to take the burden of his huge wages away from Bradford, and allegedly waived some of the money he was owed by the club to help their plight.
He was often cast as the villain of the piece – the mercenary foreign player who was couldn’t care less about the club as long as he picked up his cash, but as his agent Gianni Paladini said at the time: “It was a mistake on the part of Bradford to give him that money in the first place.”
Paladini was essentially correct, but not everyone learned from Bradford’s mistakes as their Yorkshire rivals Leeds were to find out a few years down the line.
Have a look at this peach of a goal Carbone scored for Villa against Leeds in the FA Cup:
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R-Unit on August 9th, 2007
I think you’re right – if someone offers to pay you £40k a week you can hardly be expected to say no can you? I think the fault lies with the board rather than the Beni
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AJH on August 9th, 2007
Beni was amazing: he was no mercenary either; he’d turn up for extra training on the weekends in an attempt to perfect his partnership with the useless lump that was Ashley Ward. He loved it at City, and we loved him. That he was paid massive money wasn’t his fault: that we couldn’t afford to pay it was our board at the time’s.