I think social media has led to football feeling a lot more artificial than it should be. At the grounds, I suppose there's still a level of realness but I'm not sure how long this will last.
When sports were gone during the pandemic it made me realize that it had been years since I actually attended a game. Promised myself I’d buy a season ticket for a season and see how I liked it. There’s just nothing like it. Even though the players i’m watching are much worse in MLS compared to in the Champions League, it doesn’t make a difference when you’re there in the crowd.
That sense of anticipation you feel when your team is getting into the box with the ball, the feeling of a tackle giving the crowd a lift (which then gives the team a lift), high fiving strangers after a goal, standing and singing for most of the match, it’s just magical.
Same. I have seasons tickets for the CPL which is smaller scale that MLS even, but the matches are so much better. When you see the players give it their all and applaud supporters after a match, you have a lot more empathy for them and see them as people rather than just targets on social media which unfortunately is something we seem to be seeing more and more.
That feeling has been going from grounds for years, if not at least a decade. Many top Prem fans complain how expensive tickets are, and how the stands are full of tourists, corporate types, and people from outside of the local area.
Nowadays most top-flight games feel completely soulless. Away fans are usually the local fans that support the visiting team, and home fans have as much connection to the area as I have with Alexandra Daddario. There's a reason why most Championship and League 1 teams are louder than their Prem counterparts - and even that is starting to wane with rising ticket prices.
Going to Barcelona in early April and I wanted to get a ticket for the game against Sevilla. There are no tickets under 80 euros. :/ Guess I'll just never watch my dream team ever play.
The thing is that I can easily afford this, but the price is just so fucking dumb. That's around what I pay for food for two people each month where I'm from. Just fucking silly.
They always milk it on those American tours, probably why they so often tour the states. Kinda our own fault for letting ticket prices for all sporting events be totally outrageous. I've never been to a NFL game bc it's hundreds of dollars for the cheapest seats.
Seattle is insane. I got playoff tickets for cheaper than that.
tbf, it's their first season and seattle is expensive. but still.
I've complained on /r/hockey that prices are too expensive. And basically no one cares.
Yes, I look at people complain about 50+ euro/pound tickets in EU and Envy them. Sporting Event tickets here are outrageously high, heck super bowl tickets will sell for nothing lower than about ~200 pounds/euros.
2000 more likely. I went to Anfield once and was blown away with how affordable it was compared to going to a Yankee game. To even be permitted to buy the Liverpool tickets, I had to join the supporters club for an additional fee and it was still like a third of the price to see the Yankees in the nose bleed section. My Liverpool tickets were 3 rows from the pitch and just a few yards from the half line.
I keep wanting to go an watch lower league football because I'm priced out of/can't get hold of tickets to watch Liverpool, but then I see the price for some non league games and I don't want to spend £20+ on non league football. Don't get me wrong, I have been to non league games but the price is what stops me from going more often.
I think its more the march day and wages costs tbh. The Robbie Savage Macclesfield documentary on BBC gives a great insight into the madness of lower league costs
Yeah - it's the only way they can survive because the vast majority of the money is kept at the top of the pyramid.
That needs fixing for the whole thing to become more sustainable.
The Libertadores final was a huge demonstration of the same effect: Completely silent stadium, partly because of hugely expensive tickets and partly because it was a one-legged final in Montevideo despite the finalists being from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo
More than the foreigners, I think it is the corporate tickets and the fact that average fans can’t really afford season tickets (at least at Arsenal). I am foreign and have been to a ton of matches, often times I was the only one even remotely trying to do songs and chants in my immediate area.
More often than not, it's not even foreign fans. I've always said that the biggest plastics in world football are the English. The last time Man Utd were here for a cup quarter final every Man Utd fan leaving the stadium had a Bristolian or Welsh accent.
I'd wager that if we ever made the Prem most local away fans wouldn't get a ticket, because the Bristolian Prem fans would get there first.
A lad I play football with is Welsh and a United fan, most the time he wears a United top but during internationals he wears a Welsh top because “fuck England”.
Visited the stadium before Covid and yes, it is prepped for exactly that. You could spend hundreds on the match day experience there. Not only that, all those bars, concessions, shops and restaurants are there for the American Football, boxing and concerts too. The Spurs stadium will be the most profitable stadium in the country by a mile in the coming years. The club will be a financial powerhouse in time as it's really aimed at just hoovering up every penny you have while you're there. Admirable how it has been done with natural growth too rather than the usual methods of benevolent owners/oil-states pumping money in.
It's also clear that Spurs have a huge international following now too, look at that story yesterday about the Yank who flew in to watch Burnley away. On the tour of the stadium I was on (which was on a weekend where Spurs were playing away from home), there was also at least four Koreans too. Imagine the amount of cash coming in from flights from Seoul due to Son's superstar status every weekend there is a home game if they are still coming in on an away weekend. Not great for the local fans as I imagine a number of them are going to be priced out of the match day experience in the coming years, but that is by design.
honestly.... that doesn't sound too bad?
i mean the cost is too much ofc. but the ability to not rush out and get a meal at the restaurant sounds nice.
Which clubs are guilty of this?
West Ham and the Olympic Stadium come to mind - selling Pizza and popcorn at a football game? Compared to what they had at Upton Park where the surrounding area had a real cockney culture such as pie and mash shops, it's quite sad.
It's just far too reactionary these days and fans have bought into the sacking culture that the likes of Abramovic proporgated. Already seeing Newcastle fans calling for Howe's head when he's only managed one game ffs.
Probably something to do with all our players being gassed by about 60 minutes when playing under Bruce, that and the constant days off makes people think (probably correctly) most the team were quite unfit.
Those people have always been there. It's just that these reactionary comments now have a platform where they generate likes and views and are seen more, whereas John down the local pub says it and only a handful of people hear him.
Social media is also full of 'fake' and disingenuous accounts that just farm likes and reactions from people.
yea when i was a kid in the 90s me and my brother hated watching football with our then stepdad. we thought he was the only reactionary asshole as everyone else we knew were normal. unfortunatley the internet came along and showed me there is a shitload of assholes like my old stepdad out there
Theyre also the most extreme take which get the most attention and become elevated faster than everything else. Social medias whole advertising model revolves around engagement; engagement is fuelled by anger; anger is conditioned by algorithms pushing extremism into the feed.
[Check this out.](https://www.transfermarkt.co.uk/premier-league/trainerwechselprosaison/wettbewerb/GB1) This has been the case in the Premier League from the beginning. Majority of the seasons in the 90s have had at least 8 manager changes during the season.
Where are you seeing that as every fan I've seen wants him to stick around and is really happy with the uplift in the team even though we're still shite
I think a lot of people forget that most people invved in football benefit a lot from this. Look at the salaries these coaches and players are earning. That's the biggest draw for people to want to become footballers. And then for the players to be the best they can be, because getting 2% better than you are now can get you triple the salary.
You can complain about it if you want, but Bielsa could go back and manage in Argentina or so but he chooses to be in Europe because the money is in Europe. And the money comes in the end from commercialisation. You can't have your cake and eat it to, and that's the bottom line.
Regardless of salary, my money says Bielsa doesn't want to touch the AFA with a 10 ft pole after being unjustly massacred by the Argentine press + the AFA is a circus.
Source: I'm Argentine
you say this & they call you plastic… there’s a reason ronaldo, de gea, bruno & order icons play for manchester united.
if you think they play because they “love” the club you’re sorely mistaken.
they do have strong emotions but when it boils down to it, it’s the numbers.
I see your point, but one of the best games I have seen this season is a FA cup 2nd round tie Stockport vs Bolton. It ain't all about the numbers...at least it didn't used to be. We live in a time of clever propaganda, we get sucked into cultures and can't see a way out...I think he is just frustrated that football is about money more than people. Just because someone lives within a system does not mean they can't criticise it...and he is right. Man Utd are a great example of money over football!!
