davieG

It was only a 3 day Jolly Boys' Outing.

Pass more down to the FL and below, invest in local facilities so every kid has facilities and proper coaching at schools and after school. Let's see a bit more football related philanthropy. They could also reduce the number of 'extra games they keep adding to the calendar for the betterment of the player's health after all they wont need to earn as much.

They don't have any it's been a money grabbing carve up from the day they forced the FA and FL to give them control over the way it's run. Tradition would be back in the FL.

They should change the line (halfway) from where you are offside, move it to the penalty box line. Being offside just inside the opponents half is not 'goal hanging' which was why it was brought in. It'll open the game and reduce the number of times it's even relevant.

WE haven't even got full planning approval for all the none stadium builds or even outline planning for the EON building it's gonna be a few years before you see any progress on them as I doubt they'd even look at it until the stadium's complete and fully operational.

TFFT Zone

As long as their name gets thrown about and they look good in the community that's all they want. Maybe suggest it's merged with the Singing section and called the King Power Choir. If you're really lucky you could get them to sponsor you as to tour the Countries Football Stadia.

Don't forget to vote here

This is very important if you did it in company time or used company equipment then it's likely theirs and not yours. The best you can hope for is some 'reward' from them and if they patent it get your name on it.

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A US Premier League game would be wildly popular – and demean everyone Aaron Timms Fifa is considering a policy change that would allow leagues to play domestic matches overseas, reopening one of football’s most squalid ideas The dream – or nightmare – of a 39th Premier League match in America has drawn a little closer. After reaching a settlement with US promoter Relevent Sports, Fifa last week signaled it will consider changes to its policy of blocking league matches from being played outside the league’s home country. The indication that Fifa’s thinking on the issue may be evolving in a more flexible direction will be welcomed by Europe’s top clubs and deplored by football traditionalists. More here - https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/apr/18/premier-league-39th-game-chelsea-arsenal-manchester-united-america

