I chose the 49ers as my team when I was six years old, when they won their second Super Bowl. Actually, I picked them before the game, and when they rewarded my choice I vowed to be forever loyal (like, bedroom-painted-team-colors loyal). Portland, OR didn’t have a local team, so I was free to choose anyway. A first-grader can’t be called a bandwagoner. I could have picked my family’s team… but my mom never let on the 49ers were her and her dad’s team before my choice.
I can understand the bandwagon effect. Teams are more interesting and fun to watch if they win. If there is a local team and you pick a distant one because that one is winning, no go. If you didn’t pay much attention to the local team until they started winning, that’s OK if you can A) admit it, and B) not jump off the wagon if they start sucking.
Before the EU? Um … huh? I’m not entirely sure what that has got to do with anything, the mass influx of foreign players coincided with the late 90s and more and more TV money becoming available, which was then followed by rich foreign benefactors buying clubs as vanity projects.
Frankly, the amount of foreigners is one of the reasons England underperforms. Others are: simply just aren’t good enough (which some blame on the massive amount of imported players), managers bowing the public pressures and playing the names rather than who would play best together, (tieing in the with previous one) too many egos, players not seeing playing for their country as important as it used to be (seen by players making themselves unavailable for internationals, I’ve heard many say that if anyone does that they should never play for the national team again). There’s loads of possible reasons.
Regarding wanting a worse league, I see you live in the US. Are you American? If so, perhaps you don’t really understand the importance of such things the supporters, much as though we Europeans have been told in this thread how we don’t understand how US sports are structured.
I don’t think you realise quite how much these people are ploughing into the clubs. It dwarfs TV and sponsorship money.
Regarding TV money, I don’t know if it has changed, but up until a few years ago it wasn’t provided just to the clubs playing, it was 50% shared, 25% on other stuff and then 25% of it was allocated depending on how well a club did in the league.
I’m sure you’ve heard of the Bosman ruling? The most famous aspect of it is that players have the right to free agency after their contract runs out. The other aspect is that quotas (restricting the amount of foreign players that could be fielded, the 3+2 law) were ruled an unlawful restraint on the freedom of movement and contrary to EU discrimination law. Of course, Britain can discriminate against out of EU foreign players, but most of the foreigners are from Europe.
Wouldn’t it figure that if English players were playing against the best players week after week, regardless of where they come from, they’d have a better team? The English Premier League has rocketed to being arguable the best league in the world because of the mass influx of foreign players - as the league most definitely wasn’t anywhere near the top in the 1980s (that was likely Serie A).
I am aware; I was just pointing out that if owner contributions were somehow completely forbidden tomorrow, teams like Man U would still have a huge leg up on say… Hull, just because they sell SO many more items of kit, and are in Turkish Airways commercials and the like.
The TV deal hasn’t changed- 50% is shared, 25% is divvied up by relative league standing at the end of the season with the top team making 20x the worst team, and the remaining quarter is allocated as “facilities fees” based on games that are shown by television, with the top clubs more or less naturally getting the most of it, due to being a bigger television draw. Foreign broadcasting cash is shared equally.
Still, that gives a team like Man U drastically more income than Hull (excepting owner contributions) so that when next season rolls around, they can sign more expensive players. This is a virtuous/vicious circle- it tends to keep good teams good and bad teams bad.
Yes, but that ruling was in 1995, and the UK joined the EC, the forerunner of the EU, a couple of decades before. But anyway, you asked how England were before that? Well in 1990 they reached the semi-final of the World Cup and in 1996, right after the Bosman ruling so it hadn’t really had much of an effect, the reached the semi finals of the European Championships. And I’m sure you know that they went out on a penalty shootout after the games were drawn, both times to Germany.
And I could be really anal and say that officially they didn’t lose. Shootouts are not part of the game proper, much like drawing lots that they used to do, they are a method of deciding who goes through if there is a draw. In fact, over both tournaments they only lost one game, the largely pointless 3rd Place playoff in 1990.
Yes, England didn’t qualify for USA 1994, but anyone that follows England will know of the hideous refereeing in their penultimate game against The Netherlands, where Koeman was not sent off for a clear professional foul and then a few minutes later scored against England.
