Very good article on the implications of BT's latest attempt to shove aside SKY and find some room in the fight to broadcast sport, with their £900M payment to televise European football. The piece goes into the ramifications and ties in the Financial Fair Play initiative as well. It projects, as most of us thought, and Nicola Cortese voted against, that the rich will get even more powerful at the expense of smaller clubs, and therefore competition, the heart blood of all sport, will diminish with the same names winning titles, cup and trophies. It also shows how fairly diverse the competition was before the PL came into being. It may well be that Saints have got in on the act just in time. http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/24958189
This is probably the start of the European Super League…would be no surprise to anyone if there is a breakaway from the domestic competition…not sure how I feel about it.
It would bring the end of away support. Fans may travel for a rare event, but won't be able to afford or spare the time to follow their team round Europe.
Horrible idea. Even now you see half empty stadia for all but the top clubs. Most people prefer the cut and thrust of the local derby (with the odd game against Barcelona thrown in for good measure!).
Only if we CL Football this or next year; also, we will need a bigger Stadium and fans to fill it (which they will if we do smoehow manage to get CL football). If we want to stay competitive at the top, anyhow. Staying in that second tier of Spurs\Everton\Liverpool etc. isn't beyond us but climbing that 'cliff' to 4th is just going to get harder every year without lots of money and with FFP, I'm inclined to agree that it is indeed 'unbridgable' (to mix my metaphors). On the plus side, our Academy is going to be our biggest asset in the near future if they can keep up the supply of quality we've been getting recently, then either we're going to manage to stay near the top on the relative cheap, or another revenue stream that other second tier clubs can't match (at least until they catch on) that can help us up that cliff.
I think a super league is more attractive to European teams than English ones. If given a stark option to leave the Premier League to enter a European Super League I can't see any English team leaving.
Everything is surmountable, save one thing - profile. What I mean is a presence in the sporting world, of the likes of ManU, Real Madrid, etc... They'll never achieve that kind of profile in the near future, or possibly at any time. It doesn't figure well for Saints that we have a less than illustrious past [let's not kid ourselves], compared to the big clubs. One FA Cup, a JPT, a 3rd Division championship, and several runners ups and finals don't make for a bulging trophy cabinet. We could do with Everton's achievements, for example - then we'd sit at the top table comfortably. Profile is going to have to be earned. Can it be done..? Well, before big money came to ManC and Chelsea, they weren't the highest profile clubs by any means either, though they had more trophies than Saints, that's for sure. But neither club have had the impact of say, Arsenal or Liverpool, though that hasn't stopped them becoming equally as big, possibly bigger, in terms of profile. So yeah, get the message out there. Get some silverware won and some presence amongst the big boys. If it was anyone else, bar Cortese, I'd probably suggest we forget it. But with him at the front, I think it's doable.
That's the spirit TSS That article talks of Southampton and Everton doing well then big players move? Which big players are they then? They don't understand that we will replace any with another big player straight from our academy. lol and of our squad likely to leave if we do well I can only think of the recent arrivals like Osvaldo or Wanyama. I think even Lovren may be buying into the 'club for life if I am good enough philosophy'.
That is a depressing article. I don't want to open a well worn debate but yet again this comes down to wages. I'm not going to preach about what I think a top footballer "deserves" because there are always enough people who argue that they deserve whatever they can get. However, the absolute fact remains that it is wages which eat up the budget and until there is some sort of wage control it will continue to be money that dictates success or failure on the football pitch. And that just isn't what sport should be about. For once, the Americans have it about right, although their sportsmen still manage to earn silly money, but they at least recognise the importance of competition and do their best to ensure that everyone starts equal.
