You're the one talking about never watching the Premier League again if you're club isn't allowed to be handed inexhaustible wealth to win titles and would prefer to see the marginalisation of the domestic leagues if it means your club can win trophies. I've said - repeatedly - that I don't agree with the way the sport is organised in Europe right now and that I oppose a Super League because of what it means for the future of the game. You've ignored that over and over again and refused to actually debate any point. Yes, I've tried to convince you that your arguments are wrong but rather than offer a decent counter argument, you've just responded with a bunch of shite about Man United, when Tottenham would have taken the same path as that club given half the chance and from what you've posted, I'd wager it would be with your blessing. And FYI, I've never taken abuse for my "attitude". Most of the abuse I've taken has been from complete strangers for doing nothing more than wearing a United shirt. In fact, most of it occurred in the mid-nineties when we'd only recently started being successful in the league again and I naively thought that jovially pointing out to ABU wankrs that "it's alright mate, I've always supported them" would be an accepted position. So I don't think we've anymore to discuss with each other. I don't oppose your stance, I just think your solutions are crap and I'm suspicious about what your motives really are. That's all there is to it.
Things are clearly changing. There is now the Big Four in Ukraine. In the SPL the top two are almost always unchallenged. The top Two in Ukraine have now been challenged for several years and actually split up the last year. Just three years ago Dacia beat them for the title.
I What do you expect me to say?! Because Tottenham do something, or probably would have done something then should it automatically get my blessing? Where's the logic in that?!?! Of course Spurs do things that I don't agree with. I'm allowed to have my own views, I don't have to agree with everything that Tottenham do. Mate, you're just guessing to suit your own agenda. Listen to yourself. Spurs are as bad. They all are. You hope that any football club will be your Knight in shining armour then you're dreaming. United, Spurs, they'll argue for their own self-interests as Levy has done with FFP. Once you start banging on about "Spurs done this, Spurs done that"thinking that I support a clown like Levy you're clutching at desperation.
Come of it! Do you work for the Ukrainian version on SkySports or something?! That's the kind of tripe they say on there about England.."is there now a big four/five/six?" etc. No. There isn't. Only two of those clubs can win the title, the same as only two of those clubs in England could/will win the title under FFP.
That is patently untrue. And the fact that Dynamo aren't even in the CL this year is a further proof to you (if a bit of a painful reminder to me)
Your entire premise has been that you intend to stop going to Spurs games if they cannot be purchased by a sugar daddy and that you'd prefer the biggest clubs take off so Spurs could have a chance of winning the title. You advocate two potentially damaging situations for the sole purpose of making a league title more accessible. Only one of us is shuffling things to suit their agenda.
You're twisting my words. Yes, I said I want to see my club win the title again (what supporter doesn't FFS? Why do you think we support out clubs? In the hope of finishing 4th? Do one) but if that were just as a result of replacing one of the other 'top four' clubs and it being a closed shop again then that's just as bad. I said, and I'll say it again since you keep ignoring it, that a league whereby it is impossible for clubs like Spurs, Everton, Aston Villa, Sunderland, Newcastle, Leeds United et al have exactly 0% chance of winning the league anytime in the next 50 years isn't a proper league at all. The current system and that under FFP is designed so that only 1 or 2 clubs can win the title and the rest serve no purpose other than to make up the numbers, provide players, be on the opposite end of regular thrashing etc. It's a bit better with Chelsea and City making it 4/20 that are decent, but now Arsenal & United want it back at 2/20.
When another club other than Dynamo Kiev or Shakhtar Donetsk actually win the title then it's more than a two-team league, until then though, thats exactly what it is. Same as Spain is, Scotland was, and what England will become. Until then it's just speculation.
Actually, Tavriya Symferopol did win it in 1992. Regardless, a two-team league, like SPL, would have only two teams with a chance and the rest - far behind. UPL is now a four-team league, where four different teams compete for the title, even though only two have won it lately.
I'm ignoring nothing. Chelsea and City have by no means made it "a bit better". They've made it worse. They are essentially pre-packaged "superclubs" with more spending power than any club that existed before them. To say "4 teams competing>2 teams competing" is an oversimplification. Especially when the magic number "4" effectively blocks access to the CL for other clubs, along with the revenues and exposure it provides. But we've been over this. If you can't see that adding clubs with inexhaustible spending power diminshes the ability of the rest of the league to compete, I can't help you. Just look at France: even with Lyon's run, they had the most competitive league in Europe's top five. Then a billionaire waltzes in and piles a ton of cash on PSG and they immediately win the league. Now the same has happened with Monaco and if they're successful, we will very likely be looking at an entrenched top 2 within the next few years. Chelsea and City might make it harder for Man United, Liverpool and Arsenal to win titles but they've made it much harder for the rest of the league's teams to progress, let alone compete. At least when it was United and Arsenal competing, there was at least the potential for a change during the transition from Ferguson or Wenger to a new regime (and if you think that's so impossible, take a gander at Bayern Munich's revenues over the last decade compared to their domestic competition, yet other clubs have won that title). In fact, even if you found 15-20 billionaires prepared to spend endlessly on an EPL club each, it would still be bad for the game because every club that didn't have such an owner would likely be screwed. You'd have seen none of the progress that clubs like Stoke, Swansea, Cardiff and Reading have made in the last ten years.
