Rubbish. I agree that bigger clubs dominated, but there was more variety than nowadays. There was a chance that smaller clubs could win the European Cup, or UEFA Cup etc, whereas now UEFA (and FFP) have removed that chance once and for all. Wouldn't happen now. Yes Ajax, Bayern, Liverpool, Milan etc dominated, but the hope was there for supporters of smaller clubs. That's my point. Now it's gone, so you tell me why supporters should pay £50 a ticket for a corrupt system just to support the bigger clubs? .
I'm not condoning Tottenham at all. If Levy had his why he'd love Spurs to be part of the elite like Manchester United, part of the corrupt system ruining the sport for supporters. FFP will ensure that Tottenham are the best of the rest, but will also ensure that they can never compete for major trophies. Levy is content with this. Happy to pick up the scraps off United's, Arsenal's and Chelsea's plates with no chance of challenging them, but happy to sell our best players and overcharge fans. Levy is no better a chairman than Harry Redknapp was a manager. He too should have gone last summer with Redknapp, they're both clowns.
Celtic, Panathiniakos, Saint Etienne, Borussia Monchengladbach, Club Brugge, Malmo, Hamburg, Steaua Bucharest, PSV Eindhoven, Red Star Belgrade. All appeared in the European Cup final or won it in the two decades preceding the invention of the Champions League. No variety apparently.
I am sorry but I believe this is wrong, Tottenham are already competing with Arsenal and Chelsea! I think you may be overreacting somewhat about this 'super club' thing? Again I ask you why you think it is that the way football is now is ruining it for supporters when there are FAR more supporting now than there were in for example the 80's when you say things were better?
Basically, the bigger clubs are growing at ten times the rate of smaller clubs. United had 100,000 supporters in 1970. Bolton had 15,000 supporters. Now Bolton have 25,000 supporters whilst United have 100 million. Once there were big clubs & small clubs. The game was dominated by big clubs, but small clubs had a chance to win and sometimes did. Now there are small clubs and giants. The big clubs always win, the smaller clubs serve no purpose whatsoever other than to provide opposition, get plundered of their best players etc. FFP only ensures that no more small clubs can 'do a City or Chelsea' and actually win.
Attendances are a lot higher than they were in the 80's, so I sign perhaps that people dont feel football is being ruined
That's a view mainly held overseas, in non-traditional football countries who are new to the sport. In Uk & Europe the 'Against Modern Football' movement is growing as fans become disillusioned. It will only get worse.
It isn't really a 'view' it is a cold hard fact that average attendance at football matches across Europe is now much higher than it was in the 80's so therefore it follows that football is doing something right.
He doesn't understand that people are getting tired of supporting clubs just to be shafted in important finals, the UCL final being a prime example in which you must know someone to watch a club you supported during the entire journey. Instead, some executive who probably watches 4-5 games a year gets it. Regardless, it is getting tiring of hearing "ESL" anytime anyone does anything that helps football as a whole. I wish FIFA would just tell them to go ahead and get on with it. FIFA aren't much better, though.
First off, your list of finalists: Those in bold were strong clubs at the time. Those in italics were decent sides at the time. Yes, there was a bit more variety in terms of finalists but there was also only one representative per country (with the obvious exception of the reigning champion, unless they also won the league), meaning there was a greater variation in entrants in general. If anything, the finals should have been MORE varied than they were. As for the smaller teams having hope: that's just a symptom of a weaker field and a straight elimination format and in reality (as I already pointed out) only resulted in two actual "shock" winners in three decades. Also, they made for some awful finals, 1986 in particular. The lack of perceived smaller teams having success is more to do with the strength of teams involved than anybody being "held down". Also, UEFA recently made it easier for champs of smaller nations to reach the group stage.
You pulled those numbers out of your backside. All should be significantly higher. If you're just going to pluck abstract figures out of thin air, there's no point in raising them. How many more times? You've got tunnel-vision related to things that have changed IN ENGLAND over the last twenty years. All that crap was going on decades before in a majority of footballing nations. Go and look at the histories of leagues around the world and the vast majority will have a few teams winning most of the time.
Oh - and the bottom line as it relates to the underlying point we're discussing: A SUPERLEAGUE is not the solution to any of these issues. Parity is. Yet the second anyone mentions implementing that... well let's just look at the ignorant attitudes towards MLS for a taster.
