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Does anyone remember Hendry Thomas from Wigan? He's a Honduran holding/D-mid. Looks like he got a number of starts there then fell out of favor or was hurt. The Colorado Rapids just signed him as life without Pablo Mastroeni has been a bit rough. (Mastroeni has been suffering from concussion symptoms for nearly the entire season and it looks like he'll have to retire.)
A whinge about money in English football from the LRB.
"Many deride what has happened at Manchester City, and with good reason, yet even critics have been surprised by how professionally the club has been run since the Mansour takeover. And putting millions into a club is surely less of an offence than owners buying clubs to take fortunes out."
So Bilbao got something for their obstruction. Seems to me that keeping a player when he wants away and the bid triggers the clause is a rather hopeless project. They would have had time to bring in a replacement if they hadn't played those games. Of course they are rich now, so I guess all the chairmen of La Liga are salivating at the prospect of unloading a player to them. Which would explain the part about the players being no stinking foreign imports.
It's David Conn, and reads like a shorter "The Beautiful Game" + "Revised with New Chapter covering the 2012-13 Premier League Season!" Though I see he's written a new book about City, so maybe that's the new book.
They had plenty of time to find a replacement, before he left. As far as deadline day deals go, his was completely predictable. And with all the last minute deals going down, if clubs got an extra 4 weeks every time it happened, there would be no point in having a deadline in the first place...
Holy crap! When was the last time a player the caliber Hulk spent an entire career outside one of the big 4 leagues?
(I'm American, I just love the term whinge > whine)
Looks like Zenit's rumored to get Axel Witsel as well.
60 million for Hulk, 40 million for Witsel.
I think he rose too fast, or too far beyond his skill level. As you say, he's a good, not great player. It's tough for a player of that caliber to have a strong spot with a team like Chelsea. Which means you'll be considered expendable. I think that he would have had a regular job at Liverpool, but I don't see many players pass the opportunity to move on to a better club.
Someone want to tell me what I should know about Witsel? Is he better than Dembele? These Portugal clubs make an absolute killing on the transfer market. I don't understand it.
Sounds like he might be a good replacement for Mastroeni, short-term at least. Pity he's not going to have a chance to set the all-time MLS record for fouls.
Because they can't compete for anything ever? Because they are shut out from lucrative play in the Champions League? Because they can't get high-value sponsorship deals because of the lack of visibility? Because their fanbase is turning apathetic and reluctant to spend? The off-chance of a big transfer deal is poor compensation for all of that.
Take your trickle-down economic theories to the politics thread!
Meh, all of this applied before Chelsea, City, PSG and Gazprom broke the bank. At least now fans of small teams can hope that one day their team will be the one with a sugar daddy.
The amount of money sloshing around in football has been a disaster for many smaller clubs. It has resulted in:
- large clubs signing good players from smaller teams that they don't need for the first XI and "stockpiling" them or loaning them out to other smaller clubs. This is distorting competition (and the EPL have just bullied the football league into a new academy system that will ensure that the football league clubs will miss out on many such transfer fees in future anyway)
- most of the money goes not on transfer fees, which only the bigger teams pay, but on wages, which everyone pays. The only "trickle down effect" is that there are mediocre players all over the lower divisions on unsustainable wages
- sensible financial fair play rules in some lower level leagues (eg English tiers three and four) but as the higher leagues have yet to adopt them there is an argument that they merely perpetuate the inequalities.
- financial trouble, or extinction, for teams who lose the wealthy backer or who loses interest (Rangers, Darlington, Portsmouth, Gretna etc).
This may not matter to fans from the US or Asia who are perhaps only interested in a limited number of teams whom they can see on TV and are not used to the concept of leagues of independant teams below a top tier, but these problems are very real.
I accept a salary cap is difficult to enforce given the vested interests, European law and trans-national issues, but there are changes that could be made to level the playing field. Limiting loan signings or squad sizes in some way would be good places to start, IMHO.
*raises hand*
Pretty much completely apathetic. Over the last couple years I've gone from watching fairly regularly to only watching the odd league game if I have nothing better to do and not watching any Champions League game.
