Falling Out Of Love With Football

Which of our lower league rivals received similar amounts of cash from a sugar daddy owner at that time?

 

He is one of the most successful recording artists of all time. Football is a hobby of his.

 

I’ve really enjoyed reading this thread and I feel similarly to many of you.

I started going to Leicester with my dad in 2000, so I caught the last two seasons at Filbert Street. I think my idea of what made football special was forged around then. By no means was it ‘the good old days’ my Grandpa would tell me about. The rot of Sky and massive wages had set in by then but there was still some magic to it. Muddy pitches, knee high tackles, drunken fat blokes like Gerry Taggart marking Thierry Henry out of a game.

There was still some mystery to football I guess. Now it’s showbiz, it’s feels ephemeral and fickle and plastic. Having no fans in the stadium has helped to highlight this for me. Fans in the stadiums should be what it’s all about but as has already been said, the sense of entitlement generated by plastic fans, Twitter warriors and overseas followers have created a bubble that it feels hard to break through. My club seems far more preoccupied with generating slick (or cringy) social media content than say, finding a way sell fans in the ground a pint that isn’t flat, tasteless or costs £5. If you’re going to spend like and present yourself as a big, slick organisation then at least treat your customers with some respect. I laugh to myself every time I see that the new shirt has come out and the thought that some sucker is actually spending £70 on it.

And we’re one of the well run clubs!

While we’re not considered one of the deified ‘big 6’ we do okay. However it feels like playing with the cheat codes on now. £30 million on an unheard of Fofana here, £20 million a piece on the truly useless Rachid Ghezzal and Kalechi Iheanacho. It’s meaningless. Genuinely, if it wasn’t for Jamie Vardy I probably wouldn’t bother. It’s become harder and harder to like the players for numerous reasons and football has definitely lost its magic in that respect.

Young footballers come across as so unbelievably arrogant, even if they’re capable of stringing two sentences together like our own James Maddison. You know they get indulged and fawned over every second of their lives and it takes a lot of the passion and fight out of them on the pitch in my opinion.

I’m lucky in that this set in for me after we won the Prem. That was special, we didn’t buy it, we didn’t act like it was our right to win it and the players understood what it meant and genuinely seemed to love every second of it. I don’t want to be arrogant enough to presume that everyone in the world was willing us on that year but it did seem like it could be the start of something, a new chapter in football where it’s proven that with the right attitude and a big enough pair of balls, anything was possible. As it turns out, with ‘project big picture’ or whatever it’s called, it looks like that title win was a very definite end to football being an open shop. Daniel Levy has apparently admitted that they can’t have an outsider winning the league again. And that’s coming from Spurs. Let that sink in.

 

Chelsea is a ‘plaything’ for Abramovic. EJ, on the other hand, stood on the terraces along with the rest of us and will always be a real fan. The fact that he has been very successful at his job is irrelevant.
I would also point out that football is a hobby for all of us who are not employed in the game.

 

In my view, there are two aspects; liking professional football in general (I don’t) and loving your specific team (I do & can’t help it). The extent to which someone may do the latter probably depends on the circumstances in which they chose their club; or, in most cases, how their club chose them.
For me, WFC happened to be something an unhappy young boy in a difficult childhood could view as a constant to believe in when all the other 5h1t3 was going on around me. No matter how distasteful I find professional football becoming, it would be impossible for me to take it as far as not wanting Watford to succeed.
If we went out of business, then I probably wouldn’t watch football at all.

 

It's all about the matchday experience. OAPs calling multi millionaire professional athletes useless cuunts. Levels of intoxication that are otherwise never acceptable in daylight hours. Marvelling at the complete oddity of some of our fans.

It's stuff like that which makes football great, the game itself is often irrelevant.

 

I read this last year and it was interesting at times it's a bit rambley but worth reading - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Can-Have-Our-Football-Back-ebook/dp/B07XDZY54N

I find the PL pretty boring, and in the book he makes the point that the viewing figures for games in this country and actually incredibly low. Also makes the point that the majority of games are actually rubbish and are only interesting to fans of each team playing, which I'd say is true.

