football thread No11

[Takhisis]

He can get the Andorrans to accept FC Barcelona as their national team.

 

[Serutan]

So I guess Man City won't be instantly translated to Valhalla after the season after all...

 

[AdrienIer]

Yeah 19 wins and 2 draws in 21 games is weak sauce

 

[Snerk]

Marvellous. Now city just needs to lose another five or so games.

 

[Takhisis]

Arsenal can still overtake them!

There's rumours of PSG and Real Madrid swapping Neymar for Cristiano Ronaldo.
And of Zinedine Zidane being almost out of the chair at Real Madrid. They should fire whatever officials were in charge of bribing Champions League linesmen and fixing the draws these past few years instead.

 

[Pangaea]

"Dear Dinosaur (a.k.a. Mourinho)

Please leave the team I love, and who used to play good football.

Thanks,
the World."

 

[Takhisis]

Please leave the team I love, and who used to play good football.

FTFY

 

[BirraImperial]

Great job from Toronto FC to eliminate Tigres from the Concacaf CL! Also great to see NY Red Bulls defeating Tijuana as well...Great night for the MLS...If the Sounders beat Chivas tomorrow night, we may see at least one MLS team in the final...

 

[Takhisis]

Does anybody give any credence to the rumour/legend whatever that the Arab magnates simply want to inflate the market so that they are the only ones who can pay for decent players?

 

[BirraImperial]

Does anybody give any credence to the rumour/legend whatever that the Arab magnates simply want to inflate the market so that they are the only ones who can pay for decent players?

Well, they have certainly tried, specially the guy owning PSG...But, just like many times in the past, pouring money into a football team doesn't necessarily mean success, at least not at a European level...Football also requires the right trainer and the right chemistry between players, in order to get a winning squad...

 

[Pangaea]

FTFY

He's really lost the plot now, bloody hell. Ranting like the crazy person he is.

What he doesn't seem to understand is that it's not the loss in the CL itself that is hard to take - it can happen and will happen again - it's the manner of the play, the approach, the ultra-defensive approach against teams that have worse players than what United possess. No reason to not play reasonably attacking football with such players. Instead, Mourinho hunkers down and hopes to score on a lucky counter sometimes during the 90 minutes. Sometimes it happens, but often it doesn't. Admittedly he has had great success with this in the past. But football has moved on, and it's not so easy to just sit back, score on the counter, and keep the opposition out for 90 or 180 minutes.

As usual, players are starting to turn on him, and downing tools. Usually this has happened in his third season (see Chelsea for instance). Only some 18 months into his reign, and there are pretty clear signs of discontent.

Footballers these day make sick amounts of money and have a lifestyle we can only dream about. But at the end of the day, they want to play football, and they want to play proper football. It's really not too surprising that some of the best talents on the planet get the life sucked out of them when asked to be a parking valet.

Of course it's not easy to compete against a state-financed football club with unlimited funds, he's right about that, but at least try to play football the right way and get bums off seats. He's boring people to sleep and giving a whole new meaning to "The Theatre of Dreams".

 

[Snerk]

That Salah though. But I'm 99% sure they'll sell him after the season is over. If not they might have a striker good enough to keep Liverpool in the race for the top spot next year and we can't have that now can we.

 

[Pangaea]

Is this allowed to be posted here?
https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...d-squires-on-the-fa-cup-and-football-heritage

Loved the bits on Mourinho. And Charlton's comment on Shaw


Salah is having an amazing season. Wonder what happens in the summer there, and if he would be able to take such performances into another team. He's not realy done this until this season, so a part of me wonders if Liverpool are simply very well set-up for him.

Kind of boring to follow the 'big' league this season though. One team so far ahead of everybody else that we pretty much knew by the turn of the year who would win the league. The only exception is Italy. Hopefully Napoli can recover from the two recent poor games and follow Juventus to the door.

I do miss how the sport was like some 10 years ago, when money wasn't such a huge factor. The time when teams like Ajax, Rosenborg and Dynamo Kiev could go to the later stages of the Champions League seem to be gone - perhaps forever.