That's not what got Rangers into financial trouble. Illegally evading taxes for about a decade, and then getting caught did.
No it's really not. The debt they racked up due to the illegal avoidance alone, was worth more than the value of Rangers FC. It took a completely manageable debt situation, and turned it into a massive train wreck. Rangers were doomed, the second they got caught.
Fans? They have a board who have tried their utmost to enforce a white Zenit policy until now.
Vlastimil Petrzela and Dick Advocaat have spoken about how they tried to sign black players and were blocked.
Hulk and Witsel are in for some interesting times, I guess.
Tom Huddlestone had his red card ban overturned. I thought that call was a bit harsh on the big fella.
Supposedly Del Piero's move to Sydney is not finalized and he could still end up in Southampton.
They may not be building as frantically as PSG and City, but there is no doubt that Zenit's owners – Gazprom, the largest extractor of natural gas in the world – aspire to making their club European champions. Indeed, Gazprom is itself a growing influence in European football: in July the company to whom Roman Abramovich sold Sibneft for £8.4bn in 2005 agreed a three-year sponsorship deal with Chelsea for an undisclosed amount that will likely help the London club's attempts to comply with financial fair play regulations and possibly helped smooth through the purchases of Eden Hazard, Oscar et al. What is more, in the same month Gazprom was unveiled as the sixth "official partner" of the Champions League, alongside Sony, Heineken, Visa and so on. So in a sense they already have their name on the trophy.
The emphases are mine.
Seriously, what the hell does Sibneft have to gain by sponsoring Chelsea? It's a joke.
And their business reasons for doing so are at least as valid as AON's for sponsoring Manchester United (though perhaps not as valid as Gazprom's reasons for sponsoring Schalke).
Right, those are two different things I'm highlighting. The first is that Gazprom is throwing money at UEFA--not a bad way to get in good with the body regulating FFP--and Chelsea are having money thrown at them by Sibneft for no other discernible reasons than Abramovich needs a way to skirt FFP.
It's Gazprom (the company that acquired Sibneft from Roman) that are doing the money throwing though, very possibly a quid pro quo of some sort, but Gazprom is doing a lot of business in Western Europe.
Ha!
I find that I can't quite formulate my thoughts about why I find the petroleum industry's co-opting of world soccer so distasteful. That's usually a sign that I'm being emotional and irrational. I know things are going wrong in my head when I start moving Real Madrid and Bayern over to the "good club" designation in my brain. At least Real and Bayern are football clubs first and evil second.
What happened to Kenwyne Jones? Has he been hit with injuries or something? Looks like he did nothing last year, and doesn't play anymore.
Yeah he tripped over his first name.
You're lucky I am too busy playing Bloons TD, or I would show you the wickedness of your ways!
That sentence really begs for quotation marks around style.
Crouchinho must be delighted at the prospect of reigniting a big man-little man partnership like he had at Pompey and Spurs. It'll be like having the pace and strength of van der Vaart and the creativity and passing guile of Defoe all in one little package.
But not a great country? I mean they should just better hope that no clubs from Russia come knocking. Now that is a big country...
There is nothing of substance about Liverpool's finances here at all. Alas, if only they could be as purely sporting as a club near to his heart...
I'll vouch for Australia. It certainly is a big country. Even bigger than Greenland, which isn't a country, but if it was!
Del Piero seems too old to be the guy you sign to a record salary.
That said, I thought Marco Di Vaio would be another retirement farm player, instead he's been very good helping Montreal make a late playoff push (which will come up short).
If Del Piero pulls a shocker and goes to Liverpool, would he be the first Juventus player to move to Liverpool?
Even farther from Zenit: just plain Vostok.
No. Ian Rush moved from Juventus to Liverpool in 1988, having been sold to Juventus the year before.
Why would that matter? It's not a long term deal and he is certainly better than all the other players in the league.
And he can still play. More than a few people scratched heads when Juve decided to get rid of him. MLS has taken players more over the hill than him - I think Henry's time at a top European club was done - and had success.
