Reply With QuoteOriginally Posted by OneBrianIrvine
Fits this tier sh@t? Never knew about it. Going by the soaking I got on Sat I take it I'm in the sh@tty brown tier and everyone in the Y is such
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The Grauniad taking the piss out of it
https://www.theguardian.com/football...ty-tunnel-club
Spurs are going to have one in their new stadium too, I suppose the people who are really to blame for this nonsense are the fans who are gullible and stupid enough to pay for it.
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Fits this tier sh@t? Never knew about it. Going by the soaking I got on Sat I take it I'm in the sh@tty brown tier and everyone in the Y is such
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Interesting article on Sky this morning, albeit ironic, about football transfers in world football.
Adam Parsons, Business Correspondent :
What do football clubs and anxious socialites have in common? No, this isn't about dreams of a champagne lifestyle, nor about falling out of nightclubs on a Saturday night. Rather, it's about bad cases of FOMO.
"Fear of missing out" is a real thing. As a noun, it's now in our dictionaries. As a business imperative, it drives on our football clubs, who live with the morbid fear that they'll lose their place at the top of the world's most popular sport.
And with good reason. Recent years have seen a succession of clubs, many of them famous old names, sent into a ghastly spiral of relegation from the top league followed by relegation down the divisions. Alongside that has come financial crisis, an exodus of players and dwindling crowds. It is a horrible spectacle that every single club dreads.
That's why they do whatever it takes to mitigate that risk. The biggest clubs in England don't worry about relegation, but they do fret about missing out on Champions League football, on struggling in the league and, ultimately, on losing their lustre.
A clever coach can take you so far but, increasingly, ambitious clubs across the continent have come to the same conclusion about the best insurance policy against FOMO, which is to invest in a succession of players who are, hopefully, a bit better than the ones you already have.
So today brings a special frisson, a particular tingle of energy. Because this is the last day when a Premier League team can buy a player this year. After 11pm tonight, you're stuck with what you've got.
In the language of football, the transfer window doesn't merely close, but slams shut. And it invariably slams to the echo of last-minute deals, of hastily-arranged medicals, and of faintly comical tales of players rushing down the motorway to sign before the deadline.
These are the cliches of football transfer windows, but this one's been different - disruptive, sometimes acrimonious and, above all, ludicrously cash-laden.
Football has got itself into a swirl of ridiculously escalating costs, predicated on the assumption that income will always go up... The same assumption previously made about the value of tulips, houses, dotcom businesses and gold.
Nothing represents that more than the £200m transfer of the Brazilian player Neymar from Barcelona to Paris St Germain. Four years after a murky deal took him to Spain, PSG bankrolled an even weirder deal to take him to France.
Why weird? For one thing, PSG's money comes almost entirely from Qatar. For another, there is no way on Earth that you can justify that transfer on any sensible business grounds. It simply doesn't make sense to pay such a vast sum to sign one player.
Yes, he's a very good footballer, but no - there is no way they'll get back the cost of the transfer fee, Neymar's £500,000 weekly salary or the sums paid out to middle-men, including Neymar's father. This is not a football transfer, it's a vanity purchase.
But what this absurd deal has done, has been to recalibrate the expectations of European football clubs. Barcelona spent the money on signing the promising French player Ousmane Dembele in a deal that could be worth £135m.
Liverpool's attacker Philippe Coutinho has been valued at something like £120m.
Mundane players are now being touted around for fees of £15m, £20m or £30m. And FOMO is leading anxious clubs to buy them.
There are those worrying about all this spending. "I think it's unsustainable," said Pep Guardiola, the manager of Manchester City, but not before orchestrating his own £218m spending splurge. Among that was about £158m spent on the team's defence - a higher level of defence spending than Ghana, Bosnia or Afghanistan.
His concern may sound slightly ironic, but the word is accurate. Football has got itself back into a swirl of ridiculously escalating costs, predicated on the assumption that income will always go up. It's the same assumption that people have previously made about the value of tulips, houses, dotcom businesses, gold and a thousand other things. And history suggests that it almost always ends badly.
Nobody knows what will happen to the next round of television deals in England, France, Spain and around the world. Yes, the income might go up - but will it cover these rising costs? Will transfer fees continue to follow a Neymar-induced spiral? Will we lose the green shoots of financial prudence that, surprisingly, began to sprout in the Premier League?
It's a fear of missing out. "Just one more £20m player, and we'll be safe". But that £20m player wants a four-year contract, and a signing-on fee and £100,000 per week, and suddenly the deal will cost £45m and he might not even get in the team. But every other player now wants to earn at least as much as him.
These are the finances of exuberance, of excess, of bubbles. As its window closes, football should be nervous.
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Football should be nervous as its f@cked
International
The whole deadline day thing is a complete embarrassment! There will come a point where those in the stands will just eventually give up on this! There was an interesting app on BBC website that showed that Neymar would take 24 minutes to earn my annual salary! It would take me 424 years to earn his annual salary.
F@ck that. It is obscene!
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SSN having a a major chug over the obscene 1.5b quid spent by guffball teams this summer. How is it a good thing.
Only 4 teams recieved more money than they spent
Last edited by Pacman1903; 01-09-2017 at 08:08 AM.
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It is obscene if you think about it morally, but that isn't going to stop people going - no more than the huge amounts of money Mayweather/McGregor earned stopped people wanting to watch the fight, the huge amounts film stars make stop people going to the cinema and so on.
Will the bubble eventually burst? Possibly, but there are some reasons to think it won't matter that much if it does. Some of these clubs are backed by states and may as well have infinite resources. Even the ones that aren't explicitly owned by countries have a kind of under the table de facto guarantee that if they got into serious financial trouble they'd find a way out of it. At worst they'll drop down the leagues and come back again like Sevco. There is essentially a zero percent chance Real Madrid, Barcelona, PSG (and so on) will somehow cease to exist. Governments won't allow it, UEFA won't allow it, so there's no real jeopardy. Even a catastrophic financial collapse would be forgotten about in a few years.
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I sort of disagree. For these clubs to crash in the first place, there would have to be a burst of the bubble or less demand from the fans to pay these obscene amounts. If either happen, the so called 'fans' will walk away. There is no affiliation when it comes to these 'big' clubs and they will soon find something else to focus on.
Football is just another fad for those with money to burn. The hardcore bunch will always go to games, but the glory hunters and the masturbators of transfer windows will vanish quickly. Lets face it, half the guys in the stands in England or Spain etc do not anything about football. Its about prestige and signing multi million pound kids with sh!te haircuts. Transfer deadline day epitomises English football and its as cringy as it is immoral. W@nking over £1.5bn being spent is utterly tragic and football has forgotten itself.
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Aye, but in your industry it'll be some chunt in a suit who does about 2 hours work a week who'll be the one earning the millions, being flown around in private jets, and not the chunt (i.e you) who actually does the work. There's money in fitba whether we like it or not, and i'd much rather it went to a player than some arse who bought himself his seat in the game.
Fitba is about the most socialised industry on earth. No way the highest earning doctor on earth will ever have grown up with nae shoes on a beach in Portugal. No way some prick shareholder of an oil company is going to end up ruined just so his business can pay a Mud Engineer 10 million a year.
Its nae fitba that obscene, that honour falls to the industries that value board members and shareholders over workers.
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Frank De Boer sacked after 77 days at Crystal Palace. 8 days less than when at Inter.
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