Reply With QuoteFootballing greed and arrogance.
I haven't heard from any top players yet. It would be nice to hear that they would want a transfer rather than be disqualified from playing for their country.
What’s your thoughts now? Looks like they have signed up.
My thoughts are that, if they play in it I hope UEFA, The Premier League and fifa stand by their threats and kick them out of the domestic competitions and such.
My other pondering is if they are kicked out the domestic leagues when this falls flat in a few years what level are they allowed to rejoin?
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Footballing greed and arrogance.
I haven't heard from any top players yet. It would be nice to hear that they would want a transfer rather than be disqualified from playing for their country.
My thoughts are that it won’t happen, it’s simply posturing ahead of the Champions League re-structure.
However if they have or do sign a statement of intent then the EPL has to throw them out as quickly as possible. If they do go then that’s it, no coming back to the league in the future.
I can’t help seeing the irony of a league full of so-called European super powers that will include Man City, Arsenal and Spurs who have hardly any European pedigree, especially Man City FFS. It’s all about greed.
Originally Posted by woodacre1983
I’m a casual fan. I never understood why there’s an expectation to be a die hard fan to enjoy football. It’s different for other sport, you can enjoy athletics once every four years, watch tennis in July for two weeks and there’s no issue.
So for me I love it when the best players and teams go up against each other, there’s no hiding. So if it meant more of this I’m all for it. I’d prefer to see Liverpool play Barca twice a year than maybe twice a decade.
Apparently they have all ‘penned letters of intent’
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
And Tottenham joining a European Super League is like Bananaman getting called up as an Avenger
Couldn't have said it better myself
Sent from my SM-G960F using Tapatalk
We should remember that the CL was formed out of the old European Cup where only league champions got to compete. UEFA expanded this for money, nothing more. It’s no different.
Money is at the heart of it all. These billionaires haven’t bought their clubs out of charity but there are interesting sub plots. Juve haven’t won CL since the 90’s, Real and Barca are in loads of debt, United are no longer the footballing force they once were. I’m disgusted in my own club, City, for being part of this.
PSG haven’t confirmed but that’s only because of their conflict due to World Cup at Qatar and BEIN being major benefactor of UEFA broadcast contract.
Quote of the day!
Gary Neville sums it up nicely: https://www.reddit.com/r/sports/comm..._the_european/.
brilliant! i'm having that thanks!
It's absolute disgrace and I'm embarrassed being a Liverpool fan.
The whole thing is based on greed and is the way of the American sports set ups which is no surprise considering the amount of US owners involved.
I'd be surprised if the FA ban them because the sponsor's will walk away of the big clubs aren't in the league.
It will ruin the Premier League though if 6 teams have an extra 300 million a season to spend.
👍🏼😂
Some reports saying Spurs manager has been sacked.
Yes, Mourinho sacked. I suppose Spurs can now afford Jose’s compensation claim now they’ve signed up to the big table.
Having given it a bit of thought I reckon it could be good for the game.
It's pointless whinging about greed and money ruining the game... that can of worms was opened in 1992 and this is just the next logical step. The rich get richer and richer until such a time that they can pull up the ladder, slam the trapdoor and ensure no one else can join their club. So, let them go and form their own little league and remove them from all domestic competitions. No need to wait until 2022, go now and don't let the door hit your backside on the way out.
That leaves us with a 'new' English league. For argument's sake, let now call that the First Division. We can promote a few more teams up from the (to keep consistency, now named) Second Division to keep the numbers right.
Ok, so the money available is going to be less so every club is going to have to cut their cloth more prudently. Perhaps the best players will stay in the Super League but not having the best players doesn't make for a lesser spectacle... People can fall in love with the game again (once VAR has gone, naturally), support their local club. Wages will drop to a more sustainable level, clubs will be run for the good of the fans and maybe BBC and ITV could afford to show matches live again.
Obviously none of this will ever happen as UEFA and the Premier League are just as invested in keeping the gravy train rolling as the 'big six' but we can dream.