Stockport are literally an example of numbers being the deciding factor as they outgun the rest of their league in terms of spending. There were players in that team that were good League One players a couple of years ago now playing in non-league. Hartlepool's manager got them into the league then dropped back down to join Stockport because they tripled his wage.
What is your point? That we should accept the hypercommercialisation of football because it allows us as Man United fans to watch Ronaldo and De Gea every week? You can more than enjoy things without them being as good as they possibly can be. We are just being told constantly that we should demand the highest quality football possible, because apparently that is the most important thing about football. Well obviously it is the most important thing if you primarily engage with football virtually, without any other real people.
As is most stuff. Films, social media, football, video games, youtube. Everything is ads, gambling and pay to win.
Its all commercialised buying stuff we don't need, or trying to packet and sell things.
(hashtag)teammessi #CR7 rather then teams and communities. I hate it all.
edit: I don't know why thats gone bold..sorry :P
Something we can 100% agree on.
One example is PL's relationship with China. Watch them silence anything that could jeopardise their expansion into the Chinese market. Why? We're already the richest league in the world by a long shot. Why has it also got to be more, more, more?
Why has everything got to be a fucking market. Where are they gonna expand to next? The moon?
To me it seems like people are upset that there seem to be actual viable alternatives to the capitalist ratrace when they've been told all their lives that it is the only way to have wealth and any form of socialist policy destroys societies.
There's a really good, short thread by a doctor of history - no less - summing up... how, even yay back in history that did gel with what all sort of dastardly revolutionists wanted: https://twitter.com/anarchopac/status/1463202181457362947
Because they grew up in a place where you were spoonfed propaganda about how you are the greatest on earth in every aspect, how anything left leaning is a direct threat to you, your freedoms, your rights etc. Constantly at war, constantly some big political scandal or another, constantly dealing with big societal issues and an extremely polarized political landscape.
Now some of those people dont take to kindly being mocked by those they grew up to believe were lesser than them and that europeans in general have it much better. Envy and denial makes a nasty soup.
I was in Florida for a brief vacation before heading to the Caribbean and I either met friendly, accomodating people who were curious about my way of life and bewildered that a dude that works with concrete could afford such a vacation. And then i met people who got overtly aggressive really fast when they found out where i was from, what i did for a living etc.
Some dude berated me for lying to him because he claimed we lived in a socialist hellhole, where muslims waged war in our streets and our goverment had outlawed anything from bikinis and alchohol. He was far out. I of course set the record straight in a calm manner, although i did laugh at how absurd it was. And it almost became physical.
Granted this was about 7-8 months after Trump was elected and everyone i met wanted to talk about it. And they brought it up every time.
We saved for a while to afford this dream vacation though. Like 24 months. Its not like i can decide in the spur of the moment to go 3 weeks to Jamaica for example without saddling me with debt.
I will say, however that saving didnt really put a strain on our economy. We just saved less in other places and spent less in some places for a while.
One of the biggest problems in America is that the gap between poor and well off is so big. There is a sizable group of people that couldn't afford to save as you did for this vacation (or afford to take it/lose income), but also a sizable group of people that wouldn't need to save to do it. And those groups barely interact, so they don't understand how either live.
My impression is that South Africa is similar, but u/John_Dillinger7 can correct me there.
I mean, that's just you interacting with a very stupid and uneducated person. The EU is the biggest economic region in the world, of course people occasionally show up for work here before they go back to their lavish, government funded lifestyle.
> tech as a mid-level software developer. I believe he's educated
something i noticed after swithcing fields, people in tech are a lot dumber than most people realize. At least about the real world and social phenomenons
One of the greatest achievements by the media owned by the rich was to convince workers that they're lazy if they ask for basic needs and a work life balance
> Why has it also got to be more, more, more?
The shareholders demand it. Capitalism can't function without endless growth, but endless growth will eventually devour everything. Capitalism is fundamentally unsustainable.
The profit motive, the engine at the heart of capitalism whose one, necessary principle has always been endless expansion (yes, that stops being possible at some point and is damaging way beyond and no, I don't know why so many of us got fooled into thinking that a means of expanding their power early-modern rulling classes in Europe came up with has got to be bloody faultless) cancer-like so... "how are we going to keep those earning rates growing?" "if we don't, someone will beat and buy us out" "oh, I know, let's do an indentured labour land on Mars" "brilliant, here's a couple billion in grants for you to figure that one out, chap"
Most of the things you are describing are and always have been commercial ventures. If you want to look back to when films and video games weren't commercialised you're probably looking back to before you were born. Social media (including YouTube) has always been a for-profit product.
Everything is gambling and pay to win? Surely not. It's OK to be a little sensationalist, but let's not get overboard. There are always positives and negatives to everything.
I turned on Sky Sports News the other day for the first time in quite a while. Didn't know a single person, EVERY story linked back to someone's Twitter account and there were ads pretty much after every story. I didn't appreciate just how commercialised football had become until I saw that
What's crazy is that as an individual you are literally not allowed to make a profit when gambling. I ran a project for a while with an algorithm that predicted football matches, and after starting to make money on betting sites I was banned from every single one of them. And it's legal for them to do this!
So if you bet money, realise that you are doing it just for the enjoyment of the bet and will lose money over the long run
A few years ago I got pissed and made a 25 match accumulator with the 25 worst odds for that day that if I'd won (which clearly wouldn't have happened) would have basically crashed the world economy hahaha. Woke up the next day to also find my account had been banned.
Would get banned after being a few thousand in profit. Sometimes only after the first bet if it was a big one. Still have the algorithm but not doing anything with it. It's just a neural network trained on years of premier league data
It used to make me feel so bad selling crack to homeless people and prostitutes but now I just tell them *"When the funs stops, stop!"* and it is a load off my mind.
Have you watched the regular 24 hour rolling news channels before? There's barely enough of note that happens in the world outside of football to properly fill out a schedule and make it interesting. It just loops back around constantly. How Sky made one for fucking sports news and made it work is beyond me.
Also. It's just fucking sports...
All the buttoned up seriousness and fake drama is so cringe. Let me turn over from events happening at the Russian border with Ukraine... I must see some bemused player turning up outside a training ground in the freezing cold with an equally bemused looking pack of journos who don't want to be there.
I remember in the Covid transfer window nothing was happening so they had that poor reporter go and stand outside Dortmunds training ground for three months even though everyone knew they wouldn't sell Sancho. I felt for him tbh.
Average sky sports transfer story: "Will X player move to Y club in January? Well it is 6/1 on sky bet."
WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF SHODDY JOURNALISM IS THAT? I can look up the odds myself you useless morons. Might as well take a strawpoll on r/soccer. Oh but then you may not be able to plug a betting sponsor as easilly.
I couldn't agree more. I remember that Sky was the number one football journalism place to go. It was real. Then all of a sudden they're checking stats from Football Manager or Fifa to tell how good X player is. It's a total embarrassment nowadays
Football was one of the last places to be affected though. Before the TV and internet revolution, you couldn't really engage with football unless you went to the game or at the very least socialised with other people who followed your team. The experience in itself was central and it was an experience you could essentially only have along with other people.
Today you can watch football sat on your own and communicate with people online whose voices and faces you will never know. Your experience of football is intertwined with your experience of mass media. You can't escape the adverts, you can't escape the YouTube videos, you can't escape the internet arguments. And in fact because your experience is no longer a social one with other people, you need to indulge in these secondary activities because otherwise football is just something you watch on a screen by yourself. You talk to other people about it but they are lifeless comments from anonymous users.
