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7:34 PM (14 hours ago)
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I
am not taking the moral high ground against every other club. Like most
other fans, I am against the sugar daddy clubs. There is a difference
between spending money you generate and money you don't. Chelsea just
stockpiled a load of players before FPP came in and the last two years,
they've have had to sell just to break even because they spend stupid
amounts in wages. Same goes with City and PSG.
The
problem with this is that other clubs then have to pay inflated prices
for players and spend huge amounts just to stay competitive while they
can just write it off like it was pocket change. We'll see how they fare
in a few years time without a youth policy and no more salable assets
because all they do is buy players in their prime. Chelsea is a small
club with a small fan base and yet they have spent well over a billion
(net) in the last decade or so. Without Abramovic they would go back to
mid table or most probably go bankrupt.
Anyway,
the point is Liverpool, Arsenal and ManU have to spend so much money
because Chelsea and City just outspend us irrespective of the money they
make. Should we just sit back and let them win title after title? At
least we can try to do something about it because don't forget about the
likes of Tottenham, Everton, Newcastle and Aston Villa. All bigger or
at least similar in support to Chelsea and City but they now have no
fucking chance of even getting in the Champions League, let alone win
the league.
It makes me laugh that you try to
argue about this when you would be saying exactly the same thing if it
happened to your club.
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7:36 AM (2 hours ago)
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What
I'm saying is that the sugar daddy clubs are no different from
Liverpool in the way they are ran, as in they abuse the proven
correlation and causal relationship between spending and success (and
always have). Liverpool, for a club that has no sugar daddy, has spent
crazy amounts of money in a highly inefficient way at times (while at
others, in a successful way). This is only symptomatic of what bothers
me the most in Liverpool, a club that I grew up admiring and which I
identify as a special and unique club, with similar social and
historical traits as Benfica. What bothers me about Liverpool is the
inconsistency stemming from a seeming lack of vision for the club, from a
strategic point of view. Much like you have shown in your text ("we have to spend
as much as they"), Liverpool seems to just follow big spending models
in their own (relatively) more limited way. Liverpool buys tons of
overpriced players every season, mostly with little criteria (remember
the Houllier days?). I think Liverpool's total spending is crazy for the
level of domestic success you've had (wages aside, which I haven't
bothered looking at the real numbers, Liverpool has spent up to 76% of
Chelsea in new players).
I don't think you've realized that
my point is more radical than yours: what I'm trying to say goes
further than the bemoaning about sugar daddies as the destroyers of the
modern game. The modern game was already destroyed for at least 10 years
before them, they only recently made it more obvious. Nowadays fans of
other clubs herd together in repetitions and reiterations of the same
things you've said, over and over again, while missing the point
altogether - the problem is not the sugar daddies (although I also hate
their vapid participation in the game), the point is put simply,
capitalism and the free market. It would always tend to this and always
will, if the market is free. Just like a planet attracts more mass as it
grows, a club will, on the long run, generate more wealth the wealthier
it gets, and ultimately generate more success, the more successful it
gets, spend more, and so on (Real Madrid being a prime example of a club
that is run the same way as sugar daddy clubs, without having a sugar
daddy). You may claim the romantic argument over how Real Madrid would
have "deserved" this, as they use the money they've generated themselves
(only half true, as they have extremely strong backups from banking
institutions), but that is the same as claiming Microsoft is entitled to
buy every promising start up there ever was, just because they've built
their status quo before others, and that new players with big capital
are less entitled to do that. I see sugar daddies as business angels,
which will pick a start up for some reason and finance it into success
motivated by whatever often obscure and dodgy reasons they have (the
methods for success are well known and documented, you just need enough
capital), it's just that for something like football, which you expect
and want to be less predictable, it's frustrating, we don't like to see
it, and that's where my argument comes in, I don't like to see it for
Chelsea or City, and I don't like to see it for Liverpool, for me it's
the same shit, different angle. I already criticized Liverpool before
Abramovich came into scene, it just came across as a wasteful club, with
a very loose market strategy.Anyways, to break this you need market regulation. This is tough for me to say because I am anti-regulation by default, I like to believe in the natural order of things, but if the Universe is capitalistic - which it is, big galaxies become bigger and so on - and we would like to keep this game a bit less predictable, a bit more open, a bit more human, then we need to regulate. Also, you need to restore club ownership to fans, make them engage and participate more, discuss more, and have a say on how clubs are run, why they are run and what identity they should have. And that's my point: if you eliminate sugar daddies, you still have a problem, the rest is a matter of quantity and proportion, which I'm frankly not bothered by.
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10:15 AM (10 minutes ago)
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Well,
I agree with pretty much all of this. Liverpool wastefulness. Fan
ownership. The inevitability of a free market global game and the
predictability of it all...
It's kind of ironic that
the best model is in the land of the capital as all the major sports in
US now have salary caps. I think most would be in favor of that.
Problem is, how do you implement it in football? NBA, NFL, MLB and NHL
are all private entities and they do what they want. Player power comes
from the Players Associations but they get their "share" of the
revenues. A bit like football but in a more even way.
Without
the fear of relegation, investments are pretty secure and it's not
catastrophic if you have a "few" bad season. On the contrary, you get
the best picks with the draft system. Free agent rules makes it very
hard for young players to move just to go to a successful club.
One
thing that might make things change though is the growing influence of
agents and especially the arrival of the "super agents" or agency
companies like Jorge
Mendes'. I think there will be a point where clubs will come together
and say we have to do something about this because these guy are taking
money out of the game (the club pockets and the fans in the end) for no
reason other than greed. Unfortunately for a lot of clubs, the only way
this will probably happen in the form of a European super league with
all the big clubs forming a breakaway system. It would be good for the
few but bad for the rest. Although, I'm not sure if fans of "the rest"
feel like they have a chance anymore anyway. Most of the guys from the
Lions supporting smaller say they like it better in the lower leagues
because of the unpredictability of it all.
Last
thing about the sugar daddies though. If they did it as a romantic
investment just to get a club to be competitive, I would not have a
problem with it. The problem is not that they spend money at the level
of their competitors. They completely dwarf their spending. And yes
wages makes all the difference. Correlation between wages and final
positions is higher than any other metrics in football.
John
Henry (FSG president) philosophy is to spent smart. Find a way to
exploit untapped potential in the market to find value. That's where I
think the strategy has changed for Liverpool under the new owners. Buy
young players before they become world class. Try to find world class
players who are undervalued because they are perceived as undesirable.
Spend less money to get to the goal: win. I'm not sure if we talked
about it but it's based on Billy Beane and the story of the Oakland A's.
Moneyball. The movie is one of my favorite.
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10:26 AM (0 minutes ago)
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10:29 AM (4 hours ago)
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Agree to agree. Isn't it just wonderful. Let's just hold hands and go for a walk in the sunset :)
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