The shitness of modern football

[Stickman]

Great article by the always excellent David Conn which sums up the title of this thread.

 

https://amp.theguardian.com/football/2017/jul/23/premier-league-at-25-sky-tv-deal-club-owners-fans-betrayed

[AngryOfTuebrook]

40 years ago today we sold Keegan - a European champion who would go on to be European Footballer of the Year - for half a million pounds: adjusted for inflation, that's about £2.6m.

 

This summer we sold Andre Wisdom for 3 million.

[SlugTrail]

I think the thread title summed it up very well

[Trumo]

40 years ago today we sold Keegan - a European champion who would go on to be European Footballer of the Year - for half a million pounds: adjusted for inflation, that's about £2.6m.

 

This summer we sold Andre Wisdom for 3 million.

 

Vicenza signed Paolo Rossi for a then-world record £1.75m a year before we sold Keegan. Based on the current highest fee paid (£90m-odd for Pogba), Keegan's fee in proportion to Rossi's is equivalent to £25.7m today. Keegan was only 26 when we sold him so Hamburg got themselves a real bargain.

[sir roger]

We got Kenny &  £60k so I've just about got over it.

[Trumo]

You lot might have heard of Justin Kluivert, who broke into the Ajax first team last season. You've certainly heard of his dad Patrick. Well, Patrick's 9 year old son Shane has just signed a boot contract with Nike. He's currently on the books of PSG, and apparently has over 200,000 followers on Instagram.

 

http://www.footyheadlines.com/2017/07/9-year-old-shane-kluivert-signs-nike-boot-deal.html

[Hades]

If it weren't for the shit, repetitive jokes I would have sacked football off a while back.

[SammyAftershave]

Excellent article from David Conn in the Granuid regarding the shitness of modern football:

 

https://amp.theguardian.com/football/2017/jul/23/premier-league-at-25-sky-tv-deal-club-owners-fans-betrayed

 

How fans were betrayed as Premier League club owners made fortune.

David Conn

 

When the Premier League was established with great fanfare 25 years ago, no mention was made of top club owners being allowed to walk away with millions

David Dein, left, who made £75m selling his Arsenal shares, at a 1993 friendly with then Manchester United chairman Martin Edwards, who collected £94m from his directorships and sale of club share.

 

In the Football Association brochure that sanctioned the breakaway Premier League 25 years ago at the dawn of the first pay-TV deal, no mention was made of the personal fortunes it would make for the owners of the bigger clubs. Led by the self-appointed “Big Five” of Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, Everton and Tottenham Hotspur, the First Division clubs had angled and threatened throughout the 1980s to leave the century-old Football League, so as not to share the new TV millions with the clubs in the three lower divisions. The FA’s culture had narrowed and curdled through that decade, which ended in 96 people being unlawfully killed at the 1989 FA Cup semi-final which the governing body itself had commissioned at Hillsborough.

 

The FA produced its “Blueprint for the Future of Football” just two years later, its woolly pages little more than padding for the booby trap at the heart of it: to decapitate the Football League by allowing the First Division to break away. Reflecting on this ruse years later as a profound historic mistake, Graham Kelly, the FA’s then chief executive, said the plan had been for the FA to run the new top league, just as it did the FA Cup. The club owners – referred to as chairmen then, when the game was more coy about the reality that the clubs are commercial companies with shareholders – immediately stripped the FA of that notion and went off to make their billions.

 

The plight of the Hillsborough families and survivors, suffering a repeating nightmare through the legal system with no support from the FA or the newly super-rich clubs, has presented a terrible contrast throughout with the Premier League’s 25 years of Sky-fuelled windfalls.

 

The outrage is thumped home by this coincidence of timing: that the Premier League has reached its quarter century, now wallowing in £2.8bn annual television deals, with clubs spending £50m on right-backs, in the same year that the authorities have finally brought criminal charges for those deaths 28 years ago.

 

The first official report by Lord Justice Taylor identified the causes of the disaster, but the families were still somehow consigned to a 27-year campaign for the truth to be legally established by the new inquests verdicts in April 2016. It was Taylor’s second, final report into safety at sport generally which condemned the governance of football, the state of the grounds, the self-interest and greed of owners and directors, and the dismissive attitudes to supporters who stayed loyal throughout.

 

The clubs accepted Taylor’s recommendation for grounds to be compulsorily all-seater, which was never willed or agreed by supporters organisations who are still arguing for safe standing.

 

At the same time, the clubs managed to persuade the government they did not have the money to rebuild their grounds and secured grants of £200m public money, with the new millions from Sky TV’s desperate search for subscribers just over the horizon.

 

Taylor had argued against the supporters that seats need not necessarily mean higher prices – citing the then £6 cost of a ticket at Rangers’ Ibrox, which was virtually all seats – but the clubs wholly jettisoned that part of his report and multiplied the price of tickets 1,000%.