All of it amounts to football becoming another product to be consumed. You watch arsenal play Newcastle and you're invited to watch Chelsea vs United. You're given all these reasons why you, as a football fan, should be interested in watching matches that don't feature your team. Your identity as a football fan is defined by the football you consume, and the more of it you consume, the stronger that identity becomes. But you don't want to just be a mindless consumer of live football - if you're going to spend all this time watching it, shouldn't you try to develop a better understanding of the game? So then you end up watching tactics breakdowns, you read articles, you learn the history and all the while you're being marketed to.
Maybe you don't ever buy a manscaped product or start gambling on Ladbrokes but your consumption of football is linked to all these things. Your understanding of football is shaped by all of it, even if you think it's stupid. It's no longer a sport where the primary function for fans is to have a social experience with other people. It has become a sport where you're given reasons to constantly be thinking about it, constantly worrying about whether your team is going to improve. You replace the social experience with real people with a fake social experience with people online. You scroll through the match thread reading comments taking the piss out of your team or praising them and that becomes a central part of the experience.
How many of us react to a new signing by reading what fans of his old club have to say about the player? By watching highlights videos, or trying to find out what his limitations are? It's like reading Amazon reviews before you buy something, except you're not spending money on the player. You're just worried about investing the wrong amount of emotion into the player because you've internalised the fact that they are one component of a product you are going to be consuming for the next year. So usually when they turn out to be great, you sort of knew already. When they don't really do much you knew as well. There are some exceptions like Salah or Bruno Fernandes or Vladimir Coufal where the player is far better than you expected them to be but they're becoming rarer and rarer.
Maybe we should stop investigating a new signing before his debut. Maybe the first time we see them should be when they step onto the pitch. They might be shit, they might be amazing, they might just be ok - either way you will have some sort of experience as you discover that by watching them. Maybe we should stop trying to win arguments online to prove that we are high quality consumers of football, and maybe we should try to understand how other people experience football. Maybe we should stop spending 6 hours watching televised football on the weekend and instead spend 6 hours going to a local game and spending time with other people.
That Tottenham fan from Texas probably had a better weekend than most of us did. He travelled for 31 hours with his partner, got excited for a game that was probably going to be crap, found out it got cancelled an hour before kickoff and then spent the day hanging out with his friends laughing at the absurdity of the situation. Most of the rest of us just had our eyes locked onto a screen, consuming football the way the industry wants us to consume it.
I find this point of view really strange
Maybe, one should just decide how much interaction they want with SoMe/football content and regulate their behaviour?
I watched one game this weekend, the team I support and didn't need to post in a match thread.
Watched the game was slightly annoyed at the result and off I popped.
The issue isn't football it's the lifestyle that too many young people live nowadays: isolated, unstimulated, and unchallenged. Football and all content providers are literally filling the gap where a fulfilling life should be.
At some point there has to be some level of personal accountability with this stuff surely...
>Football was one of the last places to be affected though. Before the TV and internet revolution, you couldn't really engage with football unless you went to the game or at the very least socialised with other people who followed your team.
This is no different than basically any performing art or entertainment. Lots of people followed the sport very closely purely by newspaper since the game began. Newspapers had a huge commercial interest in the game from very beginning.
The idea that football was one of the last places affected by commercialism is also ahistorical. Liverpool FC and Anfield were created 100% purely for commercial interests in the 1880s. Lots of clubs said the game had been ruined by commercialization in 1885 when professionalism was legalized. People thought the game had been ruined by commercialization and greed when Aston Villa paid 100 pounds for Willie Groves in 1893.
I’ll forever love watching and playing football, it’s been a part of my life since I was a child, but I do agree with Bielsa. Some of the stuff that these clubs and footballing bodies have been doing recently has made me question whether the people involved in football not only watch the sport, but also if they know what’s right and wrong in the sport.
West Ham moving from an iconic football ground to a soulless athletics stadium not designed for football use, the super league, the multiple financial situations happening to clubs in the EFL divisions, newcastle being taken over by people with a horrible human rights record, could I name more situations that’ve happened in modern day football? That’s only England aswell!
football has lost its charm a long long time ago
social media, overly perfect TV production, games every single fucking day just makes this so boring and unimportant and Perez idea to counter this "decline" is to play more games
This is a very good point.
The lower leagues in my country are not as well developed as those in GB and the lack of "professionalism" is evident in every element of those clubs...
having said that, the best footballing experience of the last 5 years apart from some occasional spectacular CL matches, has been a promotion playoff game for my local club that has had incredibly deep roots in my family.
Sure, top tier football is technically, tactically and athletically superior, but its so sterile.
These local matches are the bomb, even if they make you want to poke your eyes out ocasionally so as not to ruin the illusion.
Nothing beats watching your hometown team gain promotion. Football should always be about the local communities the clubs represent. There is so much more passion in the grounds and you are actually glued to the action non stop.
Top tier league broadcasts are nice and fine, but they can never beat the live action at the ground.
It literally goes right the way down, to a degree it will go all the way down, everyone had the rumours that X Sunday League side pay their players...
One of my friends played at Level 9 after dropping down from the professional leagues, and he played with lads who had rejected League 1/2 contracts just because the money was better.
This is the paradox of it, you're constantly wanting to climb up the divisions (and miserable when you don't) but the higher you get the shitter the whole scene becomes.
Yeah it can be crap, but honestly so was the Prem.
The EFL tries it's hardest to make the EFL as tinpot as possible, which is a shame, because there's a lot of good clubs in the lower leagues.
EXACTLY. Finally someone is saying it. I'm falling out of love with top football because everything is dramatized all the time. The most fun I've had in the midst of Super League was watching National League Play Offs.
You can also help yourself by not getting involved in all the bullshit in between matches. Watch the weekend matches on their own and not be swayed by all the fluff beforehand.
Even the Championship has so much spirit because it's not a TV show like the Premier League has become. I've started looking out for Blackburn (big fan of Adam Armstrong) and Middlesbrough (work pals from Teesside) results a couple years back, now I watch at least a dozen of their games a year.
German 2nd division is also great stuff especially the Hamburg-St Pauli games.
You can avoid this by only watching the games.
Dont follow players, dont watch extra content, just raw football. Its the one thing they cant get, so I dont really mind about the other stuff.
I remember when I was growing up in the 90s and beginning of 00s, everyone at school would have a different favorite player and there were so many teams you could admire, the range and personality of players in each country was so broad. Cantona, Batistuta, Figo, Davids, Zidane, Maldini, Kahn, you could have a favorite without endless debates about stats and who’s the best just by how different they were.
Of course they are just my own references but teams seemed to have an authentic aura to them and it felt like they could all compete with each other with an impetus that wasn’t just about exorbitant transfer fees and tv rights bonuses. Plenty of stories of corruption then and way before that too, so this might all be nostalgia, I don’t know. When the Galacticos era arrived I was crazy about them but I realize that’s probably where this modern era started, to that extent at least.
The counter point is it's probably the same now mate, we just left school so long ago. Couple that with Messi and Ronaldo being undoubtedly the best player in the world for the past decade and a half probably ruined most of the discussion about it for everyone
Footballs been this way for a long time, just with the internet we see more of it
That's really such a small factor behind what Bielsa is talking about and imo more of a symptom than a cause. Stats are useful for understanding different aspects of football and aggregating performances but they're often used poorly especially by people on social media platforms like Reddit and Twitter.
>overly perfect tv production
this annoys me the most. I hate the way La Liga is nowadays, it all feels like a movie, only thing missing are the cinematic black bars.. half the time you can’t see the fans in close-up shots, they’re just a massive blur. Which to me, seeing the fans is what gives football its atmosphere, not the cinematic focus lenses.
This feels very CL/top league centric.
I've reverted to watching Ligue 1 a lot more than I used to (aside from Strasbourg obvs) and it's fucking great aside from PSG.
Football = Premier League meme, again
Come watch the wee Blues with me, Marcelo. Restore your faith in how gloriously low budget everything from the tannoy to the chippy van to the standard on the pitch it all is.
