Football Is Too Hard For Me To Understand

[T42]

My best snippet about football is that a hell of a lot of people I know took up cycling because their knees were buggered at 40.

[Wowbagger]

I went to a futboll match once, my father took me. To give you an idea of the timeframe, I sat on my father’s shoulders to watch George Best playing in red against a team in orange *

Blackpool/Norwich/Hull/Watford?


*I've included yellow.

Wolverhampton Wanderers?

[Cudzoziemiec]

...Wolverhampton Wanders...

Er...

and is not lost (but often loses).

[T42]

They just said on the news that that Messi bloke was pulling down 40 million euros a year.  Presumably his employers expect to make a few times that from people wanting to watch a ball being kicked about.

Lord, what fools these mortals be.

[citoyen]

Apparently, a private equity firm was offering to pump an obscene amount of money into the Spanish league, but in return they wanted the clubs to give up a percentage of the TV rights.

If they’d accepted the deal, Barcelona would have been able to pay Messi, but they and Real Madrid vetoed it.

So I guess that means he doesn’t bring in enough money to offset what they would have lost in the long term.

I’ve not heard anything to suggest how the rest of the Spanish league clubs feel about this.

[DuncanM]

They just said on the news that that Messi bloke was pulling down 40 million euros a year.  Presumably his employers expect to make a few times that from people wanting to watch a ball being kicked about.

Lord, what fools these mortals be.

Messi is a slight anomaly, but as the best player in the world for many years, you would expect him to be the best paid player in the world. To give you and example of other players on huge salaries, Jack Grealish (who is 26, has appeared in approx 100 Premier League games for an average team, and has 12 England caps) will be paid almost £20 million a year by Manchester City for the next 5 years. The City wage bill (including players, coaches, backroom staff etc) is over £350m.

To give some context as to the amount of money sloshing around in the top football clubs, in a non-Covid affected year, Barcelona FC will have a turnover a little over 500 million Euro. As will Real Madrid and Manchester Utd. Some other teams can approach that in a successful year (eg Liverpool the year they won the Champions League). Qualifying for the group stages of the Champions League is worth about 50m euro, and the difference between getting knocked out in the group stages of the Champions League and winning the thing is about 50 million euro in TV money alone. If Messi can make that difference, it's probably 40m euro well spent.

[Peter]

I uterly diskard this thread.

[John Stonebridge]

From posts here & my broader experience I reckon I lie within a very narrow intersection of life - I love football, I mean I really love it eg I spent 6 hours a day training and practising between the age of 18-24.  Im also degree educated and a Im a reasonably accomplished long distance cyclist (15 SRs).

I look one way and see people who hate football and who wear their dislike as a badge of honour to prove how superior they are. 

I look the other way recalling my own experience of paid semi pro football and see a sport where I was considered an outsider because I had had something other than football to fall back on life and therefore wasnt considered a proper football person. 

I can understand both groups, and despise them both for different reasons. 

 

[MikeFromLFE]

I went to a secondary school equidistant from both Tottenham and Arsenal, in the 1970s.
ISTR that this period was the pinnacle of footie related violence.
Never being one for a punch up, or being particularly tribal, this turned me off football for life. I don't think I've missed much.

[rogerzilla]

SO went to watch the Charity Shield yesterday, an annual game between the two most successful clubs in the country and famous for:

(a) both sides fielding a reserves team because there's no money in it for them
(b) the most inglorious moment of Kevin Keegan's career.

[citoyen]

From posts here & my broader experience I reckon I lie within a very narrow intersection of life - I love football, I mean I really love it eg I spent 6 hours a day training and practising between the age of 18-24.  Im also degree educated and a Im a reasonably accomplished long distance cyclist (15 SRs).

I feel inadequate now!

I’ve always loved football but was never any good at it. (Played for the school second XI once.)

I’m a not very accomplished long distance cyclist (2 SRs).

My uni awarded me a degree but grudgingly.

There’s a lot that’s wrong with football and all-pervasive football culture, so I can understand much of the animosity towards it from those who have no interest. I think the problem is that football being the national obsession, it represents a microcosm of wider society, including everything that’s bad about wider society. As in wider society, there are obscene amounts of money in football being concentrated into ever fewer hands, and it’s appalling.

But football also represents much of what is good about wider society - as demonstrated by the acts of Marcus Rashford and Jordan Henderson.

I mercifully avoided much exposure to hooliganism growing up. But I have been on a supporters coach leaving an away game which had rocks thrown at it by the home fans. That was pretty scary for a 12yo. (We’d also had a police corridor for protection to enter the ground.)