Last edited by Meesterbond; 19th April 2021 at 11:05.
I honestly don't think it will happen. It will have no support from the fans - at least the real fans. Evidently, some of the owners of these clubs are now referring to the fanbases they inherited as 'legacy fans' but actually are looking to the 'fan of the future' to provide the income going forward. Oh well. Anyhow, all this said, I have absolutely zero regard for UEFA and FIFA either - they have to be two of the most corrupt organisations on earth and some form of change or change of power-holding has to occur but this certainly isn't the way forward.
Football has been ruined completely by money and greed. I’m a Watford fan and we’ve had a little bit of success in recent years but I’d give that all up to return to the 80’s and 90’s where we had loyalty and owners that genuinely cared for the fans. When we were managed by Graham Taylor he made sure that the club had a connection with the fans and understood that a club has no soul without them. The players had to live near the town, they had to take part in community projects and they would eat and drink in the same places as the fans.
That has gone now. We have a team of players that are there for one thing only, money. When we were relegated last season our so called talisman Shrek, ten years at the club and bloody useless for the last two, couldn’t even wait until he’d left the pitch at Arsenal before doing a come and get me interview for Sky. We allegedly had senior players, who were responsible for our relegation, go on strike until they got their move away. We even had young players who had never played for the first team demanding moves rather than play Championship football! Owners and players don’t care for fans, it’s all about money.
This has been on the cards for a while and will be the final nail in the coffin for the beautiful game. Without that dream of climbing the ladder and qualifying for the biggest competition the smaller clubs will be asking whether it’s worthwhile continuing. If the Premier League is relegated to a second rate competition tv revenue will fall, and if revenue falls for the Premier League that will flow through to all competitions. Plenty of clubs in the pyramid are close to the wall now, any further reduction in income for them now and they will be gone. The owners of the big six, two of whom that are only a couple of injuries to key players away from being relegation fodder, do not understand the history of their teams, and even if they did they would not care. It’s all about money for them and they probably feel that the income from tv rights and overseas sales means that they can survive even if their domestic fans turn on them.
This has to be stopped, the teams have to be expelled from domestic competition and any players that take part have to be excluded from their national teams. Personally I’m not sure that FIFA, UEFA, The FA and the Premier League actually have the balls to stand up to them. Again that will be down to money, a Premier League with Man Utd reserves would still make the backers more money than a Premier League without them at all. I also don’t hold up much hope of the players standing up to the clubs if they can’t play international football. If anyone seriously believes that the likes of Raheem Sterling and Harry Kane wouldn’t renounce their citizenship and bow down and pledge allegiance to the flag of JP Morgan for an extra £100k per week they are living in cloud cuckoo-land. Greed and it’s disgusting.
If "the best players" know that their chances of ever playing for their national team or for another club outside that league are cut off for good, they may think twice. They will become what the North American Soccer League was at its beginning, getting the big name players just before (after) they retire, the likes of Pelé, Chinaglia, Cruyff, Müller and Best.
The NASL is no more.
'Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain' - Schiller.
100%
I stopped taking any serious interest in football decades ago, when money became to prime, if not single, motivator.
Clubs and players have little connection, cultural or social, with grass roots local supporters.
I did wonder about this, whether it would become a last big paycheck for players approaching retirement. Perhaps after a few years, once contracts are up they may think about it but realistically, are you going to take £200k a week at ManUtd or £200k per annum to play for Wolves so that you also get to play Moldova and Finland?
Agreed. As a lower league fan it would make the top league more interesting. Who would win ? Everton, Leicester, West Ham, etc ? It would be a change. I would watch this but not the ESL !
Don't think it will happen though - a tactic ahead of UEFA negotiations!
M
Playing for the national team didn't deter a host of top players joining the cricket world series funded by Kerry Packer back in the 70s. I doubt footballers will be keener to play Gibraltar in a euro qualifier than sign a contract promising them £200k a week.
Uefa have made me laugh today with their condemnation of it all while announcing plans to enlarge the Champions league to include clubs on status rather than merit.
Money talks.
