zequist

Because football is much more globalized than rugby, there are a lot more countries that have been playing the sport professionally for a lot longer, and there's a hell of a lot more money to be made in football. I wouldn't be surprised if Robinho's transfer fee by itself was more than the combined wages of the entire Guinness Premiership. As I said in another post, the EPL and FA would be committing suicide if they went to a wage cap system without all of the other wealthy leagues agreeing to do so at the same time. Otherwise you'd have a mass exodus of players fleeing the EPL for the other leagues that could still offer them higher wages, and what you'd be left with in England after the dust cleared is the SPL South. A better solution to me is to put a cap on squad sizes. Say, for instance, at the senior level each team can have 22 designated squad players and 6 designated reserves. Squad players can play in reserve games for fitness, but reserves can't be called up to the squad except under limited circumstances, and if a reserve is called up more than a certain number of times in a season he either has to be added to the full squad or is immediately granted a Bosman and becomes free to leave for another club at any time. If a club already has 22 players on the squad and they want to sign someone else, they have to make room first - either by cutting a player outright (and either buying out his contract or continuing to pay him even though he's no longer on the squad), selling someone, sending someone out on loan, or demoting someone to the reserves (if there's room). A cap on squad sizes has multiple benefits: *It wouldn't stop the biggest clubs from buying up a bunch of all-stars, but it would put a crimp in their ability to hoard talent. You wouldn't have quite as many Steve Sidwells wasting away on the bench at those clubs when they could still be valuable players at other clubs. *It's much less likely to run afoul of the courts than a wage cap or a nationality quota (you aren't limiting anyone's earning power or their ability to work across borders, only the total number of jobs that your "company" is hiring for), and the EPL teams would still be able to compete with other leagues for top talent no matter if the other leagues followed their model or not. *It would make it harder for players like Berbatov to force their way onto those clubs against their current team's wishes. *You could scrap the transfer window, which everyone hates anyway.

Playing the streak game too, are you? Personally, I'm staying away from that one completely. Too much of an unknown quantity.

West Ham announced their shortlist today, and he's not on it (see the Curbs thread).

Roberto Donadoni, Gianfranco Zola, Michael Laudrup, and if he's willing to resign from Croatia immediately (or at the latest after October's matches) Bilic. That's their short list.

Blue shirts, more dollars than sense, historically been second or third bananas in their home cities...seems to me like an easy mistake for him to make.

Looks like City definitely got Rafa's undivided attention: http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id...and&cc=5901

Here's a funny story. Apparently there's a fellow who wanted to place a wager on US presidential nominee Barack Obama becoming West Ham's next manager (hey, he has as much experience as a football coach as he does as a government executive!), so a bookmaker gave him 10,000 to 1 odds on it. According to the article, this particular book's favorite for the job is Slaven Bilic at 3-1. http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingsports/...?nclick_check=1

That's true. Isn't it something like 41 times in the last 50 years that one of those three clubs has won the league? Then again, football has become such a plutocratic sport (ironically, for its working class roots) that it's hard to find established leagues anywhere anymore that aren't absolutely dominated by just a few teams. And as long as the EU refuses to allow UEFA or the national FAs to establish salary caps, revenue sharing, or any other mechanism that's designed to create a more level playing field, that's never going to change. I've heard the observation made that Europeans are socialists in everything except sports, while Americans are free marketers in everything except sports. It's kind of funny, but it's true...all of our major sports leagues in the US have some combination of a salary cap and/or revenue sharing, and they're designed to prevent exactly the sort of thing that's happening with Man City...some fabulously wealthy person buying up a club, outspending everyone else by 5-1 or 10-1 margins, and turning what's supposed to be an athletic competition into a complete joke. Of course it's also much easier to implement those controls when it's only one country and not beholden to an extralegal body like the EU. Football is such an international game with players hopping not just teams but leagues all the time, that it's completely impractical for one country to decide to implement cost controls on its own - they'd get trampled as all their star players bolted for the other leagues that were still allowing unrestricted spending. There would have to be a broad consensus reached by all of the wealthiest leagues and probably most of the second-tier leagues as well that they all take those steps to balance things out, and for many reasons that will never happen.

Hibbert. Who can switch in and out with Nuno Valente as a bench sub depending on which one seems more likely to be useful that day.

Well, for all of the panicking we were doing here on the board, we almost hit our target in the end. Moyes wanted to sign at least six players, and if Obinna's permit had gone through that's exactly what we would've gotten. Instead we ended up with five: one forward, two mids, a defender, and a backup keeper. Would've made for a much more relaxing summer for all of us if some of these deals could've been sorted out oh, say, LAST MONTH. <_< But unfortunately that seems to be the nature of the business these days; lot of clubs just don't want to sell until they're right up against the deadline. At least we got most of the reinforcements that we needed. Finally. We're still on the smaller side, but at least we aren't going to have to put 4 or 5 kids on the bench for the next match. And hey, now that the kids have been blooded a bit, maybe it'll help with their development down the road. Let's just hope now that with so many new players coming in, the team can jell quickly. I still fancy our chances with a healthy team of snagging another UEFA Cup spot (CL was a long shot to begin with, and it just got even longer with the "new" Man City trumpeting their arrival), but we can't afford to dig ourselves too deep a hole while we're busy trying to get our act together.

Now supposedly City are also tabling bids for David Villa and Mario Gomez too, in addition to Berba.

