Keep/Get Rid Contract Thread

[vikingTON]

9 minutes ago, Cet Homme Charmant said:

If you going to point out individuals, our very own Gavin Gunning who stood out in the Championship has regularly plied his trade at or lower than National League level with the likes of 'Billericay Town' (National League South), 'Solihull Moors' (National League), 'Gloucester City' (National League North), and currently Chesterfield Town (National League)

Gunning also strolled English League Two at Forest Green champ, before moving to be closer to big piles of cash. 

Thanks for playing anyway. 

[Cet Homme Charmant]

35 minutes ago, vikingTON said:

Gunning also strolled English League Two at Forest Green champ, before moving to be closer to big piles of cash. 

Thanks for playing anyway. 

I've got no doubt he performed well for Forest Green Rovers, but if he was such a stand out at League 2, why didn't a team at a similar or higher higher level snap him up, instead of him heading in the other direction? Surely he would have got as least a similar 'big pile of cash' from another League 1 or 2 team.

As per my pervious point, for Morton fans to dismiss the English National League as a 'pub league' shows a lack of self-awareness that's actually quite hilarious and cringeworthy in equal measure.

[vikingTON]

1 minute ago, Cet Homme Charmant said:

Surely he would have got as least a similar 'big pile of cash' from League 1 or 2 teams if he'd been good enough.

As per my pervious point, for Morton fans to dismiss the English Championship as a 'pub league' shows a lack of self-awareness that's actually quite hilarious and cringeworthy in equal measure..

Billericay were an English Gretna, so no. Nobody was talking about the 'English Championship' either, so I think we can just safely disregard your flailing, Catherine wheel of fail from now on tbh. 

[Cet Homme Charmant]

8 minutes ago, vikingTON said:

Billericay were an English Gretna, so no. Nobody was talking about the 'English Championship' either, so I think we can just safely disregard your flailing, Catherine wheel of fail from now on tbh. 

Yeah, Championship was a typo since corrected, but I'm sure you knew that.  

So you've dismissed 'Billericay Town'. What about 'Solihull Moors' (National League), 'Gloucester City' (National League North), and currently 'Chesterfield Town' (National League).

[TheGoon]

15 minutes ago, Cet Homme Charmant said:

Yeah, Championship was a typo since corrected, but I'm sure you knew that.  

So you've dismissed 'Billericay Town'. What about 'Solihull Moors' (National League), 'Gloucester City' (National League North), and currently 'Chesterfield Town' (National League).

There is no such team as Chesterfield Town in the National League. 

[Cet Homme Charmant]

4 minutes ago, TheGoon said:

There is no such team as Chesterfield Town in the National League. 

You are correct, it's Chesterfield F.C., well done.

[EanieMeany]

37 minutes ago, Cet Homme Charmant said:

 

As per my pervious point, for Morton fans to dismiss the English National League as a 'pub league' shows a lack of self-awareness that's actually quite hilarious and cringeworthy in equal measure.

It’s not at all. The lower ends of English football are rubbish, no matter how much anyone wants to wet their knickers over it.

[Cet Homme Charmant]

7 minutes ago, EanieMeany said:

It’s not at all. The lower ends of English football are rubbish, no matter how much anyone wants to wet their knickers over it.

Just as many English football fans dismiss the whole of Scottish football as rubbish. Both are wrong. 

And my knickers are perfectly dry thanks.

[EanieMeany]

English football fans are wankers.

Anyway, this is Butler’s career path so far. I have no qualms whatsoever with dismissing luminaries such as Concord Rangers and Hemel Hempstead as no-marks or any other phrase you care to use, because that’s what they are.

The point stands that it shouldn’t have taken more than half the season to sign a guy who’s spent the last decade mostly failing to get a game with the likes of the Met Police: there’s surely any number of goalkeepers that could have been signed rather than taking a huge risk in the majority of our league games.

 

[Cet Homme Charmant]

20 minutes ago, EanieMeany said:

English football fans are wankers.

Many are, no doubt. But a fairly high percentage in Scotland are as well, I don't think we can claim the moral high ground on that one.

[EanieMeany]

The rampaging hoards of Genghis Khan could claim the moral high-ground over English football fans.

[TRVMP]

English fans tend not to talk down their game as much as Scottish fans do. There are obvious exceptions in both directions but I think this is a reliable enough heuristic.

Football - like publishing, music, retail, corporate leadership* - has over the past few decades seen a massive reallocation of wealth upwards. The size of the pie has grown enormously, particularly in the Premier League era, but the share of the pie is now hugely disproportionate to the size of the game. Most of the gains go to a small number of top-flight clubs, and most of those gains are concentrated in the hands of a few global brands, such as Manchester United.

