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Premier League Thread 2019/20

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5 hours ago, FOXSE said:

True, but a professional footballers job is to win football matches, not be impartial. If the ref doesn't like things said Toni him, book them and include it in match report.

I probably wouldn't make a good referee but if a player started giving me excess crap I'd pull out a yellow card and tell him and his teammates that I will keep pulling them until they shut up. That's what they're for. It's his power to control the match. Don't understand why it gets to this point unless the referee doesn't do his job. Yellow and red= power/control.

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6 hours ago, The whole world smiles said:

I absolutely hate John moss but he's a human being. I bet my bottom pound that he was being called allsorts by these same players who have been crying to the press (fat, a cheat etc). Why should referees (or any one else for that matter) take constant abuse without giving a little back?

Youre just assuming here though. Its completely wrong if true.

 

If a player was making comments about a ref going to be taking charge of championship games because of how bad a ref he is, theyd be booked instantly and rightly so. You cant take on the role of a fan when you are supposed to be the most neutral man in the ground.  

 

Its his job to control the players, if they are overstepping the line in anyway, you book them, you dont make snide comments. 

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1 hour ago, StriderHiryu said:

https://www.telegraaf.nl/sport/604631338/chelsea-en-ajax-akkoord-over-transfer-hakim-ziyech

 

Tier 1 Dutch site claim Hakim Ziyech to Chelsea in the summer is a done deal for 45m. Think he will be a big hit over here if true, sad we couldn't get him though I don't think we'd ever stand a chance TBH.

Good signing for them at that price, looks a great player.  You'd imagine he'd be a direct replacement for Willian.

 

If Chelsea get Sancho too, Ake back and a decent striker in they could be in good shape for next season.

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1 hour ago, StriderHiryu said:

https://www.telegraaf.nl/sport/604631338/chelsea-en-ajax-akkoord-over-transfer-hakim-ziyech

 

Tier 1 Dutch site claim Hakim Ziyech to Chelsea in the summer is a done deal for 45m. Think he will be a big hit over here if true, sad we couldn't get him though I don't think we'd ever stand a chance TBH.

I am here for anyone who needs emotional support.

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Just in on BBC news:-

The Oxford English Dictionary has changed its definition of the word Yid to include a "supporter of or player for Tottenham Hotspur".

Apparently they narrowly missed out on

"perpetual losers", "has beens" and "big headed b*stards"

But there's always next year.

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7 hours ago, The whole world smiles said:

I absolutely hate John moss but he's a human being. I bet my bottom pound that he was being called allsorts by these same players who have been crying to the press (fat, a cheat etc). Why should referees (or any one else for that matter) take constant abuse without giving a little back?

Cos they are there to keep order and be a calm impartial voice- the fact that they regularly fail is beside the point.

The natural conclusion of reacting is referees shouting, sulking and waving their arms around like 3 year olds..... And professional footballers.

Hate to mention it here but Rugby Union option?

Polish_20200212_140235964.jpg

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1 hour ago, Leicester_Loyal said:

The only thing that will stop the breakaway of the top clubs is a wage cap. The amount of money the top 4 get is insane.

just wont happen ….. the genie is so far from the bottle and thousands of times the size of the opening, debauched on the excesses of money and general avarice ……. its never going back in there ……...not unless the whole thing eats itself  …….

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2 hours ago, EastAnglianFox said:

So the highly rated Ben Gibson who joined Burnley from Middlesbrough is now back training with Boro but not expected to join them. 

 

Bizarre? Anybody know anymore about this? 

Isnt his dad/ uncle or some family member the owner. Makes sense. 

 

Always over rated.... quite possibly because of his family connection :dunno:

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4 hours ago, KingsX said:

 

This is a brilliant summary of the financial forces ending the "sport" as we have known it, and turning into a global entertainment business.  After reading it, it’s hard for me to get worked up about Jon Moss and Bournemouth.

 

As supporters, we can no longer afford to choose to keep ourselves in the dark about what football is in 2020,  For tl:dr types, here is a ¼- length condensed version.  It's still long.  But I made the effort because I think it should be read:

 

 

 

The entire sport has been increasingly conditioned so that Leicester City situations – where a club from outside the financial super elite actually wins a major title – are close to impossible. Let no one tell you, as former Real Madrid president Ramon Calderon insisted, that “football has always been like this”. It hasn’t. Every metric indicates that it is at a far worse level than ever before. It is getting worse and threatening to become irretrievable.