 

At the heart of the Hillsborough tragedy was the youth of so many who were killed – 37 were teenagers, many attending their first away match – because to stand on that benighted terracing cost only £6, to watch one of the greatest ever Liverpool teams play an FA Cup semi-final against Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest. It has been another betrayal of supporters and the Taylor Report that through the Premier League’s 25 years, in grounds made safe by law because the FA and clubs themselves were no longer trusted to do it themselves, young people have largely been priced out.

 

Football is still as coy now as the FA was in its blueprint about how much money the lucky owners have pocketed personally, and the old myth somehow lingers that mostly they lose their fortunes. Of the original “Big Five”, Martin Edwards made £94m from his directorships and sale of shares in Manchester United, David Moores £90m selling his inherited Liverpool stake to Tom Hicks and George Gillett, David Dein £75m selling the Arsenal stake he bought cheaply in the 1980s to Alisher Usmanov. With no blueprint or planning by executive chairman Richard Scudamore or anybody else, the Premier League is now a spectrum of owners from overseas, attracted by the investment value of English football.

 

Successive governments since Labour’s Football Task Force of 1997 have nibbled at this corporate carve-up while being dazzled by football’s media rehabilitation and magnetic appeal abroad. The pledge by the Premier League in 1999 to contribute just 5% of its ballooning TV income to improving squalid grassroots facilities was given in return for the government supporting the 20 top clubs’ exceptional right to maximise their deals by negotiating as a collective league.

 

Currently the Premier League contribution to facilities and community programmes is £100m, just 3.6% of the galactic TV deals.

 

When the sports minister Tracey Crouch appeared in front of yet another select committee inquiry into football’s governance, she asked to be congratulated for securing this figure. Like the FA, football’s sadly compromised governing body, and all her predecessors, she has let the top clubs and their owners get away with it.

[Kloppite]

Not sure if this has been posted already but fuck me what the fucking hell is it posted but fuck me what is it with some people?

 

http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/thousands-pounds-raised-liverpool-fans-13394075#comments-section

 

This is a story in the echo saying that there has been a collection for the individuals who have been locked up after the trouble at old Trafford during the Europa league game there last season.

 

Firstly these people humiliate themselves and every other Liverpool fan and person from this city for causing the trouble in the 1st place. They knew if was going to cause shite but they still done it anyway; but they have now had money raised for them because they are going down.

 

I am not suggesting these people have asked for this money but whoever is collecting for them really needs to get to fuck.

[suzy]

The new Man City away kit is called 'true berry' Looks purple to me!

[jimmycase]

The new Man City away kit is called 'true berry' Looks purple to me!

 

Looks shit to me whatever colour it is!

[Strontium]

Well, Patrick's 9 year old son Shane has just signed a boot contract with Nike. He's currently on the books of PSG, and apparently has over 200,000 followers on Instagram.

Following a 9 year old on Instagram. Not at all dodgy.

[suzy]

Looks shit to me whatever colour it is!

Indeed!

[an tha]

This has at least two reasons for being here

 

1. Trophies in pre season are fucking stupid

 

2. This one actually wasn't won by the team who won the most football matches....the team who won both their matches including beating the 'winners' didn't lift the trophy....oh no this one was won by a team who only won 1 of their two games - because they scored the most goals.

 

Fucking hell.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/40770273

 

Laughable:

 

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/jul/30/arsenal-sevilla-match-report-emirates-cup

[AngryOfTuebrook]

Pre-season, generally, with all the frantic talk around transfers (most of which never happen) and the hype around friendly, training matches.  And it lasts all summer.  It almost makes me want to watch cricket.

 

Almost.

[setreal]

If it weren't for the shit, repetitive jokes I would have sacked football off a while back.

 

Takes one to know one.

[VladimirIlyich]

Pre-season, generally, with all the frantic talk around transfers (most of which never happen) and the hype around friendly, training matches. And it lasts all summer. It almost makes me want to watch cricket.

 

Almost.

Yep. If it wasn't on sky then I probably would too.

[Trumo]

Actually, this is a positive step. The Premier League has banned clubs from putting fancy patterns on their pitches, so clubs like Leicester and Southampton will have to stop putting in crop circles.

[navbasi]

 

[navbasi]

CHAMPIONS!

[VladimirIlyich]

 

Wow! Atletico Madrid,twinned with the Blooshite.

[Russ Atmosphere]

[sir roger]

Wow! Atletico Madrid,twinned with the Blooshite.

 

Was a bit surprised at how excited Simeone seemed when they scored.

 

I am a bit old school and think Pre-season matches should be local romps like Wigan winning 13- 0 the other night.

[Moctezuma]

Was a bit surprised at how excited Simeone seemed when they scored.

 

I am a bit old school and think Pre-season matches should be local romps like Wigan winning 13- 0 the other night.

 

I do quite like it when the Italian sides play their first pre-season games against some local amateur side and win 26-0

[Sputnik1]

 

 

 

I have to admit that the best part of not winning that Audi cup thing was that we didn't end up with a photo like that, it's embarrassing. Yeah you won a few pre season fitness games, cringe.