That didn’t put me off though. Football has given me many moments of pure unadulterated joy in my life too.

I’m not naïve enough to think hooliganism has gone away, but it mostly takes different forms now.

[Wowbagger]

SO went to watch the Charity Shield yesterday, an annual game between the two most successful clubs in the country and famous for:

(a) both sides fielding a reserves team because there's no money in it for them
(b) the most inglorious moment of Kevin Keegan's career.

Of course, that had me onto Youtube looking for that. I don't remember it at all, and I watched quite a bit of football in those days. The hairstyles and moustaches were wonderful, and Brian Clough was starting his 42-day wonder-career as the manager of Leeds.

[citoyen]

the Charity Shield yesterday, an annual game between the two most successful clubs in the country

Points of order:
1. It's called the Community Shield these days. No idea why. People still commonly refer to it as the Charity Shield.
2. It's held between the previous season's winners of the Premier League and the FA Cup. Describing these as the "most successful clubs in the country" is not entirely accurate in an age when success is defined by income rather than trophies. And as per DuncanM's earlier post, clubs earn many more millions of pounds from finishing in the top four in the league, and therefore qualifying for the Champions League, than from winning either of the domestic cups, which is why most of the top clubs field a second-string team for domestic cup matches. Having spent most of last season in the top four, Leicester were pushed down to 5th place by Liverpool and Chelsea on the final day of the season, which was regarded as nothing short of disastrous at the time.

I think you might be underestimating how seriously clubs treat the Community Shield as well - traditionally, it is not included in a club's trophy count, being regarded as a glorified friendly, but in recent years, Pep Guardiola (Man City manager) has gone on record as including it when talking about how many trophies his side has won, and he usually fields a pretty strong team (City are in it every year these days, being habitual winners of the league and/or FA Cup).

The Kevin Keegan incident was before my time, but famous enough that I'm well aware of it. And yes, it is probably the only thing of note that has ever happened in the Charity Shield.

[fd3]

Football feels like it’s a bubble that will burst, like the housing market.  It’s especially shocking how expensive it is when you compare it with other national sports (e.g. rugby).

On the other hand, do we consider that the money involved in the film industry is ridiculous?

[rafletcher]

Yes. But, like many professions, what you get paid is a measure of your worth compared to others. Ayrton Senna made that point when asked if he thought he was paid too much. He also said he didn’t race for the money, and he’d do it for £1 - as long as Prost was paid less  .

[DuncanM]

Football feels like it’s a bubble that will burst, like the housing market.  It’s especially shocking how expensive it is when you compare it with other national sports (e.g. rugby).

On the other hand, do we consider that the money involved in the film industry is ridiculous?

Rugby is basically just going bust from a much lower base. The salary of one Man City player could probably cover the whole squad for any top flight club/regional team anywhere in the world (except France?). Hell, I think the salary cap for each of the Welsh regions is under £4m, so one Grealish salary is probably equivalent to every professional rugbi player in Wales.
The whole reason is the TV deal, and the Premier League has just rolled their existing one with Sky/BT forwards a year at something like £3bn a year. I'd be surprised if all the TV deals for all the rugby clubs in world came to £100m a year. (It's also why the Premier league has so much more money - I think the next league down in the TV rights league table is around £1.5bn.)

[Cudzoziemiec]

Several big clubs are said to be bankrupt (Barcelona, Inter). But that probably doesn't mean the end of anything.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Article about investment opportunities spurred by American capital inflows and streaming opportunities in football: https://theconversation.com/football-in-europe-is-being-transformed-by-us-private-equity-firms-heres-how-157445

COVID-19 didn’t cause football’s private equity boom, but it helped by accelerating and amplifying existing or emerging trends. As football clubs have struggled financially, investors have moved in to pick up some bargains. And as people have stayed at home, so the consumption of streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime have become entertainment and lifestyle staples, enhancing the relevance of such platforms for sport.

[DuncanM]

Things have moved on since that article was written in March - both Serie A and the Bundesliga have rejected the media rights proposals from CVC (and it looks like La Liga have too, though that's still not final).
Also, there's a fair amount of old new there, it's not like FSG getting investment from RedBird is changing the nature of the ownership or their focus. FSG are an American private equity firm who bought the club in 2010 (from the previous owners because they couldn't refinance their bank loans), and streaming was the reason why FSG bought in back then - I believe they own a cable sports channel in Boston as part of their Red Sox ownership and they wanted to leverage LFC's global fanbase.