The Champions League is killing Football

Dont mention Liverpool that 05 victory is practically the only thing that keeps them in the same breath as the other 3 big clubs in england.

 

Jesus, you couldn't have missed the point more by reading only every fourth word.

 

O Fenomeno is a very ignorant man, take it as a given.

 

LOL You simply can't make a blanket statement like that.

That said, international football isn't pure. A Brasilian carried Tunisia to the World Cup in 2006 and is currently leading them to the quarterfinals of the ACN.

 

Hardly. I'll say it again: Hardly.

 

they didn't used to get together any more as national teams in the past than they do now. Apart from the tours that teams would go on, to south america and vice versa. Like International cricket tours.

the quality is still there, it's just overshadowed by the HYPE the CL gets.

Ask Pirlo what medal he'd rather prefer. Go and read what Buffon said in his WC Winner's FIFA.com interview. Ask any German player. Watch the WC semifinal in Dortmund again. Haven't seen a game that high in quality for so long, and on top of that during a WC semifinal (almost comparable to a CL group game!).

 

Lets not stray too far away from the topic...........

 

Who cares about chelsea fans....

yea im includign you CLAN...


Anyways

zippy shaddup

I love international football.

 

Since I notice that you have no clue ... I thought to inform you that Liverpool FC is the most successful and most traditional English football club!

 

And is internationally a far bigger noise than either Arsenal or Chelsea. What's that old saying? Oh yeah - "form is temporary, class is permanent".

Anyhoo ...

International football is not "boring". It's just normally not as high a standard as the CL (at least the latter stages of it, in any case). Nonetheless, as a competition, an event, a happening, the CL is vastly inferior to either the European Champhionship or the World Cup.

 

Sorry, it's this kind of "thinking" that shows a complete and utter lack of understanding of the time value of money and how money and interest actually function.

One thing clear, relegation isn't changing, here or anywhere else.

For a promoted team to be promoted that team will have necessarilly been a lower league team without benefit of the money associated with the higher league. That is a penalty, one way or another. It is also the very root of all non-competitive issues in football. It's also at the root of the CL's success.

Domestic football isn't competitive. It just isn't. For many fans to get that "mystery" of result if you will, the CL is now needed.

At no time did I say this imbalance couldn't be either overcome or wasted for that matter. It's just very rare for either to occur over a long term. Only extreme individual expertise or incompetence can or has ever changed the advantage of having money. Hard work isn't enough. Which is why, with few exceptions, the domestic leagues and the CL will remain the same few teams with also-rans completeing the numbers.

Albert Einstein was asked once at a convention what the most powerful force in the Universe is. His answer after a considerable pause, guided by his massive intellect and higher level thinking of all things, was: "The power of compound interest".

Simply stated, those that don't ever get relegated have more of this power.

Playing and doing well in the CL is yet another form of monetary relegation from the teams that are in to the teams that are not. It's not killing football exactly, but it is killing competitive domestic football.

I think your question shows a willingness to consider other things. That's good. Again, those teams mentioned are not regular fixtures in the CL, therefore they experience that form of monetary relegation every year.

Comparing that list to say the 4 usual suspects from England in the CL is a large difference. In that circumstance, it's everything from reward for table position to Europe receipts to interest on retained funds from previous years to budget differential to foreign receipts to stadium size to whatever else. You probably know these differences better than I.

Still, good and bad decisions can be made under any circumstances or system. That said, there are many reasons, for example, why capitalism is everywhere and communism today isn't. Some systems better allow prosperity to flourish widely among the have nots. Relegation matematically does not as it further rewards the strongest over time.

 

I take it you like rewarding failure then?

 

So would you care to explain how a small club in Argentina won the league last season while a newly promoted side finished 2nd? Or how clubs all over the world get promoted from the "n"th-tier one season and then do very well in the "n-1"th-tier the next (e.g. Bristol City)?

Yes there is a world outside of the BPL...

 

I think you need to take a step back and realise just how many divisions there are in football. It is not like the USA, where you have a major league, and everything else is just a reserve league or no importance.

There are effectively five levels of football in England that are full time professional these days (not all in the blue square premier are full-time pro, but a fair chunk are).

Below that there are another four or five levels of semi-pro football.

Below that are about another ten levels of football with either small payments made to players, or the players are amateurs.

The ONLY place you get a "big 4" situation is in the the premier league. It doesn't happen anywhere else. The reason for that is tv money, and the ill-considered method of distributing it.

That's why you never had a "big 4" prior to the premiership, or even for the first few years of the premiership. Prior to 92, for example, Man Utd had gone 25 years without winning the title, or even coming close to winning it. They even got relegated. All that time, even when they were in the second division, they were still the best supported team in the country. Chelsea were second division regulars in the 1980s. Arsenal were distinctly average for large portions of the 20 years prior to the premiership, even if they were good at either end of that period.

Derby won the league twice in the 1970s. Nottingham Forest, who been an average second divison club for several years prior, won the league in the first season after being promoted, and won the european cup for the next two years as well for good measure.

