Ray wrote:

It's funny that Liverpool and Spurs can't afford to pay club staff for a few weeks, and expect the tax payers to cough up, but come the transfer window, they'll drop £30-£50m on a signing.

That’s cos they’ll be spending next year’s money. The optics look bad but that’s the state of the game. These guys are living day to day like drug dealers in Range Rovers and Gucci jackets

jones wrote:

Well said. It's very hard to feel any kind of sympathy for either the football clubs or the football millionaires who still earn millions just by sitting home, when normal people get to choose between temporary layoffs and permanent unemployment.

I guess my position when it comes to the football world in general is that we should just burn it all down. And then salt the earth for good measure.

Uefa will need to come out of this with some liquidity measures to improve ability to withstand shocks and to protect vulnerable staff. They can do things like

  • decrease the wage - revenue ratios
  • mandate a cash reserve that’s equivalent to some percentage of revenues
  • maybe even encourage football teams to increase investments / non-cash holdings etc., as a buffer
  • put clauses that allow reductions in player salaries under certain extraordinary circumstances- like a global pandemic

I can understand the unsavory things that football teams are doing now but it doesn’t mean they need to do them in future

Klaus wrote:
jones wrote:

Well said. It's very hard to feel any kind of sympathy for either the football clubs or the football millionaires who still earn millions just by sitting home, when normal people get to choose between temporary layoffs and permanent unemployment.

I guess my position when it comes to the football world in general is that we should just burn it all down. And then salt the earth for good measure.

Over the years football has meant less and less to me. It’s full of vile, ignorant and greedy folk.

Recent events have just highlighted how wrong the set up is.

Go watch Liverpool and Spurs spend millions when the transfer window eventually reopens...

They’ll lose fans during the recession. I think football makes the mistake of thinking that it’s a unique pastime, but it isn’t. The more Uefa rips apart the fabric of the game by making it expensive and inaccessible to the local fan, the more it changes the nature of the “product” and turns it into an entertainment that can be substituted with watching other sports and TV or playing video games, etc. And the more expensive it gets, the more exposed it becomes during economic crises and consumes need to rethink how many games they watch or shirts they buy.

I hope the next year hurts them. So they rethink it all.

Klaus wrote:
jones wrote:

Well said. It's very hard to feel any kind of sympathy for either the football clubs or the football millionaires who still earn millions just by sitting home, when normal people get to choose between temporary layoffs and permanent unemployment.

I guess my position when it comes to the football world in general is that we should just burn it all down. And then salt the earth for good measure.

Yup, in times of crisis you see the true side of human nature and people. You can understand Leyton Orient doing this, but Liverpool and Spurs who have hundred millions of revenue trying to use this to save costs so when season restart they can have big money transfers again is disgusting.

With 'Stay Home', 'Bring Back Our Girls', 'Me Too', may be even 'Black Lives Matter'...such a shame certain sheep (or wolf in sheep's clothing) feign virtue or blindly partake in social media trends when in reality they don't apply the principles they espouse or don't give a fuck. Its legitimately one of the biggest embarrassment to me. Seriously fantasize the like the rest of us bachelors.

I'm not sure the PL will ever be the same really.

This has just exposed football for what it really is, arrogant, overpaid players working for corporate vile clubs, and its pretty much all of them.

Not felt good about football for some years now, even our beautiful club lost a lot of its soul moving from Highbury to follow. the gravy train, but i'm not sure the business model is sustainable long term for the big clubs now.

I mean, we all knew it, but when you actually think about, its absurd...the money one average pl player earns a week is a 4 nurses salaries for a year. For what, exactly?

Ok, you can make the tax argument: they are paying into the economy etc but unfortunately many or probably nearly all have offshore accounts etc.

Football, of all things, seems utterly meaningless now.

Nothing's been exposed. As you said, we knew all this before. Although nurses do a much more important job than footballers, it's much easier to become a nurse than it is to become a Premier League level football player. The salary is decided by their replaceability rather than how important their job is. That won't change when this is over.

Not to be pedantic but nurses are not remotely replaceable, there’s a shortage numbering in the tens of thousands in the NHS.

The real difference is that while footballers are a commodity that make their employers a lot of money, all nurses do is treat people and save lives.

I explained what I meant by replaceability in the sentence before.

If you want your nurses to make more, tax your footballers a lot more and pay them. Not every country can afford thst, but in a wealthy country with multi millionaire footballers, it’s possible. As for what footballers make, that’s what the market dictates. Football is a global money spinner. If the money doesn’t end up with them, it will most likely be eaten by Kroenke, Levy and Gazidis. It’s not like it will be give. Back to the fans or shared with Tranmere Rovers.

So as usual governments in the west are propping up billionaires, corporations, investors, etc with public money and the response to this is "footballers are paid too much".

Claudius wrote:

They’ll lose fans during the recession. I think football makes the mistake of thinking that it’s a unique pastime, but it isn’t.

They're removing it from what made it unique, the sense of community, etc They're turning groups of passionate fans into consumers with brand loyalty. The thing about brand loyalty is it changes a lot more quickly than genuine communities.

Qwiss! wrote:
Claudius wrote:

They’ll lose fans during the recession. I think football makes the mistake of thinking that it’s a unique pastime, but it isn’t.

They're removing it from what made it unique, the sense of community, etc They're turning groups of passionate fans into consumers with brand loyalty. The thing about brand loyalty is it changes a lot more quickly than genuine communities.

Precisely. It’s becoming more and more commoditized. I grew up walking to the football stadium, walking up and down the stalls outside the stadium buying my food and drink, and then going in to sing and dance. And the day before and after the game you meet at ‘the tree’ to talk about how the referee was cheating and the manager was confused. In an age where tickets are super expensive and it’s all geared towards one’s ability to surf from channel to channel picking their favorite big club, the dynamic changes. Suddenly although the basket of money is bigger, the leagues are perfect substitutes for each other, tenuously anchored on a few big clubs. And football itself has close alternatives in other sports and entertainment.

What’s crazy for me is they make so much TV money, they could afford to hold onto the match day experience.

Claudius wrote:
Qwiss! wrote:

They're removing it from what made it unique, the sense of community, etc They're turning groups of passionate fans into consumers with brand loyalty. The thing about brand loyalty is it changes a lot more quickly than genuine communities.

Precisely. It’s becoming more and more commoditized. I grew up walking to the football stadium, walking up and down the stalls outside the stadium buying my food and drink, and then going in to sing and dance. And the day before and after the game you meet at ‘the tree’ to talk about how the referee was cheating and the manager was confused. In an age where tickets are super expensive and it’s all geared towards one’s ability to surf from channel to channel picking their favorite big club, the dynamic changes. Suddenly although the basket of money is bigger, the leagues are perfect substitutes for each other, tenuously anchored on a few big clubs. And football itself has close alternatives in other sports and entertainment.

What’s crazy for me is they make so much TV money, they could afford to hold onto the match day experience.

Some clubs would much rather have visiting tourists in the match day crowd because they're much more likely to use the services and buy club merch. It was inevitable in London since there are so many tourists visiting at any given time but you can see Manchester really pivoting hard this decade into using football as 'the' main attraction in the city. And this is supported by local businesses and councils too so it's a tricky one.

Thats a dangerous game too. You should see Dublin airport early on a Saturday morning, there are loads of lads heading to England for games on cheap Ryanair flights. Only a matter of time before airlines get hit hard by emissions taxes and those cheap flights go away. A few years ago I was going to London five or six times a year to watch Arsenal on same day trips.