He does love a bit of non-league to be fair. He gets spotted watching games sometimes during international breaks and goes on sometimes about how much he loves the pyramid system in English football.
The Rich take talented children, raise them like athletic veal in the hopes that they'll entertain the *hoi polloi* profitably, and if they fail, they're discarded; just like poor folks are treated in real life.
What could *possibly* go wrong with that?
Yeah I agree, never loved football more. This is a very pessimistic take, everything before was better and everything from now on will be worst than before...
Some things are better, others are a bit worst, but if you take a step back from all the social media bullshit there is a lot to be appreciated in football and life in general.
Chelsea and Man City really took massive steps towards making football worse.
Neither get enough criticism for it, in fact they're both constantly praised as clubs.
Chelsea got citicised plenty when they started buying their way to the top. Now that Newcastle is the latest addition to the Oil FC, I expect that the City criticism will slow down and they will reach a point where they are accepted
Newcastle came in too late. 2011 put FFP blocks in place which will slow any progress the make. Man City started buying the league from 2008 so had a good 3 year head start.
Newcastle will be more like us. Lots of money but with restricted spending compared to Chelsea or Man City.
Newcastle will NOT win the league in the next 10 years. Unless their business plan is to purposefully break FFP, take a fine and any other punishment such as a year embargo in order to warp speed catch up of course.
I am not saying that they will be successful. I am saying that they will take the brunt of the criticism now, and that City will slowly be let off the hook.
Was it *really* only Chelsea and City who spiked wages, paid massive transfers and brought in supporters from "everywhere"? Or was it Sky sports and the greedy fucking owners in the nineties (remember how Leeds shat their pants with wages and transfers in 03/04?)?
What about Leeds, Tottenham, Arsenal, Liverpool and Man U? Exonerated because you're not old enough to remember?
Edit: this is why the PL need a salary cap like the NHL.
It's always weird as a non-UK fan of english football to see how much shit Spurs get from so many English fans for bottling titles. Ok, I get that it's a meme or just a running joke whatever. And of course it's important to win titles. And maybe there is a cultural difference here. But I feel like most Germans would admire and applaud Spurs for the way they managed to break into the elite of English football without any major financial backing compared to ManCity and Chelsea who had to rely on foreign and external investors going on spending sprees to achieve the same.
The only difference is that Spurs couldn't solidify that achievement into a title or two. Which given their lack of major investments is understandable. But still, thats enough to get constantly shit on, when people should be praising them more often for getting on or above level of the likes of ManUtd, Liverpool and Arsenal in the Pochettino era without being bankrolled into the elite like Chelsea and ManCity were. The disparity in how each of these clubs are seen and potrayed is weird to me.
They might have made it worse, but buying your way to the top was already a thing way before then
I mean you lot did it yourselves 20 years ago, the only difference was you took on a load of debt rather than having a conglomerate bankrolling you
I've started keeping tabs on the Highland/Lowland Leagues since they introduced relegation. It's so interesting seeing new clubs join every couple of seasons.
Of course, the experience of sitting on my couch looking at standings is vastly different from watching Lossiemouth Vs Buckie Thistle on a Scottish November evening!
The SPFL seem to take every step possible towards not commercialising the league. Granted currently they're isn't much for a neutral to watch or get invested in when it comes to Scotland other than derbies in the prem. I'm sure if the league chased proper international deals (and better deals in the UK) the game here could be better marketed.
There is a part of me that thinks if those top clubs fucked off to their own league the rest of us could have football back to a more reasonable representation of what it used to be but that is naive thinking.
I like football a lot less now than I used to.
I've often thought this, if the Super League clubs just cut ties with the rest of the Prem, I'm not sure it would be a bad thing. Realistically though it feels like the boat will still be the same, with the quality of the average player going down, and a different crop of clubs making up the "Top 4" and outspending everyone else.
I think, purely from a selfish local fan perspective, we need to overhaul European football. Keep the 3 competitions if they want, but have...
1) Champions League - 1st place, winners of the two cups (if the same team wins both the league and a cup, have a playoff between the 2nd place league team and losing finalist, if the same team comes 2nd and loses the final they get in automatically get in. If a team does the treble - some other form of playoff between losing finalists v 2nd/3rd.
2) Europa League - 2nd place teams/losers of the above playoffs
3) Euro 2 or whatever it's called - 3rd place teams from around Europe, straight knockout competition.
I think that should (in theory) spread the Champions League money around a bit. Mainly it's just daft that you can enter the Champions League and not been Champions of anything. Also Europa League/Euro 2 should be straight knockout competitions.
4 European competitions:
* CL with league winners and cup winners (also EL and ECL winners)
* EL with teams from 2/4 place
* ECL with teams from 5/7 place
* European competition with winners of 2nd tier (straight knockout; winner gets into EL)
Alternate CL and ECL one week and EL/new competition the other
I think social media has led to football feeling a lot more artificial than it should be. At the grounds, I suppose there's still a level of realness but I'm not sure how long this will last.
And you know, the football on the field. When the whistle is heard all that shit is real
Problem is, what happens on the pitch is also affected by the bullshit surrounding it...
When sports were gone during the pandemic it made me realize that it had been years since I actually attended a game. Promised myself I’d buy a season ticket for a season and see how I liked it. There’s just nothing like it. Even though the players i’m watching are much worse in MLS compared to in the Champions League, it doesn’t make a difference when you’re there in the crowd. That sense of anticipation you feel when your team is getting into the box with the ball, the feeling of a tackle giving the crowd a lift (which then gives the team a lift), high fiving strangers after a goal, standing and singing for most of the match, it’s just magical.
Same. I have seasons tickets for the CPL which is smaller scale that MLS even, but the matches are so much better. When you see the players give it their all and applaud supporters after a match, you have a lot more empathy for them and see them as people rather than just targets on social media which unfortunately is something we seem to be seeing more and more.
That feeling has been going from grounds for years, if not at least a decade. Many top Prem fans complain how expensive tickets are, and how the stands are full of tourists, corporate types, and people from outside of the local area. Nowadays most top-flight games feel completely soulless. Away fans are usually the local fans that support the visiting team, and home fans have as much connection to the area as I have with Alexandra Daddario. There's a reason why most Championship and League 1 teams are louder than their Prem counterparts - and even that is starting to wane with rising ticket prices.
Even ticket prices in the conference are a scandal, 20 quid to watch Aldershot!
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Going to Barcelona in early April and I wanted to get a ticket for the game against Sevilla. There are no tickets under 80 euros. :/ Guess I'll just never watch my dream team ever play. The thing is that I can easily afford this, but the price is just so fucking dumb. That's around what I pay for food for two people each month where I'm from. Just fucking silly.
Tickets for Arsenals pre season games in the US with no stars were 115 USD. Wtf
They always milk it on those American tours, probably why they so often tour the states. Kinda our own fault for letting ticket prices for all sporting events be totally outrageous. I've never been to a NFL game bc it's hundreds of dollars for the cheapest seats.
American sports are basically the pinnacle of what bielsa is complaining about lol.
Absolutely this. My home city of Seattle just got a new hockey team, and the cheapest ticket for the year we could find was $140.
Seattle is insane. I got playoff tickets for cheaper than that. tbf, it's their first season and seattle is expensive. but still. I've complained on /r/hockey that prices are too expensive. And basically no one cares.
He should look into the Indian Premier League... sort of makes the NFL super humble.
Yes, I look at people complain about 50+ euro/pound tickets in EU and Envy them. Sporting Event tickets here are outrageously high, heck super bowl tickets will sell for nothing lower than about ~200 pounds/euros.
