Has football lost its integrity and morallity?

  • Please bear with us on the new site integration and fixing any known bugs over the coming days. If you can not log in please try resetting your password and check your spam box. If you have tried these steps and are still struggling email [email protected] with your username/registered email address
  • Log in now to remove adverts - no adverts at all to registered members!
"Liverpool had made all the right, persistent moves for Van Dijk and how delighted they must be with the man who, it wasconfirmed yesterday is to be crowned PFA player of the year."

This is the player who Brendan Rodgers (when he was Liverpool manager) wanted to buy when VVD was still a Celtic player...and the Liverpool scouts said he wasn’t good enough for the premier league.
 
  • Like
Reactions: davecg69
Schad said:
No, it's that the complaints are directed at the wrong place, in my eyes. Liverpool is doing what a team in their position does. We are doing what a team in our position does. If one wants that to change, it'd have to be real systemic change; playing within the rules as currently constituted is such an onerous burden that no one does it. Complaining that Liverpool doesn't handcuff themselves when we don't handcuff ourselves is ultimately pointless.

There are two factors at play:

- The formalized system of making offers and then negotiating contracts with players frankly makes no sense. No team is going to spend weeks going to and fro with bids without any idea of whether a deal can be reached with the player. Hence, back-channeling is damned near universal...agreeing a fee is generally the last step, not the first. I have no idea how to change this, barring seriously harsh penalties for tapping up, because tapping up simply makes sense. Maybe a Tinder-style app where players can swipe right on a team to indicate that they'd be happy to join them, and if the purchasing team also swipes right, they then enter negotiations with the selling club? **** me, that started as a joke but it's actually the closest I've come to a solution, and yeah that's sad.

- The fact that contracts can be ripped up at any time, the massive fees due to agents (relative to the fees earned by agents in other sports), and the manner in which those fees are earned, incentivizes transfers. The issue here is that I don't believe that either UK or EU contract law would allow for the one real solution: making contracts, rather than player rights, transferable, because you'd need a UEFA-wide collective bargaining agreement. But that's basically what would need to happen: moving to a big team today wouldn't be so desirable if you were bound to the same deal until it expires, which happens to be the case for most other professional sports.

That said, reform of the agent market would make a difference. In most industries and most sports, the agent is paid by the individual that they represent, usually a percentage of their salary/any peripherals they earn. In football, they are paid by a team (or in some cases, both teams) in the form of a negotiable fee when a new contract is signed. Pursuant to the previous bit, this creates a strong incentive to sign lots of contracts. If your livelihood (or at least the payments on your new Maserati) depend on frequent contract churn, you aren't going to sit on your hands and hope the team your player is contracted to decides to accept an offer.

Additionally, the number of agents-that-aren't-player-agents is staggering. There is this weird market of middlemen who exist, and get paid, to connect buyers to sellers in football that simply doesn't exist anywhere else, something that has gotten a fair bit of attention with the Cardiff-Nantes drama over the Sala tragedy. Fewer fingers in pies would mean a process with far fewer players attempting to scheme behind the scenes.
Click to expand...

Cor, Schad! You might be right with your very exact & sanitised view of the system but you know as well as me it ain’t gonna happen. More likely to go Juva’s way than above. Anyway, i’ll continue on my rather blinkered SFC “hard done” by route, on this subject & all other manner of other things. which allows me to have teams I dislike & ones I have some stupid affinity for. It adds to a bit of, NO a lot of added spice & passion, albeit it, probably daft, which is what makes me love football & especially SFC. Here’s to me shouting my mouth off (aka James) this afternoon pushing Saints & deriding AFCB for a silly notion about who’s the best club on the South Coast! <doh> <laugh> COYS
 
Beddytare said:
I just wonder folks how we would have reacted had the boot been on the other foot. Ok I agree we wouldn’t be paying such a large fee for a player. Yes I agree it was an illegal move, but do you honestly think we do not do similar things?? Maybe not using our manager granted but we would be nieve to think we don’t do similar. This type of tap up has been going on probably since around the 70s maybe a bit earlier.