https://www.theguardian.com/football/article/2024/may/10/arsene-wenger-premier-league-man-city-ffp-profit-sustainability-rules?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3fShlbroCL7xEPB9Ak5yCOM1ikBZ8VVFICEJ9WffnCcWfAYC6RVrgoJc4_aem_AXaPrJp5VWFXOtN83G2OtAIKb2sOxKwwbymSWZ86GSsFGUiZ4cPzM9hqAvMJygAVCAGcCrqKA1Xk4ll9daq2_jC0 Has Wenger finally won the culture war over big money in football? The Frenchman raged over the game’s super-rich when in charge of Arsenal. His hopes of a more level playing field may come to fruition Aaron Timms Fri 10 May 2024 09.00 BST Share For much of the final 14 of his 22 years at Arsenal, Arsène Wenger was a study in frustration. The free thinker who brought trophies and glory to Arsenal in his blazing first eight years at the club, ushering in a revolution across the Premier League with his use of data, approach to talent scouting, commitment to technically intricate football and careful attention to the diet and lifestyle of the players under his watch, was suddenly transformed into a snippy crank. The sideline fiddling with his parka zipper, the tetchy press conference responses, the comic insistence that he “almost” signed every successful player in Europe, the disgusted tossing of the tiny water bottle as his once-invincible team gave away another lead, endured another slapstick mishap at the back, squandered another title challenge: the visual lore of Late Wenger has, in its own way, become a series of cliches, a kind of stock carousel for any once-great manager on the brink of professional disintegration. The cause of Wenger’s great anguish through this long decline, of course, was what he memorably described as “financial doping”: the emergence – first with Roman Abramovich at Chelsea, then with the Abu Dhabi United Group’s takeover of Manchester City – of a new class of billionaire club owners who turned the Premier League into a simple spending contest tilted, seemingly perpetually, in favor of the teams controlled by plutocrats. Season after season, Arsenal struggled valiantly to live the Wengerian truth of thrift and delayed gratification, selling their best players, patiently paying off the new stadium at Ashburton Grove, jacking up ticket prices to stay in touch with the money boys. Chelsea and the Manchester clubs feasted on all the trophies; Arsenal fans were left to pick through the crumbs of their club’s responsible balance sheet. The Gunners may have lost the art of winning the Premier League, but their income statements were Wenger’s press clippings from this period are filled with the rage of a man who feels that the tide of history has moved definitively against him. “It is a satisfaction for a club to live within its natural resources,” he said in early 2009. “We live in the real world. City are in a different world.” A few months later he was at it again: “I am always insisting that in our job you should live with your resources, because it is always defendable that you make money if it is linked to the income you earn inside the club, it is not if it is not linked to the income made inside the club.” Papa Arsène became a lone voice honking in the fiscal wilderness. Philosophy, reason, morals, pleasure: Wenger appealed to all of them in his attempt to convince the Premier League to rein in spending and force clubs to live within their means. To the end of his time at Arsenal he remained delusionally stubborn in his commitment to the club’s self-sustaining business model (“I believe, and I take full responsibility for this, that we can be competitive the way we run the club”: that’s from 2011). Wenger’s economic thinking was formed at a young age, from the values he absorbed by watching his parents at work in their bistro in rural Alsace. For Wenger, childhood in the starchy world of 1950s Duttlenheim was, as he writes in his autobiography, “an education in resourcefulness, in tenacity, in passion, in physical effort”. Self-control, responsibility, and stamina were the values most highly prized; exaggeration, and recklessness were looked down upon. The word “excesses” appears three times in the first 20 pages of Wenger’s autobiography, and not once is it used positively. From those early years in Alsace he learned to find the beauty in austerity, in material and cultural privation. As a child, his football team played with “no jerseys, no coach, and no referee”, and in the village, he writes, “we didn’t have much. I sometimes wonder whether my passion might not have been born out of that frustration: that small world, those so scarce words we exchanged, those matches our team lost, that pitch that looked so little.” Arsène Wenger was a study in frustration during his final years of management. For much of the past two decades Wenger’s long project to create a new model for club football across England and Europe – one in which self-sufficiency is paramount, the realm of the financially possible has real limits, and creativity is defined by the negotiation of material constraints – appeared doomed. The war for the sport’s soul was lost. Football had been sold out to sovereign wealth funds, gas barons, and private equity buffoons, all those Abramoviches and Mansours and Al-Khelaifis clapping unsmilingly from on high while their expensively assembled squads nightsticked hapless opponents into the dirt. The future, seemingly, belonged to the wealthy. The future, for now at least, still does: Manchester City, after all, are on the verge of winning their fourth Premier League title in a row. But as the season comes to an end, it’s worth reflecting on how meaningfully the regulatory culture of European soccer, and English soccer in particular, has shifted over the past six months. The Premier League, of course, is much changed from Wenger’s time at the Emirates. Even Arsenal’s old commitment to the self-sustaining business model has evolved. The club enjoyed 16 consecutive profitable seasons until 2018, making almost £400m along the way, but the pandemic-era hit to gate receipts and the loss of Champions League football have seen the accounts dip into the red in recent seasons (though Arsenal’s most recent results forecast a return to “a self-sufficient financial base” with continued participation in Europe). There’s so much wild tinkering at work in the administration of the game today – VAR! An expanded World Cup! An expanded Club World Cup! Body cams on referees! Blue cards! No more blue cards! – that it can often feel as if the footballing authorities are as clueless about the sport’s future direction as the fans are. But in the realm of financial regulation, the past six months do seem to herald a real change. After years of shambling inaction, the aggression with which the Premier League has prosecuted breaches of the profitability and sustainability rules – while motivated by a spirit of regulatory competition and designed, in part, as a performance to nullify government efforts to impose an independent watchdog on the sport – has been genuinely surprising. The double strike of the new anchoring and squad cost rules provisionally approved before the Premier League’s annual general meeting in June has been another shock to the senses. These rule changes promise a future that, while not entirely equal (the Premier League will still be a league of financial blimps and mere balloons), will nevertheless impose some measure of restraint on the spending of the biggest, richest clubs. Since leaving Arsenal, Wenger has occupied the role of Fifa’s Chief of Football Development, a sapiential perch from which he pontificates about the state of the footballing universe. But his real legacy is in the Premier League, and it continues to grow. The Premier League is entering a new era of financial regulations. View image in fullscreen The Premier League is entering a new era of financial regulations. Photograph: Michael Regan/Getty Images The fact that it was Manchester City who voted against the measure to “anchor” each club’s spending on wages and transfer fees to a multiple of the bottom club’s TV revenue suggests that the league is traveling, finally, in the right direction on basic questions of fairness and competitive balance. After the sleaze and recklessness of the post-Abramovich Gilded Age, the Premier League appears, over the objections of the biggest and most well resourced clubs, to be entering a new progressive era of fiscal prudence and limitation. Regulation, accounting, and litigation will be the hallmarks of this new age, in which clubs will rise and fall as much by what goes on in the books and arbitration chambers as on the field. On the other hand, these changes arrive at a time when, for some of the billionaire-owned clubs, all the early benefits of rule by plutocrat have already accumulated and a new regime of fiscal responsibility has been put in place. At Manchester City, for instance, the trophies, TV riches, and millions of adoring new fans are secure. The club posted a profit of £80m last financial year, comfortably the highest in the league, and made £122m on player sales: the fiscal strength that financial doping buys has been fully worked into the corporate bloodstream, giving the Sky Blues a structural advantage over less monied rivals that will endure for years, perhaps even decades, even under the austerity of a more strictly regulated league. The clubs that bought success under the old rules arguably won’t stand to lose all that much under the new regime. By now, their position at the top of the sport may be unassailable, and fresh rules to prevent other pretenders from taking the sugar daddy route to glory could simply end up blocking the ambitions of smaller clubs, ossifying European soccer’s existing order. A more parsimonious future may simply be a recipe for more springtime nights in the Champions League featuring Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, PSG and the rest of the usual suspects. And yet. It’s possible to retain some optimism, to imagine that this new age of regulation and restraint will embolden clubs and managers to find perfection and success within the strictures of a new economy, to do more with less. “The beauty of sport is to respect the rules and to win,” Wenger once said. “People who do not should not be allowed to win.” For a long time, this seemed like a losing proposition, condemned to failure by a small coterie of super-rich clubs able to bend the sport’s reality to their own limitless financial will. But over the past season, the future that Wenger spent all those years fighting for – an alternative reality in which the rules are designed to take silly money out of the sport – has lurched suddenly, if precariously, into view. Squad cost ratios, anchoring, crackdowns on the reckless spenders, a new spirit of activism rising up the football pyramid: will all of this create a new playing field for England’s top flight, or will it simply freeze the hierarchy embedded across the Premier League from two decades of laissez-faire regulation and casino spending? Has Arsène Wenger won, at last, the culture war over money in football he lost as a manager? We are about to find out.