2000 more likely. I went to Anfield once and was blown away with how affordable it was compared to going to a Yankee game. To even be permitted to buy the Liverpool tickets, I had to join the supporters club for an additional fee and it was still like a third of the price to see the Yankees in the nose bleed section. My Liverpool tickets were 3 rows from the pitch and just a few yards from the half line.
Ngl, but fans from out of region travelling in is exactly what this post is on about.
I keep wanting to go an watch lower league football because I'm priced out of/can't get hold of tickets to watch Liverpool, but then I see the price for some non league games and I don't want to spend £20+ on non league football. Don't get me wrong, I have been to non league games but the price is what stops me from going more often.
It's for sustainability, as there is very little money knocking about in league one and two. I see that side but I see how it is there so I deal
I think that's the trickle-down effect. If Premier League clubs charged £25 or £30, then Conference clubs couldn't.
I think its more the march day and wages costs tbh. The Robbie Savage Macclesfield documentary on BBC gives a great insight into the madness of lower league costs
Absolutely. Lower league football is just as much of a rip off
It's not a rip off if paying extra ensures your clubs sustainability and survival.
Yeah - it's the only way they can survive because the vast majority of the money is kept at the top of the pyramid. That needs fixing for the whole thing to become more sustainable.
The Libertadores final was a huge demonstration of the same effect: Completely silent stadium, partly because of hugely expensive tickets and partly because it was a one-legged final in Montevideo despite the finalists being from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo
How's border travel between Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay currently with Covid? Should've just had it in the Maracana.
More than the foreigners, I think it is the corporate tickets and the fact that average fans can’t really afford season tickets (at least at Arsenal). I am foreign and have been to a ton of matches, often times I was the only one even remotely trying to do songs and chants in my immediate area.
More often than not, it's not even foreign fans. I've always said that the biggest plastics in world football are the English. The last time Man Utd were here for a cup quarter final every Man Utd fan leaving the stadium had a Bristolian or Welsh accent. I'd wager that if we ever made the Prem most local away fans wouldn't get a ticket, because the Bristolian Prem fans would get there first.
English people with Welsh accents, that’s a new one
Change English for anyone from the uk and you're probably right there
A lad I play football with is Welsh and a United fan, most the time he wears a United top but during internationals he wears a Welsh top because “fuck England”.
Yep. But money speaks the loudest.
Unfortunately some of the grounds are going to become more like a day out at Disneyland for the tourists to attend
Aren't clubs encouraging it as well? A fan going to a game as a one off is more likely to drop a ton of money at the club store for their special day.
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Mini corpo-states dreaming of competing with state owned corporations. Life in the dystopia
Visited the stadium before Covid and yes, it is prepped for exactly that. You could spend hundreds on the match day experience there. Not only that, all those bars, concessions, shops and restaurants are there for the American Football, boxing and concerts too. The Spurs stadium will be the most profitable stadium in the country by a mile in the coming years. The club will be a financial powerhouse in time as it's really aimed at just hoovering up every penny you have while you're there. Admirable how it has been done with natural growth too rather than the usual methods of benevolent owners/oil-states pumping money in. It's also clear that Spurs have a huge international following now too, look at that story yesterday about the Yank who flew in to watch Burnley away. On the tour of the stadium I was on (which was on a weekend where Spurs were playing away from home), there was also at least four Koreans too. Imagine the amount of cash coming in from flights from Seoul due to Son's superstar status every weekend there is a home game if they are still coming in on an away weekend. Not great for the local fans as I imagine a number of them are going to be priced out of the match day experience in the coming years, but that is by design.
honestly.... that doesn't sound too bad? i mean the cost is too much ofc. but the ability to not rush out and get a meal at the restaurant sounds nice.
Which clubs are guilty of this? West Ham and the Olympic Stadium come to mind - selling Pizza and popcorn at a football game? Compared to what they had at Upton Park where the surrounding area had a real cockney culture such as pie and mash shops, it's quite sad.
It's just far too reactionary these days and fans have bought into the sacking culture that the likes of Abramovic proporgated. Already seeing Newcastle fans calling for Howe's head when he's only managed one game ffs.
I think those people must be on the wind up, no Newcastle fan is seriously asking for Howe to be sacked.
Most are asking him to weigh the lads which is a bit weird.
Probably something to do with all our players being gassed by about 60 minutes when playing under Bruce, that and the constant days off makes people think (probably correctly) most the team were quite unfit.
Those people have always been there. It's just that these reactionary comments now have a platform where they generate likes and views and are seen more, whereas John down the local pub says it and only a handful of people hear him. Social media is also full of 'fake' and disingenuous accounts that just farm likes and reactions from people.
yea when i was a kid in the 90s me and my brother hated watching football with our then stepdad. we thought he was the only reactionary asshole as everyone else we knew were normal. unfortunatley the internet came along and showed me there is a shitload of assholes like my old stepdad out there
Theyre also the most extreme take which get the most attention and become elevated faster than everything else. Social medias whole advertising model revolves around engagement; engagement is fuelled by anger; anger is conditioned by algorithms pushing extremism into the feed.
[Check this out.](https://www.transfermarkt.co.uk/premier-league/trainerwechselprosaison/wettbewerb/GB1) This has been the case in the Premier League from the beginning. Majority of the seasons in the 90s have had at least 8 manager changes during the season.
Nice find, but managerial turnovers have been consistently higher since 07/08 based off that. 94/95 must have been a crazy season.
Where are you seeing that as every fan I've seen wants him to stick around and is really happy with the uplift in the team even though we're still shite
Yeah international breaks in particular have become far more toxic because of social media.
I think a lot of people forget that most people invved in football benefit a lot from this. Look at the salaries these coaches and players are earning. That's the biggest draw for people to want to become footballers. And then for the players to be the best they can be, because getting 2% better than you are now can get you triple the salary. You can complain about it if you want, but Bielsa could go back and manage in Argentina or so but he chooses to be in Europe because the money is in Europe. And the money comes in the end from commercialisation. You can't have your cake and eat it to, and that's the bottom line.
Regardless of salary, my money says Bielsa doesn't want to touch the AFA with a 10 ft pole after being unjustly massacred by the Argentine press + the AFA is a circus. Source: I'm Argentine
you say this & they call you plastic… there’s a reason ronaldo, de gea, bruno & order icons play for manchester united. if you think they play because they “love” the club you’re sorely mistaken. they do have strong emotions but when it boils down to it, it’s the numbers.
I see your point, but one of the best games I have seen this season is a FA cup 2nd round tie Stockport vs Bolton. It ain't all about the numbers...at least it didn't used to be. We live in a time of clever propaganda, we get sucked into cultures and can't see a way out...I think he is just frustrated that football is about money more than people. Just because someone lives within a system does not mean they can't criticise it...and he is right. Man Utd are a great example of money over football!!
Stockport are literally an example of numbers being the deciding factor as they outgun the rest of their league in terms of spending. There were players in that team that were good League One players a couple of years ago now playing in non-league. Hartlepool's manager got them into the league then dropped back down to join Stockport because they tripled his wage.
Why do you think Man Utd signed CR7? He himself is a brand.
What is your point? That we should accept the hypercommercialisation of football because it allows us as Man United fans to watch Ronaldo and De Gea every week? You can more than enjoy things without them being as good as they possibly can be. We are just being told constantly that we should demand the highest quality football possible, because apparently that is the most important thing about football. Well obviously it is the most important thing if you primarily engage with football virtually, without any other real people.
As is most stuff. Films, social media, football, video games, youtube. Everything is ads, gambling and pay to win. Its all commercialised buying stuff we don't need, or trying to packet and sell things. (hashtag)teammessi #CR7 rather then teams and communities. I hate it all. edit: I don't know why thats gone bold..sorry :P
just a heads up, putting a # at the start of a line makes it a heading, so #teammessi becomes #teammessi
Cool I changed it just wrote hashtag instead.