The same is true, I believe, of footballing talent. With very few exceptions, guys like Bill Shankly are never going to exist again. You simply aren't going to have guys working down the mines and playing occasionally at weekends and then playing for a modest professional outfit and then hit the big time. (Again, there will be exceptions, such as Jamie Vardy.) The best talent is spotted at a very young age and is generally filtered upwards, once again to those major clubs with the wealth and reach to find, attract, train, and retain such players.

England is actually a bit behind Italy in this sense, where the lower leagues operate almost as a farm system, with huge numbers of loanees from Inter and Milan and Juventus filling out squads even up to Serie B level, and certainly at Serie C. (Pick a random Serie C side and they'll likely have at least seven or eight loan players in a 25-man squad.) This is only going to become more prevalent, absent a rule change, as the likes of Chelsea build out entire armies of young players that previously would have been "plying their trade" with nonsense like Scunthorpe.

The point is that the kind of guys who might have been able to make a decent living at lower-league level, without risking disappearing into the reserves or the scrapheap further up the pyramid for only slightly better money, are now incentivized to simply find a spot as far up the pyramid as possible. (This logic ends in the upper non-league setup, where it can be more lucrative to play on non-contract terms for some random guy's pet club, than it can be to play semi-pro elsewhere. But again, it's a heuristic, not a rule.)

So some English fans will recognize the fact that Crappington Town and Botchford Boulevard and Plink Athletic aren't attracting the same talent they once were, and that the quality relative to the time has gone down a bit. That's not controversial. But they'll also recognize that even at Championship level, any team from even 30 years ago would get absolutely shoed by any of today's teams, simply because the wealth and resources are there that weren't previously, and the talent is filtered upwards moreso than in the past.

tl;dr: fans of teams like Bradford City and Coventry will certainly think that not just their own teams, but their current divisions aren't up to much. But English fans writ large are not likely to declare their entire league to be dreadful, as a very high percentage of Scottish fans do on a daily, tiresome basis.

*Did you know that, during the pandemic, the market capitalization of the Tech Big Five - Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Amazon, Facebook - rose by a trillion dollars? Amazon alone rose by over $400bn.

[Cet Homme Charmant]

1 hour ago, TRVMP said:

English fans tend not to talk down their game as much as Scottish fans do. There are obvious exceptions in both directions but I think this is a reliable enough heuristic.

Football - like publishing, music, retail, corporate leadership* - has over the past few decades seen a massive reallocation of wealth upwards. The size of the pie has grown enormously, particularly in the Premier League era, but the share of the pie is now hugely disproportionate to the size of the game. Most of the gains go to a small number of top-flight clubs, and most of those gains are concentrated in the hands of a few global brands, such as Manchester United.

The same is true, I believe, of footballing talent. With very few exceptions, guys like Bill Shankly are never going to exist again. You simply aren't going to have guys working down the mines and playing occasionally at weekends and then playing for a modest professional outfit and then hit the big time. (Again, there will be exceptions, such as Jamie Vardy.) The best talent is spotted at a very young age and is generally filtered upwards, once again to those major clubs with the wealth and reach to find, attract, train, and retain such players.

England is actually a bit behind Italy in this sense, where the lower leagues operate almost as a farm system, with huge numbers of loanees from Inter and Milan and Juventus filling out squads even up to Serie B level, and certainly at Serie C. (Pick a random Serie C side and they'll likely have at least seven or eight loan players in a 25-man squad.) This is only going to become more prevalent, absent a rule change, as the likes of Chelsea build out entire armies of young players that previously would have been "plying their trade" with nonsense like Scunthorpe.

The point is that the kind of guys who might have been able to make a decent living at lower-league level, without risking disappearing into the reserves or the scrapheap further up the pyramid for only slightly better money, are now incentivized to simply find a spot as far up the pyramid as possible. (This logic ends in the upper non-league setup, where it can be more lucrative to play on non-contract terms for some random guy's pet club, than it can be to play semi-pro elsewhere. But again, it's a heuristic, not a rule.)

So some English fans will recognize the fact that Crappington Town and Botchford Boulevard and Plink Athletic aren't attracting the same talent they once were, and that the quality relative to the time has gone down a bit. That's not controversial. But they'll also recognize that even at Championship level, any team from even 30 years ago would get absolutely shoed by any of today's teams, simply because the wealth and resources are there that weren't previously, and the talent is filtered upwards moreso than in the past.

tl;dr: fans of teams like Bradford City and Coventry will certainly think that not just their own teams, but their current divisions aren't up to much. But English fans writ large are not likely to declare their entire league to be dreadful, as a very high percentage of Scottish fans do on a daily, tiresome basis.