The system worked absolutely fine for 100 years, and it provided an interesting league, and the divisions below the premier still provide that level of interest - divisions where Nottingham Forest and Leeds can compete against Doncaster and Carlisle without any hint of the games being one-sided.

In short, it's not promotion and relegation - it's the way the money is dished out.

What you seem also incapable of grasping is that a team can go down and come back up again, and have a better team and be financially healthier.

People who seem over-focussed on the relegation aspect, as many Americans do, seem to also be incapable of comprehending that a promoted team can be better than relegated one.

that implies that relegated teams will get progressively weaker. The problem is, while that might seem a sensible anology to an outsider, it completely ignores the fact that there's no evidence at all in 100 years of league football to suggest it's happening. Why did the current stratification not happen prior to the premiership forming? Why are we not seeing the same thing happen throughout the other divisions? The likes of Wolves rake in a fortune compared to the likes of Blackpool, but you don't see Wolves play Blackpool with Wolves ranked as near certainties to win.

It also assumes that premiership teams are getting richer every year re-investing their profits. While premiership clubs may be good at making money, some are notoriously bad at spending it. Quite often the only "compound interest" they are accumulating is on their debts. The reason the likes of Man City, Aston Villa and Newcastle are doing more in line with how they ought to be is through rank awful management, not relegation.

the champion's league's success is down to gloryhunter fans who think the way to watch football is from an armchair. UEFA pay the bigs clubs as much money as they can to try any make sure that the set of "glamour" clubs are always there. They even brought in the group stage to minimise the chance of upsets, as it was harldy fair that if Juventus had to play Malmo, that Malmo could go through instead of them just because they beat them over two games. No, they should have to prove it over six games instead.

The extra CL cash the top clubs get not only helps them buy stonger first teams, it also helps them build much deeper squads. Chelsea play my team tonight and have something like seven top players out. 15 years ago that would have been a crisis. Now they can just bring in another seven top class international players in their place and it's not a problem.

I can look at Liverpool's squad from 1986, for example, and they only had 21 players, and over the season only 18 of them actually played. It was one of the reasons why it was so much harder for clubs to go deep into several club competitons in any season. The League and FA Cup double, for example, was regarded as being nearly impossible to achieve.

i agree, but it's about money, not the competiton.

Staying up rewards those who stay up, providing they spend money wisely. Many chairman act with their club's money like George Best probably would have if you'd dropped him into the red light district of Las Vegas with his life saving in small notes in a carrier bag.


But I'll humour you. Imagine we have a premier league with the best 20 clubs in the land cherry picked to be in it. We scrap relegation, allowing the clubs supported by around half the fans in the coutry to wither and die, as a more open title race takes precedence over their existence.

The tv cash is still going to be distributed as now, both in this new superduperpremier league, and in the CL. Not going down maybe helps those at the bottom end to become teams capable of racking up 45 points rather than 35 within a few years and the top to bottom points difference squashes a small bit.

How does that help Spurs, Newcastle, Man City, Aston Villa etc, not to mention those scooped from below to be in this new league, challenge the big 4? It's not like they can get draft picks and an easier schedule to artificially help them.

 

I reckon it's about the same. You get a lot of average quality CL latter stage games and average quality WC latter stage games.

And then you get great games too.

 

That’s another way the CL is hurting football. All those great players sitting-on the Chelsea and Man Utd bench, instead of out on the pitch playing for other clubs that could use them desperately and where football fans would be able to enjoy seeing them play every week.

 

Well that was a joke but since we're on the topic how many league titles have Liverpool won since 1990? I think the numbers equal to 15 out the non big 4 16 premier league teams.

 

The squad depth problem that richard speaks of affects bundesliga clubs in europe a lot. They still opearate like old Division 1 clubs.

 

I'm saying that I wouldn't be comfortable with my club being in the hands of people who have only business interests at heart, even if it means that we'd get a massive financial injection.

 

Exactly.

 

That's a silly question though as one doesn't exclude the other. It's like asking me 'does your son want to improve his life to please his mother or because he wants fame and fortune'. I chose that analogy for a reason. For local Twente heroes like Sander Boschker, Jeroen Heubach and Karim El Ahmadi, and also to a certain extent Fred Rutten, the club is like a family member. Boschker literally said in an interview 'Twente is like a father and a mother to me'. That sentiment wouldn't change if they moved away to a richer, bigger, more high-profile club.

 

NO!
...and that isn't what is happening. Failure is punished systematically very hashly, ususally on a more harsh level than things like cheating or financial dishonesty!

Again, situations can be overcome. Advantages can be wasted.

Mentioning the representative thing in the vast minority doesn't disprove the reality.

OK, that isn't news. What's your point?
Also, that isn't how leagues work in America. Only baseball has that system. Also, the advent of free agency has almost completely invalidated those historical connections, but that's beside the point and beyond your knowledge.

That isn't the only place, nor is it even the only sport with that issue. Also, it isn't just the Prem TV money. Maybe you should take a step back.