We haven't had it tested in the PL yet, but I've a feeling that Cortese, possibly even more than Pochettino, engenders an atmosphere of loyalty and ambition at Saints. Chamberlain went off at the sound of Arsenal ringing the doorbell, but that was League One. This is different, and the players are seeing that they can possibly achieve things right here. What with pundits, professionals and hangers-on, coming out of the woodwork to proclaim what a genius coach Poch is, and Cortese being able to look back at a meteoric [there's no doubt, it is] rise in the past few years, then he sells them the future, I don't see any player who fits in budging an inch from St Mary's. In fact, I wouldn't mind betting a few divas are starting to consider Saints as an excellent career move.
How long before the top half of the Premier League break away and form a 10 team super league where [like the SPL] they play each other 4 times? Money Money Money - this is why I HATE the Premier League. Even when we were in it, it just didn't feel right. Sterile football that I find horribly boring to watch. When I was living in the UK I would NEVER bother watching Premier League games on sky [apart from Pompey of course], but give me a Friday night Conference fixture and I'd tune in. The lower quality, the unforced errors etc makes for a more entertaining game for the neutral {IMO}. Rant over before I start rambling like a mad fool!
I'm with you on that. You just have to listen to the players; it's all a bit Stepfordesque. They all talk about the project and about Nicola and MP in a very committed and unusually devoted way. I love that there was NO serious talk at all last summer about people leaving (bar the ones the club wanted to go). They all appear to be at one with the club. I see that as a large part of our success. They have all bought into the new style of play as a way of achieving our target. In that light, I don't think that MP/NC will be wanting any divas as they may well upset the balance of the team. Vin
I don't know Devon, but I don't think it will be soon. The glamour clubs need the lesser clubs to beat. And yes, as mentioned many times, I hate the Premier League too. It is no advantage at all, to the supporter, over a normal First Division. Shall I bother to mention that I foresaw this when everyone clamoured for SKY..? Perhaps not.
I would bet the majority of those Divas, no matter who they are, will get the same response that Strachan gave to Adebayor I wouldn't be surprised if a list of players touted to us that we turned down pre season totalled more than we enquired about. Trouble is that most of the people on here are all about facts, figures, reality this, money that. They don't believe in romance or the possibility of players buying into a project. To them it is a player saying the right things to suit circumstance etc. I bet Osvaldo doesn't buy into the project at all. He's here because Mauricio is here and at this juncture it's whats best for him. Wanyama? maybe but I doubt it. I would suggest that he will be off in a couple of years even if we won the PL to a 'bigger' club for bigger wages. If that were as true as many say I think many of our player's agents (Luke, Morgan spring to mind) would never have signed extended contracts. I'm sure that both of their agents will know that Cortese isn't going to accept what they are worth as a transfer fee and that they are virtually now chained to Saints until either a silly £40m offer comes in or they are in the last year and a half of that extended contract. We should start to accept that the romance of a player accepting less than he can get may well still be alive at least for some I guess we will see come the end of the season.
To a certain extent you could class Osvaldo as a Diva, although I think that is hugely influenced by the media coverage in Italy, the very land of the term. Not sure that he won't buy into the project either. Fellow countryman as a persuasive chairman. A previous manager who he got with extremely well before coming here, and the fact that, despite the ifs, buts and hype of the transfer market, he'd decided fairly early on that he was coming to Southampton. What he needs to do is fulfil his end of the bargain. Then we'll see whether he's allowed to remain a part of the project.
Imagine if clubs were forced to spend a percentage of income on youth development. That would naturally cut wages and improve England's chances of improving by 2034...
Or you would have loads of Chelseas who produce loads of really good players and then never play them. (i.e. Terry being the last one)
Football is ****ed. Men's football, women's football. It's all one great big cluster **** from the Premier League to non-league and every league in between. And the FA don't care as long as the money keeps flowing. No matter how many clubs go bankrupt, no matter how uncompetitive the Premier League is, no matter how much damage is being caused to football of it, no matter how many fans they alienate, no matter how big the gulf between the big 4/6 and everyone else. The FA, FIFA, UEFA, all as bad as each other. One day the revolution will come. Here is the thing about equality, every club's equal when they're liquidated.
