It's not about morals, the club and everything associated with it holds no meaning to me any more, that ship has sailed.
The problem is I've conditioned myself over the best part of 25 years to attach incredible value to this sport. It's literally been at the centre of my life. I can't just turn that instinct off like a tap so I'll still watch the game tonight. What I'll be feeling during it I'm not sure yet. I'd back Leeds but what damage would that do to the club? Minimal. I'll probably still enjoy seeing the team I cared so much about as a remembrance service tonight. The real interest will be if the players and staff take a stand. Get the Suarez tshirts rehashed, get Klopp to instruct them to allow Leeds to walk it in (after which Bielsa can do likewise), watch the Kop get molotov cocktailed by the working class fuckers whose livelihoods have been taken away from them, those are the real things I will get excited about.
UEFA can fuck off, too - acting the innocent party and then TODAY confirming the new 2024 format, which includes "spots for non-qualified elites clubs".
How can players even be banned from playing for their countries in tournaments. It’s not their fault if it goes ahead.
I can only imagine that currently both they, the relevant FAs/leagues and UEFA/FIFA are all on the toilet Donald Gennaro style trying to decide what action to take.
The only possible action is just to throw them out of all comps with immediate effect and ban all associated players from the Euros. As soon as you start to negotiate terms or back down even a little, you've already lost.
Words cannot express how desperate I am for that to happen.
It is all pretty popcorn.gif, tbh, I can't see them kissing and making up. Read the below with the knowledge that Ceferin is godfather to one of Agnelli's children
Alexander Ceferin, the president of Uefa, takes ESL clubs and execs to task
“If I start with Ed Woodward, he called me last Thursday evening saying he’s very satisfied with and fully supports the reforms [to the Champions League]. The only thing he want to talk about was FFP, when obviously he had already signed something else ... Andrea Agnelli is the biggest disappointment of all, I’ve never seen a person that would lie so many times, so persistently as he did. It’s unbelievable ... We didn’t know we had snakes so close to us, now we know.”
The ironic thing is that bar the closed shop nature of it, what these clubs are proposing actually sounds better than anything UEFA have come up with.
Their 2024 proposals are truly dreadful.
What they are proposing is far worse than anything football has seen to date, because it's a closed shop and not based on merit.
Somebody on reddit plagiarized Jimmy's post, word for word. The cheek
I've seen a few tweets blaming "Asian fans" for this nonsense. I would reiterate, midweek games are shit for Asian fans... I can't imagine 2am or 3am kick offs generating that much in Asian TV deals and replica shirts.
Also, who the fuck wants to watch these games. I enjoy Liverpool playing a big team every now and then, but not every fucking week. Give me a trip to Sheff United over playing Barcacuntinglona and the like every fucking week.
Is that a bot or is some tragic bastard putting in a shift for reddit points?
Who's Mr Malik?
An occasional cricket thread poster, I think.
I don't mind being plagiarised for my scorching (ow!) hot takes as long as they don't nab my golf tips.
You really do forget the state of the wrong'uns this place harbours until you're brought back to the cold harsh reality every now and then.
I nominate Don. That's two attempts to throw us off the scent. Kiko is obviously Mr Malik.
More troubling than the idea of somebody nicking posts and using them on Reddit is the thought that Jimmy's real name is Sean and the posts are gone because he's been rumbled.
I don't think it will actually happen provided the rest of the sport holds its nerve. If they could get the message across that anyone associated it with wouldn't be welcome elsewhere, domestically and internationally, like how rugby union used to shun people 'going North', then players aren't going to touch it.
Best players won't want to play if they are not able to play international football and shunned from domestic leagues.
That's nonsense, it's a team sport, no individual wields that level of power and 100-200 of the best isn't a big enough population to overcome the shortcomings of the format.
Edit: at Yev.
These lizards will presumably propose their own international tournament which would be just an extension of the ESL so yeah, they're fucked if they think they have the power.
Are their contracts likely to specify specific competitions for bonuses, etc. too? i.e. Champions League win or goals or whatever vs. 'European competition'? No idea how that stuff works.