The champions league is getting boring for me too now when the same teams play each other all the time. The problem is, I was talking to a guy who worked at PlayStation who sponsor the CL. For them when Man U play Madrid they get way more ROI but if Porto play Young boys, they get nothing. No wonder Uefa are keen to keep the status quo.

 

Working from home all the time I find myself listening to talk sport a fair bit (more than) I should.

Simon Jordan keeps talking about how if the Premier League has any sense (from a monetary point of view) they’d ditch Sky and create a sort of ‘Netflix’ of football, which in theory you could add other leagues to as well.

He’s pointed out a few times that the Iron Man franchise makes more money than the PL, despite the PL having unique content every week.

Instead of the PL individually agreeing rights with individual countries, you could have a global platform for which you charge maybe a tenner for a monthly subscription, but you’d get billions of subscribers.

It makes sense as obviously every television network has to make a profit on the packages they buy, but if the PL went direct to the consumer they’d make a hell of a lot more than selling them at a price that means each network can still make healthy profits themselves.

If things are bad now then that’s a scary thought if that ever happens.

 

That's not quite the point you made. You said that Elton spent £1.5m on getting the club up the divisions and that the club was a plaything, which it really wasn't. Elton was for a lot of the time deeply involved in the running of the club (although missed almost all of the first season in Division 2 because he was on a huge tour).

The idea that GT had limitless fortunes to spend is not true, just as the idea that he did it on a couple of buttons and some pocket fluff is not true either.

A significant proportion of the money Elton spent on the club in GT's first five years was actually on ground improvements, and a significant chunk of the money spent on transfers was generated by cup income. (source: GT, Eddie Plumley).

If you add up the cost of every player signed between summer 1977 (start of the Div 4 season) and summer 1982 (promotion to Div 1), Watford spent £1.24m (source: GT's programme notes v Aston Villa, Feb 1983).

Players sold in the same period earned £484,500.

So on transfers it cost Watford £762,500 over five years to go from Div 4 to Div 1.

Cup run income (gate receipts and prize money) for the same period brought in: £445,000

So the shortfall was £317,500.

 

I dont agree that Abramovic is less committed than EJ. Owning Chelsea is probably the most exciting thing in his life, the same isnt true for Elton and Watford. Also Gino is much more actively involved in Watford than Elton was and Watford is a much more important part of Gino's life. I love what Elton has done for the club but the idea that our sugar daddy is better than other sugar daddies is just another example of Watford fan's delusional view of their own club. Like claiming we have 'values' when Troy Deeney is our club captain. Like banging on about us being a family club when all football clubs are family clubs and Ive never seen a sign outside the vic saying 'no orphans'!

 

Thanks, thats a very interesting and inciteful post. Id imagine wages were a big issue too for attracting players like Sims, Rice and Armstrong. Maybe Wilf too. Id imagine most other small town lower league sides would have been selling players to break even over the same period. We were a buying club at that time thanks to Elton's cash. GT was probably on a pretty hefty whack too.

 

I didn’t say that Abramovic is any less committed than EJ. That’s not the point. I think most Watford fans would agree that they would prefer to have a rich Watford fan as owner rather than simply a rich owner.

 

If anyone wants a prime example of how toilet premier league football is see last nights re-taken Leeds penalty
Madness

 

- thinks Premier league football is toilet
- watches obscure premier league matches on a Friday night that is none of his business.

 

No you halfwit I watched football focus this morning where they were talking about it.
But don’t let facts or anyone else’s opinion get in the way of you or your mindset

 

yeah defo, I was and still am quite relieved we got relegated as I thought this might lead to a more fun experience, just a shame covid has got in the way of that

 

Yeah that too lol

 

Yep.

 

I never thought I would say this but I am contemplating not bothering when fans are allowed back I may catch a game here and there but my interest has massively declined and there are just other things that I could be doing on a Saturday rather than watch my shower of **** football team.