They must know that people with mobiles pass on their tickets so I'm not convinced that is the short term aim. More of a long term one as it makes me think once the majority are on board they'll change the systems to one that's harder to pass on.

Bump

https://sportwitness.co.uk/i-absolutely-delighted-leicester-city-player-walking-cloud-nine-bursting-happiness/ “I am absolutely delighted” – Leicester City player walking on cloud nine and bursting with happiness By Sean Lunt -10th May 2024 Leicester City goalkeeper Mads Hermansen has admitted he is walking on cloud nine after the club secured their return to the Premier League. The 23-year-old has been speaking to Ekstra Bladet about his success with Leicester this season after they were crowned Championship winners and sealed their return to the top flight. Hermansen has been the number one for the Foxes this season under Enzo Maresca, making 44 appearances in the Championship and keeping 13 clean sheets, as well as only conceding 41 goals in total. It’s been a successful year for him after he joined Leicester in a €7.7m deal from Brondby IF in the summer as the Foxes prepared for life back in the Championship. It means he’s been a key part of the side this season who managed to finish a point ahead of Ipswich Town at the top of the table. Playing such a role means he’s been at the centre of a fascinating season for the Foxes, who flew out of the traps following relegation last season. They appeared to be on course to secure an easy return to the Premier League but stumbled in the second half of the campaign, allowing the other promotion chasers to rally and put pressure on them at one point. Fortunately, Leicester rallied again and ensured they went up at the first time of asking and Hermansen admits he ended up learning a lot about himself thanks to the journey they’ve been on. “I also think that you are personally tested along the way when you take those steps up the career ladder. Then you also get to know yourself better, and I am challenged on some things personally, which make me feel good,” he said. “I am learning to appreciate friends and family and to have time with them, for example. There are just many things in it that you are challenged with when you are abroad and when things are going as well as they are doing right now. “First of all, it’s about football for me, and the most important thing for me is to be on the field and deliver in a team that appreciates me. I’m just looking forward to doing that at the next level as well. “I am looking forward to being a part of it. The Championship is also huge over here, but globally there is nothing that comes close to the Premier League, and it will be special. “It will also be something that I have to learn to deal with when you are in it in relation to how big it is. But it’s a surreal thought, and there’s also a little holiday to be had. It will also be necessary before we embark on the new, but I am absolutely delighted.” Enjoy your holiday, Mads!