That must have been weird for everyone.
I honestly had no idea they were that much. You can get a suit on 34th street for 180 bucks! I guess there was probably little chance he wouldn't have picked #2...
This was the rationale behind teams in cities with large Hispanic populations signing Mexican players to generate interest and ticket sales, and it didn't work. There just aren't enough first or second generation Italians in those cities to move the needle by signing Del Piero because he's Italian.
The question isn't if he can play, the question is does he really want to play. And as I said before, by taking $2M to play in Australia, it seems to me he is more interested in taking a paycheck than anything else. Again, that's fine, but MLS isn't interested in those players.
Similar things were said about Cuahtemoc Blanco, and he didn't move the needle. Chicago didn't see a spike in attendance because they signed the Mexican icon and Rafa Marquez hasn't helped one bit in New York, so I have a hard time seeing 5th generation Italians showing up in droves.
Lucky for you, you can get a brand new Andy Carroll Hammers shirt for just $125
EDIT: Or, for the truly bizarre, an OBAMA or ROMNEY National Team shirt (#12, of course) for just $110.
Is this The Jim's stalking horse for a little BTF franchising offshoot? I have quickly read through the first two articles on the front page that cover AVB's Tottenham tactics, and while I don't agree 100% the quality of the writing and analysis is pretty high. I am looking forward to digging in to more of their content.
They even have the same page format as Zonal Marking.
The Australian league is a serious league and I doubt it's inferior to MLS in quality.
Is he in the squad at all? If not the deadline is irrelevant. I doubt he's going to play in the prem this season.
It is a serious league, but it's inferior to MLS. MLS has more money, better top end talent, deeper rosters, more international players and a larger and more skilled domestic talent pool to draw from.
Went to a few Melbourne Victory games last year and while I do think that its inferior to MLS, its not by much.
Haven't posted since last week, but god Falcao is f'ing good. Anyone who hasn't seen his 3 goals in the SuperCup should search youtube because of the technical skill involved in all. Just completely dismantled Chelsea, though I don't think the best of efforts were given for that match. I think that Roman might have found his next white whale.
Henriquez is U-21, so I don't think he has to be named in the 25-man squad regardless. But that shouldn't have any bearing on his transfer and registration, right? For example, Eden Hazard is also U-21. Could Chelsea have waited until after the deadline for him to agree personal terms? The reporting on Henriquez's transfer is a bit muddled, but that sounds like what happened with him. Universidad and Man United agreed to the transfer a couple weeks ago, but the player hadn't agreed personal terms until today. I don't know; it's not exactly clear.
It seems they had to wait for the work permit.
I was assuming he was "done" old. I may have been misinformed, he hardly played last year. But I would not have assumed he was "certainly better than all the other players in the league." And then even Henry is pretty much better than all the other players in the league, but has trouble staying on the field.
And yes, there was reported interest from Montreal, but ADP didn't seem enthused about the city.
Weird. Montreal is pretty great. Choosing between Montreal and Sydney as a place to live would be pretty tough unless you just really hated cold winters or loved the beach. Hmm, I think I just sold myself on Sydney, too.
Well, that rules out Liverpool.
That damn anarchopanda must've scared him off.
I do wonder if Del Piero hesitated when he realized that his kids' English is likely to sound like Christian Vieri's.
I've read teams make very little from the Europa League, but it's a little shocking to see just how different it is from the CL...the article says Stoke received the most of the English teams, 3.5 million euros. Does the figure go up much for teams making deep runs in the knockouts?
The squirrel was reportedly very upset by Scunthorphe's tactical ineptness and poor team selection during their poor start to the season.
It's very much a second tier competition, the gap will only widen.
I kind of miss the Cup Winners Cup, it at least had a hook. But of course it couldn't work well with the expanded CL.
Does the figure go up much for teams making deep runs in the knockouts?
Only if you make the final.
EDIT: Beaten to the punch, coke for ursus.
There are a lot more pictures on the development website.
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