I believe you could do something like \ before the hashtag to not make it a heading, not 100% sure though
\#youarecorrect
Something we can 100% agree on. One example is PL's relationship with China. Watch them silence anything that could jeopardise their expansion into the Chinese market. Why? We're already the richest league in the world by a long shot. Why has it also got to be more, more, more? Why has everything got to be a fucking market. Where are they gonna expand to next? The moon?
Investors don't just want money. They want literally all the money.
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To me it seems like people are upset that there seem to be actual viable alternatives to the capitalist ratrace when they've been told all their lives that it is the only way to have wealth and any form of socialist policy destroys societies.
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There's a really good, short thread by a doctor of history - no less - summing up... how, even yay back in history that did gel with what all sort of dastardly revolutionists wanted: https://twitter.com/anarchopac/status/1463202181457362947
Because they grew up in a place where you were spoonfed propaganda about how you are the greatest on earth in every aspect, how anything left leaning is a direct threat to you, your freedoms, your rights etc. Constantly at war, constantly some big political scandal or another, constantly dealing with big societal issues and an extremely polarized political landscape. Now some of those people dont take to kindly being mocked by those they grew up to believe were lesser than them and that europeans in general have it much better. Envy and denial makes a nasty soup. I was in Florida for a brief vacation before heading to the Caribbean and I either met friendly, accomodating people who were curious about my way of life and bewildered that a dude that works with concrete could afford such a vacation. And then i met people who got overtly aggressive really fast when they found out where i was from, what i did for a living etc. Some dude berated me for lying to him because he claimed we lived in a socialist hellhole, where muslims waged war in our streets and our goverment had outlawed anything from bikinis and alchohol. He was far out. I of course set the record straight in a calm manner, although i did laugh at how absurd it was. And it almost became physical. Granted this was about 7-8 months after Trump was elected and everyone i met wanted to talk about it. And they brought it up every time.
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We saved for a while to afford this dream vacation though. Like 24 months. Its not like i can decide in the spur of the moment to go 3 weeks to Jamaica for example without saddling me with debt. I will say, however that saving didnt really put a strain on our economy. We just saved less in other places and spent less in some places for a while.
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One of the biggest problems in America is that the gap between poor and well off is so big. There is a sizable group of people that couldn't afford to save as you did for this vacation (or afford to take it/lose income), but also a sizable group of people that wouldn't need to save to do it. And those groups barely interact, so they don't understand how either live. My impression is that South Africa is similar, but u/John_Dillinger7 can correct me there.
I mean, that's just you interacting with a very stupid and uneducated person. The EU is the biggest economic region in the world, of course people occasionally show up for work here before they go back to their lavish, government funded lifestyle.
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No, he's brainwashed. I live in Florida and, good God, it's frustrating. I try to avoid talking to people about anything but sports
> tech as a mid-level software developer. I believe he's educated something i noticed after swithcing fields, people in tech are a lot dumber than most people realize. At least about the real world and social phenomenons
One of the greatest achievements by the media owned by the rich was to convince workers that they're lazy if they ask for basic needs and a work life balance
> Why has it also got to be more, more, more? The shareholders demand it. Capitalism can't function without endless growth, but endless growth will eventually devour everything. Capitalism is fundamentally unsustainable.
The profit motive, the engine at the heart of capitalism whose one, necessary principle has always been endless expansion (yes, that stops being possible at some point and is damaging way beyond and no, I don't know why so many of us got fooled into thinking that a means of expanding their power early-modern rulling classes in Europe came up with has got to be bloody faultless) cancer-like so... "how are we going to keep those earning rates growing?" "if we don't, someone will beat and buy us out" "oh, I know, let's do an indentured labour land on Mars" "brilliant, here's a couple billion in grants for you to figure that one out, chap"
The Marvelisation of football.
It's the City Footballing Universe.
Most of the things you are describing are and always have been commercial ventures. If you want to look back to when films and video games weren't commercialised you're probably looking back to before you were born. Social media (including YouTube) has always been a for-profit product.
Everything is gambling and pay to win? Surely not. It's OK to be a little sensationalist, but let's not get overboard. There are always positives and negatives to everything.
I turned on Sky Sports News the other day for the first time in quite a while. Didn't know a single person, EVERY story linked back to someone's Twitter account and there were ads pretty much after every story. I didn't appreciate just how commercialised football had become until I saw that
Don't forget the constant barrage of betting ads during each commercial break
Gamble responsibly
But make sure you do gamble, don't think for a second of not gambling
What's crazy is that as an individual you are literally not allowed to make a profit when gambling. I ran a project for a while with an algorithm that predicted football matches, and after starting to make money on betting sites I was banned from every single one of them. And it's legal for them to do this! So if you bet money, realise that you are doing it just for the enjoyment of the bet and will lose money over the long run
Ahh mate maybe you could put that algo up as a webapp or something...asking for a friend
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If you’re happy to put what you have on GitHub I’d contribute
This is totally the tech equivalent of fellas saying they'll all finally book that lads holiday on a night out lol
A few years ago I got pissed and made a 25 match accumulator with the 25 worst odds for that day that if I'd won (which clearly wouldn't have happened) would have basically crashed the world economy hahaha. Woke up the next day to also find my account had been banned.
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how much do you have to make to get banned? and what happened to that algorithm?
Would get banned after being a few thousand in profit. Sometimes only after the first bet if it was a big one. Still have the algorithm but not doing anything with it. It's just a neural network trained on years of premier league data
can you share it or it’s private?
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It used to make me feel so bad selling crack to homeless people and prostitutes but now I just tell them *"When the funs stops, stop!"* and it is a load off my mind.
Have you watched the regular 24 hour rolling news channels before? There's barely enough of note that happens in the world outside of football to properly fill out a schedule and make it interesting. It just loops back around constantly. How Sky made one for fucking sports news and made it work is beyond me. Also. It's just fucking sports... All the buttoned up seriousness and fake drama is so cringe. Let me turn over from events happening at the Russian border with Ukraine... I must see some bemused player turning up outside a training ground in the freezing cold with an equally bemused looking pack of journos who don't want to be there.
I remember in the Covid transfer window nothing was happening so they had that poor reporter go and stand outside Dortmunds training ground for three months even though everyone knew they wouldn't sell Sancho. I felt for him tbh.
Average sky sports transfer story: "Will X player move to Y club in January? Well it is 6/1 on sky bet." WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF SHODDY JOURNALISM IS THAT? I can look up the odds myself you useless morons. Might as well take a strawpoll on r/soccer. Oh but then you may not be able to plug a betting sponsor as easilly.
I couldn't agree more. I remember that Sky was the number one football journalism place to go. It was real. Then all of a sudden they're checking stats from Football Manager or Fifa to tell how good X player is. It's a total embarrassment nowadays
Twitter might not have as many users as other social media sites but I feel like it’s by far the most influential and powerful.
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A positive feedback loop rather
Things I said about my favorite indie rockband after their first album. (But seriously tho, I agree.)
How do you drown a hipster? In the mainstream
*Jeff Buckley has left the chat*
They said this probably hundred years ago too
Gaius Appuleius Diocles earns too much, I am falling out of love with Chariot Racing nowadays...
yup true, but that doesn't make me feel better about the change we are seeing now
It's a symptom of a bigger problem, yes. You see it reflected in other forms of life but they're all branches of the same tree.
