Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying for a second it would work here, however at the very least there is some willing there to try and level the playing field.
Agreed. It’s a **** show and needs changing. A club our size can handle it but the lower teams having a player make it through their respective youth structures playing a season or two then making a big money move which supports the club they left for years to come is a thing of the past. The Canadian premier league has set up rules to protect the youngsters and give them a chance. I think they have to have 6 starting home grown players in either squad or starting 11 and each club has to play the youngsters a certain amount of minutes. Maybe if the lower echelons of our football pyramid was forced to do this these youngsters would stay in the lower leagues to progress. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
The whole concept of trying to assign a value to a young player like that based on a set of rules is pointless. Trying to restrict a young player from making a move would be illegal and wrong. Just because someone is born in East Bumcracksweatfordshire shouldn't mean that he's stuck in the academy of the local tinpot club in perpetuity. A far better answer is something along the lines of what I laid out above. Let him sign, but the club that initially "found" him retains an interest over time. If he's Sancho 2.0, everyone makes money, the player develops and everyone is happy. East Bumcracksweatfordshire United gets a couple of nice payoffs and can paint the changing room, the yoof is playing in the Champions League making millions and legions of chavs are drooling onto his shirt in London. If he stops growing and blows up a knee in a year and ends up working in construction the rest of his life - well, his dream didn't work out, but no club lost anything except his wages. Same as if the big club had found him on their own.
That sounds sensible. No guarantee that a Stella talented 15 year old is going to make a professional contract let alone become a top player. Arsenal ship out as many young players as all the top clubs. The trick is picking up the best ones they discard. Wasn’t Declan Rice a Chelsea youth reject?
I don't get his point - the players leaving for Germany are disillusioned at not being able to break into the City first team - why would going and playing in the Championship or League 1 suddenly fix that? They'd still end up moving to Germany to play top flight football.
The most chilling thing in the article is how they want to use the pandemic to push this idea again. They'll happily let smaller clubs go to the wall (see the PL being so hostile to any kind of bail out) so they can get some B Teams in to take their place. Really can't stand the big clubs and the way they behave towards everyone else in the footballing pyramid.
For sure there are ulterior motives in the mix, but I do get why the PL isn't keen to write a cheque to, say, Stoke who have owners with a net worth in the billions.
The Elite Player Performance Plan was introduced with the claim that it would improve the quality of young English players. The EFL clubs were pressurized into accepting it (although Watford voted against acceptance) by a threat to withdraw financial support. In reality, it is designed to benefit the 'Big Six' clubs at the expense of everyone else (including the other Premier League clubs), but it could kill the academy system at many clubs. The 'Big Six' clubs can sign talented young players for relatively low fees and then many of these players will never get anywhere near their first teams. That is the reason why some of these players have chosen to sign for German clubs. Brentford closed their academy and adopted a different system using a 'B' team because of the EPPP.
Definitely - I don't think Championship clubs should get a bail-out for that reason - especially since Championship teams such as us and Brentford can be asking for 20m+ for our top players. However Leagues 1 and below are a different story.
Especially since City have about 8 other B teams within their group they can use to send their youngsters to.
When it came out, I couldn't understand it. It seems I did understand it and it was as bad as I thought.
The bloke's point is hilarious. "we have a development gap".. "they sell them back to us at 10 times". Cry me a river Sunshine. The solution is to DEVELOP THEM. Give them minutes against top players. Hire a few more staff and upgrade your training sessions. You've got the money to buy them back for "10 times what you paid for them", spend a little of it. The players go to places like Germany because they get coached and get meaningful minutes. The focus of big clubs is not and never has been on player development. It's on making profits and winning in the short term (which begets profits of course). Now, if the FA were REALLY interested in player development, they'd REINFORCE the academy systems at smaller clubs, make more rules that force inclusion of homegrown players, etc.. The big clubs could/would still poach players from smaller ones, but they'd be more established and everyone would win. He's just whining. He wants it both ways. He wants to poach players from smaller clubs in Britain, but be protected from losing those players elsewhere. The dead elephant on the table is that the players aren't leaving for big money, they're leaving because they know they are getting developed. It's simple really... make your club a better place to work for the workers, and they won't leave as much.