Seriously. And Howard has all kinds of incentives to keep playing well whether he's got someone "pushing" him or not. It's not like he's suddenly going to turn into Massimo Taibi without a veteran backup behind him.

Either he was being facetious, or he was referring to the wage bill, which is a totally different issue from the transfer bill. The cheapest transfer in the world is still too expensive if you can't afford to pay the player's salary.

In order for a footballer from a non-EU country to be granted a work permit pro forma, he has to have appeared in at least 75% of his national team's fixtures in which he was eligible for selection, over the last x number of years (can't remember if it's 2 or 3 years). If he doesn't meet that requirement, the work permit is automatically refused initially on that technicality, the team wanting to sign him appeals and has a hearing with the Home Office where they argue why the player should be given a permit, and then the real decision is made. It's all a very routine process, and any manager who passed sixth grade maths is already going to know as soon as he approaches a foreign player whether the club will have to prepare an appeal or not. Castillo's work permit was initially refused for the same reason, and so was Yakubu's because that falling-out he had with the Nigerian FA had dropped him below 75%. We got those guys, and we'll get Obinna too. He's a major talent, fresh off an Olympic medal and destined to become a fixture on Nigeria's senior squad; unless Everton has a newborn infant arguing the case they're not going to lose.

Oh no! Not only is this draw a lot tougher than it should have been for Everton, but now I have to listen to Reds from TWO different countries on here for the next month. Ha ha, just teasing you fans of Les Rouches a little. Anyway, welcome to our little corner of the web! People around here know that while I'm an Everton fan first and foremost, I also follow the Belgian League too (as much as one can from the United States, anyway), but I'll try to keep my Anderlecht badge off my sleeve while you're all here (mostly).

Hey, I used to be pretty good at the computer game "Life and Death," why not let me take a shot?

Darn, why didn't you fight for your claim a little harder, Mike? I was the one person up there who voted for you!

Maybe Moyes plans to revolutionize the Premiership with his innovative new 7-2-1 formation!

Desert island disc...I'm envisioning WALL-E with his "Hello, Dolly" video here. Hmm, I'm definitely going to want a mix of musical styles, so how about: BB King - Why I Sing the Blues The Cure - Prayers for Rain Def Leppard - Billy's Got a Gun Holst - Mars, the Bringer of War Nightwish - Stargazers Peter Gabriel - Moribund the Burgermeister Tangerine Dream - Green Desert Van Halen - Mine All Mine

Right now they plan to drop baseball and softball and add women's boxing. There has been a push from some quarters to get cricket put on the docket for 2012, but we'll see. I do not and would not watch any of those sports at the Olympic level anyway, so it makes no difference to me. Here's an interesting article that I found talking about Lacrosse, and how much more that would have to grow before it would qualify as an Olympic sport. http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/sports/lax...olympics_1.html Looking at the current requirements for eligibility to the Olympic program that he talks about also gives us some insight into what other sports might or might not have an Olympic future. "Sports, disciplines or events in which performance depends essentially on mechanical propulsion are not acceptable," for instance, pretty much guarantees we won't ever see water skiing made into an Olympic sport.

None taken. I'm quite realistic about where MLS is right now, but I also know that the teams and level of play are getting better all the time. The Premiership and Football League have been around for 120 years; MLS has been here for 12 years, and we're still growing the game both in this country and on this continent (CONCACAF is finally starting a true Champions' League for the first time just this year). Anyone who dismisses MLS simply because it's not the EPL or La Liga is missing the point completely - if football was a financial market, I'd be buying up MLS as a long-term growth stock right now and sitting on it for the next 30 or 40 years, because it'll take at least that long for it to start reaching the first stages of maturity. Right now it's still more like a precocious child. And yeah, I hope he's still going well at the end of the season too, because Earthquakes need all the help they can get at this point!

So far it's looking like a good marriage. Earthquakes completely revamped the offense around mid-July, bringing in Huckerby, signing Francisco Lima from Brescia to bolster the midfield, and acquiring Trinidadian forward Scott Sealy. They've scored 8 goals in four matches since they got those three, with Huckerby involved in 5 of them (2 goals, 3 assists) and Sealy in 3 (goal, 2 assists)...prior to that they'd only scored 10 goals all season. They're also unbeaten in five straight matches now.

Spot on, fussybear. Zenit did just cut the price, although nobody is saying by how much. Spurs still look odds-on to get him, though. http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id...and&cc=5901

I swear, football is turning into a theater of the absurd! First we had that story about the club being forced to pay a player compensation for a career-ending injury that wasn't their fault, then there was that ridiculous move by Real Madrid trying to collect money from C. Ronaldo because he didn't sign with them, and now we have a story about a player being forced to pay the club compensation for failing a drug test that apparently wasn't even legal? I can't wait until some enterprising season ticket holder for a relegated club decides to sue for a refund on his tickets on the grounds of emotional distress caused by a defective on-field product. The way things seem to be going these days, he'd probably win.

Funny...a lot of us on this side of the pond say the same thing about the main two parties in this country too. Not a dime's worth of difference between them most of the time, it seems like. I took one of those "see which candidates support your position on the issues" quizzes last year - there were about 15 potential Presidential candidates in this quiz, and I didn't agree with ANY of them on even 50% of the issues raised. I think I agreed with Obama's positions about 40% of the time and McCain's about 33% of the time.