He's basically describing cup competitions! There is no way that a playoff to decide the champion at the end of the season will be accepted here by the fans, no way! Could you imagine if after winning the league Man City lost a playoff against Spurs to decide the league champion!!? It would make a mockery of the whole 9 month season before! You may as well just forget the season and have a knockout tournament like the world cup! Never going to happen.........and if it ever did that would be me done with the game completely.
I'm with you on more inter-conference play in the play-offs; but it also needs to happen in the regular season. Teams in the middle, but on different sides of the conference line; should still play at least one. Minnesota and Chicago, for example. And the Canadian teams should all play each other even though 2 are in the east 1 is in the west. Plus, as a Rapids fan, I don't want to just see the same West teams year after year.
Interesting that he chose to use American sports for comparison when he could have looked closer to home. How the most popular team sports in Italy choose their champions: 1. Football: full season 2. Basketball: playoffs 3. Volleyball: playoffs 4. Rugby: playoffs 5. Water Polo: playoffs Yeah that makes sense.
The "Texas to Portugal with no USSDA/MLS academy involved" tax, I'm all for it, I hope the pen stings in Don's hand everytime he signs the check, like in Harry Potter
Potentially, but the mechanism of promotion acts to reduce those chances since they would have to run a club well enough to earn promotion in the first place.
Some rumblings about financial irregularities(?) that potentially could impact Everton's relegation survival.... https://www.espn.com/soccer/everton...ction-over-finances-in-relegation-row-sources
Yep just listened to a Podcast on this with Rory Smith of the NYT. It was a Liverpool one so biased but he was saying he wouldn't be surprised if whoever ends up relegated doesn't sue after the season.
Training and Solidarity payments would help alleviate that - wonder if Varzim sent money to his u12-18 teams....
Actually I was wrong (again!). I don't think he played for Liverpool Warriors academy but for their defunct NPSL team having been plucked directly from his high school. After about a season his Portuguese shopped him around Europe. I wonder if the coach got a backhander. I think today the Warriors would get a solidarity payment of around $10k. I don't think schools can accept anything.
Would it though? The pay to play academies are here to stay for the foreseeable future. Hell, even Barcelona's US academies are pay to play. The training and solidarity payments aren't a sustainable business model.
This is completely foreign to North American fans. I'm currently watching a Stanley Cup (NHL) Playoff game between the Carolina Hurricanes and the New York Rangers. Yes, announcers have mentioned that the Florida Panthers won the Presidents' Trophy for best regular season record. If they don't win the Stanley Cup, then they're not the champions. It's that simple.
For many Americans, it's the exact opposite: it would be a mockery to not decide the champion in a playoff, because the American sports mentality is that you can't be the best without beating the best head-to-head.
Watching them has been great entertainment the last several weeks though. And this League One play-off final this morning is really entertaining too.
I don't care if its accepted in the US, it will NEVER be accepted here it would make a complete mockery of the whole damn competition, can you imagine if at the end of the season Spurs played Man City and beat them with a fluky goal and then Spurs were declared as the best team in England!?? It would be laughable, the Premier League is the worlds most popular league for a reason and it would destroy it. It ain't happening, not today, not tomorrow, not in 10 years, the fans are STILL the power behind English football (see the ridiculous Euro Super League proposals) and the fans WON'T let it happen, end of.
A handful of games yeah ... plenty of Everton viewing this season wasn't and yes, playoff matches are usually very entertaining Cool, check the thread title again ... this is about p/r in the US. and that second part is just your opinion. The place in which this discussion is aimed, the US, that isn't the case. It was also pointed out that in most/many other sports even where soccer is king, "our way" is perfectly fine for determining things. Yes, because that's what happens when you're forced to play the best of the best in a head to head knockout to determine the champion. This last year the 49ers hit a FG as time expired to upset the No1 seed Packers. Guess what? Nobody laughed and nobody thought it bullshit and nobody thought the season was made a mockery of! Cool story, but the EPL ain't the US league. So this is irrelevant! Though, if you think it is P/R that is what makes the EPL the most popular league in the world then I feel sorry for you. Why isn't the Bundesliga or LaLiga or Serie A or Ligue 1 or the Superligen or the Jupiler? They all have pro/rel ... ... the EPL rise to world dominance happened when ManU and a few others decided to be very AMERICAN in their approach to their club and create global brands out of them. Pro/Rel literally had nothing to do with it.
What a fan regards as the proper way to designate a yearly champion is conditioned by what that fan has become used to through years (sometimes many decades) of experience. European leagues should stick with what European fans are accustomed to. American leagues should stick with what American fans are accustomed to. Neither continent should be trying to force its system on the other. To each his own.
Yeah it would be a complete mockery of the season if 4th place Harlequins (71pts) were to beat both 1st place Bristol (85 pts) and then beat 2nd place Exeter (82 pts) in a playoff to be crowned League champion.....wait??? That actually happened last season???? Where was the outrage??? I know, I know....it's Rugby Union who cares??? Crazy thought: Trim the EPL down to 16 teams. After 30 games of home/away fixtures the table splits into two halves of 8. The top 8 then play another round robin schedule of games, with the league champion being crowned after those results. The lower 8 teams play round robin to determine who gets the drop. It's not quite playoffs, though it does give more matchups between that season's best teams at the "business end" of the season. It's arguably the most watched sports league: https://www.sportingfree.com/top/most-watched-sports-leagues-world/ I dunno....the EPL is VERY popular outside of England, especially in Asia. More than half of the world lives in Asia.....
Only in the sense that America is the world. I think globally its a toss up between NBA and the EPL as both are hugely popular in Asia. The global ratings for the FA Cup Final, which I know isn't a league, is about 3x that fit the Super Bowl.