On another note.... am in temperatures ranging from 32-38...... can anyone explain how the hell I’ve got a stinking cold?? <laugh>
Click to expand...

Air conditioning . If it’s where you are , it’s the reason !
 
Archers Road said:
All football clubs are rotten; but Liverpool is more rotten than most (apart from Man City, Chelsea, Real Madrid, Barca etc etc).
Click to expand...

You include Real Madrid, this ultimate of clubs, "royal" by name, even more "royal" by nature, even more "royal" than all the royal families throughout Europe, in your list of rottenness. Can you not forgive them for finding favor with Franco, with the big institutions when in need of cash, with their dark arts when they need to squeeze out a victory, finding favours with referees to get opposing players sent off {CL final v Juve], Ramos taking out Salah. Surely we can forgive them for all their sins? Perhaps not?

PS: Well done to Getafe the other night by the way
 
The Ides of March said:
You include Real Madrid, this ultimate of clubs, "royal" by name, even more "royal" by nature, even more "royal" than all the royal families throughout Europe, in your list of rottenness. Can you not forgive them for finding favor with Franco, with the big institutions when in need of cash, with their dark arts when they need to squeeze out a victory, finding favours with referees to get opposing players sent off {CL final v Juve], Ramos taking out Salah. Surely we can forgive them for all their sins? Perhaps not?

PS: Well done to Getafe the other night by the way
Click to expand...

And that other team from Madrid screwed us over when Toby moved to Spuds of course....
 
Saints_Alive said:
I think that the unseemly and quite frankly distasteful ongoing dispute between Cardiff and Nantes answers the OP's original question perfectly.
Click to expand...
May not like it, but it is fully understandable...this money isn't peanuts. If he is a Cardiff player, then Cardiff's insurance will pay out. If he is shown to be Nantes, then their insurance pays out. Cardiff would be idiots to pay the money, then find out he is a Nantes player anyway and they can't claim on their insurance. Easier to withhold the money till the legal side is sorted than to try and get it back later. It's a complicated issue that needs sorting out.
 
fran-MLs little camera said:
May not like it, but it is fully understandable...this money isn't peanuts. If he is a Cardiff player, then Cardiff's insurance will pay out. If he is shown to be Nantes, then their insurance pays out. Cardiff would be idiots to pay the money, then find out he is a Nantes player anyway and they can't claim on their insurance. Easier to with hold the money till the legal side is sorted than to try and get it back later. It's a complicated issue that needs sorting out.
Click to expand...

No solace to the departed's relatives though.
 
Schad said:
They shouldn't have done what they did, in no small part because it was stupid and unnecessary. But we're acting as if we were uniquely disadvantaged; how much of a difference does it actually make that Klopp met with him personally, rather than secretly negotiating a contract with a player through their agent before making an offer to their team, something we have done and practically every team at this level does? Does anyone actually believe that the hotel meeting made any difference, that Van Dijk wouldn't have happily traipsed to Liverpool, with its CL berth and trebled wages, even if he'd never so much as seen Jurgen Klopp in a photo?
Click to expand...

It wasn’t about whether he would leave Saints, it was about where.
That’s why Klopp & Liverpool overstepped the line and that’s why they took the risk.

As you’ve pointed out, the whole system leads to corruption, but in a football world with many conflicting interests, there will never be an ideal solution.
 
Well never mind, the European Super League, with promotion and relegation, looks like it might happen:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/footbal...entus-chairman-andrea-agnelli-outlines-plans/

This would obviously have a profound effect on domestic football, as the Premier League, money-wise, would probably be reduced to somewhere near the status that the Championship currently enjoys. Instead of fighting for Champions League or Europa League places, the “best of the rest” would be aiming at one or two promotion spots to the elite, where the difference in resources would mean they would stand little chance of lasting any longer than Fulham did this season.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back