Saddened! wrote:
Do the City fans crowing about signing Tevez not feel a slight sense of anti-climax about the whole thing?
They've just managed to sign a player from Man United, a player who the Man Utd supporters loved and wanted to keep. There's a prospect of them buying more top players and in future competing with the biggest names in the game.
But maybe they'd enjoy it more if they were getting relegated again?
Lets face it, football is dead as a sport. It's now an entertainment media platform much like the massive American sports. It's 100% about money and the next revolution IMO is franchising.
Bull5hit. If football is dead to you, then **** off and leave the sport completely. But to millions of supporters around the world football is as real as it's ever been.
Yeah, football has been tarnished a lot by the ridiculous sums involved in the game, but that part of the game is pretty easy to ignore when the players are on the pitch and the whistle is blown.
If City reach the Champions League next season have they achieved anything? If they win the league is there really any need to congratulate Hughes or whoever their manager is after they spent £999 gazillion on players?
I don't think Citeh will reach the CL with the squad they have, so yes, they will have achieved something if they qualify for the CL.
The thing about signing Tevez, Adebayor, Robinho, Santa Cruz and co is that they can't play every week or they'd lose every week due to an embarassing lack of balance. So that means their statements about wanting to push themselves and play every week are ridiculous. Santa Cruz in particular is going to be playing Coca Cola Cup games and every fourteenth Saturday.
Of course not every player can play every week, but that doesn't mean that each individual player doesn't want to play every week. You want your players to want to play.
You get this picture of this Arab sat with the Football Manager 2009 database on his screen and youtube on the other, finding a well-known and horrifically overpriced player and then dialling the phone and telling the club to bid for them. I don't think Hughes has any involvement in these fantasy deals at all.
And if that's true, and citeh end up spending 300m to stay in exactly the same place, the rest of Europe can have a laugh at them.
If they achieve success then the constant top 4 will be broken by a fresh team.
I think the European football authorities need to get a grip of things before they get even more farcical.
But when the Italian clubs were signing world stars like Maradona, Gullit, van Basten, Platini it was okay to spend big? When Madrid were buying Zidane that was okay? Madrid breaking the world record again to buy Ronaldo is okay?
Salary caps linked to turnover are surely needed as there are now so many clubs solely reliant on individuals to survive.
So the biggest, richest clubs not only have the advantage of wealth, they are the only ones allowed to spend big. That really helps football as a competitive game, doesn't it?
If those individuals are naughty and have their assets frozen or lose out in business climate changes, there is a risk clubs will go out of business.
There's always that risk. Even for clubs like Madrid. There's only so many training ground deals that can be done.
Clubs who take the risk deserve to go under if they fail. It's a risk most fans want to see.
They have also got to sort out the Champions league circle where the teams that qualify for that are guaranteed such increased levels of income that it becomes almost impossible for them to fail to reach the CL.
See, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
They are creating the much talked about European Super League by default as they are allowing several clubs to swell to truly epic proportions whilst allowing the rest to languish in eternal mediocrity, unless bought by a rich boy looking for a status symbol.
Which you want to outlaw anyway.
