Roiling football blather

Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
crackerjack said:
French sides would certainly be cheap, but you'd be starting from scratch and it would be one hell of a risk. When I was a kid there was a fleeting moment when everyone was saying NY Cosmos would soon be the most popular team on earth. Man, did that hunch cost Steve Ross some moolah!
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But they failed at least partly because they weren't in competition with anyone anyone had heard of. Whereas if you bought a mid-level french or german team and poured in cash, you could be seriously challenging for the CL, playing clubs that everyone's heard of and so on.

I'd imagine this might start to happen in the next few years - the Premiership's got to be giving diminishing returns, given the amount of money you need to spend to even have a decent chance of getting into europe...
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
"Sure, but the CL must be a minor percentage of income next to a weekly competition watched by millions at home and tens of millions (?) abroad"
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I thought that the CL was where the money was but perhaps it's just the icing on an already lucrative cake. In other words, when they say "Arsenal's failure to quality for the CL in the 2008/2009 season has cost them £40m" (for example) they don't feel the need to mention that it is a small percentage of what they get from just being in the prem.

"I'd imagine this might start to happen in the next few years - the Premiership's got to be giving diminishing returns, given the amount of money you need to spend to even have a decent chance of getting into europe..."
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That's what I'm getting at.
 
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crackerjack

Well-known member
Slothrop said:
But they failed at least partly because they weren't in competition with anyone anyone had heard of. Whereas if you bought a mid-level french or german team and poured in cash, you could be seriously challenging for the CL, playing clubs that everyone's heard of and so on.
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As stated above, the CL must be a juicy, but still minor slice next to domestic league that draws large crowds at home and massive nation and international TV audiencs.

I'd imagine this might start to happen in the next few years - the Premiership's got to be giving diminishing returns, given the amount of money you need to spend to even have a decent chance of getting into europe...
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I agree, there's a sense that it's a bubble that just has to burst. But, if you decided to buy, say, Schalke, how much extra would you need to pay the star players in wages to get them over? Everyone wants to be in the Prem, La Liga or Serie A, because that's where the best players (and, let's assume, the best sponsorship deals) are.
 
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crackerjack

Well-known member
IdleRich said:
I thought that the CL was where the money was but perhaps it's just the icing on an already lucrative cake. In other words, when they say "Arsenal's failure to quality for the CL in the 2008/2009 season has cost them £40m" (for example) they don't feel the need to mention that it is a small percentage of what they get from just being in the prem.
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The figure quoted about 50 times during last week's hideous Liverpool v Liege match was a "minimum of £10m". According to this
http://www.footballeconomy.com/stats2/eng_liverpool.htm
that's less than 10% of their turnover three seasons ago.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
"The figure quoted about 50 times during last week's hideous Liverpool v Liege match was a "minimum of £10m". According to this
http://www.footballeconomy.com/stats2/eng_liverpool.htm
that's less than 10% of their turnover three seasons ago."
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Sure, but if you bought, say, Marseille, it's not as though their income from the league would be nothing is it?
Obviously I haven't done the sums on this but and the fact that gazillionaires are snapping up English clubs right left and centre disagrees with me but I'm still surprised that there isn't a better deal to be had elsewhere.
Maybe a related question is, why is the premier league so popular abroad? Obviously nowadays it's got most of the biggest stars (though other leagues do still give them a run for their money on that) but even before that it was the most watched right?
 
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crackerjack

Well-known member
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha - right on time, the most blatant bit of dick-waving ever.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/premier_league/manchester_city/article4659785.ece

Maybe a related question is, why is the premier league so popular abroad? Obviously nowadays it's got most of the biggest stars (though other leagues do still give them a run for their money on that) but even before that it was the most watched right?
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Isn't it the whole fast & furious thing? I think English footy has always been the most-watched foreign league pretty much everywhere, outside of Latin America, which leans towards Italy & Spain. Even when our teams played shit kick & rush.
 
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crackerjack

Well-known member
IdleRich said:
That's what they say although I find it slightly unconvincing. By that argument wouldn't lower divisions be more popular than the prem?
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Oh, God no, fast & furious with a bit of decent football thrown in. Have you ever been to a lower league match? It's just awful. I was gonna see Brighton on saturday, but didn;t make it down in time, thank fuck. £27 for a 0-0 in which even Mickey Adams admits we were outplayed by a team who'd lost their previous six away games? Jeezus.

Mind you, I'd have felt much the same had I paid to be at Villa Pk on sunday.
 
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don_quixote

Trent End
thats what you get for supporting a team managed by micky adams, did you ever see the football they were playing when he got leicester promoted to the premiership? it was fucking dire.
 
mos dan

mos dan

fact music
i must preface this with a sorry to rich - one of two perfectly decent human beings i know who support man u - but i'm really enjoying the schadenfreude of thinking about how weirdly intimidated man u and their fans must be feeling right now. i mean city are one team you never really had to worry about challenging you.

meanwhile the facebook status updates of people i know who support chelsea are pretty amusing: they're all 'anthony says sod off robinho, we didn't want you anyway' and stuff like that.

is this a new fucking paradigm or what? ..to quote nathan barley.
 
mos dan

mos dan

fact music
crackerjack said:
Oh, God no, fast & furious with a bit of decent football thrown in. Have you ever been to a lower league match? It's just awful.
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i normally agree, even about afc, but this season we've been playing an incredible, elegant, entertaining passing game.. it's still quick, but it's stylish. i'm not joking! the afc gaffer terry brown overhauled our style completely over the summer, having decided the best way to get promoted from this particular division was to abandon our usual route one style completely.

as of this season our keeper isn't even allowed to kick it long.. he rolls it out to a full-back 95% of the time now. it's a crazily dogmatic approach, very ambitious, and you can see the players adapting to the continental style slowly, getting better with every game.. but so far it's working!
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
"i must preface this with a sorry to rich - one of two perfectly decent human beings i know who support man u - but i'm really enjoying the schadenfreude of thinking about how weirdly intimidated man u and their fans must be feeling right now. i mean city are one team you never really had to worry about challenging you."
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Don't worry, I can take it - and it's definitely put the cat amongst the pigeons that's for sure. I have to admit I'm enjoying all this - although that's partly because I think that the wheels will probably come off. I certainly think that outbidding Chelski on Robinho is exactly the kind of glamorous but not entirely sensible move you would expect from someone collecting stars rather than building a team. I can easily envisage results not quite matching expectations, managers being sacked before they get a chance to settle and so on and so forth. Despite their claims they are a long way from being the biggest club in the world just yet.

"meanwhile the facebook status updates of people i know who support chelsea are pretty amusing: they're all 'anthony says sod off robinho, we didn't want you anyway' and stuff like that."
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Yep, that is pretty funny. I might feel differently if it had been the Berbatov one that had been scuppered.... though I have to say I'm not a massive fan of buying players who sulk.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
What I don't get is, what exactly is Abu Dhabi United Group? Does it represent someone's personal fortune or is it a conglomerate of people's money or what? I keep reading how the guys behind the takeover are "ten times richer" than Abramovich and in the Guardian it estimates their wealth at £1trillion. But presumably that's not one individual fortune as I thought that the richest person in the world was Warren Buffet (who passed Bill Gates earlier in the year) whose personal fortune is $62bn according to the Forbes Rich list

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_billionaires

How can these people have thirty times as much money as the richest person in the world? Unless there are at least thirty of them - and in that case who controls where it is invested?
 
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