 

Football’s embrace of unregulated hyper-capitalism has created a growing financial disparity that is now destroying the inherent unpredictability of the sport. This is not just the big clubs often winning, as has always been the case. It is that a small group of super-wealthy clubs are now so financially insulated that they are winning more games than ever before, by more goals than ever before, to break more records than ever before.

 

That is a consequence of the explosion of money in the game, which means you need a minimum amount of annual revenue (€400m in 2020, going by Deloitte’s figures) to even begin competing. This is why we are seeing so many historic records now being broken season after season.

 

The last decade alone has seen:

 

·        a second Spanish treble

·        a first German treble

·        a first Italian treble

·        a first English domestic treble

·        three French domestic trebles in four years

·        a first Champions League three-in-a-row in 42 years

·        the first ever 100-point season in Spain, Italy and England

·        ‘Invincible’ seasons in Italy, Portugal, Scotland and seven other European leagues

·        13 of Europe’s 54 leagues currently seeing their longest run of titles by a single club or longest period of domination.

 

Many of these feats appeared to be impossible for decades. They have now all taken place around the same time in the last decade, with the prospect of more to come. Needless to say, they have all been achieved by the wealthiest clubs in those competitions.

 

This is not to say there won’t be outliers, like underwhelming seasons suffered by Manchester United or Arsenal, or the unexpected triumphs of clubs like Leicester City. To point to such exceptions as counter-arguments is the football equivalent of using a few cold days to dismiss global warming. The wider trends are beyond debate. They are also causing huge debate at the very top of the game.

 

Football has famously always been the game that anybody can play, with matches anyone can win. The preciousness of a goal has ensured it is just low-scoring enough to strike the perfect balance between satisfying reward for performance and the right amount of surprises. It isas Johan Cruyff once said, is “a game of mistakes”. That is where its unpredictability lies. That is what the embrace of hyper-capitalism is eroding. An 11-strong group of the “most global” clubs have reached a size where mistakes are less and less likely. The sport’s immense global popularity has actually funnelled more and more resources to an extremely narrow band of clubs.

 

Premier League TV rights for the current 2019-22 cycle are now worth £8.4bn. The total Champions League prize money is now worth €2.04bn, having grown from €583m just 10 years ago. Such forces have seen Manchester United go from a turnover of £117m in 2001 to £627m last year.

 

The biggest clubs are no longer the financial size of local supermarkets, as was the case just two decades ago. The sport in Europe now turns over more revenue than the publishing or cinema industries. The ‘stretch’ in wages from the bottom to the top in the Premier League has gone from 2.85x in that breakaway season of 1992-93 to 4.7x last year.  Repeated studies have shown that player wages affect results to a greater degree than anything else. Arguments about net transfer spend are close to irrelevant.

 

“Buying the most expensive players doesn’t automatically generate good sporting results,” Manchester City chief executive Ferran Soriano wrote. “What does generate those good results is having the best players in your team and paying them the salary they deserve.” This is what creates the stretch. “I had the money to buy players,” another exec says. “But not the money to keep players.”

 

This has been the primary issue for most PL clubs seeking to grow, despite the influx of TV money that has allowed high transfer fees. By the competition’s latest figures, the big six paid 51.3% of the total wages.

 

This disparity has led to a corresponding disparity in results. And thus the unpredictability of football – the lifeblood of the sport – begins to dissolve. Every metric shows the sport across Europe is more predictable than 30, 20 or even 10 years ago. You can start at the very top. The average points won by champions in the five major leagues has shot up.

 

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England might only show a marginal change from the 2000s to the 2010s, but the change becomes much more pronounced if you focus on the last three seasons. It then extends to 96.7 points – and that’s before you even bring in Liverpool’s current season.

 

That is emphasised by the fact more clubs finished in England’s top four in the first five years of the 1990s than in the 20 years so far of the new millennium.  It is not just that the wealthiest clubs are winning much more, however. It is that they are winning by much more.

 

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The 14 other Premier League clubs were at first taken aback. Then the feeling that they were being taken for a ride began to grow.  Their representatives were at a meeting to discuss international TV rights distribution and, in putting forward the position of the big six, Daniel Levy just kept using the same five words: “We only want what’s fair.” The Tottenham Hotspur chairman repeated it to every single objection.

 

The argument was that the ‘big six’ are the clubs who bring all the international attention – and so they therefore deserve more of the money. The counter-argument is obviously that they need teams to play against, and that the founding principle of the Premier League is equality.

