My grandson is an Arsenal supporter, he kept winding me by saying that Liverpool is a loser . In order to keep him quiet, I sent his father the league table , Arsenal 4th Tottenham 5th. I added Arsenal and Tottenham are in the same league. I am waiting to hear from him.
It’s funny hearing forest say that they could have sold Johnson to Brentford for 30m in June and complied with ffp but instead sold him to spurs for 45m in august which meant it went into next seasons accounts. I’m sorry but how’s that an excuse? That’s just poor planning. That’s like me owing my mortgage on 31/07, not paying it but paying it in August then moaning when I’m charged interest. What forest should have done is spent 250m buying 25 new players then buying a few more, half of which have been moved on or don’t play
Messi wins best player at fifa awards. The awards were from December to august as didn’t include the World Cup as were used in last years awards.. so messi won it because he helped psg win the title and then scored a few goals in usa. Haaland on the other hand scored 50 off goals and won a treble… What a shambles of an award. What I do find funny is reading who some of the other captains voted for. Lyle Taylor voted for rice Roberto martinez voted for Brozovic
Lamine Camara from Metz. Scored a couple for Senegal at the ACON, including an absolute cracker. A 20 year old, goal scoring midfielder…..will keep an eye on him for the rest of the tournament.
Few things on this: - Brighton's owner has pumped **** loads of money into the club. Half a billion in 15 years (club in league one when he took over) - They've still got no real chance of progressing any further they reached last year. How do they breach the next gap? It's not possible under current rules - No guarantee this continues to work. 7/8 years ago everyone was saying the exact same things about us. Only takes one poor summer of transfers or one poor managerial appointment - The big clubs (and specifically their American owners) absolutely do want to maintain the status quo. To deny this is denying reality, remember project restart?
I think this is fair. Actually FFP is more equal now that it would be under the UEFA rules. the egalitarian (ha!) nature of the premier league means everyone gets the sample slice of cash and everyone has the same limits to work under. the only difference is the amount of wage son offer. Brighton have absolutely 100% maximise what can be done as a club of their support base. A nice if a bit boring 32k stadium, lots of expensive hospitality available. Global scouting networks and science based recruitment. training facilites done. I totally agree with you that if they get a couple of decisions wrong it will fall apart rapidly. Whats happened from 1992 onwards is that certain "big" clubs got the global reach and global exposure for growth and some joined them in 2004 and 2010. Those clubs have collected in 4x the revenue streams so an pay those wages and trade the players while carrying higher amortisation numbers on the books. By accident of history Brighton are very late to the party and its very hard grow the club revenues globally to match the big clubs. Its a lock out in other words unless you secure a region of the world thats going to give you money and attract large corporate sponsors. Other clubs such as Everton have basically stood still and not bothered themselves to grow in this way. Everton and brighton basically have the same revenue numbers as do palace, villa and a few others. the 200mil mark seems to be a glass ceiling. What the yanks and oil states want is the prme to go to the eufa ffp model which then allows them to fully exploit this increased revenues and make the smaller clubs even less competitive. Man utd for example have 2 hands tied behind their backs through rank signings and grossly inflated wages and are hard up against ffp. If they sold sancho they could buy but because they gave him a ridiculous wage (same for mount btw) they are now stuck with them. They want ffp to change to favour them the status quo is actually too restrictive for the rich boys! This for me however is not about the big boys. This is about having football for fans in future. the bad owners the fa etc allow buy clubs, the mulitple club ownership and the bad actors who'd happily grab a franchise and move to jeddah int he morning don't care at all about fans so any rule that keeps the thing somewhat in check is vital. If we want to see the kind of very exciting things everton did with james and the like (never mind siggurdsson, keane, lookman etc) and then club collapses then we are on a good path. the new proposed everton owners are worse than anything thats happened to leeds for exmaple. Its a shocker. we need clubs that can compete fairly while fans can be confident they will still be around in 50 years (irrespective of their sporting success) It is in the end a day out for a group of mates on the weekend more than a 1.5hour armchair fest.
I don’t think it’s about maintaining status quo. That suggests that liverpool want united and city to continue to be strong. They’re all in it for themselves and they want themselves to be the strongest/one of the strongest. I think it’s a really tough one because you don’t want to stop clubs progressing. And we all know to do that you need money and lots of it for it to be sustained. However we can’t go back to a complete free for all. I think most fans want a competitive league and if it was a free for all you’d have 2 clubs spending unlimited money and putting ridiculous wages out there. Then you run into 2 problems. 1, teams spend more and more to try keep up. That means more wages for average players, which means clubs next level down have to spend more wages to try keep their players and suddenly clubs lower down are getting into difficulty by trying to just maintain their current squads. or 2, you say sod it and let those 2 teams do what they want and it becomes a Scotland situation where you have 2 teams dominating the league each year and everyone else just fights for the other few places and a cup now and then. There needs to be some kind of control, not to stop progression or stop clubs going bust, but just to add some sort of fairness. Why can’t there be a squad salary cap like there is in NFL. You get £5m to spend on your squad wages. Whether you split that evenly or have 2/3 huge earners. Maybe every 3 years you can spend X% over your revenue to allow clubs that can afford it to spend more? maybe after a takeover if the owner can put aside X amount for the first few years in order to progress the team
Long time no see - hope you're doing ok. Looks like there's a serious danger of you getting back to the big time, you have my condolences. As to your post: It's not the big clubs that brought in FFP is it? Although I'm sure you could claim that they were behind it. The fact is that something had to be done to prevent clubs overspending and going to the wall. You can argue that it has a protectionist element as a by-product of that, but I don't think that was the specific intention behind its introduction. I'd rather see even more done to prevent a massive influx of money into the game, and I wish it had happened earlier, before the sugar-daddies and state ownerships rocked up - but that would have taken a degree of foresight well beyond the football authorities. Imo, the massive amounts of money have ruined the game as a competition - I'm not sure how you fix that, but allowing even more massive amounts to be lobbed in isn't the answer.
Alright bud, yeah I'm good thanks and enjoying being able to celebrate goals again! Unfortunately does seem a real possibility we'll be back next year but it's been great fun equalling an 102 year old record for unbeaten matches and I've loved having a season ticket. Be a shame if I have to give it up but I still harbour hopes of a Wembley defeat in May Money has undoubtedly ruined the game and that started way before Abramovic imo and making the game global and opening up to foreign investors meant this was always going to be inevitable. See no way back now sadly. We'll agree to disagree about the original intention of the regulations (David Gill was a big driver of it wasn't he?) and I'm not sure how they prevent clubs going bust as I'm sure Bury/Southend/Reading fans would agree. Not really arsed about a long debate on FFP as we've done it to death tbh and I've no need to follow the PL now though I see you've a good chance of winning it this year which would be good for the league.
Cheers for detailed responses both but as said to saint not really interested in long debate on it as we've done this dance before many times and not sure there's much else to say really. I still maintain that it's wrong to limit how much a business owner can invest in his business but it's a complex issue with lots of nuance involved. Really I just wanted to provide some context on the post around Brighton as there seems to be some misleading narratives around them, and they're classed as having done things in the 'right' way despite the owner pumping half a billion in which is the very thing many here were against I thought. Also that I don't believe that sell to buy and progression plans are sustainable long term as maintaining high success rates in recruitment is very difficult in any industry. As I say this was us not that long ago and it very quickly fell apart though I don't expect it to go quite so badly with them as they have an engaged chairman who's also a fan.
