Except Nuorense didn't sell him to Napoli. They sold him to Torres, who were in Serie C/1. Not a lot of money at that level. And Nuorense have stayed exactly in the same range of divisions they were in the 1980s when Zola played for them: they've bounced up and down between the 4th and 6th tiers of Italian football.
Also, I see some goalposts have been moved. Getting good players costs money. Less money at lower levels, but you generally have to spend more than other clubs at the same level to get better players. You may get some bargains, but you can't get them consistently unless you spend a lot of money on scouting, and you can't keep those players very long if you don't pay them what they're worth. One other thing: promotion may mean more revenue, but in the Football League the cost of staying competitive is currently outstripping revenue. Collectively, Championship clubs are spending more than 100% of their revenue on player wages. Yes, there's the reward of promotion to the Premier League if you finish at the top, but that's currently requiring big cash injections. Organic revenue growth is not in fact covering the cost of better players.
I don't see why Wrexham can't be as successful as, say, Burnley. It's a bigger place, has no Football League club near it, and its owners almost certainly are wealthier than Burnley's.
You still miss the point! Brighton DID NOT spend hundreds of millions of pounds on players or wages when they were in the fourth tier! Read post 35340 and you'll see how its done.
There is no reason whatsoever, I just can't see how the way the pyramid woks seems so difficult to understand for some people!? I thought I was oversimplifying things as it was! Wrexham right now need to outperform Maidstone, they need to get promoted, that way they get more money, can buy better players and COMPETE with their new peers. Players will leave Maidstone to go to Wrexham, the whole point of pro/rel is to improve your spending power and increase your standing in the 'pecking order' (and visa versa of course), its really that simple! Why do people find this so hard to grasp?
Irrelevant, doesn't change anything does it? Fact is if you were a promising young player in the year 2000 and both Bradford and Brighton were vying for your signature you are going to favour Bradford............................in the year 2023 the same young player would go to Brighton...............Yet they are still THE SAME clubs, its still the same young promising talent, so tell me - what's changed exactly?
Then something has changed no? What do you think that something is? Besides Bradford would have to pay a hell of a lot more money than Brighton to persuade the youngster to go to Bradford over Brighton right now for blatantly obvious reasons no?
What clubs are they? What year are we talking about? Have they got anything to do with Brighton's rise? Do they have anything to do with Wrexham's ambitions? Are they examples of the impossibility of promotions...........or has it got anything to do with rules and regulations not being met? FACT is any club can gain promotion to the Premier League as long as it follows the rules and regulations of English football.
Almost 30 years ago. And before the rules were changed to give teams a grace period to bring their stadia up to standard. I think Stevenage were the last to be denied promotion to the Football League in 1996. It does occasionally happen at lower levels than that, often because the team in question has no ground of their own.
You are LITERALLY saying the same.exact.thing. that the other posters are saying!!!! Teams have to win to move up the Pyramid, correct? Everybody is saying that. In order to win your team needs good players and managers....which the further up the food chain you go, cost exponentially more. In order to attract better players your club needs to be able to pay them more, and also provide them with a better environment in which to train and play. Which, you guessed it, costs more money.... Teams can develop their own talent!!! Yeah, as it turns out youth development is VERY expensive. In fact it costs so much that many teams in England don't have youth academies. Are there ways to raise money? Yup...sponsorships, player sales, ticket revenue, etc. The FACTS are that winning your way up the English Football Pyramid ain't cheap.
washington post did a poll popular sports in usa football is at 11% just imagine if there is pro/rel here
Look, this all started with the incredibly obtuse assertion that you don't need to spend money to win, you just have to have good players and a good manager. And that post further cited Zola as an example of a good player who might not cost much money because he was far down in the depths of the Italian pyramid at one point. Here's the thing: hidden gems in the depths of the pyramid are hard to find. If you want to have any appreciable chance of finding them while they're still cheap, you need to spend money on scouting. If you get them indirectly through some other club's scouting efforts, you're buying them from a higher-level club with an accordingly higher price tag. And then, once you have them and everyone knows they're good, you're not going to keep them very long unless you can pay them as much as other clubs are willing to pay them. You don't get good players on the cheap very easily -- and when you do, they don't stay cheap.