 

The more money the ‘Big Six’ receive, the better they become. The more attractive they are to audiences. The better commercial deals they can strike. The better they become. And the more attractive they are. Thus strengthening a self-perpetuating cycle that just keeps on increasing the gap.

 

The leverage – of course – is another break-away.  “They’ve been using the threat of the super league for 20 years now,” one high-level source says. “Every time there is a discussion about revenue distribution, they put it on the table.”

 

There has been almost no resistance or regulation, which in itself has added multiple layers of self-perpetuation. The belligerence of the big clubs has been a huge part of it. Inequalities were already hard-wired into the global football infrastructure before the game’s authorities even realised the need to do something about it.

 

The Champions League has been a closed shop for the majority of the last decade. A figure like £100m allows you to buy an awful lot of wages, to invest. So if you want to challenge them, you’ve got to find £100m and that’s just for one season. That, by coincidence, is the figure Jack Walker pumped into Blackburn Rovers to make his club Premier League champions in 1994-95 by financial brute force. It would now barely make a dent.

 

The CL also creates what you might call the ‘Everton problem’. The player market makes it a race to the top, where the richest are able to accumulate the best in a way never seen before. Every player obviously wants to be in such a competition. So clubs like Everton are still mostly a level of player short of the true elite. And when they do have a player who can perform at Champions League level, like Romelu Lukaku, he is quickly picked off.

 

The forces of the game just don’t allow clubs outside the elite the time and space to get to that level. There are too many ceilings to smash through, with so many layers of money on top. England’s big six have benefited from 93% of European TV money in the last eight years. Some clubs – like Valencia and Leeds United – have attempted to break through this with huge investment, only to bring themselves close to ruin.

 

The introduction of Financial Fair Play (FFP) attempted to prevent this. But the legislation came too late. Rather than creating a necessary competitive balance in European football, it reinforced the pre-existing levels. “20 years earlier, I think it would have made a notable difference,” Goldblatt says. “And I think it would have been a deterrent to more egregious foreign owners who have lots of money and political aims.”

 

One potential solution to this would be revenue redistribution, in the form of “solidarity” payments. Discussions are ongoing at the start of 2020 to determine Uefa money towards clubs not participating in European competition for the 2021-24 cycle, so as to level the playing field. The threat that has hung over any discussions: the prospect of a European super league. The result in the last discussion over solidarity payments? They actually decreased: from 8.5% to 7.3%.

 

“Solidarity for the non-participating clubs is the sole mechanism we have to protect competitive balance,” one source says. “The big clubs are always pushing. UEFA is in a difficult position, as they need to find a balance, but it’s not easy. It usually ends up that they say we have to listen to the top clubs and give them something, to stop them going in the direction of a super league.”

 

This is the cycle the game is now in. With every step of negotiation, a little more is ceded to the big clubs, which earns them even more revenue. So it is with results. They shift a bit more towards the super-wealthy with every cycle. And so the differences between clubs become imperceptible and thrashings become so commonplace.

 

It is also why UEFA’s description of “global clubs” is so apt. In this almost completely unregulated world-wide football market, there are only a few that traverse the planet in terms of supporter base and appeal. It allows them to grow to financial sizes that no other club can reach. Sponsors are not going to go to a team not playing international football. They want to put their money – and pay a lot of money – for the biggest audience.

 

All of these factors began to properly coalesce around 2010 to just put this distinctive group of clubs on another level, that was only going higher. It fundamentally changed what they are.

 

“The growth of the third source of income converts the football club business into a global entertainment business,” Soriano wrote. “This is the point where the big football club ceases to resemble a local circus and becomes more of a Walt Disney.” They are no longer just football clubs. They are glamorous content providers. The stadiums are big TV sets, where 22 performers are performing.

 

“I look at the big clubs and their endless desire for money and I just think… what’s the point?” Goldblatt laments. “People think the unit of analysis is the club, but actually the game as a whole should be the unit of economic analysis. It’s the mad dynamic of capital accumulation, and it’s ultimately very odd that a very small number of people should be driving what is a collective experience for millions of people.”

 

We cannot allow the football eco-system to be destroyed in the interests of a small group of clubs. It is much more than money at stake here. We should all recall the social value of football, the role it plays in communities.

 

"unexpected triumphs of clubs like Leicester City. To point to such exceptions as counter-arguments is the football equivalent of using a few cold days to dismiss global warming. "

 Very good comparison to be fair. Just because we pulled off the miracle we shouldnt be blind to the reality. The sport can so easily go down a dark path. 

