A step to deal with the shamateurism of college athletics: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/California-could-become-first-state-to-allow-14070856.php
A message I received from one MLS source:“#FCCincy waiting 18 months for a coach is unreal. That’s legitimate tanking until they can get out of bad contracts. What a mess.”Other teams may have similar plans with coaching hirings; rare to hear it spelled out plain as day. https://t.co/VxoHy15nnw— Jeff Rueter (@jeffrueter) July 5, 2019 So there we have it: tanking in MLS. Right out of the gate.
Not sure what tanking is going to get them. They already royally f'd themselves by trading away all of the expansion Allocation funds the league provided them for year one. Couple that with the bad contracts they have signed.......... Tanking will hurt their bottom line as well, as eventually fans get tired of watching their team get their butt kicked on the regular.
I was on board the "tanking won't happen in MLS because the superdraft is worthless" train, but this feels like a whole nother level of cynicism. They've basically realized they've screwed up their entrance, so they're going to tread water until they can offload their mistakes, and press the reset button on the expansion year when their stadium opens. What could go wrong?
Is "tanking" something that is part of the closed structure of sports in the USA in general, or is it peculiar to mls? Can't think of any situation in Euro P/R leagues where it's of any use.
That's not how I read it. FCC is basically going to go through a 3 year building plan where they re-build/tool their team in order to be ready to break out when they open their new stadium. Obviously Teams in the US do have the luxury to go through a building process without the threat of relegation. That said, the building process can erode a team's fan base, sow mistrust between fans and the front office, make it harder to sign and re-sign players who's career's are short, etc.
Tanking is a recent phenomenon in NBA and NHL. It's pointless in MLS as the super draft is an afterthought. Cincinnati, Orlando and Minnesota fans are all realizing that "promotion" is not all it's cracked up to be. Fortunately they have a safety net.
It also exists in MLB. The Astros did it a couple of years ago. Well, it's pointless for draft picks. What Cincinnati is doing is going into sleep mode until they can get out from under their bad contracts. That's still tanking, so Cincinnati has clearly found a purpose for it in MLS.
I think we're reading it the same way: they don't have any plans to try and field a competitive squad until the 2021 season. It's a really risky gambit and could easily crater the frankly amazing support they've had.
Burnley in 2009/10. Promoted to the Premier League, their biggest signing was Stephen Fletcher who would struggle to hold down a starting place in most MLS teams. They lost their manager Owen Coyle, making a cheap replacement, with no panic buys and actually over-performed in finishing 3rd from bottom, took the parachute money, and rebuilt for a second attempt at the summit. Then they did the same thing again, more successfully in 2014/15 adding the proceeds windfall sales of Danny Ings and Kieron Trippier at the end of the season.
You're out of money and need a parachute payment? Your problem in Europe is that you'd theoretically still have the bad contracts that you're trying to wait out while in a lower revenue league.
..............you mean there's a club that made a business model out of jojo-ingin and out of the epl
And Huddersfield basically tanked last season. It's actually a prudent business model, making more sense than plunging a club hundreds of millions into debt in a desperate bid to remain in the top flight. Not really in the spirit of the game though, is it? I bet Ellis Short and Randy Lerner wished they'd tanked several seasons ago.
So instead of going broke by relegating you can make money out of it. There goes a certain poster's mantra Well, ..
Well, in way they were tanking. They certainly weren't trying to compete for mid-table status or Europe League places. Hell one could make the argument that Sunderland were so bad that they couldn't even tank correctly having made the great escape a few years in a row, all while plunging the team into massive amounts of debt.
Oh. What did they do the season before ? Did they forget to tank? On the bright side. Notts County and their wanker fans are going bust. Hahahahahahahaha.
I think they would have been willing to but had a freakishly good season. Last season they picked up 4 points from the 18 games after Christmas making just 2 low key signings in the winter transfer window.