Activate Another Lever and Still Lose to a Madrid Remontada - The Small Teams Thread

The premier Ieague Is gonna look amazing when arsenal AND villa fold in CL group stages next year AND the entire country Will aguain be dependant of City to carry them. Year after that those two might be replaced by Everton AND burnely for all we know.... Its a shit show actually.

 

The Premier league benefits from hyping up has been teams like Chelsea, Arsenal and United since they still have large fanbases.

It's almost like La Liga hyping up Valencia and Deportivo La Coruna today because of past success.

 

I am so glad Poch never got hired for Madrid and got Don Carlo instead. Huge bullet has been dodged!

 

It was an analogy 4x4s, relax

 

I'm not going to pretend to be above anything, but most people tend to enjoy goal scoring. There can be some 0-0 games that are legitimately fine to watch - I think every single one of us has seen plenty of 0-0 games in our times following this sport - but generally a game with a few goals is going to be better received than a game with few to no goals.

To that end, it doesn't hurt the Premier League at all that the average Premier League team averages 1.64 goals per game. There have been 1081 goals scored in 331 Premier League games season. The respective numbers in La Liga are 1.30 goals for each team per game, and 835 goals scored in 320 La Liga games this season. Real Madrid, with 70 goals scored this season, account for a larger share of the La Liga goal scoring output this season (8.4%) than Arsenal (7.6%), Manchester City (7%), or Liverpool (6.9%), even if most people would probably say those teams play more attractive, attacking games than we do. (Our goal scoring - and conceding - would be higher in the Premier League, without any question.)

While there is such a thing as "too much scoring" which can have a negative effect - I don't find NBA games that finish 145-138 in regulation to be very exciting, that just means the defense is absolutely non-existent, give me a 101-93 type game every day of the week; all things in balance - overall we are more likely to skew a preference towards the game with sloppier defending but better attacking than one with great defending and sloppy attacking. There's a better likelihood of those games at least being entertaining. To that end, we can debate the merits of "quality" however much we'd like (despite Chelsea's best efforts to prove otherwise, I personally tend to think the league that splashes more cash than every other league in Europe combined is most likely to have the overall best quality of player team 1-20 than the other leagues, just by complete default), but I don't think there's much argument that the Premier League is definitely a more entertaining product to watch than La Liga is.

As you know very well yourself, the Bundesliga is also very attacking. The average team there scores 1.60 goals per game, just narrowly fewer than the Premier League. Unsurprisingly, I also tend to really enjoy watching the Bundesliga, it's appointment viewing for me every week.

 

Chelsea without Cole Palmer pic.twitter.com/oKmf05AGec

— Domino's Pizza UK (@Dominos_UK) April 23, 2024

 

Nothing I hate more than Corporate account “banter” and memes

 

Might just be because it's a slow news day, but just saw an interview with Guardiola where he was chatting with Barca F player Aitana Bonmati who is a Ballon d'Or winner. She joked that when she retires she will be the Sporting Director of Barcelona and wants to re-hire Pep to be the manager; and he joked "Or maybe I will be the President and hire you as the sporting director. Let's see who ends up hiring whom".

Interesting as Pep has never expressed interest in an executive role before. Would be hilarious to see him battle it out with Pique or Laporta.

 

Javier Tebas: "I don't know when, but this time LaLiga will play official matches abroad, I think it could be in the 2025/2026 season." pic.twitter.com/CgomExdq8L

— Madrid Universal (@MadridUniversal) April 24, 2024

 

Liverpool open talks for Feyenoord’s Arne Slot as replacement for Klopp

45-year-old Dutch coach understood to fit Anfield profile

€10m compensation could prise him from KNVB Cup winners

https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...n-talks-arne-slot-as-replacement-jurgen-klopp

 

I get it. I don’t really like it though.

I think this is more common in US so maybe someone can explain, how is it fair that you play these abroad fixtures that should be home fixtures?

 

I don't really think it's a terribly popular thing in the United States when an NFL team loses a home game because they get sent to play somewhere in Europe, but I think it's just one of those things that's become "accepted" at this point because Americans are (American) football degenerates and we'll watch the sport even if it's being played on Mars. (I'm as guilty of this as anybody.) The problem in some ways is even worse with the NFL because all 32 teams don't face each other every season, sometimes it's an inter-conference matchup that gets sent to Europe, and under the current schedule any two NFC and AFC teams (for the sake of example, lets say the Bucs and the Colts) only play in the others stadium every 8 years, so when a game like that gets sent to Europe, it means it'll be 8 more years until one of those teams plays host to the other in their own stadium, which is kinda nuts. Tom Brady was drafted in 2000, became the Patriots' starter in 2001, and didn't play a game at Raymond James Stadium (Tampa) until 2017.

But this is about the global kind of football...same kind of problem would no doubt arise though. Any game where Barcelona or Real Madrid are sent to the United States will be an away game that comes out of the schedule of a club like Osasuna or Celta Vigo. Those clubs lose what figures to be one of their biggest selling games of the season, and even if the clubs are compensated in the stadium sales that occur in the United States (do we even know if this would happen?), that still pales compared to a) losing a home game and all that comes with it, b) being forced to travel across the Atlantic, and c) playing your "home" game in front of an almost-entirely Madrid- or Barcelona-supporting crowd. This is where there are some key differences from the American football equivalent; while some of the big NFL teams like the Patriots, Packers, Giants, etc. will have their fans over there, those games tend to be more of a spectacle for all American football fans, and seeing jerseys from teams not involved the game is entirely common.

The Jaguars have kinda/sorta made playing in London a common thing in the last 5-6 years or whatever, they've played the most games of any NFL team in Europe (their owners are the same people who own Fulham), but nobody would ever confuse a Jaguars game in London with being a partisan crowd that overwhelmingly supports them. That doesn't happen, the Jaguars aren't a big enough team to a foreign audience to have that kind of pull. (They're one of the least-popular teams in the United States, they're a '90s expansion team that's never played in the Super Bowl and they play in a comparatively small market. They don't have many fans outside of their home area.)

If La Liga were to decide to add a 39th game to the schedule, with a random draw to decide which team plays which, then we can talk. That's a much fairer idea. Nobody loses their scheduled home game that way. If Tebas is insistent on this idea, that must be the implementation.

 

******** that.

 

What a joke.

 

I feel like he says sh*t like this on purpose lol.

I thought he was a Barca fan...

 

You guys think prices are bad there

mama Mia wait for the prices here

 

Never understand all the money chasing these organisations do. Everytime they have chased more money and got better tv deals and sponsorship deals it's then not enough and they chase something else after. This is just the next stage of that, and it won't be enough, so they will chase more money afterwards again.

 

They’ll move the teams to the U.S