 

Teams disrespecting the FA CUP and EFL cup worries me a lot. If you dont respect the football pyramid we will start to see more and more situations like Bury. The once dream gig of a game at anfield gets diluted because your actually just paying to see the youth team. Over time fans will take the same attitude as the manager and not see the game worth watching.   

 

 

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Leicesters title is a exception

 

The sport is becoming like hollywood major studios dominated by a small group to the point in a few years for the bigger clubs bordedom might occur and this super league becomes all dominant.

 

My prediction is by 2030, the the prem will go to 18 teams to allow for a bigger euroupen league including games on weekends with a few games in places like Miami and Saudi Arabia like they do in the nfl in London, the league cup wont exist and the facup will have no replays and finish before May like the Copa Del Rey does now.The championship clubs might breakaway for a new prem 2 to be part of a bigger cash grab.

 

The money train with streaming will only continue and this premflix model will dominate the way we watch football.

 

 

 

 

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2 hours ago, Lambert09 said:

"unexpected triumphs of clubs like Leicester City. To point to such exceptions as counter-arguments is the football equivalent of using a few cold days to dismiss global warming. "

 Very good comparison to be fair. Just because we pulled off the miracle we shouldnt be blind to the reality. The sport can so easily go down a dark path. 

 

Teams disrespecting the FA CUP and EFL cup worries me a lot. If you dont respect the football pyramid we will start to see more and more situations like Bury. The once dream gig of a game at anfield gets diluted because your actually just paying to see the youth team. Over time fans will take the same attitude as the manager and not see the game worth watching.   

 

 

The big six hardly need the football pyramid as most of their squads are foreign even the lower leagues are slowly filling up with foreign players.

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The disparity between wealth isn't new, if anything with there being a huge spread of this PL money across all 20 clubs as opposed to a decade or two ago where there was more money for the top teams it should have marginally closed the gap. The top sides have always generated more revenue from sponsorships and other income streams, I'm not sure that's the reason for the league being less competitive right now.

 

One thing I would say is this increased wealth in the Prem hasn't helped the majority of clubs as the inflated prices we all have to pay for players has made it harder to recruit well, you look at what Dortmund buy at very reasonable prices and its staggering how clubs in our league can't get the same value. 

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3 hours ago, Lambert09 said:

"unexpected triumphs of clubs like Leicester City. To point to such exceptions as counter-arguments is the football equivalent of using a few cold days to dismiss global warming. "

 Very good comparison to be fair. Just because we pulled off the miracle we shouldnt be blind to the reality. The sport can so easily go down a dark path. 

 

Teams disrespecting the FA CUP and EFL cup worries me a lot. If you dont respect the football pyramid we will start to see more and more situations like Bury. The once dream gig of a game at anfield gets diluted because your actually just paying to see the youth team. Over time fans will take the same attitude as the manager and not see the game worth watching.   

 

 

Couldn't agree more, too many people don't look to the long term results of short term decisions and are then the first to cry "nobody saw this coming".

The slow theft of our beautiful game has been insidious but those with vested interests have kept quiet- of course.

The demeaning of the FA and League cups are the most visible but far from the only worrying changes of attitude on the part of the games should be leaders.

But if ordinary fans do nothing because it's "their team manager" or owner damaging the good of the game, then the old divide and rule wins again.

Someone on this forum said he couldn't understand why I and others were so upset with Klopps disgraceful actions because "it wasn't even my team"!

Such a blind not to say thoughtless attitude will spell the end for the game as we know it and I fear the old political quip "no one ever underestimated the intelligence of the average voter" could equally be said of the average football fan.

If this bias is allowed to continue unchecked then our sport will cease to justify the name and will become like WWE-Fake but profitable, that's when real fans depart for ever.

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17 hours ago, Realjimbo said:

Just in on BBC news:-

The Oxford English Dictionary has changed its definition of the word Yid to include a "supporter of or player for Tottenham Hotspur".

Apparently they narrowly missed out on

"perpetual losers", "has beens" and "big headed b*stards"

But there's always next year.

Did they mention Spud cry baby whining jealous Cnuts 3rd in a 2 horse race in the descriptive of Tottenham Lukewarmspurs ?

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Why did Brighton feel it necessary to give Graham Potter what was it? A five year contract? Based upon how Brighton are ‘playing better football’? 
Playing better football and ‘progressing’ could easily equate to relegation.

Football clubs don’t have make some bizarre decisions at times

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