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Anybody else fucking despise international football?


23_Carra_Gold
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11 hours ago, Harry's Lad said:

It's the way players are called up when their clubs are nursing them back from injury, or they have had a knock or felt a muscle twinge etc and they come back broken.

Does my fucking head in. 

 

The club pays the wages, the club has to deal with trying to play without them when they are out injured, so the club should decide whether a player can go or not.

 

Unfortunately, it's not like that, so fuck them.

 

Had to give Tuchel a bit if credit when he basically questioned Ingurland's sanity in calling Reece James up even though he's out with a fairly long term injury! They admitted it was a mistake, but I wouldn't put anything past those FA cunts!

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Can't stand it. As a kid it was good cause it was the only time you got to see semi mythical players live. Now it's just Chelsea V Man City etc as all the players are here anyway. It's also a bastion for the knuckle dragging hard of understanding wankers this country has so many of. Also injures our players. 

Never watch it nowadays. It's absolute wank.

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Appears Watford refused the club's request to re schedule the game to Saturday evening after the international break.

 

Watford apparently said fans had already made travel plans. Their fanbase is 90% Hertfordshire isnt it? What happened about giving the game back to fans so they could see the top players play? Oh, stacking the deck so you hopefully have more chance of causing an upset takes precedence then?

 

Just why is this league game scheduled for a Saturday 12:30 kick off anyway? Why isnt it Norwich v Brighton? No one wants to watch them on tv you say?

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I think CONMEBOL need to have a serious rethink about the South American qualifying section, especially if they also insist on having a Copa America every couple of years. They have 10 teams so rather than one big league system where every team plays 18 matches, put them in 2 groups of 5. The top two qualify automatically and the two 3rd placed teams play off home and away to secure the continent's fifth World Cup spot.

 

The trouble with this idea is that the national teams will just flood their calendar with a load of friendlies.

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Oh and another thing. The Premier League needs to scrap Saturday lunchtime kick-offs following an international break. All it is really doing, especially in this Covid climate of quarantines and lockdowns, is penalising clubs who have the temerity to be good enough for their players to be in high demand for their national teams too.

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15 hours ago, TheRedMachine said:

Can't stand it. As a kid it was good cause it was the only time you got to see semi mythical players live. Now it's just Chelsea V Man City etc as all the players are here anyway. It's also a bastion for the knuckle dragging hard of understanding wankers this country has so many of. Also injures our players. 

Never watch it nowadays. It's absolute wank.

This. Loved the mystique around the big stars. Such times, very nostalgia. 

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It's utterly, utterly ridiculous, all this international football, and it needs binning immediately.

 

Of course, for that to happen, you'd need to bin FIFA as well, since they're the ones insisting that everyone wants to watch Guinea v Mali every three weeks during the season instead of Liverpool v Man City.

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Not a fan of international football , but credit where it is due , the UEFA Nations League was an excellent idea.Been some excellent match-ups at the top end like the last two nights' semi finals , and actually given absolute minnows like Gibraltar and the Faroes a chance to compete and win in suitably seeded groups.

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Carragher speaks up about the league's integrity being shot with this international nonesense. Rather than introducing the UEFA Nations League to replace 'meaningless international friendlies,' do away with those not introduce another meaningless competition no one wants.

 

The Premier League has a credibility issue on Saturday. For a long time I have considered international breaks an inconvenience. This weekend, it is an unacceptable intrusion. 

 

Eight Brazil players and three from Argentina will be among the Premier League's South American contingent representing their countries in the early hours of Friday morning.

 

The following day, Liverpool are resigned to being without goalkeeper Alisson and midfielder Fabinho at Watford. Manchester City are likely to face Burnley without Ederson and Gabriel Jesus. Chelsea are expected to miss Thiago Silva, Manchester United Fred, and Leeds Raphina. Aston Villa No 1 Emiliano Martinez is a doubt for his side’s game with Wolves.

 

And though Tottenham’s Brazilian Emerson Royal and Argentinians Giovani Lo Celso and Cristian Romero have longer to recover because their club plays on Sunday, a 12-hour flight through different time zones is no preparation for a Premier League fixture.

 

Although all the title-contending clubs are affected to some extent, the integrity of the matchday has been undermined due to avoidable, external circumstances. It is inexcusable that Fifa has allowed World Cup qualifiers to be scheduled at such a time which means the clubs paying the players’ salaries - in some cases around £250,000 a week - cannot reasonably use them in an important domestic match.

 

There should have been compromises to stop this happening. Brazil and Argentina’s first games of this break were last Friday. Even accounting for the disruption caused by the pandemic, they should have been able to reschedule three games in two weeks without it impeding their clubs.