If FFP came in now and blocked billionaires overspending then it would bring more harm than good. It wouldn't turn back the clock, as Chelsea and Manchester City now have huge revenue which dwarfs the 'chasing pack'. All it will do is lock Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Man City in the 'top four' forever, and lock every other club outside of the top four forever. The rest of the clubs won't suddenly compete. It may improve things for United and Arsenal, but for everybody else it's a life sentence. Spurs will still be £100m in revenue behind those clubs, despite trying to do things the right way, and having a loyal fanbase. Everton will never compete again. It will never happen. They could unearth an excellent manager who is a master tactician, and screwed in the transfer market but the best they can achieve without mega-money is 5th. Same goes for Aston Villa, Newcastle, Sunderland and everybody else. We'll all be playing for 5th place. Taking billionaire owners away now will do no good. It should have been banned from day 1, and they should also have looked at how revenue is distributed, but there's nothing they can do now to try to make the league as open as it was in the 60s/70s/80s etc. that ship has sailed. Wait and see. I'll bet you the price of a season ticket in this.... The smaller clubs will raise ticket prices in order to compete. Fans will become disillusioned, attendances outside the 'top four' clubs will grandly fall, and the league will become even more predictable and less competitive. It's natural progression I suppose. Eventually it'll be pointless the Uniteds of this world thrashing also-rans, and like Bayern in Germany, the terrible twins in La Liga, and the Milan clubs and Juve in Italy they will see more money in a Super League. Without competitiveness, less predictability and lower ticket Prices the Premier League's popularity won't last forever.
I agree that FFP is flawed in this respect. Something else needs to be done. However, supposedly rich owners have destroyed more clubs in recent years than uncompetitive leagues. For every Chelsea, there's a Malaga or even worse, a Portsmouth. Clubs can't keep overspending and FFP is a way to combat that. But I agree that you can't simply bar outside investment and link it to revenues because that does severely hurt the capacity for clubs to grow. Now FFP doesn't entirely ban investment - just the paying of transfer fees and salaries with it. It does allow an investor to spend what they will on youth programs and infrastructure. On a more optimistic note, Man City and Chelsea will no longer be able to just bid miles above market value for any player they want or buy their loyalty with money the club hasn't made, so we should at least see some decrease in fees and wages. Especially in terms of the "English tax". However, I do think that a better approach would be to force any new owners who want to "buy" success, to put up any funds in advance and to ban the use of club assets as security. This way the club is protected while the owner has to make a commitment and be fiscally responsible.
They wouldn't. Which is why the English don't even want two big clubs from its own [officially recognized] country the United Kingdom to join their pyramid. The largest and wealthiest leagues should not, assuming logic is in play, be the ones to instigate mergers first. The idea and initial implementation will start among leagues who have nothing to lose and much to gain by joining up forces with other leagues or foreign clubs. Its fairly predictable that the next step for European soccer is closer relationships between currently independent leagues; and not a broadstroke European League some seem to predict. My bet for the first three merged leagues to "emerge" are Czech Rep and Slovakia, Belgium and the Netherlands, and Russia with at least one of its former Soviet Republics (Ukraine is the obvious choice, but it remains to be seen how receptive UEFA is to two very large nations coming together). The other likely development that falls short of a European Super League is the expansion in the number of games played in the Champions League. It makes no sense for most of the big clubs to ditch their national leagues. They make way too much money out of it to all of a sudden forgo all of it to share revenues with other big clubs in a Super League. So the domestic game is here to stay for some time. But as I said we will almost definitely see mergers among smaller leagues, and in all likelihood the expansion of the Champions League to incorporate more matches. So instead of 6 group match days, we may have anywhere between 8-16, which would depend on the number of teams in the Champions League and the format of groups. Off the top of my head, an idea could be 4 groups of 8 teams playing home and away 14 times, with top 4 in each group going into the same round of 16 knock out tie as it currently takes place. People are going to get upset about the increase in number of games, but it really is inevitable. It probably wont jump from 6 to 14, but there will be at least 8 group match days in the near future. Groups of 6 with 10 group match days are another real possibility. I'm not sure you understand the purpose of FFP. It is not flawed at all, rather it was made exactly how it was intended to be. Its not designed to curb the current big clubs, otherwise they never would have allowed such an imposition to be made. It would have been thrown out by the ECA (who represent many European clubs, but was designed to represent the top echelon of clubs). UEFA needed a way to ensure that the middle-to-low-tier clubs didn't overspend, because they are the ones who will suffer most, not the big clubs. They know that the big clubs aren't likely to go bust, even with some of their massive debts. The only way to do it is to enforce an idea like FFP, where expenditure cannot be more than revenue over a period of time. The big clubs backed the idea because although they couldn't overspend, they also knew that their position would be enhanced because they would not threatened by smaller upstarts. UEFA get to ensure that European soccer as a whole becomes less indebted over time, and the big clubs don't threaten to break away from UEFA and form their own league. FFP is not flawed. It is flawed in the eyes of people who think UEFA was doing this to increase competition and the playing field in European competitions. Why anyone would think this is beyond me, particularly as the big clubs would have conspired with UEFA to create FFP.