*Did you know that, during the pandemic, the market capitalization of the Tech Big Five - Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Amazon, Facebook - rose by a trillion dollars? Amazon alone rose by over $400bn.

Stopped reading at 'incentivized'. You sound like that parody 'Soccer Guy' with patter like that 

[Cet Homme Charmant]

By the way, if my posts came across as talking down the Scottish game, it definitely wasn't my intention. In fact I specifically said that I think the standard compares very well against those of similar sized small countries. What I do think about Scotland is that we have two clubs who are disproportionately huge for a country of our size, and that is to the detriment of the game as a whole. 

[TRVMP]

6 hours ago, Cet Homme Charmant said:

By the way, if my posts came across as talking down the Scottish game, it definitely wasn't my intention. In fact I specifically said that I think the standard compares very well against those of similar sized small countries. What I do think about Scotland is that we have two clubs who are disproportionately huge for a country of our size, and that is to the detriment of the game as a whole. 

We do, and while powerful clubs in national leagues are the rule rather than the exception, Scotland is at the extreme end. That is, while Barcelona and Real Madrid dominate in Spain, both financially and by reputation, they are nowhere near as all-consuming as Rangers and Celtic are in Scotland. Ajax, Feyenoord and PSV, the same. About as close as you can get are the Big Three in Portugal and even then in recent years we've had Sporting struggle and drop out (although they might actually win the title this year.)

UEFA actually did a pretty fascinating report on this a few years ago, the most and least competitive leagues, measured not just by league placing but also income, support, TV income etc. Of proper footballing nations, Scotland was the least equal. I can't find the exact one I was looking at but from the 2018 club licensing report they showed wage spread, which was pretty predictable if one looks at the league tables:

 

What really stands out here is less the fact that the lowest SPFL Premiership clubs have tiny wage bills - that's pretty obvious - but that even clubs 4 to 6 are so completely dwarfed. OK, Hearts and Hibs and Dundee United have had troubled years recently, but it really is true to say that there are Rangers and Celtic, then there's no money. Whereas even leagues like Denmark, where you wouldn't expect the lower clubs to have much cash, are spending alright money compared to the top teams.

6 hours ago, Cet Homme Charmant said:

Stopped reading at 'incentivized'. You sound like that parody 'Soccer Guy' with patter like that 

It's to do with careers and money in general, not the game specifically. Or to put it in the kind of terms you'll hear all the time, it's easier and almost certainly more lucrative to disappear into the Chelsea youth system for four years than to get kicked up and down various ploughed fields in the National League.

[Cet Homme Charmant]

Interesting! 

We had of course a short period in the early to mid-80s when Aberdeen and Dundee Utd temporarily broke the Old Firm stranglehold on the game, and Kilmarnock in the 60s won the old First Division, but since then the duopoly of the Scottish game has only got stronger. I don't think a team outside the duopoly will ever win the Premiership, and that can't be good.

In the last few years I've started to take more of an interest in Scandinavian football, particularly the Norwegian Eliteserien. I haven't really thought why I've gravitated towards that league in particular (it wasn't a conscious decision, more by randomly picking up a game one wet Sunday afternoon and it snowballing from there), but now I think it's because it is a relatively even league in terms of quality. In fact early on I picked Bodo/Glimpt as 'my team' (mainly because up until a couple of years ago they were pretty shite and I could relate to them, ha!), and this season they only went and won the league for the first time ever I think. I'd love the Scottish Premiership to be like that. 

[TRVMP]

Which is itself surprising because when I was a lad, Norwegian football was synonymous with Rosenborg. They won 13 titles in a row and were Champions League mainstays. They also won four in a row from 2015. 

[Cet Homme Charmant]

Indeed, that is correct. I really only started to take a close interest in the Eliteserien in 2018, the last season Rosenborg won it. Since then it was won by Molde and Bodo/Glimt (yay!). I think Rosenborg finished 4th in 2020, something like 30 points behind Bodo/Glimt. Not sure why they've declined so sharply in the last couple of years.

[Toby]

I’ve only ever been to two club games outside the UK in my life- St. Patrick’s Athletic v Limerick the night before Scotland played Ireland in 2015 and Skeid Olso v Sarpsborg in the Norwegian second tier in 2009, before the Steven and Gary Caldwell inspired 4-0 hosing. I believe Sarpsborg are now one of the better teams in Norway now, and won the game 2-0. I was interested to see how it compared to our second tier given that Norway’s a comparable country in terms of population to Scotland.

The standard was absolutely shite. Things might have changed since then, but I just thought I’d add that.

[TRVMP]

I'm a huge fan of the Abroad Leagues but people tend to overestimate their quality significantly.