 

The threat of a suspension if these players do not accept an international call-up means the clubs have been bullied into losing their own employees, Fifa able to flex its muscle in order to enhance and promote its own tournaments, regardless of how much it impacts and undermines the domestic game.

 

At a time when the governing body is lobbying for support for its reforms, it is no wonder so many players and managers are unhappy.

Not so long ago I received a call from Fifa’s Chief of Global Development Arsene Wenger as he continued his mission to gather support for a biannual World Cup. Naturally, Wenger is someone I hold in the highest regard, who has many good ideas on how the game should evolve and genuinely wants the best solution to prevent the stop-start introduction to every domestic season.

 

With regards the need for a radical change to the international calendar, Wenger was preaching to a converted audience. 

 

The European qualification rounds for major summer tournaments are of low quality, and are often a boring interruption to the domestic campaign, rarely pitting the best versus the best. Some of the qualifiers look more like pre-season friendlies, where a manager can make 10 changes and still win easily.

 

We see too many games where a poor team with 11 men behind the ball persists with trying to keep the score down when they are two or three goals behind. 

 

Three international breaks before Christmas is too much. It would be better if it was reduced to one longer break in mid-season, and then ending the domestic campaigns earlier to enable a series of qualifying rounds in May or June. That would also help national coaches, building momentum with back-to-back games. Where Wenger lost me was in suggesting there should be more World Cups.

 

The reforms of Fifa and Uefa have added to rather than solved the problem of congestion. To be fair, the Uefa Nations League has produced a higher standard of international football, but when replacing meaningless friendlies with competitive internationals, the end result is still too many games, increasing the chances of top players getting burnt out or injured. And it still does not disguise the reality that club football is vastly superior and far more satisfying for the game’s connoisseurs.

 

My suspicion is that the idea of a biannual World Cup is rooted in Fifa’s envy of the greatest football competition - the Uefa Champions League.

 

That’s where the highest quality football is played, especially from the quarter-finals onwards. Tactically and technically, the best players and managers measure themselves against success in that competition every season. 

 

For Fifa, a biannual World Cup will absorb more of the wealth and attention to their flagship event, increasing revenue from sponsors and broadcasters. Naturally, there will be support from those regions where there is a shortage of elite football, increasing their opportunities to be host nations. It is interesting to note that the biannual World Cup idea was first proposed by the Saudi Arabian Football Federation. 

 

I was on a Zoom conference call with Wenger with other ex-players to discuss the idea. One of his arguments was that there need to be more chances for players born in those countries lacking the infrastructure and opportunities provided by more developed footballing nations.

 

“If you were born with the same talent but you were born in Yaounde, London or Hanoi you have not the same chance to become a great football player,” he said in a recent Telegraph Sport interview.

While they are noble sentiments, it does not follow that nations will inevitably improve simply by being thrust into a higher level. Andorra and San Marino’s decades of poor results tell us that.

 

By the end of my discussions with Wenger and other ex-players, I thought, ‘why are you asking us about solutions instead of the current players?’ Listen to those who must play all these games.

The views of Belgian goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois carry far more weight than those playing 20 or 30 years ago. “We’re not robots,” said Courtois this week. “If we never say anything it will always be the same. They just care about their pockets.”

 

These sentiments were especially well-timed given they were made after a third/fourth play-off game after the Nations League semi-finals. Those play-offs are among the most absurd, unnecessary fixtures, never wanted by the players involved, nor remembered by anyone watching.

 

In their push for a biannual World Cup, voices such as those of Courtois will be as much an inconvenience for Fifa as they are Uefa.

Fifa will continue to hunt for supporters whose agenda aligns with their own - national bodies with ambitions to host the tournament, or ex-professionals eyeing ambassadorial jobs or sponsorship deals.

The most credible opinions are those of the contemporary, elite coaches and players who must deal with the constant physical and mental pressure of travelling around the world and delivering their highest performance levels 12 months a year.

 

Until all the governing bodies start listening to them, there is no prospect of a reasonable fix for an unreasonable and increasingly unsustainable football calendar.

 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2021/10/13/international-break-has-shredded-premier-leagues-integrity/

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He is spot on and the points he is making have been made on here by people like myself many times....particularly about the sporting integrity and the clubs being denied the use of what are their very expensively bought and very highly paid employees....

 

It is a farce.

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On 05/10/2021 at 15:03, El Rojo said:

I love the actual World Cup and European Championship competitions, though the Qatar winter shit-show will probably destroy that. 

Yeah I like the tournaments 

I don't get why people say they only enjoy it when England are in it.

I'm the complete opposite. 

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