The system worked absolutely fine for 100 years...[/quote]No it didn't. It only "worked well" for those who succeeded within it. Hard to prove, but, football, especially English football, would be bigger and healthier overall in complete absence of relegation. The easy examples to point to are: There is no more historically successful league top to bottom than the (US) Nationial Football League. MLB and the NBA are also awash with cash and are virtually uncontested monopolies in their respective sports. One of the many main reasons are the rules that foster competitive balance.

It's reasonable to think that England's league would be the de facto home to the world's best of the best without relegation. What real competition would there be in the developed world? It's a marvel that even under the crippling effects of relegation that the Prem is what it is. It's a pure testiment to our human lust for entertainment and belonging to a group.

It's relegation. Without relegation there is no need to do anything but divide the league money equally within every level. By that I mean everyone of a level gets a like amount that may not be equivalent level to level.

I grasp it just fine. That is rare in any case. The ability to do that does not mean anything other than the abiliity to do that. That one irrelevant team goes up and down, if fact, almost proves my arguement nicely.

First you have a team flush with top level cash for at least one year if not more, putting them at a competitive monitary advantage in the lower league. Secondly you have lower level teams who have not had access to, say, Prem money. Those teams are at a monetatry competitive disadvantage. All things being equal (which they are not obviously, but we are talking systems), relegated teams SHOULD get promoted again!

Thank you for illustrating my point.
[/quote]People who seem over-focussed on the relegation aspect, as many Americans do, seem to also be incapable of comprehending that a promoted team can be better than relegated one.

that implies that relegated teams will get progressively weaker. The problem is, while that might seem a sensible anology to an outsider, it completely ignores the fact that there's no evidence at all in 100 years of league football to suggest it's happening.[/quote]If you want to bring everything else into it then consider the effect of the internet. Info on training, coaching, nutrition, fitness, etc. is all widely available to anyone with a hook up. That has been largely responsible for all atheletes getting better, but wahtever. Teams are getting weaker when compared to the mega-teams. Absolutely they are. Top Leagues (the ones effected by the Euro CL, not Argentina, etc. Again, read the thread title.) are less competitive, with rare Cinderella stories.

Again, irrelevant. Individuals will make mistakes and have success regardless of system.

You wouldn't have a CL at this level without relegation. Neither exist in a vaccuum, but the imbalance of relegation came first. Thus it created the monsters that wisely insured their continued reign by expanding the CL.

Dumbass comment.

They don't challege the Top 4. Again, you're proving my point for me. None of the above are regular entrants in the CL. They can't compete and so they don't.

The Prem is reduced to the entertainmnent of the individual gameday experience. The league table is largely predetermined at the top. It is what it is. Fathers will still attempt to brainwash sons to wear the local colors. Only now some percentage of sons will abandon the local colors for the "glory" of a team that wins occasionally. Such is the slow death of a legaue with relegation.

Of course, the above is the extreme limit never really to be realized. Still, every day Euro domestic leagues come closer to this. Man U.'s march on to world glory. The Spurs' etc. march to irrelevance on a world stage. The Charletons' have a run in the top league never to bother anyone only to inevitably fall back down as economics say they must. The Wolves' of England have no real chance only hope. As a league, it's more boring and more pre-determined than it should be. The CL is now the product outside of the WC.

As a neutral I don't care about settling in to see Arsenal v Wigan. I'm good with seeing the 5 goals on highlight. Same with Arsenal blowing out a Greek team in the CL league stages. I will tune in to see Arsenal in a Quarter or Arsenal v Chelsea, for example. Mystery v a likely result.

I agree. My point is that situation wouldn't exist witout the ill competitve effects of relegation. Without the imbalance to start, there wouldn't have been the clamouring and pseudo-conspiritory behavior to allow for the proliferation of CL as the most watchable club games on the planet.

For a neutral, most domestic leagues are irrelevant other than highlights.

Someone else mentioned that it hurts International football. Yeah, if many quality guys sit on the bench backing up the uber-heroes, they're progress is probably stunted to some small degree. It's good for the FIFA Top 20 or so probably, but that's it.

 

False.

What you fail to grasp is that in the lower leagues (where parity and pro/rel live in harmony, BTW) most teams enter the season with a realistic hope of promotion. And that is many team's main goal entering the season and the #1 talking point among its supporters. Without that goal, the support would just disappear and attendances would resemble lower division attendances that exist in baseball in America.

In other words, it would be horrible for the health of English football.

Have you seen the average wages in baseball's second division? $2150/month

Baseball third-level? $1500/month

Fourth-level? $850-$1050/month

What's the average wage for 4th-level English football? $5000/month or so?

Baseball isn't as healthy as you think if you look at the big picture. Neither is American football. If you're not quite good enough to make the top league, you'll probably be spending your life delivering FedEx packages. So its not really the big, successful industry that English football is.

 

Substantially more than that. £49,600 pa in 2006, so over $8000/month.

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