You would have to be a very confident player (or content to have an eight year career) to assume that you will always be wanted by one of these top dozen clubs. Alternatively, the clubs expected to make up the Best of the Rest in this competition could all just say we have no interest in it and then it starts to fall apart at the seams.
Players are ten a penny.
The funny thing is that the logical end game for this sort of shit is an NFL style situation where player power is basically non-existent because of the total closed shop nature of it. That's why they give the trophies to the owners. They're the important people.
I think bluff, but they could also just be big enough whoppers to think that the rest of football will come round if a few crumbs fall their way (which you would have good reason to think if you were a Spanish or Italian club since their broadcasting already works that way).
With fan revolts such as this, the Super League will soon be conceding defeat.
The sport is still at the heart of it though and this is crucial if they want to keep milking it. What they're proposing destroys that and sure, a bunch of rich cunts will swan around in Riyahdh kicking a football around and getting richer off JP Morgan's money for a limited time but it's not sustainable. Legacy Football may lose out significantly in that short period but the odds are vwry much in its favour.
I was with bluff for a few minutes, but I just couldn't reconcile why. I still can't.
If it is a bluff, which I'm still leaning towards, then it's just to make the Champions League even more secure for themselves.
Even seeing the absolute turd UEFA are curling out for the revamp there's still a chance a badly run club (and the amount of debt a bunch of them are riddled with is laughable) could collapse and drop out altogether and basically they want immunity to incompetence.
It's not a bluff and it's not a negotiating tactic. Just look at Ceferin's quotes. Those are not the quotes of a man playing the game. They are the quotes of a man who has been blindsided/fucked over, and wants blood.
I think we're all giving the 12 far too much credit in terms of how much nous and wider understanding they have. They didn't do clever things to get into the position they're in. They didn't engineer the football boom; they just rode it, or in some cases piggybacked on it. Most of them are sons of rich fathers, heirs, oil princes, or in Florentino Perez's case, people whose entire lives have been one long subsidised ego trip. They know of very little beyond doing dodgy deals with other rich men.
Last edited by Jimmy Floyd; 19-04-2021 at 03:01 PM.
I agree with Sean.
https://www.theguardian.com/football...ous-uefa-chief
Go on son.He added: “They write in their press release about solidarity, they don’t know S about solidarity. They want to be famous. They will be famous in the wrong way.”
These are actual, WWE levels of shit talking.
If it's a ploy (they may not be genius schemers but they know about making themselves richer) UEFA/FIFA/national associations kicking their toys out of the pram would have been deemed an acceptable part of that.
It's not a bluff. It's give me my Ł300m (or whatever) now, the parasites can cream off what they can, and if it all blows up in 5 years who gives a fuck? This isn't a problem specific to football. It is the basic ethos of Corporate America/private equity et al. Get your big deal/merger over the line, rake out the money, leave some other chumps to pick up the pieces.
Petty...and I'm all for it.
If the breakaway clubs were evicted from the Champions League, this would be potentially be the qualifiers for next seasons Champions League.
No way PSG aren't one of the unnamed clubs.
"Living the dream" all over again.
Get Ridsdale and the expensive fish tank back.
Who's the other German club everyone hates? Hoffenheim? Are they a one man ownership band?
PSG probably aren't invited as they are a bit of an affront to the traditional order of things - it's tricky nuancing your position as Real/Milan. All money to us please, but no new money for any upstarts. City and Chelsea get passes because you pretty much have to invite half the Premier League to make it commercially viable (see Spurs and Arsenal being at the table).
Dortmund released a statement saying they were completely against it and I've seen that Rummenigge has said Bayern are not in favour too. Porto have also come out and said they rejected an invitation.
The cynic in me says they're only distanced from it for the time being to avoid drawing FIFA's ire somehow in the run up to the next World Cup. I'm basing this on absolutely nothing (and I can't be bothered to investigate) but surely the Qatari ownership of PSG has some financial stake in the World Cup successfully happening in their home country next year.
If Bayern and PSG are out, then the 12 will struggle I would guess, and the whole thing will blow up in their faces.
The only thing worse than the proposed Super League would be one which doesn't even contain the biggest clubs, it would have no legitimacy even on its own terms.