joe_fishfish

Shattered nightmare is an excellent phrase.

Something the government could do to stop the greed and give the TV viewers actual choices would be to stop exclusive PL rights. Make each game available on two or three services. That way the media dickheads like Sky would actually have to compete on the quality of THEIR product, the coverage, rather than the depth of their pockets.

If these had been brought in our owners would have been even more determined to break away. There's loads of things wrong with the way things are at the moment. This super league addresses none of them, and probably makes things worse.

I mean, being charitable there, he's calling out the Man Utd ownership as the worst of the lot. He's just not being direct enough.

Feels like a total afterthought this game now. Slightly unreal.

Anyway the important difference between the Premier League and this is that at least the Premier League had promotion and relegation. Once you're in this ESL it's guaranteed cash for your club forever and no chance of anyone outside of it getting your place instead.

City will just find creative ways around whatever regulations are put in place. They'll pay people off the books, get Etihad to sponsor a player's shoelaces for £450m, stuff like that. And if the other clubs try and kick them out they'll tie them up in legal wrangling for years. Chelsea will continue to operate their loan army, probably even expand it, and that's to the detriment of everyone involved as well. PSG turning it down is probably a good thing for the ESL because they'd be worse than either. I reckon the old money clubs have let the fox into the henhouse by inviting City in particular.

Yes, because City have shown they respect the spirit and letter of the law when it comes to FFP. Doesn't make sense for the old money clubs to have asked City and PSG to be in this if they care about FFP.

The biggest offenders against FFP are Man City and PSG and both clubs were asked to be in the ESL. Don't think this is about FFP at all.

The only way I'd be behind a breakaway league is if it's a kick up the arse to UEFA and the Premier League to get their shit together - e.g. by employing competent referees. Sadly this just looks like a massive cash grab for the bigger clubs.

Ardja would be devastated if Abraham was on the market and we didn't go for him.

That result is just going to make our weak capitulation to Leeds on Monday night all the more frustrating. Always liked Willock as a player. Nowhere near good enough for us but he's got something about him.

Yeah I think it's important. This is the problem with the statistical approach for things like this - you miss the second order effects. You have to optimise the whole, not each part. Otherwise you end up doing Charles Reep style long ball shite. If you're just looking at the places on the pitch where shots are most likely to go in, then yeah, shooting from outside the box is gonna look shit compared to shooting inside the six yard box. It's too simple an analysis though. For a start it's not accounting for where the opposition are. I'd rather give up a chance inside the six yard box with the entire back four and goalkeeper on top of the striker than a shot from 20 yards under no pressure with only the goalie to beat. Also, maybe if you take away all the shots from outside the box, the number of chances you get inside the six yard box goes down, perhaps because there's nothing to draw the defenders out of a low block. Problem is, you're relying on correlation to figure out the effects of shots from outside the box on how many six yard box chances you get. That sort of indirect relationship is always harder to tease out of the stats, correlation is not causation and all that. It's like if you're working on a production line and you have an incredibly thorough QA team testing everything that's made to a ridiculous degree. They never find a problem because everyone on the production line is shit scared of them and takes extra care on building anything. Then some bean counter comes along, looks at the defect rate being picked up, sacks all the QA team because they're not finding anything, expecting to save a fortune, and then wonders why everything the factory makes has suddenly taken a nosedive in quality.

Heggem was a decent player as well, always injured though.

You might be able to accuse FSG of being sell-to-buy owners who don't put in their own money, but I don't think anyone can argue in good faith that they've taken money out of the club from selling players. They're not Tom Hicks.