Interesting perspective from a board insider: "The good of the game is of secondary concern".
Shamelessly stolen quote from Twitter
Regards this proposed league fans in this country won’t sign up for it or the TV stations showing it however they probably think they will get enough subscriptions from Asia to make up for it.
Not sure they had bargained on this amount of backlash though
I’d think they would be playing to half filled stadiums too-I for one would have zero interest in watching a contrived league
Don’t agree it would devalue the premiership either-maybe could get back to UK players actually playing in it as opposed to mercenaries.
Sort of hope it happens and these clubs get their just desserts.
Good to see no German clubs as by constitution they must be 51% fan owned and fans will have nothing to do with it.
Interesting point on PSG surprising non investment
On sky sports news
Dortmund say they will not be joining
Porto were invited, but declined the offer
That's explosive stuff! Certainly looks like a done deal. Kick them out this week. Don't let City or any of them win the title. Promote nine from The Championship for next season and let's have a great competition on a more equal standing without. I'm looking forward to it, might even renew my Sky Sports!
Be talking games kicking off early afternoon midweek to accommodate the Asian market which should strip out most demand/availability for Europe, Africa and The Americas.
As several have already said, it's all about money. If there's no risk, competition doesn't exist, and it merely becomes ballet with a ball. I suspect it's a spoiler for UEFA's own plan and was never meant to be serious, but only a way to force concessions from UEFA.
They’ve generated a response from UEFA and it’s not a conciliatory tone.
It's still a good line
I suspect it's a powerplay to UEFA but I'd quite like UEFA to call their bluff and immediately legislate for massive re-entry costs where clubs have chosen to leave, with 100% of those costs being invested in grass roots/lower league football.
The Sky money exacerbated the imbalance between the club's with mega rich owners and those being run on much lower budgets such that is created a 3 tier Premier League of sorts, albeit still with the potential for a club to move through those wealth leagues (which will not be the case in the ESL American franchise style model).
The fans of the Dirty Dozen/Greedy 12 ought to speak up and let the owners know that they'll be dependant upon the new franchise fans if they go this way. To my mind, their owners are forever sullied by this action.
That is the one thing the owners are not worried about. the "heritage" fans are a demanding inconvenience, best ignored. They are looking at future fans in Asia (mainly) that will be grateful for the spectacle offered, all the "magic names" European clubs playing just for them. They'd get 10 times the domestic audience in Shanghai alone.
'Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain' - Schiller.
Not sure they’re bothered about fans, I’ve seen the term ‘legacy fans’ mentioned which is vomit inducing. It all finally shows really what these clubs want more than anything though and they can stop pretending to care.
Nail on head.
Horrendous.
Wasn’t this (sort of) how the premiership was born a couple of decades back? Obviously that’s been a huge success so it’s no surprise all of the money men want to see the next iteration of that.
Sad for the game but hardly a surprise. The big clubs haven’t given a sh*t about the local fans for many years - most see them more as a hindrance I expect.
Exactly. But I think it wrong to blame just the clubs, you also have to blame the media for offering obscene amounts of money to show their games, and the sheeple who are prepared to subscribe to them.
If footie fans really cared they could simply boycott them.
Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Indeed. As a "legacy fan" not exactly impressed with UEFA offering either...
UEFA’s plan for a revamped 36-team Champions League starting from 2024 has been unanimously agreed despite the threat of the new European Super League.
The so-called ‘Swiss model’ will see teams compete in one 36-team league – instead of the current group stage system where 32 sides are split into eight pools of four – and guarantee each club ten matches on a seeded basis.
The new format, which guarantees clubs four more games than in the current group phase, takes the Champions League from 125 to 225 matches and would create a huge headache for domestic schedulers.
Football's answer to WWF Wrestling.
Started out with nothing. Still have most of it left.
Brilliant post, I’m done with it, top football is rotten to its core. I watched the snooker rather than the FA Cup Semi Final!
Sent from my iPad using TZ-UK mobile app
I also believe this is a posturing move on the part of ESL, however whatever has to happen to stop them going ahead with it will no doubt be pretty bad for fans anyway...