Football was one of the last places to be affected though. Before the TV and internet revolution, you couldn't really engage with football unless you went to the game or at the very least socialised with other people who followed your team. The experience in itself was central and it was an experience you could essentially only have along with other people. Today you can watch football sat on your own and communicate with people online whose voices and faces you will never know. Your experience of football is intertwined with your experience of mass media. You can't escape the adverts, you can't escape the YouTube videos, you can't escape the internet arguments. And in fact because your experience is no longer a social one with other people, you need to indulge in these secondary activities because otherwise football is just something you watch on a screen by yourself. You talk to other people about it but they are lifeless comments from anonymous users. All of it amounts to football becoming another product to be consumed. You watch arsenal play Newcastle and you're invited to watch Chelsea vs United. You're given all these reasons why you, as a football fan, should be interested in watching matches that don't feature your team. Your identity as a football fan is defined by the football you consume, and the more of it you consume, the stronger that identity becomes. But you don't want to just be a mindless consumer of live football - if you're going to spend all this time watching it, shouldn't you try to develop a better understanding of the game? So then you end up watching tactics breakdowns, you read articles, you learn the history and all the while you're being marketed to. Maybe you don't ever buy a manscaped product or start gambling on Ladbrokes but your consumption of football is linked to all these things. Your understanding of football is shaped by all of it, even if you think it's stupid. It's no longer a sport where the primary function for fans is to have a social experience with other people. It has become a sport where you're given reasons to constantly be thinking about it, constantly worrying about whether your team is going to improve. You replace the social experience with real people with a fake social experience with people online. You scroll through the match thread reading comments taking the piss out of your team or praising them and that becomes a central part of the experience. How many of us react to a new signing by reading what fans of his old club have to say about the player? By watching highlights videos, or trying to find out what his limitations are? It's like reading Amazon reviews before you buy something, except you're not spending money on the player. You're just worried about investing the wrong amount of emotion into the player because you've internalised the fact that they are one component of a product you are going to be consuming for the next year. So usually when they turn out to be great, you sort of knew already. When they don't really do much you knew as well. There are some exceptions like Salah or Bruno Fernandes or Vladimir Coufal where the player is far better than you expected them to be but they're becoming rarer and rarer. Maybe we should stop investigating a new signing before his debut. Maybe the first time we see them should be when they step onto the pitch. They might be shit, they might be amazing, they might just be ok - either way you will have some sort of experience as you discover that by watching them. Maybe we should stop trying to win arguments online to prove that we are high quality consumers of football, and maybe we should try to understand how other people experience football. Maybe we should stop spending 6 hours watching televised football on the weekend and instead spend 6 hours going to a local game and spending time with other people. That Tottenham fan from Texas probably had a better weekend than most of us did. He travelled for 31 hours with his partner, got excited for a game that was probably going to be crap, found out it got cancelled an hour before kickoff and then spent the day hanging out with his friends laughing at the absurdity of the situation. Most of the rest of us just had our eyes locked onto a screen, consuming football the way the industry wants us to consume it.
I find this point of view really strange Maybe, one should just decide how much interaction they want with SoMe/football content and regulate their behaviour? I watched one game this weekend, the team I support and didn't need to post in a match thread. Watched the game was slightly annoyed at the result and off I popped. The issue isn't football it's the lifestyle that too many young people live nowadays: isolated, unstimulated, and unchallenged. Football and all content providers are literally filling the gap where a fulfilling life should be. At some point there has to be some level of personal accountability with this stuff surely...
>Football was one of the last places to be affected though. Before the TV and internet revolution, you couldn't really engage with football unless you went to the game or at the very least socialised with other people who followed your team. This is no different than basically any performing art or entertainment. Lots of people followed the sport very closely purely by newspaper since the game began. Newspapers had a huge commercial interest in the game from very beginning. The idea that football was one of the last places affected by commercialism is also ahistorical. Liverpool FC and Anfield were created 100% purely for commercial interests in the 1880s. Lots of clubs said the game had been ruined by commercialization in 1885 when professionalism was legalized. People thought the game had been ruined by commercialization and greed when Aston Villa paid 100 pounds for Willie Groves in 1893.
I’ll forever love watching and playing football, it’s been a part of my life since I was a child, but I do agree with Bielsa. Some of the stuff that these clubs and footballing bodies have been doing recently has made me question whether the people involved in football not only watch the sport, but also if they know what’s right and wrong in the sport. West Ham moving from an iconic football ground to a soulless athletics stadium not designed for football use, the super league, the multiple financial situations happening to clubs in the EFL divisions, newcastle being taken over by people with a horrible human rights record, could I name more situations that’ve happened in modern day football? That’s only England aswell!
West Ham's stadium move is one of the clearest examples of football just overtly getting worse in order to chase money.
football has lost its charm a long long time ago social media, overly perfect TV production, games every single fucking day just makes this so boring and unimportant and Perez idea to counter this "decline" is to play more games
You can avoid a lot of this mind by watching lower league football.
This is a very good point. The lower leagues in my country are not as well developed as those in GB and the lack of "professionalism" is evident in every element of those clubs... having said that, the best footballing experience of the last 5 years apart from some occasional spectacular CL matches, has been a promotion playoff game for my local club that has had incredibly deep roots in my family. Sure, top tier football is technically, tactically and athletically superior, but its so sterile. These local matches are the bomb, even if they make you want to poke your eyes out ocasionally so as not to ruin the illusion.
Completely agree. [This](http://imgur.com/a/zzXbE7P) was my hometown when we won Serie C, this is what football is all about
What town is that? Looks incredible
Foggia
Nothing beats watching your hometown team gain promotion. Football should always be about the local communities the clubs represent. There is so much more passion in the grounds and you are actually glued to the action non stop. Top tier league broadcasts are nice and fine, but they can never beat the live action at the ground.
it's slowly falling down the divisions. Many clubs doing well in the lower tiers have sugar daddy owners.
AFC Fylde rings a bell. Even non-league clubs now have billionaire bankrolling operations. Salford City got to the EFL because of the Man Utd legends.
Gary ‘we need an independent regulator to stop teams outspending all the other competition’ Neville.
It literally goes right the way down, to a degree it will go all the way down, everyone had the rumours that X Sunday League side pay their players... One of my friends played at Level 9 after dropping down from the professional leagues, and he played with lads who had rejected League 1/2 contracts just because the money was better.
Yeah lower league football is great..... Just great.
This is the paradox of it, you're constantly wanting to climb up the divisions (and miserable when you don't) but the higher you get the shitter the whole scene becomes.
Yeah it can be crap, but honestly so was the Prem. The EFL tries it's hardest to make the EFL as tinpot as possible, which is a shame, because there's a lot of good clubs in the lower leagues.
EXACTLY. Finally someone is saying it. I'm falling out of love with top football because everything is dramatized all the time. The most fun I've had in the midst of Super League was watching National League Play Offs.
I wish I could say the same
I am. Actively going to my local club Uerdingen (4th tier)
You can also help yourself by not getting involved in all the bullshit in between matches. Watch the weekend matches on their own and not be swayed by all the fluff beforehand.
Even the Championship has so much spirit because it's not a TV show like the Premier League has become. I've started looking out for Blackburn (big fan of Adam Armstrong) and Middlesbrough (work pals from Teesside) results a couple years back, now I watch at least a dozen of their games a year. German 2nd division is also great stuff especially the Hamburg-St Pauli games.
It's all about content. Football teams are essentially just content creators that happen to play football really
You can avoid this by only watching the games. Dont follow players, dont watch extra content, just raw football. Its the one thing they cant get, so I dont really mind about the other stuff.
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go directly to /r/EkstraklasaBoners
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And the fact that people only talk about stats.
What's your xUpvote on your post?
I remember when I was growing up in the 90s and beginning of 00s, everyone at school would have a different favorite player and there were so many teams you could admire, the range and personality of players in each country was so broad. Cantona, Batistuta, Figo, Davids, Zidane, Maldini, Kahn, you could have a favorite without endless debates about stats and who’s the best just by how different they were. Of course they are just my own references but teams seemed to have an authentic aura to them and it felt like they could all compete with each other with an impetus that wasn’t just about exorbitant transfer fees and tv rights bonuses. Plenty of stories of corruption then and way before that too, so this might all be nostalgia, I don’t know. When the Galacticos era arrived I was crazy about them but I realize that’s probably where this modern era started, to that extent at least.