Wow, thank you for perfectly illustrating exactly what I said about you. Were they fighting for that spot before or after they got the sugar daddies? Before or after they brought in an attacker that's proven at a level two steps above where they play? They spent over 100m just on the stadium that's helped their revenue stream in getting them to the EPL. They invested in infrastructure as well as the players (you know, the full business picture). They've spent well over 100m at this point LOL. Oh, so over 30yrs ago is only relevant when you use something from back then?
I became a charger fan because of family. Parents had season tickets, grandfather has season tickets, cousins had season tickets, the pre-game tailgate was a family affair. So I was the stereotypical fan who had it passed down to me. Liverpool was obviously different in that I "picked" them. I fell in love with the city first so it was between the blue and red sides and picked LFC for obvious reasons. So yeah you are right pro/rel did not play a major role in either of these decisions. But it did play a big role in my initial interest in the prem. It's impossible to put a number on how big of a role but it was significant. Pro/rel and the pyramid was one of the first things that struck me and drove my interest when I first started following the league in High School. Now to specifically talk about USL and the Loyal. The reason USL hasn't grabbed me like the chargers is time, I've only been interested in the league for 3 seasons. If I had grown up with the loyal it might be different. But that's an issue almost every club in the US has to deal with. They don't have the history and experiences that help develop that crazy bond. But guess what, pro/rel gives you that, gives you a chance to be part of a story. That doesn't mean winning the USL isn't a story but gaining promotion or fighting off relegation adds more to it. If we were in a closed league there would be a lot of discussion about blowing up the side and rebuilding. But we obviously can't, because we still have to think about relegation. Pulling a 76ers or Astros or Padres just isn't an option, so even a club as massive as Liverpool is impacted by pro/rel And the cowboys almost took us to the wall in 2010 we might have been a Rangers if they got their way.
Nonsense. Youth development isnot rocket science. As I've been posting for several decades now in mostly the American threads the developments isnot what makes the difference. It's the scouting, the search/spotting of talents. I've used the phrase you can polish pebbles as long as you like, you only get shiny pebbles, no diamonds. So how good the staff of an academy can be, if you donot give them diamonds in the rough, they willnot produce diamonds. How to develop youth isnot a secret, kept behind doors. You can watch and copy it from the best. The reason in England many clubs dithed their academies has nothing to do with costs but everything with it not being worthwhile anymore because of some arrangement with the epl, that benefits the big clubs, but not the small ones. In the Netherlands every pro club has an academy and the money spent on it differs wildly, from millions with the top 4 clubs to less than a hundred thousand lower in the chain. The main reason the Dutch clubs manage to develop talents out of proportion to other countries isnot because we're good at it, yes we are good at it, but because of the fine maze every soccer kid comes in contact with, starting at the amateur level, going up the tiers. This pyramid makes an effective selection tool that misses very few. We're not just better at developing, we're better in creating the circumstances that lead to talents being spotted in the first place.
Duh....Scouting costs money.... Also: https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...ditched-their-academy-premier-league-outcasts "In other words, at a cost of around £2m a year, Brentford decided it was simply too much of a risk that their academy – with so much competition on its doorstep in London – would produce enough first-team players to make that investment worthwhile." Again...why did Brentford close their academy? Because it wasn't a cost effective way to develop first team players..... At the end of the day scouting players costs money, better scouts cost money, youth academies cost money.... Sure winning helps clubs get more money, however, it also drives up their costs. It's a vicious circle in an ocean full of bigger predators.
Notts just broke a 93 year-old club record for most successive matches without defeat. But it looks like we'll end up playing second fiddle to Wrexham.
Brentford said that PDL wasn't competitive enough and the step between that and the first team was too great, do they started a B team using loan players and other clubs' cast offs instead.