Saxondale

Bayer Leverkusen are likely going to win this year.

We should be looking extremely closely at the Bundesliga. They seem to have the model spot on. * Fans have majority voting rights * Tickets are cheap as chips * Big teams can - and do - get relegated * Well-organised, subsidised travel to games

I think there’s a lot of misdirected anger about this. The problem is the shite ‘product’ that the PL has become, and the media-backed monopoly of top-tier teams. 1) Stop paying for ****ing Sky TV. It’s shit anyway. 2) Fans of all clubs should be spitting venom at the ‘big six’ teams. When we play them we should be booing all of their players all match. We should be chanting about their twat owners and oil / blood money. We should be mocking them for being plastic shite, watched mainly by Far Eastern tourists. We should be dominating every phone in and every letters page and every forum with how much the big six cartel has ruined football and how much we hate them. **** talking about offside decisions and overlapping fullbacks, we need to shift the dialogue and let the people in control of the purse strings know that these clubs are ruining our game. We need to make it hell for those clubs, their owners and their fans. We need to make it taboo to even play for any of those teams. It should be socially unacceptable to support them (in my view it already is). There are more of us than them, and it’s about time we stood up and made it clear we’ve had enough. It’s simple - we will not kowtow to the cartel anymore. If they’re not prepared to play nicely, they can piss off to some desert shithole to play exhibition games against Perez Madrid every week.

Yeah, they wanted out of UEFA competitions. Re. the domestic leagues, they must have read the rule books first, one would think? Regardless, the domestic league would have become second fiddle to them. We also don’t know how the whole situation would have played out had the PL offered them an ‘in or out’ ultimatum but the fans of the clubs had universally favoured the idea of breaking away. I also seem to remember the strap line of the Super League being something like “The best teams, every week” - if they did indeed play every week, that wouldn’t leave much time for domestic competition. So - in theory - I think you’re right that the clubs wanted to have their cake and eat it but - in practice - they would have treated the domestic league as secondary and maybe even abandoned it completely. Who knows what these idiots were actually thinking.

I think you’re revising history a bit there. They backed down because the fans went ballistic. The Super League idea was talked about for years before they actually announced it, and it was always styled as the ‘elite’ clubs breaking away from their domestic leagues. The PL were actually extremely soft on them - i.e. they basically just pretended it didn’t happen. They could have just kicked them all out the league in one hit, but didn’t for obvious reasons. Let’s say the Super League happened as proposed, the likes of Man City and com would be fielding no more then B teams in the PL anyway.

Said it before: I’m beginning to wonder whether we should have just let the Super League teams **** off. They’d come crawling back when they realise how unfeasibly boring it is.

Yep, no doubt about it, the rules need changing, but we all need to work within the existing rules until then - Leicester included.

In fact, the more I read into this, the more amused I become at those stupid idiots at Forest massively shitting the bed and then bursting into tears about it.

Barney Ronay in the Guardian has got it spot on: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2024/mar/18/supporters-should-blame-club-owners-not-the-rules-for-points-deductions “The issue is buying 29 players in a single year, spending more than every year of your entire club history combined, more than Barcelona, Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain. Failing to make the emergency stop because you’re careering off the mountain side is really an issue about careering off the mountainside in the first place. Football follows the market. If Johnson were more valuable to more clubs he might have been sold in time for the right amount. He wasn’t. So pay up.”

He’s clearly a shithead, but that article is 17 years old.

That’s bollocks. What arseholes.

But whether or not the rules make sense is a separate issue, it doesn’t mean they didn’t break them. While they were holding out for more cash on a player sale, how many clubs were taking a financial hit in order to stay compliant? Forest broke the rules to their advantage.

Re. The Dirty Forest: I think the club’s reaction is characteristically classless. They seemed to think that the fact the held out to get more money for Brennan Johnson is a legit excuse - of course it is not. They need to suck it up, as will we if we find ourselves in a similar situation. They had a couple of Forest fans on Radio 5 earlier, who were actually both spot on: the rules are unfair and wrong, but the club is also wrong for breaking the rules. It’s necessary to separate the two issues: 1) Are the rules fair (spoiler: no they are not) and 2) Did the club (be it Forest, Leicester, Everton or whoever) break those rules. Clubs that have broken the rules can expect to be punished. Separately, they should be lobbying for reform - as should we the fans.

Haha, loving the shitty Forest conceding late on. They’re (rightly) ****ed.

Personally I’d try and stay away from the insurance. A bumper from a scrappy is a good bet - even more so if you can find one in the right colour.

Happy birthday mate! @fuchsntf

I’m pretty sure Ale is pronounced like Ali. The commentator seems to think it’s pronounced like the beer.

Logan Briggs, 18yo midfielder apparently.

Seriously, does anybody know who Briggs is? I thought I was quite well up on our youth players.

I never normally whinge about the officials, but they ****ed it this evening. Daka’s goal should have stood, we should have been 2-0 up and game over.

I’m experiencing (at 40) what I consider a mid life crisis, which is general feeling of acceptance that my youth has passed and - most significantly - the realisation that you only get one life, and anything you don’t do in this life, you will never do. I think this in turn leads to the feeling of being trapped and/or lack of fulfilment, etc. It hasn’t changed my behaviour, but definitely my outlook. It’s not a particularly nice feeling.

I see they’ve got Banter Ben in nets.

That pitch was dreadful.

If you have a BMW / Mini, the warning lights come on very, very early. My wife had the warning light come on a couple of weeks ago, so I checked the pads and they’ve got like 3mm of friction material left on each. There is a way of resetting the warning light, which I will d9 when I can be arsed.

That’s Forest fans all over. Whilst we have unbelievably pessimistic fans, theirs are the polar opposite. When they were languishing in the Championship, narrowly avoiding another relegation to League 1 each year, Forest fans would always be banging on about “this is our year” and “this team is special” and “just you watch us“. Last time they were successful, only rich people had colour televisions.