If you think I am exaggerating, watch seven minutes into this video. One of the worst decisions I have seen in international football. That is why England were not in USA 1994. England had only one game after that, against San Marino.
But this marketability has been brought apart largely due to their success on the field. Being able to sell lots of kit, being able to have foreign advertising hasn’t caused success, it is due to success. Organic growth. What I am arguing against is complete and utter bought success. To use the videogame term, “Pay to win”.
This is just excuse making, IMO. Look at England’s record in World Cups between 1966 and 1990. Quarterfinals in 1970, missed the tournament in 1974 and 1978, 2nd Group Stage in 1982, Quarterfinals in 1986.
What about after 1994? Round of 16 in 1998, Quarterfinals in 2002 and 2006, Round of 16 in 2010, and crashed out Group Stage in 2014.
It appears to me that England tends to go on boom/bust cycles. If you plotted it on a graph you’d see that - highs in 1966 and 1990 and lows in the mid-late 70s and in 2014 (but even then the English qualified). One can argue that the English were a bit unlucky in both 2002 and 2006 QF matches, FWIW. I wonder who British folks were blaming for failures to even qualify for the World Cup in '74 and '78?
It’s easy to blame the foreigners. It just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
Why does ManU and Liverpool and Arsenal become immune to this pay to win pejorative? Van Gaal has spend quite a bit in the last two transfer markets hasn’t he? Is it because they already have a lot of money so when they spend a bunch its ok?
Folks like Abramovich or Sheikh Mansour are simply putting other clubs outside of the elite on equal footing with the elite. They are eliminating the in borne privileges of past success wholly determining future earnings - that is only a recipe for keeping the rich teams that were successful in the past on top. This new spending should not be discouraged.
LOL at Koeman, the scoundrel. But the Dutch goal called back for offsides in the first half was also clearly a bad call.
English struggles in international play are mostly because FA hasn’t delivered a coherent, organized structure in the developmental stages while some of their continental competitors, most notably Germany and Belgium, have.
I think we’re kind of saying the same thing in a sense. You’re saying that there are two methods for a team to become good- either the organic growth method, or the Arab oil sheik/Russian oligarch dumps their personal fortune into the team as a vanity project, and that the first is much preferable to the second.
What I’m saying is that regardless of the method that a team becomes good, once they’re there, they tend to stay there. And the reverse is true as well. Man U is good because they can pay the best players. Why? Because they have a lot of money. Why can’t West Bromwich Albion? Because they don’t have a lot of cash.
I do understand the unfairness angle of a team being bought and then receiving a massive infusion of cash and becoming excellent nearly overnight.
I recall reading articles predicting that the next step in sports leagues is to eliminate individual ownership of teams.
Investors or owners will have shares in the league only and will assign managers and budgets to the individual teams at the league level, eliminating disparities in income or funding or resources as a competitive factor.
Interesting thread. First of all, I need to point out to whoever claimed that the USA “isn’t even in contention for a good quarterfinal loss” in the World Cup that we lost 1-0 to Germany in the 2002 quarterfinals. Is that not good enough?
As an American and recent EPL fan, I am fascinated by the concept of promotion and relegation. It only really works in the context of a Darwinian system; if you had 400 pro football teams in America AND a system of drafts/revenue sharing/etc. to insure that the Reno Rattlesnakes had just a good a chance to be in the top league in any given year as the Bears or Giants, that wouldn’t work at all.
I think it would be a good thing for college football, where most fans agree that it is a big problem that schools from smaller conferences don’t get a fair chance to compete at the highest level. It could work out very neatly, as the FBS has five “power” conferences, each of which overlaps geographically with one of the five, um, “other” conferences. So, for example, the Pac-12 pairs up with the Mountain West and (based on last year’s standings) Colorado goes down for next season and Boise State gets its chance to play with the big boys. This will never, ever, happen because university administrators attach great importance to the perceived prestige of their fellow conference members; when the Big 10 added Nebraska, many academic types were very upset that their schools would be linked with lowly Nebraska in the public eye. They’re not inviting Northern Illinois to the party.
