I thoguht those on the YA board might find this interesting This is from the FourFourTwo supplement: "100 Players Your Club Should Sign - From Aberedeen to Yeovil, we name the men who could supercharge your season!" With the transfer window coming up it looks at good buys for Premiership/SPL/Football League (Championship - Div 2) clubs, so as such covers a wide range of players (form non-leaguer players up to Ronaldinho) and they're listed in order of postion (i.e. goalkeepers, defenders, midfielders, strikers) rather than merit. £ £ £ is the price guide which is £1-5m JT = Jamie Trekker
whoever wrote that; genuis....bloody genius. Everyone in BS should be forced to read that blurb. Reading, christ please. Id like Sunderland now too, rumor has it Kean-o is gonna look overseas for 3 players in January because he doesnt like the skill set of the players that would be attracted in England. Id love to see EJ and Jones up front for that club.
Eddie Johnson Age 23 Nationality American Current Club Kansas City Wizards £ £ Why buy? His pace is blinding and could easily fetch your tea and crumpets faster than any waterboy on your team. On the field he is perfect for your long ball team, just pump deep lobed passes to Johnson and watch him run them down. However, there is the whole issue of actually doing something with the ball once he has found it. While his touch is as smooth as your mulsim granfathers beard nobody taps in a sitter better. Would suit... A club looking to inflict pain and missery on theor supporters and give the opponents a laugh. The upside with EJ is that he would sell 100 shirts in the US and fans could sing "Never Socre with our Johnson", which in and of itself makes this buy a bargin. AP
O-Sack, why the hate for EJ given? I mean, he hasn't "forsaken" MLS for Europe despite opportunities? I thought that this undying patriotism is what you like to see in a player first and foremost?
I think he is worthless for the national team, just years of watching him mess it up. I put him in Twellman catagory as far as strikers for the US. I think he is highly overrated as well. As for MLS, i think he should stay here, but if he left i wouldn't care much. He put 5 years of his time into playing for his domestic league so i cant fault him for seeking other opportunites (like Josh Wolff for example). My major issue is decent young players bypassing MLS totally to play for obscure backwater teams for a few extra bucks based on misconceptions and bad advise from their handlers. I think young players in the US would benefit more by playing in MLS early then evaluating their futures after a few years, instead of opting for the bench in Europe.
As much as I agree with you from a soccer standpoint, a 19 y/o kid would be insane to turn down a six figure deal in a smaller league. It be a horrible life choice to take a 65k dollar deal to play in MLS hoping that you would develop enough to make the big dollars when somebody is putting 225k a year on the table.
In other words, you're willing to ignore his goals in WCQ in service of bashing the player. Which decent young players went to obscure backwater teams for a few extra bucks and were misguided in doing so? A guy like Demerit? I'm actually in the MLS is often a better option camp, but there's no way I can fault someone for taking a chance on Europe - just for the adventure part alone. I also think the cream is probably going to rise to the top wherever it ends up.
not looking to start anything or tear anyones head off just my two cets here. Eddie Johnson for all intensive purposes has lost the plot in terms of national team play, despite strong MLS form. That said, you cannot deny he is a menace at MLS level, and like one of you guys said, probably another case of Taylor Twellman. I guess theres no harm in that if that is what he wants. But if he has any ambition to advance his game and keep his gig with the national team he is going to need an overhaul and quick, the only way he finds that salvation is on the other side of the pond with a struggling side.....or Reading. Reading is the style that he 100% bar none caters to, and he would be bench depth behind Doyle and Kitson, but i think even EJ could beat out Lita, who in fact are much similar players. But a club like Sunderland isnt out of the question either, Keane-o has publically said he is looking for cheep talent from overseas who wants to play with pride for Sunderland. Its a high risk, high reward gig. If Sunderland stay up, and i think they finally will this time, EJ keeps a gig at a positively massive club with a massive fanbase, and is instructed by one of the brightest young minds of the game right now. Those are my two top choices.
Depends what his priorities are. 19 year olds likely would come into MLS under Gen Adidas, which pays pretty well for a 19 year old. Is making an extra 100K in the first couple years of your career worth the trade off in PT and exposure to the market? I think most young american players (not the super uber talents) making this trade off sort of take a short term perspective on their careers instead of a long term one. Whatever, i am too busy to write a thesis on it and most people here know where I stand on the issue anyway.
Not sure what you are getting at. He scored 3 against an already defeated Panama and a few goals here and there like 3 years ago. He really hasn't done anything for the US as the featured striker in a long time. DeMerit never got an offer so i can't use him as an example, but just take a look around at young american players in Europe today. Look at Dalby the premier example of snubbing MLS and being mishandled by his agent and advisors. He plays for a team thats only famous for being the home of the player involved in the big international duty injury compensation fight. Its not a question of faulting a person, its a question of identifying the misconceptions so future players aren't led away from their domestic leagues out of nothing more than pure bias propagated by the people helping them make their decisions.
