It would just be easier to put a cap on the number of appearances that a player can make in a season for both club and country. Not without it's issues of course but it would also give more opportunities to young players.
It would have to be the maximum amount of matches a country can play without it disadvantaging those countries who cannot rotate because the quality gap between their first and second choices is too big.
At the U17 women’s World Cup they have the VFS challenge system in place. England firet to use it in their match and fail and lose one of the two. Suspect if it’s was in the PL it would become a very big skill to judge when to use it or not and managers (Particularly those under pressure already) would be criticised if they get the decision to use or not wrong and it changes the result or possible result. Feels like something that could be the final straw for a manager on the edge of,losing their job to then botch a decision and get sacked because of it. Also it will really need some to be heard like in Cricket at least at home to really work through and help people know why the review was rejected. Maybe even a referee call system like cricket’s umpire call where the official for some decisons allows the challenge to not be lost becuase the referee can decide based on their judgement. At the U20 one they went back to VAR for the third place play off and final which doesn’t show the greatest confidence. .
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbRts3TpPUgK3qkklUyoT68qGGD_M4u4j This is a good resource for highlights footage of English players if anyone's interested or hasn't already discovered it. It's pretty comprehensive and has a lot of footage of different youth team players in addition to senior pros. Constantly being updated too.
Have the rules changed because how Kudus hasn’t been sent off has just blown my mind! Edit: he has now through VAR but how the referee missed about 3 pushes in the faces was staggering.
1848352022027809070 is not a valid tweet id I wonder if the Daily Mail trying to get the injunction lifted so they can report the full details.
It depends what he's done, and I highly doubt the FA didn't ask him to disclose what happened. If all he's done is have an affair, then I'm sorry but that's simply not enough to be denied the opportunity to be England manager. It could be more, but with what happened with Allardyce I'd be shocked if the FA haven't had this cleared beforehand.
Or Ashley Cole, who's now full-time with the FA. Affairs and the like are very ill-natured things to do to other people but they're not unforgivable and they're extremely common in life. I wonder how many journalists who write such pieces have had affairs themselves, or have colleagues who are guilty of them. Probably quite a lot. Some of these journalists want to treat the England manager's job like it's the Bishop of Rome.
In this country I begin to wonder if the new European competition format will turn people off. I think before the tweak in the competitions with the subscription increases they have probably already priced out a lot of fans. So, they have a lot riding on this new format being enjoyable. It just seems to be focused on providing more games for TV companies though. I’m finding it a bit boring tbh. The league stage is going to last until the end of January and the overall quality of teams has really dipped. Maybe it is too early to judge.
On paper the quality of teams shouldn’t be much worse there are only 4 more, But it’s not quite working out like that. It will probably get changed again in one or two broadcast rights cycle times
Through if Real Madrid and Barcelona get their way they won’t be in the CL next season but in the Super League.
1849410436552114195 is not a valid tweet id The FA's attitude to futsal is infuriating. It has massive participation potential and can really fill gaps left by traditional grassroots football that's subject to volatile weather. We have one of the richest FAs on the planet, I'd love to know what exactly their money is going on because every other form of grassroots football is in a shoddy state too. This article also says the men's team might not have the funding to participate in Euro qualifiers.
The Premier League has a pretty big problem with the growing disparity between the PL and the Championship in quality. Two of last year's promoted the three will almost certainly go down this year and there's a solid chance all three go down for the second year running. This year's three were very good Championship teams last season too, and whoever comes up in their place at the end of this season will be a worse crop. The league is far weaker this season. I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that these days the promoted sides are naively determined to try and play expansive, attractive football in the PL despite clearly not having the facilities to do it. Bielsa aside, a lot of the more successful newly promoted sides have been managed by men who understood the need to play pragmatically at times and coached it well. Club football in England drastically needs a cultural reset imo.
I think parachute payments might go eventually but the PL is very determined to keep them and will possibly sacrifice other stuff to keep them.
