Players come and go and many cause controversy, yet very few do those things without playing a game or arriving in the same country as the team they have signed for. Ryan Menei will walk away as a player who has done just that and probably not even knowing the storm he has caused.
In June, Menei, a former ECHL right back, signed for the Sheffield Steelers. A decent goalscorer, he seemed like a good signing for the EIHL and it was rumored that there were other British teams interested in him. However, when August Menei arrived, he had changed his mind for family reasons. Apparently his wife had heard of the South Yorkshire weather and thought better of it. That’s where the controversy began because along with all the niceties in the Steelers’ press release about how professional Menei was and how the organization understood his circumstances, came a mockery of the Nottingham Panthers. The Steelers claimed that Menei had turned down an additional £200 a week offered by the Panthers to sign Sheffield. This was later denied by the Panthers, who claimed that Menei had never been offered a contract, but that it has led to much back and forth between fans of the two rivals.
In an era where money talks, it’s sad that some fans seem to believe that money is the only thing that matters to a player. It’s fair that Menei probably has no connection to Sheffield or Nottingham or anywhere else in the UK and money would be a consideration, but what about player happiness?
Jerome Iginla, for example, chose to leave the Calgary Flames for Pittsburgh because he believed it was his best shot at a Stanley Cup ring. Of course, Iginla was in the luxury of not running out of dollars after his contract with the Flames, but he was a pick driven by the lure of personal success, not a late-season raise.
The Iginla of the world are perhaps few and far between, not only in ice hockey but in all sports. In a sport like ice hockey, where far from the big moment, a professional’s career is short and the financial reward small, single-team players are increasingly a dying breed. The story of Ryan Menei’s tenure with the Sheffield Steelers will be remembered for the feud he caused, but it may be remembered for another reason as well. That reason is that he stressed that fans are no longer romantics who believe in the man of the club and are not naive to the nature of the business that the sport runs.