https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/im-delighted-leicester-citys-promotion-9276432 I'm delighted for Leicester City's promotion and regret the moment my legacy was tarnished The Wales midfielder turned pundit is celebrating Leicester City's return to the Premier League, even though he knows his antics with Birmingham affected his standing at the club ByJordan Blackwell 12:41, 10 MAY 2024 Robbie Savage is delighted for Leicester City’s success this season despite his “tarnished” legacy at the club. A two-time player of the season winner at Filbert Street, Savage was a key man in the successful Martin O’Neill side of the late 1990s. But his relationship soured with fans when, after moving to Birmingham City, he kissed the Blues’ badge while celebrating a goal at the Walkers Stadium. Twenty years on, Savage says he regrets that action and that he’s not lost his love for City, even if the supporters may have lost their love for him. He says he’s over the moon to see the club promoted back to the Premier League. “Ever since the start of the season I expected Leicester to get promoted,” Savage told Planet Sport Bet. “They brought in a young head coach from Manchester City in Enzo Maresca and he’s done unbelievably well in his first managerial job. The facilities, the infrastructure and the players at Leicester at the moment are brilliant. The recruitment has been good and that is key. “Leicester have been on some ride in the past decade with promotions, relegations, Premier League titles and FA Cup wins. It is great to see them get promoted and I always like to see my friends who are Leicester fans celebrating. “Leicester fans will always remember me for kissing the Birmingham City badge when I moved there but there is a bigger story behind that. Part of me still regrets kissing the badge, but that happened because I was booed by the Leicester fans which I thought was unfair. My legacy was probably tarnished by that. I am absolutely delighted for Leicester, the club and its fans deserve every success.” Joining from Crewe in 1997, Savage made 204 appearances for City over five seasons, winning the Worthington Cup with the club in 2000. After the club’s relegation in 2002, he joined Birmingham for £1.25m, and also went on to enjoy successful spells with Blackburn and Derby.

History of Leicestershire in Images Steve Anderson · sdptrooenS1lg38a910cg01934m2990u4735hu73m4c9952u87i6g3132ch8 · Now and Then. Aylestone Road Gas Works.

Following on from @Bert topic This is a Poll only topic if you want to comment post in this topic. A more detailed survey. Hope I've covered all options. Please read all the options before selecting (I realise New ST Holders will not know yet if they'll have one but when and if they do please come back and complete the poll) Thanks for participating

No one's suggesting you grab some nobody off the street but there seems to be a lot of young people doing media related and history degrees who I'm sure could handle some of these fairly simple traipse across European Countries. There's been plenty of occasions where a budding 'star' has been given a chance with little experience. Blue Peter has been awash with them for years. If it's the BBC I don't believe they should or need to pay what are going to be bigger fees.

Steve Anderson osdSrpnotehg0tl32ht3ug791cmc1l4766ugf1a653g4791a1t94lag7ucmc · Now and Then St Margaret’s Church.

Mishmash

I heard he was winning by a head

Well done with your battle here's to a continual improvement Best Wishes.

This is a great example of my moan.

I'm ok with programmes for celebrities as you can decide to watch or not. But all these travelogs and historical programmes do not need a celebrity presenting them even worse when they have a family member with them. I do enjoy the travels of Simon Reeve but then that's his job as in English author, journalist, adventurer, documentary filmmaker and television presenter.