The consequences of FFP are bad though - completely predictable leagues worse than anything we've seen before, and even higher ticket prices. To get an understanding of what domestic leagues will be like under FFP watch the film Groundhog Day.
If you're watching European soccer for the parity of the leagues, you're looking in the wrong place. I know speaking from experience that if the Premier League had NFL type parity, I'd be much less interested in watching it. I like knowing that the club I'm a fan of is going to be in the mix every season, and I think this is one of the reasons why the Big 4-6 in England are so wildly popular around the world. People like success, or at least some degree of certainty that their team is better than most others in the league. That's one of the reasons why the EPL is so successful as a global league. You could counter by saying "what does that matter, its an English league for Englishmen" and I wouldn't necessarily disagree. But even in England the era of competitive teams rising from nowhere are LONG GONE. They have been for some time. The introduction of the Premier League in 1992 helped speed that process up, but it was there even before that. I just don't know how people under the age of 30 say care about whether the EPL becomes more competitive. They've grown up in a world the order of the table has been assumed for two decades plus.
They probably don't care all that much, and in a decade or so time, when all the loyal supporters of the local clubs have gotten older and don't go you will see this in the attendances. The smaller clubs stadiums will be half empty because the under-30s will have little interest in following a club who isn't "going to be in the mix every season". You'll have a scenario wherby Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City have long queues around the block for tickets, and the rest of the clubs will have more empty seats than occupied ones. In fairness, I couldn't care less because if clubs treat me like a consumer and not a fan then I'll act like a consumer and all this will take place long after I've gotten bored and found something worthwhile to do rather than watch a football league which I already know the outcome of before the season has even started - but hey, at least if the foreigner fans of the "EPL's" elite are happy that's all that matters, eh?
To be honest, I find it hard to consider overseas fans of the biggest clubs as football clubs as football fans or supporters, because they may 'claim' to love the game, but by jumping on the bandwagon of a handful of clubs they're partly responsible for killing the game.
Agree with all of your post. You're completely right about lower league club attendances. They have held up well for a long time now, but we are really only now entering a stage where those hardcore fans are beginning to die off. Last season there were 27 clubs in the Football League that averaged below 5,000, though all averaged above 1,000. In a decade as you say, I think most of those clubs will be struggling to get 2,500. And others who average between 5-10,000 may see themselves drift closer to 5,000. There is no regeneration of fans taking place, and the old fans who are the ones still attending are dying off. I think there are about 35-40 clubs in England with the potential to be a Premier League team, which is always handy for keeping fans around. All it takes is one season in the Premier League to fill your ground once a fortnight and rekindle some of that interest. The other 42 make up the numbers, and will continue to lose support. Then again its difficult to count how many people there are who would attend games at their city's club while at the same time supporting one of the big clubs. I just wonder how many of the people that are going to be at Selhurst Park this season are also fans of one of the big 3 in London? Maybe they're not the best example because of their location, but lets say Barnet or Orient. I'm sure there would be quite a number of them who attend games still that have a strong interest in Arsenal/Tottenham or West Ham with Orient. Last paragraph: In your favor though is that Spurs are one of those big clubs. Your interest is locked in unfortunately. Spurs still seem like a fan friendly club anyway.
Killing the game in England perhaps, although even thats stretching it, as soccer is probably more popular in England than its ever been. But those overseas fans and their interest in the English game might then spread to the local scene, making their country's domestic game stronger. I know thats the case with me and other people I know. There are positives and negatives. Lots of grey areas. I think the EPL is one of Britains biggest exports and success stories.
I understand that's the purpose. However, as COYS correctly points out, it isn't good for competition. You're correct that parity is hardly a feature of European football Then do something about it. If you love the game so much and want to vote with your feet, go and support a lower league club. Lobby likeminded friends to do the same. I may be a United fan but I was more than happy to give the Bloaters 4 quid to attend games. I'm with you on US fans who turn their nose up at MLS. I question the knowledge of fans who mock the standard. It isn't great compared to the top clubs but I'd take RSL, Portland or LA over Stoke for style every time.
What would this achieve though? Surely if all supporters did this then the 'top four' would only pull further clear? Agree 100%. Don't really understand Eurosnobs.
This would be if you decided not to attend Spurs games anymore, so the impact on them in the short-to-medium term would be non-existent. Yeah, you'd think a lover of the game would love to have a team in their backyard. They also seem to miss the fact that even if MLS isn't that good right now (like I said, I think that's a fallacy), supporting it will help speed up it's improvement (which between now and 1996 has been somewhat impressive anyway).
I guess I am a Eurosnob. To me MLS still looks bad, nearly unwatchable. And I am not comparing it to top European leagues. I am comparing it to a middling league like the UPL (Ukrainian Premier League) where my favorite club resides. Quality of play really is low. And even if there were an MLS team in my backyard, what in the world would have connected me to it?