Prem clubs not dealing with us

[trinitoon]

Exactly mate... think about what Wallsend Boys Club has produced over the years on a pittance. Pump some millions into the community to turn our passion for football into an education in it, get schools and sports clubs their coaching badges and get our adults teaching our kids the beautiful game every night. It won't take long before we're creating talent on and off the field on a regular basis, not to mention the social benefits of keeping these kids off the streets and focused on footy.

There's also some really interesting innovation in sports science going on at our local uni's, including some research into the benefits of low light training and a bunch of other crazy ideas that would never have crossed my mind - all about how to get that extra % that makes an ASM a Lionel Messi. All of this could provide better returns than paying Aaron Ramsay £400,000 a week to play 20 games a season.

Aye. Consider this:

Pump £100m into an Academy. Nah, fuck it: £200m. 200 million quid. No Academy on this planet for any sport anywhere could touch that for a long, long time. When that starts bearing fruit, a single top player will be worth £200m. Now you would imagine that an academy funded by £200m would do more than yield one good player.

Now double that...

If you're in it for the long term like they say they are a £400m investment in the future cannot be blocked by anyone. And if something like that started pumping out talent, no parent with a kid that is any good with a football would go anywhere else for the foreseeable. Any level of investment north of £100m would make us a football superpower and some of that kind of thinking needs to happen.

...and PIF couldn't spend that money easily now with all the Levy-led boycotts, rules being hurriedly rewritten as we speak, FFP top-club-protection-racket, etc.

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Saudi Arabia would also do well to reset their thinking on Women's Football... If they could use something like Newcastle to show that they can reform liberties in their own country with sport, something good can come out of this. These kinds of things don't happen overnight but MBS has made very slow moves to reform. While no one can pretend that football can fix all the ills in a country, hopefully the enthusiasm for football could bring about some reciprocal changes there.... in attending and playing football at least.