Of course the smaller clubs had decent teams - they wouldn't have reached the finals otherwise! That's my point!!! Nowadays the smaller clubs have no chance of building a decent team. Look at the quality of these teams then and now. The bigger clubs keep the smaller clubs down. They don't want smaller clubs to be able to reach finals. They don't want smaller clubs to be able to retain their best players. They don't want upsets because the hordes overseas (in Asia & America) want all the best players at a handful of clubs and these handful of clubs having a complete and utter monopoly on the game. If traditional fans want change they shouldn't support the system which has changed the rules of the game to suit the G14. Everton in the Champions League? They've no fans in Asia. Armchair supporters won't pay to watch Everton. Easiest way to stop the likes of Everton sneaking in is to pay the regular Champions League entrants so much money that Everton can't compete. Now FFP has put a stop to clubs buying their way in, you tell me why the ******** a supporter would want to pay £50 per ticket when I know full well that we're watching a game that only 1 or 2 clubs in England can actually win? Yeah right.
I'm all for parity. Won't happen all the while United, Barcelona, Real Madrid etc are members of UEFA. That's why the sooner they go off and form their own league the better. We can have our sport back.
So go on then. You tell me the figures. United claim to have 100 million fans. You reckon they had 100 million in 1973, do you? Now who is talking out if their backside, eh? I agree, more people do follow football today than back then, and the sport has grown worldwide, but these overseas fans 99.9% of the time only follow the most successful clubs in places like England and Spain. Or do Bolton have an equal proportion of fans to United now as they did in the 70s. No chance.
If an ESL ever happen, the Asian/USA gloryhunters would no longer follow the 20~ clubs in the ESL...they will start following the top 3-4 clubs of the ESL until 5-6 clubs, maybe 8-9, decide to eventually create an EHL to decide and the "truly best" and so on and so on... It all comes down to what the true fans want (obviously, gloryhunters from Asia, Africa and the USA are excluded from this). Just recently, there was a big survey that came up asking fans in South America to see which one they prefer to win: the FIFA World Cup or the Copa Libertadores. The great bulk chose the latter. In Brasil, most prefer the Brasileirao, and some even their State championships, over the Libertadores. Probably the biggest reason is that, despite the fact that UEFA, CONMEBOL and FIFA are corrupted to hell, the latter's tournament is seen more as a glorified event that plays out once every four years and the only thing that gives it importance is the chance to discover new players for club football (if it happens which in 2010 it didn't). That has been the case since 1994. In short, let the ********ers go about their business.
I don't think more people follow football in the UK, it has been THE sport in the UK throughout the 20th Century, crowds were huge in the past (particularly the 1950's)
You're missing my point. They weren't smaller teams back then. Half the teams you listed were champions of leagues like Holland and Germany. The ones I bolded were the equivalent of today's Dortmund at least. The overseas fans want that? I live in the US and I don't see a shred of anything like that. If anything, the hordes of casuals will follow multiple teams based on what they enjoy watching. If it was all based on a specific set of teams, nobody would have adopted Chelsea or Man City regardless of how rich they were. Then there are those that have started to watch Spurs because of their style of play, or Everton as an Underdog. West Ham seem to have a following here because some see them as a representative of the blue-collar community. If Swansea played in the Champions League and did well, they'd get fans. Yet they just changed the rules to make it easier for the Belarus Champions to "sneak in" than for the Dutch and Ukrainian runners-up or the EPL 4th placed team. I'd also like to know how it "suits" the G14. Real Madrid have so far this season had to play Borussia Dortmund, Man City, Man United and Ajax and they haven't even started quarter finals yet! In 2005, the fifth placed team in England won it. Last season the 6th placed team won it. You presumably watched Spurs overcome Inter and AC Milan to reach the quarter finals just a few seasons ago. Porto and Monaco have less resources than all these. APOEL of cyprus got out of the group stages recently, as did Basel. Galatasaray have done well this season. Not one of these teams did any of this with the sh*te draws that Steaua won the EC with. If Chelsea and City hadn't been bought, Spurs would probably have been in the UCL for the past two seasons, getting that lucrative payout for themselves. But you're saying you'd stop watching for anything but peanuts, if the long shot of a billionaire buying them was removed?
