An open invitation to Leicester City Football Club

[Bob Weasel Fox]

Cracking idea

not sure who you'd go about getting in touch with but it'd be a fantastic gesture!

agreed good idea

[Criggers]

I honestly fail to see why we should play a non league club in a friendly because we paid £4,000,000 for a player that used to play for them.

Seriously, what the....?

[John Matrix]

I honestly fail to see why we should play a non league club in a friendly because we paid £4,000,000 for a player that used to play for them.

Seriously, what the....?

to curry favour with people so they don't hate "big spending" Leicester so much

[Dan]

Well I'd definitely go.

[CosbehFox]

I have been of the opinion a long time clubs should be forced to play two local friendlies against lower tier side. The likes of Stockport could have done with a visit from United/City when they swan off to the US.

We've hardly been helpful to Hinckley in the past couple of years. Friendlies have stopped against them when dough was needed. Cov always have a PSF with them and Villa Ressies played Arsenal Ressies there last year too.

[Thracian]

So we're sitting here as the transfer window has slammed shut and the vast majority of us are relieved that our search for a striker is over. But spare a thought for those clubs that have less wealth than our own. While money is not the be all and end all, it certainly helps - just look at Plymouth Argyle at the moment.

One way that lower league and non-league clubs can gain revenue during transfer windows is through sell-on clauses. We were/are hoping for one ourselves from Max Gradel's move yesterday. I've seen one or two Lincoln fans on Twitter wondering whether they would get anything from Dany N'Guessan's transfer to Millwall.

What I also saw on Twitter was a remark from the chairman of Beckford's former club Wealdstone FC - Twitter account here - stating that it was a shame they missed out on sell-on money when he moved from Leeds to Everton on a free transfer.

To a club that size, even an amount equivalent to Beckford's weekly wage would make a difference I'm sure. They will produce very few players, if any more, in our lifetimes that will play in the Premier League (and score a brilliant solo goal against Chelsea), so how gutting must it be to miss out on a few quid as you watch your former player on Match of the Day? Pretty irritating, I'll bet.

Wouldn't it be nice if LCFC could do something to raise a few quid for Wealdstone by way of a thank you for helping, in a round about kind of way, to provide us with the striker we've been after in this window?

I'm not necessarily suggesting a direct payment because, despite our money and the positive PR that such a move would bring, I understand the Thais aren't a charity.

But it would be nice if the club approached Wealdstone to arrange a friendly at the very least. I think Leeds had a friendly down there to help raise some money for them a year or two ago - any ideas welcome though. Perhaps someone has a better idea?

What do you all think?

There might be a case for saying that every lower league club should benefit from a percentage of their former players being sold on by league clubs. But it would set a contentious precedent that wouldn't necessarily be justified.

Clubs like Wealdstone invariably benefit from the work of others even further down the line (in Beckford's case perhaps the Chelsea youth set-up) and might not significantly "develop" the player at all.

For instance a player might have moved here, there and everywhere, perhaps as a winger, before a particular club decided he was actually a full-back and developed him into one of the world's best.

Do we deserve anything more than what we negotiated for developing Gradel?. Certainly I'd say Beaglehole and company might have a strong case given the years of effort they put in. But Pearson might have done him more harm than good in not playing him much - at least to the point where he sent him somewhere else.

Seems to me it was Leeds, not us, who made him into a £7.5m player and the bit we'll get is only written testimony to how alarmingly we under-rated him.

Playing friendlies is an admirably kind and generous idea in theory but where do you stop?.

Did Loughborough United, for instance, do anything to improve Bill Garner's abilities as a footballer? If they did, I never noticed it on training nights.

Yet Garner later joined Southend and impressed so much against Chelsea that they signed him three days later for £100,000 where, among other things, he went on to score goals against European Champions Liverpool in helping his club to a famous 4-3 win in the FA Cup.

Loughborough, once members of the Football League under a slightly different name (and 8-0 victors over Arsenal in 1896 ), eventually went out of business and didn't get a penny from the fortune paid for Garner as I ever heard.

But did they deserve anything, any more than Wealdstone now?

Would Garner's first club's Leicester Victoria and Midland Athletic of the Leicestershire Senior League be more deserving? Or perhaps Dunstable and Bedford of the Southern League where he played immediately before he joined Southend?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Garner_(footballer)

http://www.football-heroes.net/football-heroes/displayhero_international.asp?HeroID=36837

Also I can't imagine our manager would necessarily be too happy about having pre-season preparations potentially littered with an inconsequential "social obligation" friendly, merited or otherwise.

Please don't mistake me. I'm all for supporting non-league football, And if our management investigated Beckford's footballing background and decided to make some kind of financial gesture to Wealdstone, I'd be extremely happy.

But playing a match would be setting what might prove an awkward precedent given who else might feel deserving either now or in a similar situation. There must surely be sounder and fairer ways of helping the non-leaguers.

[biggs]

I honestly fail to see why we should play a non league club in a friendly because we paid £4,000,000 for a player that used to play for them.

Seriously, what the....?

Agree

[Raw Dykes]

This.

Wealdstone got their 45k for him when he was sold to Leeds, if they had a sell-on clause as part of that deal it's just tough luck that Beckford went on a free to Everton. If anyone is to be thinking of trying to help them financially then it should be JB himself, I'm sure he'll have raked in two pretty hefty signing on fees with his moves since.

Although it's not too much trouble for us to play a friendly against them, that they may consequently make a bit of dosh from, I just think the idea of helping out the little club who once owned a player we just signed five years ago is a little too tenuous. If LCFC is to be helping smaller clubs by playing friendlies then arguably it should be the smaller clubs within Leicestershire. Would it be right for us to play Wealdstone at the expense of Quorn FC, for example, one year? I would say not.