(Yes, yes, Leicester in England was a notable exception, in a season when all the other usual top teams failed for one reason or another.)

Arsene Wenger talked about this a little while ago, and I think he has a good point.

 

[Gen.Mannerheim]

Well, they have certainly tried, specially the guy owning PSG...But, just like many times in the past, pouring money into a football team doesn't necessarily mean success, at least not at a European level...Football also requires the right trainer and the right chemistry between players, in order to get a winning squad...

Football teams are historically a loosing business model. They're designed to barely get buy, to hemorrhage money in buying/selling players, and to mostly live hand to mouth as an organization. That's why so many clubs seem to get into serious trouble in the blink of an eye and are unable to get out. And its also why all the major clubs rely on some pretty funny accounting.

It wasn't till the 80-90's that the idea of investing in a club as a business venture became popular.
The pattern usually goes like this:

• a Mediterranean/Chinese/Middle Eastern millionaire buys club (usually one in trouble)
• installs his leadership team "to turn things around"
• pumps in funds to buy new players and a new coach (which is more likely to blow up the cohesion of the team than make it better)
• realizes that they have to pump in more money to prevent relegation
• next season realizes they'll have to invest even more money to get promotion avoid relegation again
• usually leads to the selling of popular/best players
• fan outrage reaches fever pitch
• owner begins to realize that either a) they don't have the funds to keep injecting in to the club or b)they will never be able to recover their losses
• owner either abandons the club or sells it

rinse and repeat.

 

[Arwon]

This is a global pattern BTW, and not just in soccer. Sporting clubs are generally break-even at best and most of them even lose money unless either a league revenue sharing deal or a private owner is putting extra money in. They're low revenue and very capital poor, which is why stadiums are so hard to get without government support.

 

[Takhisis]

Clubs don't necessarily have to lose money. Of course, with the insane wages of today clubs are being priced out and/or forced to become feeders for those whom the TV Gods and/or shady millionaires choose to anoint.

 

[Arwon]

But even then, no sporting team in any sport spends 1 billion dollars a year on operations, and that includes Madrid, with most teams in any sport being far smaller than them, and not many being over half a billion in revenue. It's just not big business. Middling resource companies or any modest local supermarket chain make more money than any given sport club.

 

[Takhisis]

Which is why they needn't lose money. More often than not they're badly run or even pillaged by their owners and officials.

 

[Arwon]

That is probably inevitable in leagues with private owners, no salary cap, and no player movement restrictions I reckon. As soon as there's owners there's a partiyinterested in something other than winning, so any operating profit won't necessarily get put into improving the chances of winning.

 

[Gen.Mannerheim]

and that includes Madrid

The Spanish La Liga is a strange, and hilariously unfair, example of league money allocation. Even after the renegotiated TV deal, Real & Barça bring in a dominate share of the tv revenue each year.

Which is why they needn't lose money. More often than not they're badly run or even pillaged by their owners and officials.

Bad owners are indeed a universal problem in sporting clubs. However, even historic & successful clubs usually ran on a deficit/ break even throughout their history. Most of the older generation of owners viewed their teams as a hobby, tax write-off, or some form of community service. They would keep prices low for the fans and did minimal repairs of their stadiums because they weren't in it to make money (or at least not make a lot).

Everything changed when the TV deals started to grow...
TV rights started to skyrockey, which encouraged teams to enter into bidding wars for players. Well paid & famous players on primetime TV encouraged the explosion corporate sponsorships. In short, clubs got into a bidding with each other. However, only a few teams can fit on the mountaintop of success and popularity, meaning that for most clubs it was impossible to keep up. Clubs from West Ham to Sunderland began to take steps to bridge the gap, from building ugly stadiums that the fans didn't want in areas where they don't live, to raising ticket prices, to engaging in funny math, and more.

no salary cap, and no player movement restrictions

More unintentional ramifications of the Bosman Ruling...

And it doesn't help that clubs like PSG are trying to artificially inflate the price of players in an effort to price out the competition.