Football was a much more marginal interest in the 80s. I've no idea how old you are, but if you were around in the 80s you'd know that the game didn't have anywhere near the profile it does now. There are far more supporters now, as it's regained the mass appeal it had in maybe the 60s and earlier. There are a lot of factors in this. For a start, hooliganism has been curbed. It wasn't just the threat of violence that kept people away. It was the poor conditions at the grounds, which were often imposed with keeping hooligans at bay. The whole set-up reeked of a lack of ambition, and the game was dying on its arse. The games popularity grew from the late 80s onwards, given a huge shot it the arm by Italia '90, when England'd run to the semis, the first penalty shoot-out for England, Gazza's tears etc, really sold the game to a wider audience. It was the start of the country really going a bit loopy at world cup time, as it just wasn't like that before. Sky TV no doubt helped a lot. It maintained the interest and put money into the game, raising the profile. Better conditions at stadiums attracted new fans, and new stadiums/stands created a sense of ambition that'd be lacking before. In short, modern football helped create a lot of good. However, couch potatoes apart, that does not mean people prefer to have a set of elite clubs dominating. I mean, just think about it for a second. How could a fan of Aston Villa or Everton for example, prefer a set-up that gives them no chance of winning the league? Yes, crowds might be higher than 20 years ago, but that's for the other reasons. The same reason that's seen crowds rise at Walsall and Barnsley, fans of whom can't remotely be considered to base their attendance on whether a big 4 or 5 dominate or not.
Having just come back from Belgium, seeing three games over there, I'd say anyone who has taken in the "characterful" stadium of Royal Antwerp, might concede the whole "against modern football" idea goes a little too far. I'd hate to see the two side stands replaced with boring modern equivalents, but my god, it's probably the tattiest crumbling wreck of a ground I've ever been to. There's good and bad with modern football. Germany probably shows you can modernise without losing your soul.
I have been a regular at Stamford Bridge since 1979, football may not have been as big worldwide but I would hardly call it marginalized in the UK in the 1980's!! In fact the kids on my estate were more football crazy back then than they are on the estate now! Its easy to look at football in the 80's through rose tinted spectacles but from what I remember in the 80,s people complained about the dominance of Liverpool ruining the league and at the time there were (and always will be) the equivalents of Aston Villa and Evertons (teams that didn't have a chance of winning the league) Stamford bridge was in many ways an unpleasant place to visit in the 1980's, yes match day attendances are much higher now but I don't think that's because football is a lot more popular as a sport in the UK but because people enjoy the live experience of the games a lot more.
Football had its fan base, but it wasn't as big culturally as now. The media didn't devote anything like as much time to it as they do these days. Even the coverage in the papers was thin compared to now. Now you have Sunday and Monday pull-outs giving match reports etc from every single match in the football league. In the 80s you'd could open up something like the Sunday Mirror and there'd only be half a page devoted to match reports from outside division one, and far fewer pages given over to top division games. When you had a world cup on, you wouldn't have reporters out and about with the fans. All you'd get would be reporters abroad reporting on crowd trouble. Yes, in the 80s many were bored with Liverpool's dominance, but few complained other clubs had no chance. There was never a feeling that Liverpool were top because they could spend far more than the others. And one look at the teams who challenged up at the top in that era makes it clear there weren't equivalents of today's Villa and Everton. There was no elite set of club for whom finishing outside the top four would be a crisis. As I said, we all have a lot to be thankful for with regards to the modernisation of football, but the creation of "an elite" is a development which fans of nobody other than those clubs thinks is good for the game. Really, what's the point of a 20 (or even 16 or 10) team top division if only five teams will ever win it again? How can anyone regard that as a positive development?
I'm not missing anybody's point. I didn't say they were smaller teams, I said they were smaller clubs, which they were/are. The fact that they were smaller clubs with good teams shows that smaller clubs could attract/retain good players which they can't now. 99% of them support only the bigger clubs. There may be the odd individual who follows smaller clubs but they're rare. European fan surveys: http://www.sportundmarkt.com/filead...MARKT_Football_Top_20_2010_Abstract_Press.pdf So they should. It's the Champions League, it should be champions from all countries first and foremost. So what? Big, rich English club who shouldn't even be in the Champions League win. Bet the hordes in Asia loved that. Hardly the champions of Serbia or Romania though. If, if, if? Too late now though. What is FFP going to do? Wind the clock back? Nope. The big clubs have been established. No more clubs can break into the elite. End of. Yes. I'd refuse to pay more than about £5 per ticket. Under FFP the Premier League for the next 50 years or more will be predictable, and I'm not paying £50 for predictability. Let some other mug pay it.If he's got a few brain cells he too will work out that FFP will only ensure complete and utter predictability.