I’d be happy to go along with an ESL so long as the teams jumping on board could be stopped from taking their historic names with them. For example, the owners of my club would be forced to hand over the Arsenal Football Club brand to a new (albeit much poorer, and more grass roots) proper Arsenal for us ‘legacy’ fans whilst all the assets, big money players etc could move in to ESL under some silly new name like ‘Emirates Eagles’ or whatever shite the Asian and US TV markets will buy into.
That way the money men behind ESL could de-couple a version of football away from reliance on turnstile takings, financial reward for winning competitions, etc and create a fully broadcast-only Disney-style spectacle, and we might get our old clubs back, complete with reasonable tickets costs and proper football games.
Somehow doubt anything like this would happen though because as far as the financiers are concerned the brand is the most valuable asset of our big 5 (plus Tottenham)...
Grrrrr rant over
Last edited by Neil.Ldn; 19th April 2021 at 17:56.
From the "This is Anfield" Website
The Kop will be stripped of its banners and flags as Liverpool’s supporters’ groups unite against the club’s hierarchy putting “financial greed above the integrity of the game.”
On Twitter, they wrote: “We, along with other groups involved in flags, will be removing our flags from The Kop.
“We feel we can no longer give our support to a club which puts financial greed above integrity of the game.”
I liked the banner,
Created by the poor
Robbed by the rich
Sent from my iPad using TZ-UK mobile app
Funny, this is all over the news and the government are getting involved “ for the fans” yet when sky did the deal with F1 no one could give a toss, now we pay three times as much as all the other countries to watch live F1
Football used to be free on BBC and ITV until the premier league kicked in and we had sky sports subscriptions. Remember they tried to have the Italian league on Chanel 5 and even that was scooped up.
Remember the big argument being that “It’s free on ITV” because they had paid advertising? So what’s the excuse for gouging supporters on BT and Sky?
Champions league and Europa league on BT everything else on Sky and it’s treated like a privilege to have a cup final and a couple of England games on BBC and ITV.
The majority of fans/ and football association's will object to this, however the you tube interview above gives clear insight into the thinking of what's happening in the minds of the football owner's. If we allow this to happen, what will the next stage be ? The 'franchise' of Liverpool/ Man Utd , Real Madrid or Barcelona moved to America ? It may seem far fetched, however top tier American sport is littered with the moonlight flit's from their host city to another location where the owners calculated they could make more money.
The other thing is that it's all good saying every week Liverpool or Man Utd will play Real Madrid or Barcelona , how long through the sheer repetitive nature of the same teams playing each other will it get too boring ? That's one of the current big advantages of the top leagues, due to the number of teams in the respective leagues, no two weeks are the same.
Last edited by zippy; 19th April 2021 at 18:51.
The more I think about it the more I see it coming to fruition.
Look who has connections to US sports, Liverpool, Utd, Arsenal owners and Chelsea's new chief executive, Chelsea, Arsenal & Spurs become FC London, Athletico and Real become FC Madrid and so on.
With players the best young talent is farmed much like it is already and then a Soccer Draft at the end of every season between the teams.
Who needs the World Cup? Man City's owners already run teams in US, India & Australia, add a few more around the globe and you have a World Soccer League.
Kerrrrching $$$$$$
Listening to the radio news on the way home and they were interviewing fans in Madrid who all seemed quite happy with the proposal.
So short sighted.
What a sense of entitlement these big clubs have.
Also I always thought Barcelona liked to portray itself as a non-elitist club as opposed to the establishment club Real Madrid.
They should boot these clubs out of the champions league semis immediately as an initial sanction.
Inevitable outcome tbh and don’t see why anyone is remotely surprised. The game has been about money for years now and this for me is one another reason not watch anymore. Of course you’ll always get the die hards who will shout that they won’t be watching etc but we all know they will .One thing that hopefully comes out of this is that other clubs in the lower leagues will come on and the space from the 6 clubs will naturally have to be filled.
Posting Permissions