California has the most oppressive tax, followed by Manitoba, with Florida having no state income tax. Literally millions ride on your decision Fundamentally the NFL is a completely different beast than football around the world. The league's profitability is based on parity. Make as many games as possible matter, so more eyeballs are on television screens all season. This results in several salient differences: 1) Massive revenue sharing, TV revenues, gate receipts, shirt sales, all shared. 2) The NFL strictly controls all licensing deals - so no one can "do a Manchester City" and hire a big sponsor to enable them to outbid others. 3) Strong collective bargaining resulting in wage scales for new players. 4) A hard salary sap and a salary floor. One team can't overspend and another can't "do a Mike Ashley" and milk the thing entirely. 5) No lower leagues for player development. All the players come through universities, hence the draft. You need a way to parse them out, and given parity is a goal, the worst teams get first go at the best younglings. 6) No competition in other countries. 7) No agent fees for signing elsewhere. Under the aforementioned collective bargaining agreements, player movement is allowed, but agents are paid from the salaries of the players. There are no dodgy "per transaction" fees to drive up unnecessary movement. A player moves for more playing time and/or more wages - only. Some things are still not part of revenue sharing (concessions in stadiums, "seat licenses" for stadiums (basically a fee you pay for the right to purchase a season ticket and often other events at the stadiums), etc.. This is a reason that you seem American cities and football clubs build these massive stadiums with all sorts of restaurants and bars around them, It enables them to build a second revenue stream for the owners. The thing is that those profits still can't be channeled back into buying players above the salary cap. They can spend them on training facilities, etc.. Some do - typically the more successful clubs. Some siphon off the funds and typically suffer. The team in Cincinnati was at one point notorious for this. The main reasons players move are: 1) More playing time 2) More wages (obviously the first can beget the second over time as well) 3) A chance to move to a team that has a better chance to win. Especially for older players, they want a championship as much or more than more money. Personally I'd love to see at least number 7 implemented in European football leagues. The other bits would be harder given the number of countries and leagues involved just in Europe. But a bit more revenue sharing would be helpful.
The difference between American sports and soccerball is that their leagues are basically the only show in town, so they can do what they want (and in fairness, they are canny enough to realise that chucking a few extra crumbs to the ******* teams makes for a better product). Nothing will ever be done in European football to help the little guy, not while there are competing interests from different countries
Exactly, Jadon Sancho and Jude Bellingham both went to Dortmund for a higher level of football than they would have experienced at their previous clubs, the difference being the club that the club that trained Bellingham got a big fee (whether Brum could have got even more is by the by), whereas we got **** all from spending all that time developing Sancho
I didn't know about #4, I thought Kroenke basically did the exact same penny-pinching he does at Arsenal
Completely agree, it’s unworkable in our league and football as a whole. It was really just to highlight that when it comes to the biggest sport in the US, a place where you’d expect it to be far more of a winner takes all mentality, they kind of have the opposite approach when it comes to their young talent. As you say it makes sense to make their league competitive, but in the PL is kind of the opposite. Yes prize money is shared, which is something, but ultimately the bigger teams with the bigger grounds and the richer owners will always always have the upper hand. In theory in the NFL, it’s far more about the decisions you make, rather than how much cash you have.
The leagues in the US have no relevant competition in their sports to be sure. The interesting thing is that compared to Europe, they manage to support multiple highly profitable professional sports. American Football, American Soccer, Hockey, Baseball, and Basketball are all profitable, support big salaries. The exist alongside something unheard of in Europe, big college sports. College Football and Basketball in particular are very popular. Teams in the top leagues never suffer financial ruin. This is because they pivoted their model long ago towards one where the product is designed for television viewing. Schedules are arranged to get the maximum number of good viewing slots. 50 years ago baseball had about half of their games played during the day. Those almost never happen now. WHile baseball teams typically play between 5 and 6 games per week, generally only one weekend game is during the day. The rest are at night so they can be on TV. Also, most sports have end-of-season playoffs to crown champions. That plus enforcing a level of competitive parity so most games matter throughout most of the seasons - they get maximum eyeballs. It wasn't always that way. Back in the 1970s there was massive kicking and screaming as baseball slowly turned the screws on teams like the Yankees to keep them from just buying a title. Baseball still has the least parity of all American sports, but they still have more than the PL. So rambling aside, my overall point there is that what they've done is to bend some of the traditions of the game for the benefit of creating a television show. But by getting the focus on TV viewership, eventually they got to the point where rich owners were more willing to give up a little to get more back. Some of that could apply in European football, but a lot of people wouldn't like it. The tradition of the Saturday or Sunday afternoon match is really important to many, many people. Over time though, it wouldn't shock me if it changed some though. Some of that is already happening. COVID may accelerate it.
Interesting post, thanks. I guess the problem we have here regarding your latter point here is the football pyramid we have, rather than say the NFL, where it is just the one professional league and the college league. If you took the Premier league as a stand-alone then we could easily get rid of the 3pm kick off embargo, potential future Covid issues aside, top level football is easily popular enough that it would have no impact on attendances. Sky are probably also secretly loving the current situation as they can screen games at times that would be an issue for fans of they were are. But because we have the lower leagues that have no demand for TV viewing there will always be a huge disparity whatever we do to adapt the top level to TV audiences.
Fun fact: The starting 11 in the England team last night have made appearances in the EFL than the Premier league. Seems like players are getting developed just fine in the current system, **** City.