You're right. I'm all for helping out non-league clubs, but I can't see why we should look to raise funds for Wealdstone over any others, especially small clubs in Leics. LCFC are the only fully professional club in the whole county! I think we should carry on arranging friendlies with Hinckley, Quorn and the rest before any small clubs we happen to share a tenuous link with.

[Bryn]

Wouldn't be averse to a friendly against them but then not particularly for it either. That transfer was between Leeds and Everton, it had nothing to do with us. I appreciate your point though.

[Trav Le Bleu]

We still haven't done anything nice for (Hayes &) Yeading, whom DJ Campbell played for three teams before his Leicester days, so let's take care of that first before worrying about whom Jermaine Beckford played for three clubs ago himself.

Either the FA changes its laws to make sell-on clauses mandatory for non-league to league transfers, or the Wealdstones of the world use the Beckford case as a lesson learned.

Fez makes a good point, but so does Jordan. Have we got the time to do this for every small club we've ultimately inherited players from? Admittedly it doesn't happen often, but as Jordan says, maybe the FA needs to implement something?

[MPH]

Its an interesting idea, one i approve of and actually something i have thought about often in the past myself..... " How do we go about helping the lower league football teams and indeed non league football."?

Players coming from non league football and lower league football is getting few and fewer.... with all the youngsters around Europe getting snapped up by talent- hungry clubs..

Promotion to the premier league is already worth about 90million in a season....

My rather simple and, admittedly, potentially Naive plan would be cut that back to something like 80m and distribute that other money to lower league / non-league teams. Force prem teams to limit the amount of foreigners allowed in their YOUTH team and football in the lower divisions could well be kickstarted again. It could potentially force top clubs in England to be looking for british talent paying non league teams decent money for players they have developed ( with their new money!) and everyone is happy. Maybe

[Freeman's Wharfer]

Just a point on people saying about 'filtering' money (TV, Premier League) down to the non-League levels of football. Personally I think that the filtering of money is more of an issue regarding the gulf between the Premiership and the rest of the Football League (especially League One & Two). I would consider non-League a different matter.

Although it's great for us to help clubs like Quorn and Hinckley out by playing pre-season friendlies that will give them the money through gate receipts to make improvements as a football club (something which then benefits the local community), there has to remain a footballing hierarchy for there to be this benefit for them. I would imagine 99% of the gate at those pre-season fixtures are there to see LCFC. If the money is more evenly distributed and the gulf reduced between the clubs then the fixture wouldn't happen.

And if this gulf is diminished then non-League football loses the thing that differentiates it from League football: freedom from the influence of large-scale money.

If you asked most LCFC fans who would you support if LCFC no longer existed? Most would say their local lower/non-league side. So imagine if this did happen: LCFC go bust and our 30,000+ fan base gets split amongst the local sides such as Coalville, Loughborough, Quorn etc. Their fan base would swell, they would make more money, become more competitive and inevitably move up the footballing ladder within time. All that would happen is a shift of teams up from tier to tier up the hierarchy until LCFC's absence is no longer felt/significant.

Look at AFC Wimbledon for example; have they moved through the leagues because seven divisions lower they happened to have exceptionally good players playing beneath themselves? No. They had a larger than normal fan base for the level at which they began so were consequently advantaged with more money which afforded them better players in order to find their way to a level proportionate to their support. Now they're in the Football League the size of their fan base becomes less beneficial (hence Sheffield Wednesday and United being in the third tier). But in non-league it certainly is/was a factor.

There has to remain a significant difference between the money in the Football League and non-League to maintain the hierarchy. And I think that this is a difference that the smaller clubs don't mind; people go to non-League football because it isn't influenced/polluted by money in the same way that League football is. If the money was to be filtered down and there was more of a level financial playing field I think football would miss the variety that each level of the English game offers. If I want foreign superstars I stick Sky Sports on and watch the Premier League, if I want basic football I can pop to my non-League club. This contrast is a result of an uneven distribution of money.

If we are to filter money down the leagues then what are we doing this for? To make the non-league sides more competitive? Because that is the only thing that would happen. And as perverse as it may sound, I think that would take something away from English football.

I'm not sure if I've articulated my point as clear as I might have liked: Yes, I think that it's good to help local non-league sides every summer with a friendly (I hate all the Emirates Cup things that replace money-spinner friendlies for the smaller teams based near the bigger clubs), but in terms of the filtering of money I think there has to remain an imbalance to make English football what it is.

[Finnegan]

We could let them sell Leicester shirts in their club shop.

[Dicko]

I honestly fail to see why we should play a non league club in a friendly because we paid £4,000,000 for a player that used to play for them.

Seriously, what the....?

Agreed. This isn't our responsibility, we've paid a big fee for him.

[OzFox]

I've grown up in a family of Wealdstone & Leicester fans so personally I'd love to see this happen. The Stones got well and truly shafted over the sale of their home ground in the late 80s (it's now a Tesco) and have spent the last 20 years slowly recovering financially and on the pitch. They only recently got their own stadium (in Ruislip, several miles from Wealdstone) From that point of view, it would be great to see them get any sort of cash injection. Like others on here though, I'm not convinced they actually "deserve" anything for developing Beckford.

And while he was sensational in his time there, I'm not sure he's too popular these days. This is what a Wealdstone supporting mate of mine had to say yesterday: "Beckford is a wan*er because he walked away from leeds at the end of his contract and pissed away our 20pc sell on clause and he didn't ask everton to bung us a few quid when they picked him up for nothing"

Someone has posted a link on their forum to this discussion. I'd be interested to hear what other Stones fans have to say

Stonesnet