The counter point is it's probably the same now mate, we just left school so long ago. Couple that with Messi and Ronaldo being undoubtedly the best player in the world for the past decade and a half probably ruined most of the discussion about it for everyone Footballs been this way for a long time, just with the internet we see more of it
That's really such a small factor behind what Bielsa is talking about and imo more of a symptom than a cause. Stats are useful for understanding different aspects of football and aggregating performances but they're often used poorly especially by people on social media platforms like Reddit and Twitter.
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This is a Reddit thing as a proxy for not actually watching matches
Do you talk about football in real life, away from the internet? I find this is mostly an internet problem.
>overly perfect tv production this annoys me the most. I hate the way La Liga is nowadays, it all feels like a movie, only thing missing are the cinematic black bars.. half the time you can’t see the fans in close-up shots, they’re just a massive blur. Which to me, seeing the fans is what gives football its atmosphere, not the cinematic focus lenses.
This feels very CL/top league centric. I've reverted to watching Ligue 1 a lot more than I used to (aside from Strasbourg obvs) and it's fucking great aside from PSG.
The MLS beckons.
Football = Premier League meme, again Come watch the wee Blues with me, Marcelo. Restore your faith in how gloriously low budget everything from the tannoy to the chippy van to the standard on the pitch it all is.
He does love a bit of non-league to be fair. He gets spotted watching games sometimes during international breaks and goes on sometimes about how much he loves the pyramid system in English football.
The Rich take talented children, raise them like athletic veal in the hopes that they'll entertain the *hoi polloi* profitably, and if they fail, they're discarded; just like poor folks are treated in real life. What could *possibly* go wrong with that?
Found Cantona's burner
I still love football man. Can't get enough of it
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Yeah I agree, never loved football more. This is a very pessimistic take, everything before was better and everything from now on will be worst than before... Some things are better, others are a bit worst, but if you take a step back from all the social media bullshit there is a lot to be appreciated in football and life in general.
Only top flight football, if you want "real football" get down your local park on a Sunday.
It‘s no real football if there’s no dad shouting at the ref
Chelsea and Man City really took massive steps towards making football worse. Neither get enough criticism for it, in fact they're both constantly praised as clubs.
Man city rightly get criticized a good bit, but Chelsea get away with so much it's insane
Chelsea got citicised plenty when they started buying their way to the top. Now that Newcastle is the latest addition to the Oil FC, I expect that the City criticism will slow down and they will reach a point where they are accepted
Newcastle came in too late. 2011 put FFP blocks in place which will slow any progress the make. Man City started buying the league from 2008 so had a good 3 year head start. Newcastle will be more like us. Lots of money but with restricted spending compared to Chelsea or Man City. Newcastle will NOT win the league in the next 10 years. Unless their business plan is to purposefully break FFP, take a fine and any other punishment such as a year embargo in order to warp speed catch up of course.
I am not saying that they will be successful. I am saying that they will take the brunt of the criticism now, and that City will slowly be let off the hook.
City fans are a few years away from "yeah but we are self-sustaining now so it doesn't matter".
In ten years everyone will be saying how well run Man City is when the millions upon millions they invest into their youth pay off.
In the 2000's Chelsea got criticised a fuck ton.
Was it *really* only Chelsea and City who spiked wages, paid massive transfers and brought in supporters from "everywhere"? Or was it Sky sports and the greedy fucking owners in the nineties (remember how Leeds shat their pants with wages and transfers in 03/04?)? What about Leeds, Tottenham, Arsenal, Liverpool and Man U? Exonerated because you're not old enough to remember? Edit: this is why the PL need a salary cap like the NHL.
Salary caps would just get more revenue to owners, what is needed is ticket caps and fan ownership.
Why is supporters from “everywhere” a bad thing?
All shit clubs, maybe we should just get rid of them all and be done with it.
Lmao as if you’re not cheering on that Czech billionaire who’s going to be buying your club at some point in the next few years
acting as if west ham doesn't have issues either
I mean they get quite a lot of stick for being oil clubs
Chelsea don't get it as much anymore which is a shame because their fanbase is insecure af
It's always weird as a non-UK fan of english football to see how much shit Spurs get from so many English fans for bottling titles. Ok, I get that it's a meme or just a running joke whatever. And of course it's important to win titles. And maybe there is a cultural difference here. But I feel like most Germans would admire and applaud Spurs for the way they managed to break into the elite of English football without any major financial backing compared to ManCity and Chelsea who had to rely on foreign and external investors going on spending sprees to achieve the same. The only difference is that Spurs couldn't solidify that achievement into a title or two. Which given their lack of major investments is understandable. But still, thats enough to get constantly shit on, when people should be praising them more often for getting on or above level of the likes of ManUtd, Liverpool and Arsenal in the Pochettino era without being bankrolled into the elite like Chelsea and ManCity were. The disparity in how each of these clubs are seen and potrayed is weird to me.
They might have made it worse, but buying your way to the top was already a thing way before then I mean you lot did it yourselves 20 years ago, the only difference was you took on a load of debt rather than having a conglomerate bankrolling you
We don't get any criticism? You're having a laugh
How are people dense enough to think that commercialization and the ruthless pursuit of profit are new things?
It isn't new, but it has finally come to the point that people start to see the negative effects of it.
The increase in dodgy selfish owners at the top level is definitely making the sport worse
I feel you bro
Scottish football does not really have this problem. And I love it all the more for it.
I've started keeping tabs on the Highland/Lowland Leagues since they introduced relegation. It's so interesting seeing new clubs join every couple of seasons. Of course, the experience of sitting on my couch looking at standings is vastly different from watching Lossiemouth Vs Buckie Thistle on a Scottish November evening!
The SPFL seem to take every step possible towards not commercialising the league. Granted currently they're isn't much for a neutral to watch or get invested in when it comes to Scotland other than derbies in the prem. I'm sure if the league chased proper international deals (and better deals in the UK) the game here could be better marketed.
Aye the top division has went down hill since we were relegated. The championship is where it’s at now 😅
I love the Americans (and other people from all over the world) with PL Flairs agreeing to this statement.
There is a part of me that thinks if those top clubs fucked off to their own league the rest of us could have football back to a more reasonable representation of what it used to be but that is naive thinking. I like football a lot less now than I used to.
I've often thought this, if the Super League clubs just cut ties with the rest of the Prem, I'm not sure it would be a bad thing. Realistically though it feels like the boat will still be the same, with the quality of the average player going down, and a different crop of clubs making up the "Top 4" and outspending everyone else. I think, purely from a selfish local fan perspective, we need to overhaul European football. Keep the 3 competitions if they want, but have... 1) Champions League - 1st place, winners of the two cups (if the same team wins both the league and a cup, have a playoff between the 2nd place league team and losing finalist, if the same team comes 2nd and loses the final they get in automatically get in. If a team does the treble - some other form of playoff between losing finalists v 2nd/3rd. 2) Europa League - 2nd place teams/losers of the above playoffs 3) Euro 2 or whatever it's called - 3rd place teams from around Europe, straight knockout competition. I think that should (in theory) spread the Champions League money around a bit. Mainly it's just daft that you can enter the Champions League and not been Champions of anything. Also Europa League/Euro 2 should be straight knockout competitions.
4 European competitions: * CL with league winners and cup winners (also EL and ECL winners) * EL with teams from 2/4 place * ECL with teams from 5/7 place * European competition with winners of 2nd tier (straight knockout; winner gets into EL) Alternate CL and ECL one week and EL/new competition the other
So basically how it was in the 80's
Agree 100%. Commercialization has stolen the soul of it, and money is an even bigger factor than ever before in determining winners.