I think also, these financial restrictions that the Premier League has really hinders what the promoted teams can spend and therefore less likely enables them to compete. Forest took a huge chance when they came up and spent loads but got away with a four point deduction but they managed to accumulate enough points to stay up. They need to change these PPR rules to at least allow promoted teams to compete otherwise they are always at odds to go straight back down.
I'm not sure you can extrapolate a meaningful pattern at this stage. Looking at the last ten years, these are the finishing positions of newly promoted clubs: 2014/15: 14th, 19th, 20th 2015/16: 13th, 16th, 19th 2016/17: 16th, 18th, 19th 2017/18: 10th, 15th, 16th 2018/19: 7th, 18th, 19th 2019/20: 9th, 17th, 20th 2020/21: 9th, 18th, 19th 2021/22: 13th, 19th, 20th 2022/23: 10th, 15th, 16th 2023/24: 18th, 19th, 20th That's just a random scatter, with last season as an unusual outlier and the previous season as a equally unusual instance of all three staying up, which has only happened four times since the start of the Premier League era. Worth saying too that Leicester are currently 6 points clear of relegation, and actually closer on points to 7th than to 18th, while only Southampton are currently in the relegation zone. It looks pretty standard to me. I would also question that last year's promoted teams were unusually strong. Leicester were pretty dominant, but compare that set to previous seasons where e.g. Wolves came up backed with big money and spent it. Southampton and Ipswich were always going to be fighting the tide to stay up. It's only been five minutes since Ipswich were in League One.
I think there's an element of that, but additionally, I think a lot of clubs have just spent badly. Both Ipswich and Southampton spent upwards of £100m; I like a lot of Ipswich's transfers but they probably needed to bring in one or two more experienced heads with a bit more proven top level quality, rather than leaning quite so heavily on Championship talent. Same with Southampton, who probably made a big blunder by signing Ramsdale for that much and really could've done something much more immediately useful with the money they spent on Nathan Wood and Ronnie Edwards. Even now I think Southampton could be a good team. If they'd signed a hard working winger and another DM instead of some of what they've done they'd have the means to deploy a really good 4-4-2 counterattack with the tools they have now. It's just the way I see it going because you can see the wider trend in the EFL (not just the Championship) of clubs obsessively targeting managers who implement a certain style of football. It feels like you can't get a decent EFL job these days without committing to Guardiola-esque principles. We literally saw Bolton go to the Emirates the other day trying to deploy a system of deep buildup and get slapped 5-1, giving away goals on the cheap. It's becoming a culturally embedded idea that if you have aspirations to be a club that competes in the top league you "need" to play a certain way, and as a result I think we're going to see newly promoted clubs have less and less success when making the step up, and on top of that inequality within the PL will widen until the whole thing resets. I'd also be shocked if Leicester aren't deep in the relegation battle. They've beaten Southampton which helps their cause, but Crystal Palace will likely sort themselves out and Everton won't go down as long as they have Dyche. Between them and Wolves for the 3rd spot if I had to bet on it.
I broadly agree about Southampton's spending, although I suspect that some of the guessed-at figures on Transfermarkt are a bit exaggerated, and they also brought in £30m-40m in sales. Actually think Ramsdale was worth the money for them, whereas maybe the sums spent on Downes and Archer were a bit more of a questionable punt. I like Ipswich's signings, but again, you have to remember that they were in League One 15 months ago and massively overachieved last season. They were going from a standing start with a squad that wasn't really promotion standard, never mind Premier League ready. Again, contrast that with someone like Wolves, who won the Championship with Ruben Neves and Diogo Jota already in their squad. Again though, I don't think that's new, is it? How many times in the last 20 years have we seen a club try to be ambitious until February and then parachute in an Allardyce/Pulis/Warnock when they find themselves staring down the barrel? There's an entire class of professional northerners who've built decent careers on swiftly sacking off the continental nonsense in favour of Chris Wood and a bunch of burly West Africans staging a weekly Battle of Towton. Yeah maybe, but it's equally possible that Leicester will sort themselves out and/or make some more signings in January and/or bring in the nearest available northerner and go a bit medieval for a few months. It's a bit previous to be sounding the death knell when they're pretty well clear of danger anyway.