I think it would also be good in baseball, which has the two basic prerequisites: a lack of mechanisms enforcing parity and a well-established network of minor leagues around the country. As someone pointed out above, this would currently make no sense, since all the minor league teams are currently owned by major league teams – but THAT is what makes no sense! Minor league baseball passes itself off as a professional sport, but the people running the teams aren’t being judged on their ability to win baseball games, but on their ability to develop talent and send it on to a higher level.
Sure, minor league teams attract fans by marketing themselves as a fun, affordable family outing (how else could they market? "Our team is in the pennant race! Too bad our biggest star just got called up to pinch hit once a week in the big leagues…) but nobody REALLY CARES about minor league baseball. Compare this to the de facto farm systems for the other major sports. College football and basketball teams have devoted, fanatical fans. Minor league ball could be the same way if the teams were really trying to win. I don’t think promotion/relegation will ever fly, but I sure would love to see a rule prohibiting “affiliations” between major and minor league teams.
Having said all that, it does seem like a real problem to me that, at least in the leagues I am most familiar with, European football seems to have the same handful of teams at the top year after year. I can’t help but think it would be awfully dull to be a supporter of, say, Stoke…finishing somewhere between tenth and fifteenth every year with little hope of long-term improvement. Maybe once a decade or so you might make a good run in the FA or League Cup. College football is probably the American sport that comes closest to this, but my impression is that breakthrough seasons are more frequent even there than in the EPL (probably because the season is much shorter, so a team has to pull off fewer upsets to finish high in the standings).
The travesty of the minor leagues aside, I think Major League Baseball probably has the best balance; the really popular teams rarely get seriously bad (except for the Cubs), which is good for the league because those teams are really popular, but the little guys still have a fighting chance.
A different subject altogether but a most interesting one in its own right. Bundesliga rules prevent a single individual from owning a majority share of a club and that league is not only doing well in European competitions but also boasts the highest attendance and lowest ticket prices among the major Euro leagues. Which is fairly logical – supporters-owned clubs place revenue generation further down on the priority list than a club with a single owner.
And of course we have the NFL Packers, who seem to be able to adequately compete with the Jerry Jones and Arthur Blanks of the country with a board of directors running the show. But I don’t know if this is a trend that will ever advance much further; we had a brief discussion of this in an earlier thread and American fans don’t even seem to be interested in the concept, though this may be in part because our legal system would never allow it in the first place.
I’d say that in the case of college football, the fact that cash isn’t a direct factor (at least not legally) in player recruitment does a lot for having teams’ fortunes be more variable than European soccer teams.
I mean, for a kid like say… Kyler Murray or Damien Harris (both 5 star recruits), the decision to go to Alabama, Texas A&M, Iowa State or Louisiana Tech isn’t based on how much they’re paid, but other factors such as prestige, coaching staff, facilities, the school itself, the school’s record, the other recruits that are going there, popularity, etc…
As a result, it means that teams can, and often do have serious reversals of fortune following coaching changes. Case in point- Baylor was abysmal in most everything sporting-related in about 2005, but due to increased fundraising for facilities, increased fan interest, and the hiring of Art Briles as head coach means that the Bears are now national championship contenders, 5 years after a 4-8 season.
The EPL still more or less is cash-bound, in that AFAIK, the team’s managers aren’t as integral to the success of a team as the actual skills of the players on the field. Or at least that’s the impression I get from the outside- what seems to determine whether a team is good or bad is the quality of the players, not the coaching/management.
However, this should not be considered an argument that the NCAA is a better model than the EPL—the NCAA basically makes players into indentured servants and robs them of their right to negotiate for compensation or for their personality rights.
More importantly, the legal guarantee of individual commercial rights in the U.S. means that we could never pull off a Bundesliga deal. We are stuck with profit-driven enterprises at the top of our sports structures. No matter how far back in our brains we tuck the concept, fans are there first and foremost to be milked for the benefit of the teams’ wealthy owners.
I think, however, the structure I mentioned above is still intended to create a profit-driven enterprise, but the profit is at the league level rather than at the club level.