The problem with this view is that you're assuming that all of these Gen Ad kids will progress in ability and warrant some sort of larger deal. That's very unrealistic as you can see from simply looking at the history of the GenAd players and their salaries. Sure some will progress and go on to make a large pile of cash. But it is very much a gamble, and the first rule of Financial Planning (the rule that the entire field is base on) is that money now is worth more than money later. So again, a US kid has a choice between 200k a year for the next two years, or 65k a year with a 35% (rough guess) chance that he could earn a more lucrative deal in the future. Even if taking the europe deal could return a lower chance of advancement, there is still a good chance that a young player could crash out of MLS and never have the opportunity to really earn well. Another note, you're being way to hard on EJ. I don't know who your preferred forward is, but you can't dismiss EJ numbers. That's just bias.
Let's review. You said: To which I would respond: "Johnson totaled seven goals in his first six World Cup qualifiers (and is already third on the US all-time scoring list in World Cup qualifiers)." Perhaps you forget that we were at a time where we weren't sure where our goals would come from. Twellman isn't in that category. The Dalby story isn't over of course, but where would he be if he stayed in MLS? Who knows why he went to Europe - but I'd be surprised if he was much more than mediocre in MLS.
Yeah, but these people are footballers not accountants and finacncial analysists. There are also things called opportunity costs and other more complex financial decsions that go into it besides Basics 101- thats why proffesionals dont rely on the 101 course to do their job. But your assuming the entire decision is financial. I am not saying money isn't a factor in ecision or that it shouldn't be. But i think when the returns are marginal the other factors should be more imprortant. Well if you wash out you wash out, would happen abroad as well likely. I don't think thats the case for most of these guys. See my post responding to DK in a second.
I look at more than goals when judging EJ. He is terrible at every important aspect of the game. His touch is disgusting for a "international" striker. I have seen more than enough games to know that when EJ brings down the ball nicely and into space its a rarity. His ability on the ball is sub par for someone who is supposed to be your main goalscoring threat, honeslty he beats nobody off the dribble and he sucks at creating space to shoot. He is fast but only without the ball, case in point, Copa America breaks away from everyone then he gets the ball and falls over it (got an undeserved PK from it too). When i see EJ i see a really fast guy off the ball that doesnt work that hard on his runs, that has very limited technicial ability, and someone that kills more attacks than he ever helps create. So when i say he sucks i mean it, i dont care if he scored a few goals in 2004, he diesn't have the skills to score regularly for the US and honestly i think MLS is probably going to end up being the best part of his career no matter where he goes. We know at the very least he would have been a top 5 draft pick if he had indicated he wanted to stay as the top rated college senior in the draft pool. We know Colorado was in need of denender based on trading for Erpen. Maybe he does well and maybe he doesn't. But his opportunites probably would have been better here. He also went on an embarassing tour of europe and couldnt get on with any other team (yes i know about the work permit stuff, but the fact he even trained there knowing he was assured to not get a permit was dumb). He ended up in a sitaution that for all probability seems to be worse than what he would have here. And we see this with increasing regularity today, good and potentially talented american players bypassing the domestic leagues here because they are led to beleive or themselves believe that "anywhere in europe is better".
Isn't ironic how on the one hand you are denigrating one of the top scorers in MLS and saying it will be the highlight of his career and on the other saying American players are foolish for not rating MLS higher? I'm glad you think he sucks, but he's probably one of our all-time leading scorers as a Youth National team player (who has more?), he's 3rd all time in Qualifying and he's 13th all time in goals scored, and he's still 23? Where was McBride at his age? Oh right, you don't rate goals as that important.
Not really, i just think the best years of his career are going to end up in MLS when its all said in done, regardless of where he goes, nothing to do with quality of the league and everything to do with how i percieve his talent specificly. He gets PT in MLS with not too much competition at present for his job, alothough that could change as guys liek Sealy have shown well. He had 2 good season in MLS. My critisisms of him are mostly as a National Team player not a club player. I just think ther are many better options than him for the US based on what i see as major shortcoming to his game. He doesn't play for my club and i wouldn't want him to. But he is a decent enough club player. Also my position is way more complex than you are trying to confine it too. This "sound bite" is another thing that bugs me around here. Your positions and arguments are condeced into vague and innacurate short sentences. How i rate EJ as a player doesn't have anything to do with how i rate MLS. Big deal, he was an athletic beast as a kid against his peers. That means nothing to me. Where he stands on the feable US records list is kinda disingenuine as well. Johnson will never be better than he is now, as such the US needs to cut ties with him as a guy we are going to depend on to lead the forward line. We have better coming though the pipes and even better playing right now.
Haha, Then it's a good thing I've studied finance far past the 101 level isn't it? It would almost seem like I know what the hell I'm talking about before posting something. These kids hire agents for a reason, and if they are making decisions involving hundreds of thousands of dollars don't you think they'd call up a professional or two? The cold facts of this issue are that young US players who can demand high salaries somewhere else in the world are better off going there. Yes it is about more than they money alot of cases but think about it this way. If Dalby had come to MLS he most likely would have crashed out and would be on the fast track to USL or the end of an MLS bench. What would he have to show for that? 60k for his first year? Maybe 80 at the top? It's pretty widely accepted that Dalby has dissapointed, but sitting on the end of the bench for a G14 squad is still going to pull him 250k a year for a couple years. Now did Dalby make the right decision? Yes, instead of crashing out of MLS in two years after earning 130k, he's going to crash out of Chaleroi after making 600k.