^^^ would rep you if i could. liaoning isnt a strong team ans they didnt expect they would go through the playoffs. if they failed, they will play in a non-significant tournament that doesnt fully subsidize flight tickets and hospitalities. not to mention long distance flights, playing in india on wednesday and a csl match on saturday -- bringing fatigue for players and impacting league performance. afc cup doesnt allow you to use reserve players too. ultimately, what's the significance of winning the afc cup anyway?
It gives you automatic qualification to the next Champion's League. Actually, Qatar did send a team last year to the AFC Cup. Al Rayyan I believe. But seriously, if the Chinese don't think they can qualify, then their 0.5 berth can just go to someone else.
That's before AFC said "Qatar is among the best league in Asia along with Japan". Anyways, AFC plans on giving heavy fines to any club refusing to take part in the AFC Cup [after they have been eliminated from the Champions League playoffs]. AFC obviously knows that there will be teams who will not take their automatic participation kindly, so why are they forcing these teams to partake in a tournament they don't want anything to do with?
Because they're giving a chance to qualify to the Champion's League. What if teams played in the playoffs, lost and decided not to participate in the AFC Cup whenever they felt like it? That would require the AFC to constantly reshuffle the tournament every time a team turned their noses at a tournament with possibly even better teams than them. Look what happened: A Chinese team saw that it had a small chance of qualifying to the ACL and decided not to participate, then why should the 4th placed CSL team even be given the chance? Dozens of other countries would kill for that 0.5 berth, hand it to Iran so they get 3+1 Berth.
What the hell are you talking about? They don't have to force Champions League quality teams to participate in the AFC Cup.
That's said, Liaoning and most of the Chinese clubs, includes Japanese and Korea clubs I believe, takes the domestic leagues more seriously than ACL, as ACL's prize money is not worth mention, teams sent reserve players etc. to teams like Liaoning, I can understand their decision to focus on domestic leagues. especially when big culbs are pouring their money doing signings like this:
Then China should forfeit its 0.5 playoff berth to another nation. Give Iran a full 3+1 Berth then. Let's face it, Liaoning is not ACL quality, otherwise they wouldn't have run when they found out Pohang Steelers was a team they were up against.
Well the vision of AFC presumably is to have professional leagues all over the place. And part of the process of professionalising the continent more is probably this step here. Now I said that if the CSL would not like to have their 4th team with a CHANCE of ACL action, then they should give the 0.5 place to another league who would like the CHANCE of ACL action (and as others have said, there are probably a fair few leagues that would like the 0.5). You're saying that it's dumb to put ACL quality teams in the AFC cup, but that's not the point. The point is to have the chance of ACL, if they don't make it through playoff then thus they're deemed NOT ACL quality. Yes I'm Japanese, and if Japan had 3.5 spots, and the league decided they didn't want to have a team in the 0.5 because of the possibility of them playing AFC Cup, then I would say that the AFC should allocate the 0.5 spot to another league because otherwise it's just going to waste.
My mistake, I didn't really understand what you were talking about [hence the 'what the hell are you talking about']. If there weren't any changes to the distributions [like the Arabs promised there wouldn't be until the end of 2012 season], Liaoning would have directly qualified for a Champions League. Just in case it hasn't been clear, I am still pretty upset about the whole changes in the distributions, and that's my only real reason behind calling Liaoning a Champions League quality team--I couldn't name a single player in that team without looking it up. Every mathematically capable team in CSL played for that fourth spot until the very end knowing that if they clinch that spot, they will have be playing in the group stages of the AFC Champions League for the upcoming season. Even when the rumours surrounding possible playoffs began swirling, the last team they probably had in mind facing was an all times leader in AFC Champions League title history. These are the obvious flaws in the current distributions. If Liaoning was 'Champions League' quality, then Pohang is more like 'likely to get past the group stage and maybe beyond' quality. There can be differences between quality among Champions League bound teams. The 0.5 spot shouldn't go to Iran because they are a west team. We already have Bunyodkor participating in a east group, which is stupid enough. And giving Iran another '0.5' spot wouldn't give them the third direct spot, because as of right now, there are 5 teams in the playoffs, and Iran actually has 2.5 tickets to share among four teams. The two Iranian clubs in the playoffs each have 0.25 tickets. Also, if they just handed around the 0.5 spots, where would it end? Indonesian Persipura were disqualified [which means another playoff ticket is there to be passed around], and none of the other Southeast Asian leagues met the criteria. Australia doesn't deserve four direct spots [although they ended up getting them], and God knows no one wants Korea to get four direct spots. Even if they were to consider admitting more western teams into Asian groups, it's pretty clear that very few, if any, of the Malaysians and the Arabs in the executive committee want Iran to get any more spots. And trust me when I say this, if the Arabs thought admitting one of their clubs into a group including Gamba Osaka, Bunyodkor, and winner of Pohang vs Adelaide, would be beneficial for the club, they would have done it.
K-League to lauch promotion/relegation looks like the 2013 K-League division 1 will only have 12 teams, the K-League set to lauch promotion/relegation in 2012, and there will be no promotion in 2012 as the K-League division 2 will not be started until 2013 :lol The 2012 K-League ,with 16 team participating, will play 44 rounds,After 30 matches, the league split into two sections of eight teams each, with teams playing every other team in their section twice at home and away. The exact matches were determined upon the league table at the time of the split. This system will be temporarily enforced 2012 season.with the bottom 4 clubs relegated to 2013 K2-League.
The promotion/relegation is one of their objectives, but another objective is to create the so-called "Korean Premier League" to completely revamp the league so that the league will mature into a more professional league competitive-wise, marketing-wise and economic-wise. Currently, baseball league in Korea is getting all the attention and is expanding its reach and popularity at an increasingly rapid rate. Baseball in Korea is arguably the #1 sport by a country mile in terms of marketing, revenues generated, media exposure and attendances (6 million spectators last year for Korean baseball league as opposed to 3 million from the K-league) If this trend continues, K-league has no position in sustaining their competitiveness. Hence, the reason why this revamp is desperately needed. The newly created league will initially start with 12 teams, who will all have to meet the new league guidelines, but it will eventually be expanded further once the new league matures. This indicates that while this transition is happening, you won't see any K-league clubs dominating in the ACL like they did over the past several years. There are several reasons behind this, 1)They will have to play 44 league games and the FA cup next year. In addition to this, they will need to finish at the Top 8 in order to avoid relegation. So, even the big clubs will have no luxury in their mind, so their focus will be entirely placed on the league performance rather than in the ACL next year. 2)Clubs will have to use their budget more wisely. They will need to spend a considerable amount of money on improving their marketing ability rather than buying new players. Already, some clubs have begun reducing their squad lists.
The success of this "premier league" proposed in Korea will depend largely upon how the clubs will respond to this. Big clubs will find this opportunity to widen the gap more by investing more aggressively on their infrastructure. Jeonbuk, for instance, is building a new training ground that will set a benchmark for others. It will feature an indoor training ground as well, in which only 5 of the world's top teams have. Smaller clubs, on the other hand, will try to invest more on setting up a new model to remain competitive financially. Incheon UTD is a very good example. Incheon UTD use a 50,000 WC stadium and the club believes it is simply too big for them to manage and generate revenues. They were negotiating with the city of Incheon for their need of a new "smaller" stadium. And it worked. The Sung-Eui Arena will be Incheon UTD's new home from the start of the next season. Part of a stadium ownership will be handed to Incheon UTD, which means the club will gain all the revenues generated from operating this stadium. Already, a large cinema complex and Homeplus (Similar to Wallmart. Homeplus is Korea's 3rd largest retailer) will come into operation inside the stadium. If this model proves to be successful, other clubs will most likely follow.
Winning the ACL is worth this much (in USD): 1,500,000 - Fixed Prize Money ~400,000 - Variable Prize Money (can be up to 490,000) 1,000,000 - Minimum Prize Money paid by FIFA at the CWC. Total: 2,900,000 (Minimum) Not bad for 12 matches as opposed to a league schedule of 30+ rounds. And all this does not include travel subsidy of USD 300,000. What's the prize money in the J.League, K-League, CSL?
ACL is a financial blackhole for most teams (profitable teams would be 3 maybe top 4, but no more). As an example of expenses i'll quote what Greenlion said in the other ACL thread.
But that assumes that Guo'an doesn't make any money at all from hosting matches.....don't they charge ticket prices?
According to Guo'an officer all the incomes from ACL home macthes belongs to AFC, includes tickets revenue Speaking of Tickets revenue, the Beijing Guo'an club just announced the club is set to sell at least 27,000 tickets for 2012 season, as more than 40,000 fans subscribed season tickets online, average selling price is about 88 USD, so basically the club could earn about 2.3 million USD from season tickets selling, Usually Guo'an's ticket revenue in CSL is around 5m USD a year. Guangzhou Evergrande announced that the club plan to sell 15,000 season tickets in 2012 season, with the average price 97 USD, that means their season tickets revenue is around 1.5 million USD, last season their ticket revenue is 6.5 million USD. With Anelka joining Shanghai Shenhua, the club now expecting a ticket revenue of 3.65 million USD in 2012 season, usually shenhua has a average home attendance of 12,000+, we could expect their home crowd exceed 20,000 if they sign more starts like the Frenchman
I believe the official prize money for CSL and J-League is like this, I mean official prize from the League J-League prize money Total prize money 510m JPY ~= 6.63m USD Champions: 200m JPY ~= 2.6m USD Runners-Up: 100m JPY ~= 1.3m USD 3rd place: 80m JPY 4th place: 60m JPY 5th place: 40m JPY 6th place: 20m JPY 7th place: 10m JPY CSL Prize money Total prize money 28m RMB ~= 4.45m USD Champions: 5m RMB ~= 795k USD 2nd: 4m RMB 3rd: 3.5m RMB 4th: 3m RMB 5th: 2.5m RMB 6th: 2.25m RMB 7th: 2m RMB 8th: 1.75m RMB 9th: 1.5m RMB 10th: 1.2m RMB 11th: 800k RMB 12th: 500k RMB and the total prize money for CSL Champions Guangzhou Evergrande in 2012, includes money from sponsors, reaches 16.218 million USD, that's a new records for CSL champions prize money, in 2009, Guo'an recieved 7.97 million USD for CSL champions, this season they were rewarded 3.4662 million USD for finishing second place
That is incorrect, it's all right here in the regulations: http://www.the-afc.com/en/resources...hampions-league-2012-competitions-regulations Section 11 / 72. Financial Provisions
Whereas the total prize pool for the ACL is USD 14 million. Compare that to the CONCACAF Champions League (only travel subsidy) and Asia is doing pretty well.
So when exactly did the AFC decide to give the A League 3 berths? I see Brisbane, Central Coast, and Adelaide are all in this years tournament
They did a review this year and gave us an extra playoff spot. Due to some withdrawals our playoff turned into a full spot without a match being played. They will review it again for the 2013 edition.